The New Yorker Issue-04272020

the Tennessee Valley Authority opened “How should I know what I’m thinking? I’m not a mind reader.” the Browns Ferry Nuclear Power Plant, at the time one of the largest nuclear- •• power plants in the world, nearby. “I grew up swimming right behind a intimacy.“Everyone on the outside was They started playing together in a power plant, man,” Howard said. “We saying,‘You’re a singer in a band, you’re folk-rock band called Bermuda Tri- all did.” really gregarious, you’re really charm- angle. “I went to the fucking doctor ing,’ but in my head, I was thinking, when I first met Jesse,” Howard said, Howard’s parents—her father is Nah, I’m a fat-wad. Nah, nobody wants laughing.“My palms were sweaty, and black, and her mother is white—met to be with me.”On the title track from my heart wouldn’t stop beating really in high school, in nearby Tanner.They “Sound & Color,” Howard sings, “I fast. I was panicking. My stomach got pregnant with Howard’s older want to touch a human being / I want was flipping. I thought I had diabe- sister, Jaime, who was born in 1985, and to go back to sleep.” Her voice sounds tes. The doctor was, like, ‘You’re fine.’ married a few years later. As a kid, high and thin. Eventually, it splinters Then one of my friends was, like, Howard had a hard time getting friends with longing. ‘You’re in love!’ ” She and Lafser were to come over. “One, my parents were married last year, outside Taos: “We an interracial couple,” she explained. Howard came out when she was were sitting in a restaurant we always “Two, I lived in a junk yard.”Howard’s in her twenties, following a period of go to, and I was, like, ‘Oh, they do father took apart old cars for parts, and serious self-interrogation. She hadn’t weddings! Should we get married right her family set up a trailer in the mid- encountered many openly gay people now?’ So we got married on a moun- dle of the property. “My dad had to growing up. “When I lived in Ath- tain, next to a stream.” hustle his whole life,”she said.“He was ens, gay people looked a certain way, a black man, and he didn’t really get and I didn’t look like them,” she said. During the writing and the record- to go to college. He’s really charming, “Then, when I went to the city, I was, ing of “Jaime,” Howard often re- and good at talking to people, so he like, ‘Oh! There’s actually not a look.’ sponded to uncertainty and fear by went into the car-sale business.” She And they were happy. The gay peo- praying to her sister. “I feel like, in a described her mother as “very pasto- ple where I was from were very sad weird way, we did it together,”she said. ral. She grew up on a farm. So around and heartbroken.” Howard told her Though Howard is not religious, the our trailer was grass and animals. And parents about her sexuality a few years idea of God is often present in her then around that was . . . the junk yard.” ago. At first, her mother wasn’t sure songs. On “13th Century Metal,” her what to make of it. “Then she real- delivery evokes the hypnotic cadences Both Howard and Jaime were born ized, O.K., I have one daughter left, of Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets, with retinoblastoma,a rare form of can- and I’m not gonna abandon her,”How- but the lyrics (“I promise to love my cer that can lead to blindness; Howard ard said. “My dad did not give one enemy /And never become that which has only partial vision in her left eye. shit. He does not care at all.” is not God”) are reminiscent of the When Jaime was eleven, she became fiery sermons recorded to 78-r.p.m. seriously ill.“She woke up one day, and A few years ago, Howard met the disks by itinerant black preachers in she couldn’t see,” Howard said. “It was musician and writer Jesse Lafser the nineteen-twenties.“I went into the hospitals, until it got worse and worse through mutual friends in Nashville. and worse. Then it was hospice. Then it was over.” Howard was eight when Jaime died. Her parents divorced soon afterward. “I got shipped around to a lot of family members, because my par- ents didn’t want me to see what was going on,” she said. Howard was traumatized by her sis- ter’s death: “I would see people just being themselves, and think, What the fuck is that like? I’m over here panick- ing.” To blunt her suffering, Howard ate. “In my household, especially on my father’s side, everybody’s over- weight. I was getting away with it for a really long time,” she said. “When I first started touring with the Shakes, we’d get off of tour and I’d binge eat. I remember waking up to a Hardee’s bag, and being, like, ‘Bro, enough is enough. This is not O.K.’” She also unintentionally forswore THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020 49

studio, and I was, like, ‘Put some echo In 2011, Howard posted a song— money so I can quit right now?’” She on my voice. Make it sound really big,’” “You Ain’t Alone,” a slow-burning smiled. “I’m elated just remembering she said. She was thinking about the R. & B. ballad—to ReverbNation, a how good it felt.” gravity and the erudition of Martin social-networking site for independent Luther King, Jr., a vibe that she de- musicians. Justin Gage, the founder Howard and I made plans to meet scribed as “college campus.”The orig- of the music Web site Aquarium in Nashville in late February. inal recording was eight minutes long. Drunkard, heard the song after a friend When she picked me up, in a silver “The reason I call it ‘13th Century posted it on Facebook. In a short piece Audi S.U.V., heavy rain was pelting the Metal’ is because that’s what it sounds for the site, Gage described Alabama city. “I’ve been watching the Doppler like to me,” she said. “The chords are Shakes as “a slice of the real; an un- radar like an old lady,” she said. Ray very Gregorian, but it’s also metal— hinged, and as of yet unsigned, blues- Charles was playing on the stereo. A it’s got rage in it.” based soul outfit fronted by a woman small photo of her and Jaime in Hal- armed with a whole lotta voice and loween costumes—she was dressed as As the sun began to fade, Howard a Gibson SG.” Gage also played the the Devil, and Jaime was dressed as a and I attempted to cajole Taylor Ann, track on his radio show. “It felt com- clown—swung on a bronze chain dan- Howard’s friend and assistant, to send pletely fresh and apart from the Zeit- gling from her rearview mirror. We more White Claws down to the pool geist of 2011,” Gage told me recently. drove south, toward Athens. in the house’s tiny elevator.Taylor Ann “It seemed inherently out of time— finally appeared in person and an- nothing calculated, no retro pastiche. Shortly after we crossed the Ten- nounced that we had drunk them all. It just was.” nessee-Alabama border, a roadside at- We went inside, ordered Thai food, traction came into view: a three-hun- and sunk into a large white sectional. When Howard woke up the next dred-and-sixty-foot-tall replica of the On the flat-screen television, Howard morning, her in-box was packed with Saturn V, a space rocket developed at cued up a seemingly infinite compila- entreaties from managers and agents. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, tion of YouTube videos showing peo- The group didn’t have much time to in Huntsville, and used in the Apollo ple being walloped in the genitals. An consider its next move. “We had to program in the nineteen-sixties and A.T.V. cascaded into a gully, launch- play this show in Florence, Alabama, seventies. Howard pulled over so that ing its driver heavenward. His crotch at a record store,” Howard said. Pat- I could take a picture of it. “I’ve done collided with the steering wheel.“Bro!” terson Hood, the singer and guitarist this drive so many times, I don’t even Howard screamed, and laughed. in the Southern-rock band Drive-By notice it anymore,” she said, while I Truckers, was in the crowd that night. crouched in the wet grass, trying to fit Howard started singing when she “There were maybe twenty-five peo- the whole thing in the frame. was three years old. Her great- ple there at most, and they were play- uncle played bluegrass, and he often ing through a tiny vocal P.A. with no “My little home town!”Howard said, invited musicians over to jam in his monitors,” Hood remembered. “It was when we finally pulled into Athens. woodshop. “I came in there one night, the most incredible show I’d seen in We cruised past cotton fields, Dollar and they handed me a microphone,” years. I was blown away.” General stores, and at least a dozen Howard said. “I remember all these one-room Baptist churches.The land- grown country men,laughing and being Hood’s managers, Christine Stauder scape is flat and, in winter, incredibly entertained and giving me so much at- and Kevin Morris, flew to Alabama the wet. Howard showed me the ponds tention. I loved it.” Her great-uncle next morning. Howard woke up hung- where she fished for bream, and the started leaving a guitar in her bedroom. over. “I slept in a chair in this tiny-ass spot on the Tennessee River where she When she was eleven, a rock band per- apartment,” she recalled. Stauder and and her friends would stand around formed at the high-school gym, and Morris asked to meet her at their hotel: drinking beer. We drove by the power she immediately knew how she wanted “I get in my mail car, and I drive to the plant. We drove by her mother’s house. to spend the rest of her life. She began Marriott. I do not feel good, and I’m We drove through downtown,past City teaching herself how to play. “I had no still in my pajamas, and I have a little Hall, where, in 2007, the Ku Klux Klan options, and I didn’t care about any- do-rag on my head. I looked around, held an anti-immigration rally. How- thing else,” she said. and I didn’t see anybody that looked ard was nineteen. “Here’s the thing,” like they were from New York, so I she said. “Everybody showed up to get Howard met the bassist Zac Cock- went up to the bar and said, ‘I’ll have ’em out of town—everybody did.” rell when they were both in high school. a beer please.’ And then they walked The guitarist Heath Fogg and the up. I was drinking a beer at 11 a.m., Howard took me to a squat gray drummer Steve Johnson joined them like, ‘Hey!’” house beside the railroad tracks, built in 2009. Fogg painted houses, Johnson by her great-grandfather in the nine- worked at the power plant, Cockrell The band signed with Stauder and teen-forties. Her family eventually sold had a job at an animal clinic.“I couldn’t Morris and booked some dates open- it,but when she was in her late teens the afford college,” Howard said. “I didn’t ing for the Drive-By Truckers. How- new owners let some of her relatives get a loan. I was kind of put in a po- ard recalled Morris calling her at the move in. “We didn’t have to pay rent, sition where I had to, you know, hope post office a few weeks later, explain- because it was so dilapidated,” she told for the best.” ing that she could leave her job soon. me. “But I did have to cut the grass. So “I was, like, ‘Word? Can I get some I would cut the grass, and then I got to 50 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020

COMIC STRIP (AFTER WINSOR McCAY) BY PETER KUPER

• • borhood known as Batts Heights.“This whole subdivision is a black subdivi- live in this cold-ass, fucked-up house.” fucking terrifying,” she said. “I always sion,” she said. Her grandmother and We parked and walked the perim- had this sensation that somebody was some cousins still live there.She stopped watching me. I ran out of explanations at a rusted trash can, which had the eter. “This used to be surrounded by after a while.” words “Batts Heights Sub. Help pecan trees,”Howard said. She pointed Keep The Community Clean!”hand- to Whitt’s, a little barbecue shack next We drove past a cemetery (“Hell, painted on it in yellow: “You know how door: “I’d be so hungry, just looking at yeah! Thinkin’ about death everyday!” some people got the big brick signs the place, smelling the barbecue, and she said, laughing), and down a long that say, like, ‘Welcome to Ram’s they’d look at us and give me a sand- wooded road toward the modest house Gate’? We’ve got that trash can! That’s wich for free.” Sometimes, when she that she bought after the Shakes took probably the third or fourth trash can. couldn’t pay the electric bill, she ran an off—a brick split-level with “a big-ass People keep wrecking into ’em.” extension cord from Whitt’s to their basement.”(She sold it a few years ago.) living room. Adjusting to a life with We made a quick stop at J&G, a kind When Howard was young, her par- money has been a strange experience of general store that sells fake flowers, ents often dropped her off there to play for Howard.“I still don’t act right,” she tools, strange knickknacks, and deco- with her cousins. The kids were peri- said. “This car is the first new car I’ve rative signs (“What happens on the odically terrorized by a stray dog they ever bought in my life.”She added,“I’m patio stays on the patio”). Inside, referred to as Doody Booty. Sometimes not frugal, but, if I don’t need it, I don’t we paused in front of a display of min- they made cassette recordings on old need it. Gucci this, Gucci that—I don’t iature flags.“I’m proud of them for not boom boxes.“We’d do gangsta rap and buy that stuff.” having any Confederate flags,”she said. ‘your mama’ jokes,” Howard recalled. “I appreciate that.”We strolled the aisles. “They were brutal.” But she described Howard eventually moved out of Howard got a replica of a bream—“We the experience with gratitude. “At the the house by the railroad tracks, in part call ’em shellcracker,” she said—and a end of the day, I’m really close to this because she could no longer tolerate its plastic banana. The woman at the reg- side of my family,” she said. “They ac- ghosts. “Oh, yeah, that bitch haunted ister looked slightly dazed as Howard cepted everybody for who they were. as hell!” she said. She recounted being approached.“I didn’t realize a celebrity If you’re an alcoholic crackhead, you’re locked out of the house, cabinets open- had come in!” she exclaimed. invited to dinner, too!” ing and shutting on their own, doors slamming, and curtains moving.“It was Howard wanted to show me a neigh- Athens was a difficult place to be queer, mixed race, and, after her sis- ter’s death, in mourning. She recalled visiting an amusement park with some of her mother’s relatives and having the gate to a ride closed before she could pass through—it hadn’t occurred to the attendant that she might be part of a group of white people.Once,some- one slashed the tires of her father’s car and threw a bloodied goat head in the back. She didn’t learn about the inci- dent until she was fourteen, when her mother told her about it.“I just couldn’t believe someone would slaughter a goat because they hated someone so much,”Howard said. On “Goat Head,” she sings: I guess I’m not supposed to mind, ’cause I’m brown, I’m not black But who said that? See, I’m black, I’m not white But I’m that, nah, nah, I’m this, right? I’m one drop of three-fifths, right? In the late afternoon, we met How- ard’s father, K.J., and her cousin Promise at Old Greenbrier Restau- rant, a cinder-block barbecue joint on the outskirts of town. The menu was divided between Meals from the Pond 52 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020

(catfish) and Meals from the Barn- he asked his mother, ‘When does my mal clothes and had normal haircuts, yard (chicken, pork, hamburger steak). life begin?’ And she was, like, ‘Anytime and seemed as if they could have come A waitress brought several baskets of you want it to.’That always stuck with from any high school in any small town. hush puppies and a bottle of white me,” Howard said. “I was always try- Onstage,Howard was sometimes sheep- sauce. “We always did music,” Prom- ing to figure out what the lady meant. ish. Now she is poised and deliberate, ise said. “Brittany played drums, gui- What do you mean, anytime you want with an almost balletic confidence. tars. She’d play the piano, and we it to?” She paused. “I feel like this part sounded like a band.” of my life is my Part Two. There was The theatre’s V.I.P. balcony filled up Part One, and now there’s this.” quickly: Slash, from Guns N’ Roses; “They’d sing,” K.J. added, grinning. the rapper Tyler, the Creator; the rock “I remember Brittany went to the One night in January, Howard was photographer Danny Clinch.The mu- kitchen, she got a big pot, a little pot, appearing at the Palladium, a the- sician and actor Donald Glover, who another little pot, she got a big spoon atre in Hollywood. As we inched down records as Childish Gambino, wore a and”—he made a series of drumming Sunset Boulevard in the back of an yellow knit beanie and a mustache, and sounds—“Brittany! Put them pots up!” S.U.V., she played air drums to Meg stood alone, crooning along to the cho- Myers’s cover of Kate Bush’s “Running rus of “Stay High,”a single from “Jaime.” “We loved some music,” Howard Up That Hill,” a fierce and propulsive said, laughing. “It was free!” song about the limits of empathy.How- “Brittany is an alien,”Tyler, the Cre- ard is all empathy on some level, but ator, told me later. “Everything about After supper, we followed K.J. back she also believes strongly in account- her—from her music to her background to the junk yard.He drives a black pickup ability, particularly when it comes to re- to her energy in person—it’s so unique. truck with a license plate that reads lationships. I asked her if she leaned on She’s paving concrete for so many peo- “SHAKES.” We crossed a little wooden Lafser for support when she returned ple, and I’m not sure she’s even aware of bridge over a small creek. One time, from a tour. “To be honest, it’s not my it.”He’s especially enamored of “Baby,” Howard got stranded there during a partner’s responsibility,” she said. “It’s a spare, stretchy song about betrayal. tornado, when the engine on her old my responsibility to take care of my- “It makes my chest hurt it’s so good,” Bronco stalled. K.J. and his girlfriend self before I come home.” he said. Howard was in black pants, a were with her, and Howard had to carry black shirt, gold earrings, eyeglasses, the woman to the other side. K.J. fell Backstage,Taylor Ann brewed a pot and a long gold jacket. For her encore, in the creek and, for a brief moment, of hot tea with lemon, fresh ginger, and she returned to the stage with just her Howard thought he was going to die. manuka honey. Members of Howard’s drummer and keyboardist to play “Run “I swear to God, the most guttural band, which includes Cockrell on bass, to Me,” the final song on “Jaime.” “I ‘Daddy!’came out of me,from the depths began to arrive.During the sound check, wrote this for myself,”she said.“To say, of my spirit,” she recalled. “I thought they rehearsed a cover of Funkadelic’s ‘Hey, you got it.’” he was, like, gone, because I don’t know “You and Your Folks,Me and My Folks.” if my dad can swim that well. Some- Even when reading lyrics off her phone, That sentiment feels true of most how, he stood back up in those flood- Howard is a transfixing vocalist; she of Howard’s songs, which are either re- waters, and he just kept going.” knows how to compress and extend a assurances (I’ve got it) or implorations (Please believe that I’ve got it, and that The junk yard hadn’t changed much note in a way that feels as if she’s squeez- you’ve got it, too). The chorus of “Run since Howard lived there. Cars in vary- ing all the juice from a piece of very to Me” is mostly the latter: Howard is ing states of disrepair were stacked willy- ripe fruit. asking someone to let her love them. nilly.Her father’s dog had recently given She could be singing to herself—it’s birth to a litter of puppies, and they Howard gets nervous before a show hard to say for sure. whimpered softly from under the house. only if her parents are in the audience. Inside, K.J. had built a shrine to his Her performance style has evolved over Many of the most beloved perform- daughter: four Grammys, some gold the years. “When I was younger, it was ers try to put as little distance as pos- records, a framed photograph of her coming from a place of needing to get sible between themselves and their au- with the Obamas, taken after she per- everything out,”she said.“Now it comes dience. With Howard, this kind of formed at the White House, in 2013. from a place of being a powerful per- intimacy seems instinctive, in part be- K.J. has accompanied his daughter to son.” Early on, Alabama Shakes had a cause she is inherently unpretentious, the Grammys several times. This year, sort of populist charm—they wore nor- and in part because she has spent so he sat next to Cardi B. “I told her she much time figuring out how to live was the shit!” he said. “She wasn’t without shame.“A lot of people do shit friendly.” He had placed the floppy because they don’t know themselves,” leather hat Howard wore in her first she had told me earlier. “If you can just photo shoot—a portrait made by Au- kind of be you,you’re gonna be all right.” tumn de Wilde, in the woods outside Onstage,her brow was damp.She leaned the junk yard—on a mannequin’s head. into the final verse: On the way back to Nashville, we Run, run, run, run, run to me drove past the cemetery where Jaime Oh, run to me is buried. “I’ll never forget this inter- And I will be your partner view with Roger Waters, where he said When you can’t stand it anymore.  THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020 53

FICTION bedtime story | sarah shun-lien bynum 54 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020 PHOTOGRAPH BY JANNA IRELAND

O ne long winter night, Ezra The child falls silent, as if commit- “Julia was huge. She was everywhere.” Washington’s wife walks in on ting this to memory. “And I bladed right into her,” Ezra him telling their younger child stories from his rollerblading days.The Ezra adds, “It’s not an exaggeration says with satisfaction,the splendor of the room is as dark as a coal mine and his to say she was the biggest movie star story holding all of them in its embrace. voice floats sonorously from somewhere in the world.” For a moment they absorb the fact of in the vicinity of the trundle bed. He is being together in the darkened bedroom, remembering a time long before the “Back then,” the child clarifies. just the three of them, the older child child was born, a time when he was a Fine, his mother thinks, back then— probably off somewhere brushing his poor graduate student living in New all children are by nature sticklers—but teeth. Ezra says to his wife, from the low York City with nothing but his own in fact the poor kid has no idea. Never edge of the bed, “You remember that body and mind for entertainment. Sat- will he know the stunned sensation of day,” in the sure-sounding voice she’d urdays were spent in the narrow park emerging from the darkness of a mat- first liked in history class, and huskily that runs alongside the Hudson River, inée on Senior Skip Day, speechless at she answers him,“Mm-hmm,I do,”when blading up and down the path very fast, what they’d just seen: Julia Roberts as in fact she has been quickly sifting as if his happiness depended on it. an adorable streetwalker. It confounded through her brain only to find that she the imagination. Whatever had pos- has no memory of it at all. “She was coming straight at me,”he sessed them to spend their day of mu- says. “To the right of me was the river. tiny in this ridiculous way? They would This is the second time today that And to the left a pack of bicyclists. She never forget it. A whole group of them her mind has failed her, but the first in- was coming around the bend with a milling about on the sidewalk outside stance was so mild that it barely regis- look of panic in her eyes.” the theatre, boarding-school students tered. In the late afternoon, drowsily let loose on the world and now at a loss driving the boys to their martial-arts From the doorway his wife wonders for what to do next, Ezra with his arm class, she heard on the radio a story silently if he is speaking about her, the resting lightly across the shoulders of about the chain restaurant Medieval younger self who, on the three or four his girlfriend, Christina, his serious Times, where diners can watch live occasions on which she’d joined him, senior-year girlfriend Christina, and jousting tournaments while eating with- may have worn this expression. Christina looking shy and triumphant out utensils.The big news was that the because already more than one person restaurant had decided to replace all of “She was going fast, too?”their child had said, “You know, you kind of look its resident kings with queens. Despite asks in the dark. like her. . . .” this change in leadership, the radio host Yes, she was there that day, witness remarked dryly, the servers at Medie- “No, not at all, she was clearly a be- to the spectacle of Ezra and Christina, val Times would still be referred to, ginner. Which made the situation that and though she was sandwiched in the going forward, as “wenches.” much more dangerous,” Ezra says pa- middle of the crowd, she saw them as if tiently. He then explains how he called from a great distance, from a far, chilly She perked right up at the sound of out to her in the instant before they col- point on the periphery. She kept half that friendly old word, which carried lided. “I’ve got you! ” he cried to the in- an eye on Ezra from long habit. She her instantly to the broken-backed experienced skater as he grasped her by had done so, without quite wanting to, couches and burnt-popcorn smell of the forearms and guided her down be- through all the weeks and months of their high-school student center. For a tween his legs until her bottom gently high school that had come before, and brief spell there, “wench” had been the touched the ground. “By then she was maybe he had noticed: when he and slur of choice—originating with the laughing,” he said. “That laugh you’d Christina broke up, after a run of grad- boys,one had to guess,but soon enough know anywhere.” uation parties,it was she whom he called. used in good-natured address from girl He was miserable but talkative.You still to girl. To her ears, it summoned not His wife doesn’t recall ever laughing had to pay for long distance in those so much a barefoot slut with a tankard while on Rollerblades. Her first wild days. On a Saturday morning in early as the lanky, lacrosse-playing classmates thought is that all these years she’s been October,he appeared on the steps of her of her youth, addled on weak halluci- wrong about herself. But then the child freshman dorm, despite having enrolled nogens and jam bands.The word filled shifts in his bed and sets the comforter at a college more than three hours away. her with sadness and warmth. But she to rustling and casts the story in an en- By the time Ezra got into graduate couldn’t for the life of her recall how to tirely new light.“She’s the one who plays school, they were an old couple, a famil- use it convincingly in a sentence. “Hey, the mom?”he asks.“With the big teeth iar sight. She, too, had her tales of New wench, good game today.” “Stop being and the long brown hair?” York.The park he spoke of, and its haz- such a wench and pass the popcorn.” ardous paths—she once knew them well. “Later, wench.” It all sounded wrong. “Well, I’d say it’s more of a reddish “Tell him,” Ezra urges, his voice brown. An auburn color. But yes, that’s turned in her direction. It comes as a “Why are you talking to yourself?”her right,” Ezra says to the child. “Julia surprise: she thought she had gone un- younger child asked from the back seat. Roberts.” noticed when she glided into the room, wearing socks. “I’m just trying to remember how “Julia Roberts went right between “It’s true,” she says to their child. to say something,” she told him. your legs,” the child confirms. “In English?” he asked, sounding “Yes,but don’t repeat that,”Ezra says. worried. “Better to say we crashed into each other. Or that Julia Roberts crashed The problem, she sees now, is that in into me.” THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020 55

its heyday she never seized the chance and the furious radiators, controlled by nature of the look from across the ex- to say the word herself. Nor was it some invisible hand. panse of equipment,under the gym’s flat- ever said to her. So the failure wasn’t tening fluorescent light. Either way, she of memory but of another sort. She A steel-legged café table with a lam- had her pale eyes fixed on him,and every hadn’t shaped her lips around the word; inate top was where they ate, worked, once in a while, in the middle of a set, it hadn’t been lobbed fondly in her di- studied,and wrote thank-you notes.De- she gave him an effortful smile. The rection. Somehow the lacrosse players spite the small checks that occasionally amount of weight she was lifting,he saw, had known not to say it to her, or for arrived in the mail from relatives living was significant. An immense iron stack that matter to any of the black girls, in less expensive places,Ezra still needed rose up slowly behind her like an omen. few as they were. For them, a tone of to have a part-time job while taking collegial respect had been classes.He was descended from two gen- “Thanks,” she said, as she turned in specially reserved. So many her towel. pleasant exchanges,straight- erations of advanced-degree- forward smiles! She might holding black professionals “Why, hello,”he said jokingly, lean- as well have been wearing who loved him uncondition- ing forward on the counter. a pants suit during all those ally but regarded the proj- years.Yet dull Christina had ect of “art school” with in- Meg Sand wore a stretchy top that been called a wench more credulity. Graduate work in matched her reflective leggings, new times than could be counted. painting? they’d repeat, as if sneakers, and a full face of makeup.The Along with a few humor- maybe they had misunder- makeup wasn’t loud; she looked like a ous observations about the stood. As for her, she’d in- girl who had moved to the city from size of her mouth. Which herited her parents’ immi- upstate and, upon the shock of arrival, would explain, wouldn’t it, the popular grant terror of nonfamilial severely trained herself in how to do opinion regarding her resemblance to— debt,and so had yet to apply things nicely. She clutched a rather el- for even a credit card, much less to a egant brown purse.Her voice was deeper “Funny that she didn’t have an en- graduate program. The programs were than he’d expected and when she spoke tourage in tow,” she says. extortionists preying on directionless to him she sounded unnatural, as if she people in their mid to late twenties, she were a grownup trying to be pals with “Was she being followed by the pa- thought, and she wasn’t interested. She a kid. Did he also work out here? Or parazzi?” the child asks. liked the magic of direct deposit and also just work? She laughed lamely at her- the green-bordered Social Security state- self. Yet Meg Sand was, according to “Nope,” Ezra answers serenely. “She ment that would appear every few years, the computer, practically the same age was completely alone.Enjoying the day.” telling her just how much she had earned as him. Not even a full year older. It was so far in her working life. After moving her hair, he realized: she wore it short “Without even a bodyguard?” his to New York, she promptly found em- and gently teased,in a mature little pouf, wife asks in the dark. ployment, with benefits, in the alumni- a style chosen, he saw with a pang, to relations office at Ezra’s school. Her par- conceal the fact that it was thinning. “Not as far as I could see. But, then ents approved of the job but seemed again, I didn’t see that it was Julia Rob- undecided, even after all this time, about Quickly enough he developed the erts until I was looking down at her.” Ezra.When she watched television with trick of not letting his eyes drift above them,the handsomeness of a young actor her forehead.Sitting at the Polish restau- “Between your legs,” the child says. might make her mother pensive. “You rant around the corner from the gym, “I helped her back up to her feet and have to be careful with a man who’s he would watch her tuck into a plate of we each went on our way.” Ezra is better-looking than you,”she’d been heard cherry blintzes and finish off a big glass straightening out the comforter, by the to say, to a character onscreen. of ice water. She seemed to take undue sound of it. “I wasn’t looking around pride in not being the type of gym-goer for bodyguards. I wanted to get home Every day his girlfriend set off for who only ate healthy. The booth’s seats as fast as I could and tell you.” the university uncomplainingly, but were sticky and made funny sounds “We didn’t have cell phones,” she Ezra wanted to be on campus no more whenever he adjusted himself, which explains. than was required. Instead he got a job he did often,sucking listlessly at a foun- “You were too poor,” the child says at a gym. He had to wear an orange polo tain soda and describing what had hap- soothingly. shirt with the gym’s logo stitched over his pened that week in crit. She would lis- She doesn’t protest. The history of left pectoral. Standing at a counter, he ten with a stolid expression and barely technology is too great an undertaking scanned members’I.D. cards as they en- move.To his surprise, she did not share at this hour. tered and then checked on the computer an upsetting story straightaway,as white Also, it’s true: they lived on very lit- to make sure that their payments were girls who liked him were in the habit tle then.Home was a garden-level apart- up to date.This was how he first learned of doing, a story told slowly, as if with ment in a neglected corner of an outer her name, Meg Sand. He was familiar reluctance, but always aired fully by the borough, its distance to the nearest sub- with her name long before he noticed time they were making out. Bulimia way stop the original inspiration for her looking at him from the lat machine. and bad parents.Depression.Social pres- the Rollerblades. From next door came Or gazing, maybe. It was hard to tell the sures,double standards,a sister who had the incoherent cries of an old man and been hospitalized. All offered uncon- the smell of decades’ worth of fried sciously, he guessed, in a nervous spirit meat. They kept the windows open in all seasons, because of both the smell 56 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020

of redress. Yet Meg Sand rarely said Sand at the theatre. She was coming paused, shot a furtive look at the movie anything about herself. And “girl,” in straight from work, from an alumni net- poster, and then seemed to remember her case, didn’t exactly fit. working event that she had helped or- the risk-free response she had prepared ganize, and as she approached them he for these occasions.“It wasn’t what I was Without making a big fuss,she’d pay could tell that one of her high heels had expecting,”she said slowly. She gave one the bill for both of them.Together they started to hurt her.He could also tell that of her close-lipped, knowing smiles: a would walk to his subway station and she immediately took in the problem of precaution she used all the time,he’d no- after giving her a brisk hug he’d jog Meg Sand’s hair.Her whole face relaxed. ticed, a smile showing that, whatever the downstairs into the clatter and the heat, The job in retail, the degree from SUNY joke at hand might be, she was in on it. feeling light of heart.Nothing was going Potsdam, now the hair: there truly was on. Nothing was going on! He sailed no cause for alarm. Meg stumbled back- “Me neither!” his girlfriend replied. into the basement apartment, pulled off ward slightly as his girlfriend went in for “A lot more blood than I signed up for. his orange polo shirt, and made love to a hug. Oh, his girlfriend was a ruthless And all that gurgling when people died. his beautiful girlfriend under the open snob,as only the recently respectable can It was very graphic. Or is that more window. He planned, any day now, to be. Before she even said hello, he knew sound design? They didn’t leave any- propose to her. But not on his knees: that she would speak to Meg in the sil- thing to the imagination, did they? Her they already spent enough time practi- very, childlike voice she used when com- knife skills were . . . amazing.” cally underground as it was. Instead he municating with maintenance staff or imagined, absurdly, a wide, empty field, bus drivers,as if making her voice smaller Meg brightened a bit.“Amazing.Yes. where he would toss the glittering ring might somehow diminish the existen- I loved the fight sequences. She was so in the air and she would catch it with tial distance between them. fierce. I think she must have trained for outstretched hands. a long time to play the part.I read some- After the movie, they stood on the where that she did most of the stunt It was not only his heart that felt street, shivering. He didn’t suggest that work herself.” newly light. His legs on the long walk they go get a coffee somewhere. His to the subway, his hand as it moved girlfriend had slipped off her shoes in “Well,I believe it,”his girlfriend said. across a thick sheet of paper. His advis- the theatre and,when the credits started “The action looked very real.” er’s caustic sense of humor, which had to roll, had a difficult time getting them made him insecure at the start of the on. Her blouse was softly askew, the “I must have read that in the Times,” semester, was now a source of amuse- long day had loosened her hair, and he Meg went on.“Yes,that must have been ment and private laughter. The gym wanted to take her home and into bed. where I read it. In last weekend’s Arts regulars no longer greeted him with section.” “man” or “dude” but with his real name: But she persisted in being gracious. “Hey,Ezra,what’s up?”Rearranging the “Did you enjoy it?” she asked Meg, who “Oh! Did you see that piece about free weights took almost no effort at all. Merce Cunningham and the dog?” He felt agile and clearheaded. His skin looked good. Out of the depths of her Meg shook her head mutely. boxy brown purse, Meg Sand produced “It was funny.” His girlfriend smiled little tubes and flasks of extravagant ointments made by companies he’d never heard of.She worked on the housewares floor of a large department store, but she claimed to have friends at all the cosmetic counters, and these were sam- ples, she said. They were free. From inside the humid broom closet they called their bathroom came his girlfriend’s gentle voice. “I have to say, these look regular-sized to me,”she said. He had emptied a shelf in the medi- cine cabinet so that he could create a display. The little flasks were elegant, and he had nothing to hide. Only a month before, the three of them had gone to the movies and watched a ter- rible action thriller. His idea—both the movie and Meg Sand and his girlfriend meeting. The whole thing had come together in such a casual way as to feel practically spontaneous. His girlfriend had met him and Meg

at Meg with almost professional kind- tice into video.The over-all lack of light scrolled past the smudged glass. With ness.Then she tilted her head and nar- in the basement apartment was proving a sense of deliverance he understood rowed her eyes. “You know, with that to be a plus. He was hypnotized by the that, whatever crisis he encountered, jacket on you kind of look like—” She way that editing could turn the sloppy he’d be able to help. And if it turned said the forgettable name of the actress. footage he’d shot at school into some- out that in the end he couldn’t—well, “Especially the whole section when she’s thing rich with possible meaning. A she was just a friend from the gym.Teeth in Budapest. I’m not imagining it.” sudden cut to black, the amplification rattling, he hurtled forward, at once of ambient sound. Hours melted away weightless and full of purpose. He didn’t see the resemblance him- without his realizing it. The first week- self.He told them flatly that he thought end he spent alone, he managed to get Her address was on York Avenue, the movie was garbage. “You thought groceries and do his laundry,but the sec- which despite its Manhattan Zip Code so, too,” he said to his girlfriend as they ond weekend he didn’t leave the apart- appeared to be even more desolate and rode the subway home. She shrugged ment at all. When the telephone rang, remote than where he lived. The car sleepily. “I didn’t want to be judgmen- he had no sense of what day it was, and jerked to a stop in front of the build- tal,”she murmured, placing her head on as he answered, confused, his heart in- ing; he looked up at its expanse of mo- his shoulder. By the time they reached explicably racing,the unbearable thought notonous mid-century brick and felt their stop, she was dead to the world. that occurred to him was: She’s dead. depressed for her. She was waiting in He had to guide her up the stairs and the lobby,dressed in her jacket and boots. through the empty streets like a parent “Ezra? I’m sorry to bother you.” The He almost didn’t notice the doorman steering a child toward bed. deep,uninflected voice of Meg Sand was sitting wordlessly at his station but then on the other end. He was briefly even found himself wondering about him as As winter dragged on, Meg Sand more confused,and then strangely com- they rose in the elevator. On the sev- wore the jacket more often than not. forted that it was only her. “I know I enth floor, she led him down a carpeted Was it a coincidence that she also bought shouldn’t be calling this late. I tried call- corridor to her apartment door, which a pair of tall, zippered boots similar to ing two other people before I called you.” she unlocked with trembling hands. It the ones worn by the female assassin? swung open into a single room that con- “I used my employee discount,”she said “Is it late?” he asked. “I don’t even tained her entire life: stove, bed, clothes apologetically from her side of the booth. know what time it is.” rack, television, all laid out plainly be- He’d had to ask for more hours at the fore him.On the wall hung a poster-size gym, in order to recover from the reck- “It’s 11:47,” she replied. “It’s almost reproduction of a black-and-white pho- less amount he’d spent on a new com- midnight.” tograph of the Flatiron Building,framed. puter. Also, his girlfriend was prepar- The bed was piled high with expensive- ing to take an unpaid leave from her As she was speaking, he saw that the looking pillows of different shapes and job at the alumni office; she’d already time had been right in front of him all sizes that she must have acquired through used up all her vacation days by the along, tucked away in a corner of his her job. She went to the little stove and time they found out about her mother’s vast computer screen. “Look at that,” started boiling water—not in a teakettle breast cancer. At first she had wept un- he said aloud. but in a saucepan. controllably, but then she became very quiet and matter-of-fact, and started Then he realized: “I think the last “I hope you like chamomile,” she researching airfares.It was Stage II,they meal I ate was breakfast.” said. “It’s all I have.” caught it early, she wouldn’t even need chemo. A lumpectomy, not a mastec- “I’m sorry,” Meg said again, and fell He couldn’t find an obvious place tomy. These facts he repeated to Meg silent before announcing,“But I’ve been where he was meant to sit. He couldn’t Sand in their corner of the Polish res- robbed.” figure out what had been stolen. The taurant, as if to reassure himself. Noth- room had a slightly tousled look but ing had prepared him for the second- He flew across the city in the back seemed otherwise intact. hand jitters he was feeling.The container of a Lincoln Town Car whose shocks ship that had looked toylike on the “How did they get in?” horizon was now, upon making its way seemed in need of immediate replace- She turned from the stove and looked into port, revealing its true dimensions. ment. The traffic lights turned green at him uncomprehendingly. Since the scheduling of the surgery,he’d one after the other, benevolently syn- “The . . . robbers.”He corrected him- been having trouble falling asleep, and chronized, as if wishing him Godspeed self.“Intruders.”But maybe it had been though Meg ordered him a Coke, he as he drew closer to Meg’s apartment. someone working solo. “Intruder,” he hardly touched it. He didn’t know what he would find said, finally. there. A jimmied lock, a gaping win- She blinked once, then twice, as if With his girlfriend gone, he was dow,stuff spilling out of drawers,strewn trying to bring him into focus.“It hap- thankful for the company of his new across the floor,or ...? Darkened blocks pened on the subway,”she said.“Is that computer, which was much faster than what you mean?” his old one.The enormous monitor, the “I don’t mean anything. You’re the powerful processor, the highly sensitive one who said you were robbed.”He glared keyboard—all necessary now that he at the apartment around him, searching had decided to expand his artistic prac- for signs of entry.“And I said that I would come right over. Which I did.” 58 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020

“Thank you,”Meg said.“Thank you “Remember, when we get to go back outside, it’s still the top of for coming over. You didn’t have to. I the fifth. Jodie’s on second, Noah’s at bat, and the count is one-and-two.” feel bad that it’s so late.” •• “I don’t care what time it is. I’m just not understanding what you—” watch the Knicks lose to the Spurs in she can’t remember Meg Sand’s real the finals; she was in Florida with her name, she hasn’t been able to repeat it “It happened on the subway,”she re- parents. Also, she can say with certainty to herself and she hasn’t been able to peated. “It must have happened when that she’s never discovered a mouse be- look her up online. I was on my way home from work. Be- hind the toaster oven. Or been pick- cause then I got back and took a shower pocketed on the subway. She wonders But she doubts that she would ever and ordered Thai and when I went to if the same could be true of the roller- type Meg’s name into a search box,even pay the delivery guy I reached into my blading event. She believes that it was if she could. Her curiosity is nil.There’s bag and it wasn’t there.” an experience he enthusiastically re- nothing more she wants to know. For counted at the time, just not to her. the nearly twenty years that she’s had “Your wallet?” the video in her possession, not once “Yes. It was gone. The last time I Yet her memory is not without its has she felt the faintest need to watch had it was when I pulled out a token.” own shortcomings. She cannot remem- it again.The first time was enough, and “You think someone stole it on the ber, for example, Meg Sand’s last name. even then she didn’t watch it all the way subway,”he said dully.“Hours ago. Like Sand is just something she’s made up through. Very clearly she remembers a pickpocket.” as a placeholder.Whatever the real name how surprised she was that she could “Yes,” she answered solemnly, and is, she thinks, it must be so ordinary, so operate the playback function on the handed him his cup of tea. “I do.” unremarkable, as to be mind-numbing camera in the first place. She’d never Before taking the cup, he put down in the most literal sense. For a while she used the camera before or been inter- his backpack, heavy with the hammer thought it might have been Whitman, ested in how it worked. But there was and nails he had brought. The tea until she realized that that was the name something about the way it was rest- smelled medicinal and was too hot to of the C.E.O. who had run unsuccess- ing beneath Ezra’s desk, balanced ca- drink. He had paid thirty-eight dollars fully for governor of California.Because sually on top of the paper shredder, its for the car service, with tip. He was overcome by the sudden,profound tired- ness that comes right after a stupid expenditure of energy. Meg was now sitting on the edge of the bed, still wearing her jacket, as if she, too, were a guest. Without asking, he sank down beside her and placed his cup on the floor. He was too exhausted even to be angry anymore. “So,” he said. “This is your place.” “Welcome,” she said, and with a lit- tle sigh rested her fragile head of hair on his shoulder. “I’m glad you’re here.” At least that’s how Ezra’s wife has imagined it, their unpromising start. Some details, such as the poster of the Flatiron Building and the mound of fancy pillows, she is familiar with from the video; some—the lat machine, the good purse, the booths at the Pol- ish restaurant—she knows firsthand; the rest are the result of inference and extrapolation. It is rare for her to think at all of Meg Sand anymore, but the mention of Julia Roberts there in the dark has brought her back. When Ezra recalls his years in grad- uate school, his memory has occasion- ally confused or conflated the two of them—her and Meg.To be fair, the in- stances have been very few. In one case, she had to remind him that they didn’t THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020 59

little screen popped open, that made changed her mind ten or eleven times that it is, the dark being the only thing her stop. about what she needed to do. large,comfortable,and cluttered enough to contain all the various bits and pieces She put down the box she was car- He was breathing very hard. He had of their life together. So many years be- rying. Inside, still in its protective wrap- run the entire way from the distant tween them, and from where exactly ping, was a five-piece place setting of subway stop. On his sweating face was does one begin to count? The first day the wedding china that Ezra’s aunts had the naked look of fear that comes with of ninth grade, or the short, rainy sum- gently insisted they register for. There having loved someone for a long time. mer after graduation? The moment they was no room or use for china in their “You’re still here,” he panted. The look signed a lease and became residents of basement apartment. With ceremonial on his face summoned out of her cha- the basement apartment? There is no care she had been stacking the boxes in otic feelings the lifelong habit of prag- single starting point, only the density the corner of the bedroom not taken up matism, which caused her to say with and shapelessness of experience held in by Ezra’s enormous computer. Though formality, “She is not to see or contact common, the meals prepared and eaten, he had gallantly carried her over the us ever again,” a message that she re- the assorted haircuts and injuries, ela- threshold, marriage had done little to peated a few days later,when Meg Sand tions and malaises,car leases and check- change their abode other than to make called the apartment, and she was star- ing accounts, friends made, trips taken, it feel smaller and darker.When she put tled to hear herself speak not in her a pregnancy that failed and two that down the china, the last to arrive, her lilting telephone voice but in an unfa- didn’t. She remembers: the shock of a hands were shaking.This is another de- miliar and shaky middle register that baby’s cold mouth on her nipple after tail she recalls with perfect clarity: her seemed to emanate directly from her he spat out an ice pop and chose her hands shaking even before she picked chest. She hung up the receiver before breast instead.He remembers: her shout up the camera and turned it on. Meg could respond. Her mind was still of laughter. Now their younger child changing rapidly,hourly.The only thing kicks experimentally at the comforter, A bed piled with tasselled pillows; she knew for certain was that the video unwilling to go to sleep, while the older a framed black-and-white poster, only had become hers in some permanent, one makes his way up the stairs, halt- a corner of which appears in the shot; irrefutable way. She buried the cassette ing at irregular intervals, absorbed no a long white body, naked except for a in the deep pocket of a shearling coat doubt by the game in his hand, light- pair of knee-high gladiator sandals.The she no longer wore but that still hung ing his face from below as he moves soles of the sandals as flat and beige as thickly at the back of the closet, and so slowly toward them. pancakes. it remained there undisturbed for many years and through several moves, until “Pick up the pace, kid.”Ezra casts his And then from offscreen his voice, the technology required to play it had voice toward the door.“We’re all waiting.” the voice that she had first heard in his- all but disappeared. tory class, telling the body what he’d It is the same voice,and also the same like it to do. Could the nature of the video be in- darkness: the darkness out of which this terpreted in a different way? The voice once floated, low-pitched and She couldn’t hit the square of the therapist at the university health cen- warm, patiently unfolding and finding Stop button quickly enough. Straight- ter had asked her this question. Your her on the bed, the bed seeming to lift away she ejected the cassette,which was husband is studying art, she said, dou- imperceptibly off the floor, set aloft yet smaller than a tin of breath mints. She ble-checking the open folder in her lap. lightly tethered, his voice telling her wandered back and forth the length of Was there anything—the therapist what he saw, what he liked, the things the apartment, holding it carefully in searched for a word—artistic about what he wished to see more of. At the sound the palm of her hand.She thought about you saw? of his voice, she relaxed into the plea- stuffing it down to the bottom of the sure of being instructed, and then more garbage can, or wrapping it in layers of Grimly, she said no. They had been deeply into the pleasure of being seen, newspaper and tossing it in a dumpster, over this before. Therapy was turning and running beneath it all was a bright, or dropping it down the echoing trash out to deserve the suspicion with which nearly invisible current of thankfulness. chute at work. She also thought about she had always held it, but under her To be called such things. In words far cracking open the plastic shell and benefits plan the first six sessions were worse, or far better, than whatever had plucking out the two black reels inside free. The truth is, she was too shy to been said in high school. Tipping back and melting them over the stove—then explain to the therapist why she had her head and closing her eyes, she felt wondered about the strands of video- instantly recognized the sort of video capable of doing anything he asked.She tape she sometimes saw tangled in the she was watching. Just as she was too saw pictures: a bar of sunlight flaring branches of the borough’s trees. How shy to keep her eyes open while mak- on a mirror; the square,golden windows did they end up there? Meanwhile, a ing them. Darkness was essential, she of a long motel at night.His steady voice cold little part of her counselled pru- couldn’t explain; darkness was key. spoke to her in the dark. “Wider,” he dence: keep it safe. At which she re- said, and she opened farther than she coiled: it would poison her. After sev- The darkness created when he turned had thought possible.  eral minutes of this, she called Ezra at on the camera and she closed her eyes— the gym to say that she was leaving was it the same element that she’s stand- THE WRITER’S VOICE PODCAST him. The word “divorce” she avoided, ing in now, listening to him say good not wanting to sound operatic. By the night to their child? She likes to think The author reads “Bedtime Story.” time he arrived home, she had already 60 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020

THE CRITICS ON TELEVISION PROGRESS REPORT “Mrs. America,” on FX. BY DOREEN ST. FÉLIX You are likely familiar with the then, introspection and grief have the godmother of the modern anti- exit-poll result, in 2016, that sug- caused liberals to ask not just why feminist movement, played with gested that fifty-three per cent of white white women voted for Trump but frightening, actressy charisma by Cate American women voted for Donald why some of us ever thought they Blanchett. (She was also an executive Trump. Never mind that such polls wouldn’t.The new FX miniseries “Mrs. producer on the series.) A nervy, nine- are notoriously imprecise; the statis- America”—created by Dahvi Waller episode period piece about the fight tic was used, repeatedly, as evidence (“Mad Men”)—provides answers to over the ratification of the Equal to disprove the assumption that most both questions in its intensely psy- Rights Amendment, “Mrs. America” women want a female President. Since chological portrait of Phyllis Schlafly, feels like the product of a shift in pop Cate Blanchett’s Phyllis Schlafly is a pastel nightmare, arch and juicily camp. THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020 61 ILLUSTRATION BY ANGELICA ALZONA

feminist consciousness: a post-Clinton When Alice (Sarah Paulson), a kind through the series, cigarette in hand, critique of the savior model and of pink- of surrogate daughter, first brings the eyes furrowed in telegenic sorrow for pussy-hat resistance. E.R.A. to her attention, claiming that the sisters who have it harder than her. the libbers will force their daughters It’s easy to imagine an alternate “Mrs. into the draft, Schlafly swiftly assembles The most recognizable faces of the America”—a sappier, more complacent an army of housewives who view “equal feminist movement have always historical drama that might have taken, rights” as an implicit criticism of their been white, and “Mrs. America” prides as its opening, the last scene of the pilot, choices. Schlafly’s “Stop E.R.A.” cam- itself on reminding us why without ever in which, in 1972, the founding mem- paign lands her on talk shows and in lec- quite redressing the balance.In one scene, bers of the National Women’s Political ture halls; her vast mailing list piques the Steinem argues with the “money guy”at Caucus celebrateintheWashington,D.C., interest of Ronald Reagan, who is run- Ms., who is reluctant to put Chisholm office of the activist and politician Bella ning for President. Her crusade to pro- on the cover because she will “depress Abzug (played by a saucy Margo Mar- tect the traditional family involves travel, sales, especially in the South.” When tindale). Ambitious costuming and wig long hours, and the kind of industry that Abzug, eager to hitch the E.R.A. fight direction help us identify, in the mix, looks suspiciously like a successful ca- to George McGovern’s Presidential can- the popular saints of second-wave fem- reer; meanwhile, she relies on her sister- didacy, admonishes Chisholm for con- inism: Gloria Steinem (Rose Byrne), in-law,Eleanor (played with muted heart- tinuing her symbolic campaign,Chisholm with her long hair middle-parted and break by Jeanne Tripplehorn), and her responds,mightily,“I didn’t get anywhere her aviator glasses; Shirley Chisholm smiling black maids to take care of the in this life waiting on someone’s permis- (Uzo Aduba), with her black-salon children. A good bio-pic performance sion.”But Chisholm,in reality a staunch, bouffant; Betty Friedan (Tracy Ullman), captures a historical figure, but a tran- ingenious politician, is portrayed as an her big hair streaked, skunklike, with scendent one can effectively destroy her, egoless exemplar of political duty.Mean- gray.The Senate has passed the E.R.A., outdoing the original in our cultural while,the legendary lawyer Flo Kennedy, sending it to the states for ratification, memory. Blanchett’s Schlafly is a pastel played by the perpetually underrated and Chisholm, the country’s first black nightmare, arch and juicily camp. Niecy Nash, delivers clapbacks to black congresswoman, has announced her feminists seeking to exclude black lesbi- Presidential bid. The women’s toast to Trump spoke at Schlafly’s funeral, ans from their ranks. From the narrative progress is interrupted by a staffer bear- in 2016, apparently aware of his debt sidelines, she represents, but the show ing the opposition research: a copy of to her strategy, and there are oblique doesn’t let her live or love. “The Phyllis Schlafly Report,” a news- references to the Trump era in “Mrs. letter published monthly by a home- America”—in the finale, Schlafly greets The eighth episode is a memorable maker in Alton, Illinois. two baby-faced lawyers named Paul set piece: at the National Women’s Con- Manafort and Roger Stone. But the ference,in Houston,Alice,Schlafly’s fol- “Who the hell is Phyllis Schaffly?” series mostly avoids the premonitions lower, accidentally takes a psychedelic Friedan spits,mispronouncing the name. that dog the storytelling of such dramas and goes through the looking glass,wan- The moment, which captures the rad- as Ava DuVernay’s 2019 “When They dering into a Pete Seeger sing-along with ical élite’s reflexive dismissal of the al- See Us,”based on the Central Park jog- the feminists.But there is something too lure of white conservatism, is all the ger case. It is clear where the sympa- easy about the satisfaction gained from more powerful because, in this “Mrs. thies of the show’s creators lie, and as watching a woman escape Schlafly’s orbit America,”we have already been warned. the prim staginess of the Schlafly sub- when the woman in question is one of The series is an ensemble vehicle, with urban universe gives way to apartments the show’s few fictional characters. Ull- each episode following a different char- in New York City and offices in Wash- man’s portrayal of the middle-aged Frie- acter, but it opens with Schlafly—in- ington, the cinematography becomes dan,the intellectual founder of the move- troduced by an m.c. in a bikini compe- warmer—reminiscent of Frederick ment, feels, by contrast, painfully real. tition at a charity fund-raiser as “the Wiseman documentaries and stomp- Friedan is among the first of the femi- wife of one of our biggest donors, down-the-street seventies dramas. Yet nists to take Schlafly seriously, agreeing Mrs. J. Fred Schlafly”—and stays with the feminist fighters, drawn with less to debate her at Illinois State Univer- her throughout. A mother of six and a specificity and more reverence, are in- sity—not just because she feels a moral Radcliffe graduate, she has had a failed evitably less interesting. Abzug is the imperative to quash Schlafly’s rise but run for Congress and carries with her pushy yenta of the Senate, a pragma- because she sees the event as an oppor- an air of thwarted ambition. At a meet- tist willing to make concessions to se- tunity to retrieve the renown she has lost ing with Barry Goldwater in D.C., at cure male allies.The only Republican in to the movement’s younger figures, pri- which she hopes to advise on his nu- the caucus, Jill Ruckelshaus (Elizabeth marily Steinem. In one scene, we watch clear policy, she is asked instead to take Banks), is a symbol of the impending as Friedan, preparing for a date, opens notes. Schlafly and her husband ( John death of bipartisanship. The weakest her closet and fondles a flower-print dress Slattery) are locked in a simmering, characterization is that of the sprite- that she wore,years earlier,on a talk show. kinky battle of intelligences, but, in the like Steinem,whose primary anxiety ap- The moment is quiet,almost taboo.Frie- evening, as he presses his weight on her, pears to be the fear that her peers toler- dan may be fighting for equality, but she his needs win. Schlafly sets out as the ate her only because of her value as the is also a woman, wanting to remember most dangerous type of powermonger: movement’s sex symbol,and who swans what it feels like to be adored.  one without power. 62 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020

BOOKS This change is real, and is reflected in the numbers. As Jonathan Morris BLACK, NO SUGAR documents in his recent book, “Coffee: A Global History” (Reaktion), epicu- The war on coffee. rean coffeehouses in the United States numbered in the hundreds in 1989, and BY ADAM GOPNIK in the tens of thousands by 2013. A lot of that is Starbucks, but not all. Roast- The literature of coffee has produced a new genre: corrective history. ers in Italy went from exporting twelve million kilograms of espresso in 1988 to “ What would life be without cof- In “Seinfeld,” which he co-created in more than a hundred and seventy mil- fee?”King Louis XV of France 1989, coffee came as a normal beverage lion in 2015.Not surprisingly,the growth is said to have asked. “But, then, what in a coffee shop—bad, indistinct stuff of a coffee culture has been trailed, and is life even with coffee?”he added.Truer, that might as well have been tea. (Paul sometimes advanced, by a coffee litera- or more apt, words for the present mo- Reiser had a nice bit about the code- ture, which arrived in predictable waves, ment were never spoken, now usable as pendency of coffee and tea, with tea as each reflecting a thriving genre. First, a kind of daily catechism. At a time coffee’s pathetic friend.) Then, on we got a fan’s literature—“the little bean when coffee remains one of the few “Friends,” the characters gathered in a that changed the world”—with histories things that the anxious sleeper can look coffee-specific location, Central Perk, of coffee consumption and appreciations forward to in the morning (What is life but the very invocation of a percolator, of coffee preparations. (The language without it?), giving as it does at least an the worst way to brew, suggested that of wine appreciation was adapted to illusion of recharge and a fresh start, the they were there more for the company coffee, especially a fixation on terroir— charge has invariably slipped away by than for the coffee.Six or so Larrys later, single origins, single estates, even micro the time the latest grim briefing comes by 2020, the plotline of an entire season lots.) Then came the gonzo, adventurer (What is life even with it?). Imagining of David’s own “Curb Your Enthusiasm” approach: the obsessive who gives up life without coffee right now is,for many turned on a competition between Mocha normal life to pursue coffee’s mysteries. of us, almost impossible, even though Joe’s and Latte Larry’s—the “spite store” And, finally, a moralizing literature that the culture of the café that arose in that Larry opens just to avenge an in- rehearsed a familiar lecture on the hid- America over the past couple of decades sult over scones,with many details about den cost of the addiction. has, for some indefinite period, been a specific kind of Mexican coffee bean shut down. he means to steal.The audience was ex- The most entertaining of the coffee- pected to accept as an obvious premise as-adventure books is Stewart Lee Al- The growth of coffee as a culture,not the idea that coffee was a culture of de- len’s “The Devil’s Cup” (1999), which just as a drink, can be measured in a unit votion and discrimination, not just a helped establish the wild-man school that might be called the Larry, for the passable caffeinated drink. of gastronomic appreciation. Allen, in peerless comedy writer Larry David. a tone that marries Anthony Bourdain with S. J. Perelman, ventures jauntily on a pilgrimage to all coffee’s holy places, from Ethiopia to Turkey,meeting every- one from the keeper of Rimbaud’s house in Harar to someone who still knows how to make coffee from roasted leaves. Searching for the origins of the coffee- house,Allen supplies much lively anthro- pological detail, dense with many stal- wart sentences: “Everyone had warned me against taking the overnight train from Konya to Istanbul. They said it took twice as long as the bus (nonsense), that it was unsafe (rubbish) and so over- heated that passengers’ clothing caught fire (this is actually true).”There is also much lubricious detail: In the Oromo culture of western Ethiopia, the coffee bean’s resemblance to a woman’s sex- ual organs has given birth to another bun- qalle ceremony with such heavy sexual signifi- cance. . . . After the beans are husked, they are stirred in the butter with a stick called dan- naba, the word for penis. . . . As the beans are ILLUSTRATION BY ILYA MILSTEIN THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020 63

stirred another prayer is recited until finally with another product that offers sim- repetition are the farmer’s civilization- the coffee fruits burst open from the heat, mak- ulated energy to money-driven people. supporting but lamentable lot. ing the sound Tass! This bursting of the fruit Coffee got produced by something is likened to both childbirth and the last cry like slavery and was then pushed on a But, far beyond the hardships of of the dying man. pliant proletariat by big business and farming, the story that Sedgewick de- the Yanqui dollar. Americans, under tails (and Wild sketches) identifies a For all the book’s Hunter S.Thomp- the pressure of mass marketing and system of exploitation powered by fine- son curlicues, the essential information pseudo-scientific propaganda, have toothed gears. It is much like the story is communicated.The coffee bean comes been encouraged to drink ever more of sugar told by Sidney Mintz in his in two basic families, arabica and the coffee while the peasants of El Salva- epoch-marking “Sweetness and Power,” inferior (though easier to grow) robusta. dor suffer and die in the brutally efficient from 1985: sweet are the uses of adver- It thrives in high terrains, and, like wine coffee monoculture promoted by plan- sity, Shakespeare’s Duke says, and ad- grapes, it does best in seemingly inhos- tation growers. Both North and Cen- verse are the sources of sweetness,Mintz pitable environments—rocky and vol- tral America became “coffeelands”—a replies.What sweetened the cup of Eu- canic soil on mountainsides. An alter- peasantry making the drug, a proletar- ropeans was bitter to the people who native to alcohol, coffee was central to iat consuming it. produced it. teetotalling Islamic civilization in the Middle Ages, and spread from Turkey The first moral that this new liter- Extremely wide-ranging and well to points west, where the coffeehouse ature brings out—a commodity that researched, Sedgewick’s story reaches became the cockpit of the Enlight- was a huge aid to the European En- out into American political history, not enment, and even up to little Iceland, lightenment was a huge drag on the to mention the history of American where it became the national sacrament. people who made it—can be found breakfast, but it is mostly set in El Sal- Throughout, Allen’s assumption is that as well in Antony Wild’s 2004 book, vador, where a large-scale monoculture everyone craves coffee, and that, while “Coffee: A Dark History.” Even Stew- of coffee began, at the turn of the twen- the craving may lead to many supersti- art Allen couldn’t conceal the truth that tieth century, under the fiendishly bril- tions and black-market absurdities, the growing and harvesting coffee is luck- liant direction of a British expat named craving in itself is good. In the spirit of less and backbreaking work. A built-in James Hill. Originally from Manches- the time, craving was living. divide separates things we hunt and ter, the birthplace of the British indus- things we grow: hooking swordfish and trial revolution, Hill, in the nineteen- It was fun while it lasted. Now the netting tuna have been the subject of twenties,imposed a program of modern strictures of a corrective literature have romances, since the erotic aura of the serfdom on the indigenous Salvadoran come for coffee. Augustine Sedgewick’s chase still attaches to them. But there’s people in order to grow coffee on an “Coffeeland: One Man’s Dark Empire nothing romantic about mass agricul- unprecedented scale. Recognizing that and the Making of Our Favorite Drug” ture, no matter how prized its products wages were of limited value to a peas- (Penguin Press), as the title announces, are. Virgil’s Georgics—a propaganda antry who largely didn’t live within the tells a story not very different from the poem ostensibly in praise of farming— cash economy, Sedgewick writes, Hill kind that might be told of Colombian makes plain that frugality, austerity, and “used food rather than money to at- cocaine production and narco-terrorism, tract people” to work for him, “offer- ing an extra half-ration, one tortilla and beans, for the completion of each task. The extra rations were always given as breakfast, which was a double incen- tive, for only workers who arrived at the plantations before 6 a.m. qualified for breakfast—serving stopped and work started at 6:00 sharp.” Hill had the Fitzcarraldo-like obsessiveness of the European in Latin America: he wouldn’t use child labor, but kids served as messengers between mill and plan- tation and were treated like something close to hostages, their welfare guaran- teed as long as their parents worked; elderly people were recruited as spies, reporting on slackers among the work- ing peasants. Sedgewick concedes that this pro- gram was less total than it might sound. Because coffee-growing was booming, peasants could usually find a margin- ally more humane deal in the next plan-

tation. But given capitalism’s inclina- BRIEFLY NOTED tion to cancel competition rather than encourage it—a truth known to John Redhead by the Side of the Road, by Anne Tyler (Knopf ). Kenneth Galbraith as much as to Karl This simple but affecting story follows Micah, a man in his Marx—coffee was handed over to an forties who spends his days providing tech support to elderly oligarchy that had coalesced by the nine- clients, and his evenings with a casual girlfriend. “Does he teen-thirties. Eventually, a legendary ever stop to consider his life?”the novel asks.“It’s almost cer- “fourteen families”came to dominate El tain nobody’s ever asked him.”His placidity is disturbed when Salvador’s coffee plantations, aided by a a teen-ager shows up on his doorstep, wrongly convinced that complicated program of American in- Micah is his father. The encounter brings Micah back into vestment. When, in 1932, the peasants contact with a former girlfriend and spurs him to examine rose in a revolt, led by the Communist the rut into which his life has fallen. Tyler has the rare abil- revolutionary Farabundo Martí, they ity to evoke the ordinary with particularity, and the novel, were mowed down in the thousands,and though concerned with small events, insists on the dignity their leaders, Martí included, were sum- of its characters and the seriousness of their problems. marily executed. (A brigade of guerril- las fighting under Martí’s name bedev- Saltwater, by Jessica Andrews (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). “I illed Ronald Reagan’s Central American felt everything so deeply,” Lucy, the narrator of this heady policy fifty years later.) novel,declares.After her grandfather dies,she and her mother travel from the North of England to coastal Ireland to sift The originality and ambition of through his belongings. Lucy stays on and, in the stillness of Sedgewick’s work is that he insistently the town, takes stock of her past. Impressionistic recollec- sees the dynamic between producer and tions of her alcoholic father’s periodic disappearances, her consumer—Central American peasant adolescent sexual awakenings,and her time at college in Lon- and North American proletarian—not don coalesce into a characterization of a young woman taught merely as one of exploited and exploiter by her mother’s example how to navigate a society ruled by but as a manufactured co-dependence men. Drinking, dancing, and reading allow Lucy to experi- between two groups both exploited by ence her life fully, and to grasp that to be present in the world capitalism.“Cravings”are not natural ap- she must allow its weight to dissipate. petites but carefully created cultural dik- tats. Coffee is sold less to provide an in- Lurking, by Joanne McNeil (MCD). This cultural history of dividual with pleasure than to support the Internet’s social aspects uses the proverbial lurker—a user an industry with a skillfully primed au- who silently surveys the feeds of friends, exes, or strangers— dience.The objective of capitalist coffee as a frame. Mixing personal anecdotes and academic analy- production,in Sedgewick’s view,was “the ses, McNeil examines a range of technological innovations, foreclosure of the possibility of unpro- and traces their influence on today’s online world: the now ductive eating, being, doing—ways of defunct Friendster prefigured many current social platforms, living that were not directly convertible and early video feeds by “camgirls,” broadcasting their lives into cash on the world market.” Amer- to paying audiences, were a forerunner of Twitch live streams. ican workers were compelled to drink Describing the sense of community that emerged on Twit- the stuff as Central American peasants ter during a hashtag campaign by feminists, she writes, “It were compelled to make it. The coffee was a shared experience, despite the fragmentary delivery, like lobby bought scientific studies to sell passing a kaleidoscope around a campfire.” American industrialists on the notion that caffeine was the ideal productivity Miss Aluminum, by Susanna Moore (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). enhancer. One manufacturer served free In this vibrant memoir, a well-known novelist chronicles her coffee, because, according to an industry troubled childhood and gallivanting twenties. At seventeen, advertorial,it insured that workers would Moore leaves her home state of Hawaii, fleeing a negligent remain in peak form, keeping “the stan- father and a wicked stepmother, and haunted by the death dard set by the early morning hours of her mentally unstable mother. A wealthy neighbor from more nearly stable” for the rest of the her childhood is the first in a series of fairy godmothers who day. If faith is the opiate of the masses, step in to help, and soon she is modelling in Los Angeles, then coffee is their stimulant.Sedgewick meeting famous people, and jumping from relationship to suggests that profit-seeking bosses de- relationship. Having a child—Roman Polanski and Joan Di- liberately addicted American workers to dion become godparents—frees Moore from the shadow of the beverage, in ways that recall the drug her mother’s troubles: “I no longer thought that I was like industry’s dissemination of opioids to her, too fragile, too crazy to survive.” the same masses a century later. To be sure, Sedgewick recognizes that the actual history of caffeine and THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020 65

capitalist efficiency is more complicated to the business of eating and feeding, the margins,the margins are where such than one might expect. Famous “ratio- “picking wild fruit, tending tomatoes success begins. Rainforest Alliance nalizers” of industrial work, including and blackberries, cultivating corn and certification, “bird-friendly” certifica- Frederick W.Taylor,saw coffee drinking beans, raising chickens, hunting and tion,and the rest are far from mere win- as more distracting than energizing.Tay- fishing, cooking with family, feeding dow dressing when it comes to protect- lor,with his mechanistic take on human children, sharing with neighbors, wel- ing habitats. Several coöperatives in El physiology, sided with the breakfast- coming friends, eating anytime, and Salvador, encouraged by the energetic cereal creators John Harvey Kellogg and going back for more, again.” activists at Equal Exchange, the pio- C.W.Post,who had a dim view of coffee. neering fair-trade coffee retailer, seem At the same time, Sedgewick perhaps A milder, milkier case against coffee to be now producing good coffee in hu- ascribes undue propagandistic power to advances from another front in mane circumstances, the best of them the public-relations exercises of coffee Michael Pollan’s new audiobook,“Caf- encouraging production of the big pa- producers.Like many radical historians, feine” (Audible). After the evangelical, camara bean, a hybrid that makes a Sedgewick has a passionate feeling for psychedelic enthusiasms of his last book, uniquely “buttery” coffee. detail, but lacks a sense of irony. Ordi- “How to Change Your Mind,”he proves nary people saw through advertising to be ambivalent about the jumping To live at all is to be implicated in campaigns then as readily as academic bean. Accepting the life-enhancing and the world’s cruelty, a central Buddhist historians see through them now. No surprisingly medicinal effects of coffee, and Christian lesson, and the hermit’s one, hearing that Chock Full o’Nuts is he also relates how, in his own experi- choice to escape from the world of want- the heavenly coffee, has ever thought it ence, breaking a coffee addiction can ing and getting seems, on the evidence, actually was. be a step toward self-discovery: it was to despoil society of its humanism rather the coffee that was waking up and doing than to enrich it. The way to reconcile Sedgewick’s approach can seem du- all that writing. He sees it as a wonder the buyer’s appetite and the maker’s wel- tifully leftist, but the evidence suggests energy drug—cocaine for the masses— fare is to raise prices, to make the plea- that socialist models of production have but,where others have taken the coffee- sure costlier. But it’s one thing to ask hardly humanized the demands of agri- houses of Europe primarily as seed- people to pay more—whether for pas- cultural labor. The problem, it emerges, beds for the Enlightenment, he, like tured beef or shade-grown coffee—and is of a planetary enslavement to a mono- Sedgewick, focusses on caffeine’s role quite another to tell people that the crop existence. Agriculture, practiced on in the regimentation of work. For all pleasure they experience is not actually a mass scale, is the original sin of mo- the good it does us,Pollan argues,coffee a pleasure but an insidious product of a dernity.As Morris’s history of coffee em- is also ruining our sleep. The caffeine conspiracy of taste. The second is un- phasizes,Vietnam,after its victory against addict—king or commoner—must de- likely to sustain social reform. the United States, made itself one of the cide whether sleep may be a more pow- world’s chief producers of coffee, har- erfully salubrious remedy than the coffee Coffee was perhaps the first naïve em- vesting vast amounts of cheap robusta, that ends it. issary of internationalism. In the seven- first for the Soviet dependencies in East- teenth century,Iceland got the beans and ern Europe and then for a global mar- Not much hope there for the coffee became addicted,on the whole quite hap- ket, with peasant labor and horrific en- lover.One turns back to Stewart Lee Al- pily. You can’t open a book about coffee, vironmental degradation of the country’s len’s work, which, though far from po- no matter what tone it takes, without highland coffee farms. Whatever else lemical, does contain a useful politics. It reading a global story.Whatever else the this was, it was clearly not an issuance is the ancient politics of pleasure under- current crisis may be teaching us,the one of capitalist hegemony. stood as something won eternally from certain thing is that self-sufficiency is a pain—or, as St. Augustine would put it, non-solution to our suffering.None of us Sedgewick, in a tradition of protest from original sin. Most pleasures, after are sufficient, since none of us are com- literature rooted more in William Blake all, rely on someone else’s pain, or the plete selves, and what is true of each of than in Marx, sees mankind chained possibility of it.Sex has,historically,jeop- us is true of every nation. Whether you to a treadmill of obedience leading only ardized lives through disease, abuse, and, pursue coffee as the ideal recreational to oblivion. His book is filled with nos- for women, the high risks of childbirth. drug from Istanbul hookah lounge to talgic glimpses of prelapsarian Central The goal of a good life should be not to Ethiopian hideaway or see its dark track America, the Eden before Columbus denounce the pleasures but to minimize of exploitation from Salvadoran planta- and Hill, and he concludes with a vi- the pain. With some pursuits, the pain tion to Detroit assembly line, you are in- sion of a new order in which “food sov- seems so inherent that we must end the exorably led into stories that go every- ereignty” will emerge as “a direct re- pleasure. Bullfighting, boxing, foie gras, place on earth. On our tightly connected buke to the core order of the modern and football all fall somewhere in this planet, it is impossible to sustain the world . . . pulling up the root of the in- zone. In other instances, we believe that policy of spite stores and their isolating ternational coffee economy, cutting off we can retain the enjoyment and allevi- spiral of envy. What happens here hap- the principal mechanism of long dis- ate the suffering. pens there. A bat may infect a pangolin tance connection between people who in Wuhan, and the world shuts down. work coffee and people who drink In fact, efforts to humanize Salva- No café is an island and no latte can be coffee.” Communities in rural El Sal- doran coffee growing continue, and, Larry’s alone. In these times, it’s a les- vador will then be left alone to attend though seemingly successful mostly on son worth remembering.  66 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020

BOOKS twenty-five thousand registered black voters in North Carolina in 1896, but CITY LIMITS only six thousand or so were still on the books by 1902. African-Americans fled What a white-supremacist coup looks like. Wilmington in large numbers, decimat- ing what had been a large, thriving com- BY CALEB CRAIN munity. Before the coup, the city was majority black—at one point, it had the highest proportion of African-American residents of any large city in the South— and had several racially integrated neigh- borhoods. A visitor from Raleigh re- membered black homes as having pianos, lace curtains, and servants. By the time of the 1900 census, a majority of its cit- izens were white. In Plato’s Republic,Socrates proposes the concept of the “noble lie”—a fable that, though untrue, could inspire citi- zens to virtue,and “make them care more for the city and each other.” But what about the reverse—something all too true that might embolden bad actors to harm the state and their fellow-citizens? In Wilmington, the victory of racial preju- dice over democratic principle and the rule of law was unnervingly complete. Within the lifetimes of those who expe- rienced the coup, the arc of history that passed through Wilmington in 1898 didn’t bend toward anything close to justice. On November 10,1898,just after Elec- South Africa, estimates the number of “Up to but a few years ago, the best tion Day, white supremacists over- deaths at more than sixty. The conspir- feeling among the races prevailed,” threw the city government of Wilming- ators went on to expel prominent blacks the black writer David Bryant Fulton ton, North Carolina, forcing the resig- from the city—by means of threats in wrote, in “Hanover; Or the Persecution nation of the mayor, the aldermen, and some cases, and under armed guard in of the Lowly,” his 1900 novel about the the chief of police. A mob of white peo- others—and also white politicians un- coup. Politically, however, tensions were ple burned down the office of an Afri- sympathetic to the cause. The plan was rising, as the dominance that Democrats can-American newspaper and killed an hatched in secret, but the conspirators had enjoyed for decades waned.Since Re- unknown number of black townspeople. were remarkably open about the coup construction,the Party had won elections An eyewitness believed that more than once it began. A reporter from out of by harping on its history of thwarting a hundred died, and a state guardsman town marvelled, “What they did was federal attempts to grant rights to blacks, recalled, “I nearly stepped on negroes done in broad daylight.” but, by the eighteen-nineties, white vot- laying in the street dead.”In “Wilming- ers had other grievances on their minds. ton’s Lie”(Atlantic Monthly),a judicious No conspirator was ever prosecuted, Farmers felt extorted by railroad compa- and riveting new history of the coup, and white supremacists went on to alter nies and by creditors, and Democrats, David Zucchino, who won a Pulitzer state law so as to disenfranchise black cozy with corporate interests, opposed Prize for his reporting from apartheid-era people for more than two generations. any government regulation of business. There were more than a hundred and Voters defected to a new party, the Pop- ulists,which allied itself with the Repub- After burning down the office of a black newspaper, participants posed outside. licans—at the time,still the party of Lin- coln and committed to equal rights for blacks—to form the so-called Fusion ticket.In 1894,Fusionists swept state and county elections, and, two years later, North Carolina elected its first Republican governor since the end of Reconstruction. Once in office, Fusionists restored ILLUSTRATION BY BILL BRAGG THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020 67

political power to African-Americans 1898 campaign season,at the Party’s state blacks would hopscotch from paper to by making elections more fair—decen- convention, in May, they made so-called paper across the state, further exagger- tralizing control over them and reduc- Negro domination “the burden of their ated in each retelling, until it was re- ing obstacles to voter registration. In song,” as Helen G. Edmonds put it in a printed in the paper where it started,un- 1896,a black Republican,George Henry pioneering history of black political par- recognized, as if it were a different story. White, beat a Democratic incumbent ticipation in North Carolina and the The Democrats issued a handbook to become the only African-American backlash against it. She meant it meta- identifying America as “a white man’s congressman at the time, and voters phorically, but there really was a song. country”and organized more than eight also sent black politicians to the State The lyrics, which Zucchino reprints, call hundred White Government Union Assembly and the State Senate. The on “Proud Caucasians”to “Rise and drive clubs, whose constitution called for “the next year, Wilmington installed several this Black despoiler from your state.”The SUPREMACY OF THE WHITE RACE.” black aldermen and a Republican mayor, state chairman of the Democratic Party Come November, the clubs were to pro- and pretty soon the city had a black tapped the editor of the Raleigh News & vide manpower for challenging black- jailer, coroner, superintendent of streets, Observer, Josephus Daniels, to head an voter registrations. When Wilmington’s and cattle weigher; the county treasurer anti-black propaganda campaign. Dan- Democratic Party chair, George Roun- and a federal customs collector were iels’s paper ran provocative headlines tree, gave a speech to one of the clubs, also black. To forestall white resent- (“No Rape Committed; But a Lady even he was taken aback by the mem- ment, Wilmington’s new police chief Badly Frightened by a Worthless bers’racist zeal.“They were already will- took the precaution of instructing the Negro”) and wrote luridly about a white ing to kill all of the office holders and ten city police officers who were black woman who had died trying to abort the all the negroes,” he recalled. never to arrest a white man. The pro- child of her black lover. In an editorial portion of officeholders who were black, cartoon, a black vampire, its wings em- tatewide, Democrats were looking forward to a landslide in November, Scompared with the proportion of Wil- blazoned with the words “Negro Rule,” mington citizens who were, was tiny. extended claws toward fleeing whites. but in Wilmington the next municipal Still,“Negro domination”became a pow- “The Democrats would believe almost election wasn’t until the following year, erful talking point for Democrats, be- any piece of rascality,” Daniels later re- and the city’s whites were impatient to cause even progressive white politicians called, in a memoir.“We were never very regain power. So they planned a coup. were not ready to make the case that it careful about winnowing out the sto- “For a period of six to twelve months was desirable to have black people in ries.”Newspapers across the state joined prior to November 10, 1898, the white office. The best defense that the Re- in, and a national magazine reported citizens of Wilmington prepared qui- publican governor, Daniel Russell, was that a black man had fired into a trolley etly but effectively,”a Democratic news- willing to offer was that,out of the more car and that black cooks were hinting paperman there later wrote. Prepara- than eight hundred people he had ap- they might poison their white employ- tions were directed by two networks of pointed to office, only eight were black. ers.Sometimes a news item about a small élite whites, the Secret Nine and Group When the Democrats launched their misunderstanding between whites and Six. The groups are known to history only because, in the nineteen-thirties, Harry Hayden, an amateur historian with white-supremacist sympathies, interviewed surviving participants and recorded their side of the story in a self- published pamphlet.According to Hay- den, the Secret Nine set up a system of nightly patrols run by volunteers. Each block was assigned a lieutenant, each of the city’s five wards was assigned a captain, and atop the chain of com- mand stood a former Confederate col- onel who had once led Wilmington’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan. “The city might have been preparing for a siege instead of an election,”a visiting reporter wrote, much impressed. The ostensible justification for the patrols was the threat of a violent upris- ing among the city’s black population. These rumors, a white Populist sardon- ically recalled, alarmed “every one but those who were behind the plot.” One “Go to sleep. Everything will be worse in the morning.” white woman in Wilmington dismissed

the patrols as a “perfect farce,”comment- destine meetings with colored men than Tillman was accompanied by a group ing that,in the run-up to the coup,blacks are the white men with colored women.” of armed South Carolina vigilantes were “almost obsequiously polite.” But, Manly himself was strikingly handsome, known as Red Shirts.The Red Shirts had as the rumors spread,whites in Wilming- and his complexion was so fair that even a reputation for violence; LeRae Sikes ton bought guns—enough to equip an one of his sons admitted to wondering Umfleet, who was the lead historian on Army division, one reporter estimated. about his ancestry; so there may have a state-commissioned investigation into Zucchino has discovered that, in the five been a bit of personal flourish in his as- the coup,in the early two-thousands,de- weeks before the coup, a single hardware sertion that many lynched men, far from scribed them as “effectively a terrorist arm store sold a hundred and twenty-five being as “burly”and “black”as newspapers of the Democratic Party.” Their outfits rifles, more than two hundred pistols, made them out to be, were “sufficiently were likely a reference to the phrase “wav- and nearly fifty shotguns. Merchants re- attractive for white girls of fused to sell guns to blacks,and not many culture and refinement to fall ing the bloody shirt,”a meme- blacks already owned them. When two in love with them.” like label that Southerners black men tried to order pistols and rifles habitually used to deride any direct from an out-of-state manufacturer, Manly was writing almost attempt to call them out for their request was forwarded to Josephus seventy years before Lov- political violence. After Till- Daniels’s newspaper, which then ran a ing v. Virginia, the Supreme man’s speech, the Red Shirts story headlined “THE WILMINGTON NE- Court decision that struck spread into North Carolina. GROES ARE TRYING TO BUY GUNS.” down laws against interracial In Wilmington,they were led marriage, and the editorial by an Irish-American casual There was one Wilmington newspa- got him and his paper can- laborer named Mike Dowl- per not in the service of the Dem- celled.White business own- ing, and, in the run-up to the ocratic Party—the Daily Record,a broad- ers pulled ads, and the Daily election,they fired into a black sheet that claimed to be “of the Negro, Record was evicted by its landlord and school and at least one black home, and for the Negro and by the Negro.” It had forced to find new premises. Manly re- stabbed two black men. been established some five years earlier ceived death threats, public and private, In late October, the white-suprem- by Alex Manly, a former housepainter, and Democratic newspapers across the acist movement acquired a figurehead who ran it with his three brothers. Few state reprinted the editorial as tinder for of sorts, a Wilmington lawyer and for- editions of the paper have survived.David the white-supremacy campaign,in some mer congressman named Alfred Moore Bryant Fulton, in his novel about Wil- cases quoting from it daily. The Dem- Waddell. Zucchino has discovered that, mington, wrote that the paper exposed ocrats’ outrage was to be expected, but as a lawyer,Waddell defended lynchers, unsanitary conditions in the African- even progressives felt compelled to de- and that, while serving on a congressio- American ward at the city hospital and nounce Manly. Governor Russell de- nal committee investigating the Ku Klux advocated for better roads. The frag- clared him his “enemy,” and the state’s Klan, he hosted the leader of the North ments that remain were recently pieced Republican Party condemned the edi- Carolina Klan in his home. Described together by the Third Person Project, a torial as “impudent and villainous.” in Chesnutt’s novel as “a dapper little group of North Carolina writers and his- gentleman,” and in Fulton’s as having a tory buffs,and reveal an outlet for mostly “That editorial in the negro newspa- comb-over, he was distrusted even by local stories—a clergyman’s birthday per is good campaign matter,” a charac- fellow-Democrats, but he excelled at party,the theft of fourteen chickens from ter says in Charles Chesnutt’s 1901 novel, racist oratory, so the Wilmington Party a coop, political skirmishes over the ap- “The Marrow ofTradition,”which lightly chairman invited him to give a speech portionment of government jobs—along fictionalizes some of the events in Wil- at Thalian Hall, which contained both with household tips (“Cold eggs froth mington in 1898.“But we should reserve the city’s opera house and its municipal most readily”) and reprints of national it until it will be most effective.” The offices. Waddell asked the crowd of news stories and short fiction. whites were saving their ammunition. nearly a thousand if they were willing to surrender their liberty to “a ragged In the summer of 1898, however, the Early in October, Wilmington mer- rabble of negroes led by a handful of Daily Record plunged into controversy. chants promised to set up a whites- white cowards” and urged them to de- The Wilmington Morning Star had re- only labor bureau, and a rumor spread fend their liberty even “if we have to printed a speech by a Georgia congress- that blacks wanted to colonize North choke the current of the Cape Fear with man’s wife arguing that lynching was Carolina and turn it into a black com- carcasses.” He reprised the line about justified “to protect woman’s dearest pos- monwealth.“North Carolina is to be the carcasses in another speech, on the eve session from the ravening human beasts.” refuge of their people in America,”a jour- of the election. Manly replied in an editorial that not all nalist from Atlanta wrote. On October By Election Day, a white Populist re- rapists were black, and that black men 20th, at a rally in Fayetteville, the South called, African-Americans were “asking were often lynched for sexual liaisons Carolina senator Ben Tillman, known as their white friends not to let them be that were, in fact, consensual. Flouting Pitchfork Ben, boasted to a crowd of hurt.”Many confided to the police chief one of the South’s most explosive taboos, eight thousand that whites there had that they were not going to register or he wrote that white women “are not any smashed black civil rights two decades vote; Zucchino reports that, statewide, more particular in the matter of clan- earlier, and wondered aloud why North less than half the black voters who were Carolinians hadn’t yet killed Manly. THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020 69

eligible ended up going to the polls.Elec- ably knew, Manly had already fled the ond story of the building had been con- tion Day itself was mostly peaceful, al- city, reportedly having been given some sumed.Then they posed in front of the though Governor Russell, in Wilming- money and the white patrols’watchword ruins for a group photo. ton to cast his ballot, had to hide from by a white friend.) The way to Waddell’s Red Shirts on his train ride back to the house was guarded by the whites’armed It’s all but impossible to reconstruct capitol.For good measure,Wilmington’s night patrols, so, instead of delivering the sequence of the violence that fol- Democrats also tampered with vote to- the letter by hand, the lawyer dropped lowed, though Zucchino marshals the tals. In the evening, around a hundred it at the post office. It didn’t reach Wad- evidence expertly. Waddell claimed that and fifty whites stormed the building dell by the early-morning deadline. he marched the whites back to the ar- where the count in a predominantly black mory peacefully, but a newspaper re- precinct was taking place. The Demo- Zucchino thinks Waddell knew the ported that some of them boarded street- cratic candidate ended up winning the letter was on the way, but, if he did, he cars and rode around town, firing their precinct with more votes than there were didn’t mention it to the crowd of five guns as they passed through black neigh- registered voters. hundred armed whites who gathered borhoods. As alarm spread among the that morning at the armory of the Wil- black community, workers at a cotton It wasn’t until the morning after the mington Light Infantry. Furious about press on the riverfront walked out, only election, November 9th, that the brash- the missed deadline, the crowd asked to find themselves facing a white mob est part of the conspiracy was put into the militia’s officers to lead them to the that had heard about the walkout.A sim- action. The Secret Nine placed a notice Daily Record.The infantry’s commander, ilar standoff in Brooklyn, at the inter- in the Wilmington Messenger (“Atten- Lieutenant Colonel Walker Taylor, re- section of North Fourth and Harnett tion White Men”) convening a meeting fused,even though he belonged to Group Streets,turned violent; several black men at the courthouse. Both Waddell and Six, and his brother to the Secret Nine. were shot and killed. The owner of a Rountree, the Democratic Party chair, Technically, the militia was still in fed- pharmacy on the corner, who served as later claimed to have been surprised eral service—it was home on furlough the block’s lieutenant in the conspirators’ by the announcement, and they might from the Spanish-American War—and vigilante system, telephoned the armory. have been—neither was a member of the it may have seemed unwise to involve As soon as Colonel Taylor received a Secret Nine or Group Six, and the con- the federal government in what was telegram from Governor Russell order- spirators may have been keeping Wad- about to happen. ing him to preserve the peace,he marched dell, in particular, at arm’s length. But at the Wilmington Light Infantry and a the meeting it was Waddell who read While Colonel Taylor telegraphed troop of naval reserves to Brooklyn. But out the statement that the Secret Nine the capitol—“Situation here serious”— before they reached Fourth and Harnett had prepared. The Wilmington Decla- Waddell, Dowling, and a few others half a dozen more black men had been ration of Independence, as it came to be took charge of the crowd, which soon killed, and a few whites had also been known, proclaimed that whites had the swelled to fifteen hundred men. Many shot, though they survived. right to “end the rule by Negroes,” be- were workers, but there were clergy and cause they paid ninety-five per cent of lawyers as well; the Messenger reported Preserving the peace is not quite property taxes. It resolved to hand over that “capitalists and laborers marched what Taylor’s militia did. Zucchino black people’s jobs to whites; to shut together,” and a photograph later pub- judges harshly Russell’s decision to give down the “vile and slanderous” Daily lished in Collier’s Weekly shows some “a committed white supremacist un- Record; and to banish Manly, the mayor, checked authority to unleash state troops and the police chief.Some four hundred men wearing neckties and fashionable against black citizens.” En route, an and fifty whites signed the declaration, hats. The crowd marched through a officer told the men, “I want you to and most of them weren’t the poor whites black neighborhood known as Brook- shoot to kill.”When the militia crossed often blamed for racist outbreaks; a his- lyn to the paper’s new office, on the sec- a bridge that led into Brooklyn, it torian who researched the occupations ond floor of a building called the Love opened fire on a group of blacks whom of the signatories found that, of those and Charity Hall.They broke in, tossed it perceived as a threat, killing an un- she was able to trace,eighty-five per cent out furniture, a beaver hat, and a draw- known number, perhaps as many as were middle or upper class. ing of Manly, and set the building on twenty-five. Militiamen trained horse- fire. Waddell later claimed the fire was drawn,rapid-fire guns on black churches Waddell was chosen to act as chair- “purely accidental,” but when a crew of as they searched them for weapons— man of the meeting. That evening, black firefighters arrived to put out the there weren’t any—and shot a black he summoned thirty-two prominent blaze whites held them off until the sec- man as he fled a dance hall where they African-Americans, read them the were going in to make arrests. declaration, and demanded a reply by seven-thirty the next morning. The There is also evidence of killings by black leaders conferred in a barber shop, whites which the militia witnessed but and one of them, a lawyer, wrote a reply. did nothing to halt. In a letter, one of A surviving draft disavows responsibil- the militiamen described watching the ity for Manly and promises to “use our death of a black man who was believed influence to have your wishes carried by the mob to have shot at a white:“The out.” (In fact, as some of the men prob- crowd of citizens who had him said go and he hadn’t gone ten feet before the 70 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020

top of his head was cut off by bullets. It aged. His first declaration that armed forms. Rountree, newly elected a state was a horrible sight.”At a certain point, volunteer patrols were no longer allowed representative, helped craft a constitu- it becomes hard to draw a line separat- in Wilmington was ignored; so was his tional amendment requiring voters in the ing the actions of Taylor’s troops from second. “If he had any sense of humor state to pay a poll tax and pass a literacy those of Waddell’s citizens, or between he must have split his undergarments test unless a father or a grandfather had the actions of either group and those of laughing at his own joke,” a historian at voted before 1867. The amendment also the Red Shirts. This confusion of re- a nearby university commented. required voters to present proof of their sponsibility may have been by design. identity during registration,if challenged. It’s not certain from the historical evi- African-Americans were not taken There wasn’t much camouflage of the dence that the white conspirators specifi- in by his blandishments. One of them amendment’s motive. “The chief object cally planned arson and killings, but it wrote an anonymous letter to President of the Amendment is to eliminate the is clear that the climate they created fo- McKinley, protesting that “the Man ignorant and irresponsible Negro vote,” mented arson and killings, and that the who promises the Negro protection now the Democrats explained in a pamphlet. arson and killings helped accomplish as Mayor is the one who in his speech It passed in February,and in March,1899, their white-supremacist aims. at the Opera house said the Cape Fear when Wilmington at last held its mu- should be strewn with carcasses.” Peo- nicipal election, only twenty-one blacks That afternoon,Waddell commanded ple did return to their homes after a few were registered to vote, and only five Wilmington’s mayor,police chief,and al- days, but in many cases it was only to did so. The state legislature went on to dermen to report to the city offices at settle their affairs before leaving for good. pass North Carolina’s first Jim Crow law, Thalian Hall, which were soon overrun As many as fifty or sixty were depart- segregating train cars by race. Laws re- with white rioters. The mayor resigned. ing daily,newspapers reported.Between quiring separate toilets, water fountains, The police chief briefly tried to hold out 1897 and 1900, the number of black cinemas, parks, and courtroom Bibles for the salary he was owed, but, after a names in the city directory dropped by followed. Wilmington did not elect an- warning that his personal safety could nearly a thousand. other black alderman for more than sev- not be guaranteed, he resigned, too. The enty years, and North Carolina did not aldermen resigned one by one so that, as If you’ve never heard of the Wilming- choose another black congressperson for they went, the remainder could elect a ton coup before, one reason may be more than ninety. white-supremacist replacement slate.Two that white writers quickly framed it as of these, members of the Secret Nine, a necessary and legal upsurge of demo- The truth was recovered by two black delayed their swearings in.They had been cratic spirit.“It was not a mob,”the Wil- historians: Edmonds published her his- tasked with overseeing nearly fifty ban- mington Morning Star declared.“It was tory in 1951, and H. Leon Prather, Sr., ishments ordered by the Secret Nine, in- simply the unanimous uprising of the produced the second serious history of cluding of the former mayor, the former white people.” Waddell made the coup the coup in 1984. Later, Umfleet revised police chief, and a number of the black sound like a flowering of common sense her work for the state-commissioned in- community leaders whom Waddell had and bonhomie: “The good old An- vestigation in a lucid account that ap- summoned the previous evening. They glo-Saxon way of waiting until govern- peared in 2009. Today, a few historical seem to have thought it prudent to keep ment becomes intolerable, and then markers in Wilmington acknowledge a little legal distance between themselves openly and manfully overthrowing it is the coup, though Zucchino describes and the city until the dirty work was done. for the best.” Though the black writers one of them as “listing and partially ob- There was no delay,however,about nam- Fulton and Chesnutt wrote novels that scured.” In 1998, centennial remem- ing Waddell the new mayor. tried to preserve the memory of what brances in Wilmington brought together happened in Wilmington, it was “The two of Manly’s nieces and descendants As soon as the violence began, black Leopard’s Spots,” a racist fictionaliza- of Taylor and Rountree, among others, residents fled to woods, swamps, and tion by Thomas Dixon, Jr.—now re- launching a public dialogue.Such events, cemeteries on the periphery of the city. membered only for writing the book on and the publication of a book like Zuc- “The roads were lined with them, some which D.W.Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” chino’s, are a sign that, however late and carrying their bedding on their heads was based—that became a best-seller. reluctantly, America is becoming con- and whatever effects could be carried,”a In Dixon’s version of 1898 Wilmington, scious of the racial violence that insured journalist wrote.They camped outdoors white children are “waylaid and beaten white supremacy after Reconstruction. for days. Waddell boasted in Collier’s on their way to public schools”; the city’s Weekly that, as the new mayor, he sent Declaration of Independence is a re- Still,memory and understanding alone messengers to these refugees, assuring sponse to an attempt by blacks to lynch are morally ambiguous. In 2018, North them it was safe to return. He said, too, a white man; and, after the whites burn Carolina passed a constitutional amend- that, the night after the massacre, he had down Manly’s paper, “a mob of a thou- ment that limited the vote to holders of personally prevented the lynching of sand armed Negroes concealed them- a state-issued photo identification. The blacks held in the city jail by calling in selves in a hedgerow and fired on them measure reprises the kind of obstacle to the militia and staying on the scene him- from ambush.” black-voter registration cleared away by self until dawn. Once in office, he was, Fusionists in 1895 and restored by white- after all, “a sworn officer of the law,” he In 1899, North Carolina’s legislature, supremacist Democrats in 1899. Merely explained. But he had trouble tamping now overwhelmingly Democratic, dis- remembering the past will hardly stop down the mob behavior he had encour- mantled almost all the Fusionists’ re- those who are trying to repeat it.  THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020 71

THE THEATRE eclipsed by her husband, an impulsive painter named Victor (Bill Gunn, the OTHERWORLDLY WOMEN director of the cult-classic vampire film “Ganja & Hess”). Sara’s students can’t The unproduced plays of Kathleen Collins. bring up her brilliance without also men- tioning her marriage,she notices.“What’s BY VINSON CUNNINGHAM this thing they’ve got about my having a husband?” she wonders. Her scholarship is a medium for abandon: one of the most enthralling scenes has her sitting in a library, read- ing; a propulsive, half-muttered voice- over shows how meditatively and al- most prayerfully she takes to the task. In part because of her growing troubles with Victor, she conducts an ambitious study of “the ecstatic,” a state that her husband accesses easily but which feels alien to her. In one lovely and suggestive passage, Sara goes to see a psychic, asking her what it feels like to “read” another per- son and see her future. The session is unsatisfying; the psychic can’t under- stand this scientific approach to a pro- cess that, to her, is totally intuitive. She says she can tell that Sara is “intelligent,” which sends Sara into a fit of anger. Anybody could figure that out by look- ing at her face.Unsettled,she leaves and wanders toward what looks like a small Catholic church. “This is ridiculous,” she says,just before she enters and rushes down the aisle, toward the altar, where, as if urged by some unseen force, she kneels. “What am I looking for?” Good news, these past four years, richly symbolic, formidably smart fea- The components of that scene—dis- has been vanishingly sparse, like a ture film “Losing Ground,” from 1982, passionate inquiry,occult oddity,the handful of lilies in a fallow field. One has recently been rediscovered and re- search for understanding as an attempt of the brightest of these rare flowers is stored to its rightful place in the canon at control, a wary but nonetheless ardent the renewal of interest in the filmmaker, of nineteen-eighties independent film. relationship with Christian imagery and playwright, and fiction writer Kathleen thought—are even more densely woven Collins, who died, at the age of forty- Collins was, foremost, an artist and and excruciatingly resolved in Collins’s six, in 1988. Under the guidance of her an interpreter of the striated psyche.Her one-act plays, several of which are col- daughter, Nina Lorez Collins, Collins’s most striking characters are black women lected in “Notes from a Black Woman’s written work has come to us in a posthu- of a creative or intellectual bent—writ- Diary.” In fact, it’s possible, just by read- mous torrent, first with the 2016 short- ers,dancers,designers,professors—whose ing three of them together, to put on a story collection “Whatever Happened to quotidian struggles with marriage,moth- subtle,harrowing program of drama deal- Interracial Love?,”then with the eclec- erhood, and work take on cosmic pro- ing with doubt, domestic confusion, and tic omnibus “Notes from a Black Wom- portions.In “Losing Ground,”Sara Rog- the persistent encroachments of color an’s Diary,” which includes fiction, a ers (played by the actor and theatre and of the spirit.The plays take place in pair of screenplays, excerpts from Col- director Seret Scott), a vibrant profes- rooms that are at once specific and ar- lins’s diary, and scripts for plays. Her sor of philosophy whose lectures are a chetypal—a bedroom,a doctor’s office— kind of poetry, can feel herself being and therefore seem designed to be staged in your living room. In Collins’s work, black women’s quotidian struggles take on cosmic proportions. In “Remembrance,” a woman ap- proaching middle age addresses the au- dience directly. Atop a dresser, she has 72 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 27, 2020 ILLUSTRATION BY XIA GORDON

erected a simple shrine—a candle,a cross, could open the Christian language and onstage—is black, too, and it becomes a bouquet of flowers. She has begun, she find God.”Her own alternate language clear that this accounts for much of tells us, to find God.“It’s not easy to pin is gilded and profane.“I want to pee on Helen’s attraction to this particular prac- down the exact moment when I went the living room rug,” she says, “flaked tice. Helen quotes the woman at length, looking for God,” she says, trailing off, as it is with fake Oriental gold colors adding a “black” accent for effect. The but it has something to do with her sense that will not be distinguishable from women are mismatched attitudinally of her unfitness for everyday life. She’s my fake Oriental gold urine.” This is a as well: Marguerite is impeccably put- a dancer by craft,and here,at home,she’s horror story, with domestic normalcy together, while Helen has made her a distracted mother and wife. Her hus- as the invisible, malevolent force, and a slacker’s outfit an aspect of her personal- band does the cooking and shoulders wild, unknowable deity as a balm. ity. In a sharp oppositional couplet that the burden of being “a hundred percent illustrates Collins’s genius for icily intel- all here.”She hides in the bathroom,try- “Remembrance”is dedicated to Seret ligent dialogue, as cold and clarifying as ing to “locate myself, apart from other Scott, and it’s hard not to think of its Aaron Copland’s “Four Piano Blues,”the things,” finely slivering her own iden- protagonist as an opposite of “Losing women disagree about Helen’s sartorial tity away from those others—husband, Ground”’s Sara Rogers: instead of try- affliction. Helen calls it “my casualness kids—who threaten to swallow her up. ing to analyze the ecstatic, this woman about clothes.”For Marguerite,it’s “your “I try to get them out of me!” she says. dives into it head first. Another play, unwillingness to dress.” Still, these mu- “The Reading,” feels like a takeoff on tually resentful women can’t disengage: God helps in this endeavor, some- the psychic scene in “Losing Ground.” their womanhood, and an accompany- how. “He’s so silent, and His silence Two women—one white, one black— ing unease in the world,keep them yoked is such a lovely thing,” she says. Later, sit in a psychic’s waiting room.The black together, entangled in talk. she prays aloud, “Cause me to remem- woman, Marguerite, is a fashion de- ber that I may locate myself forever in- signer, and the white woman, Helen, is The strangest, perhaps, is an abstract side Your silence and be still.” In this a novelist. There’s a candle that keeps play called “The Healing.” A sick black paradoxical idea—that God, the ulti- going out: it stays lit only if one of the woman, Ellen, has come to see Joe, a mate showstopper, makes room for the women sits before it in a lotus pose, white healer who glides his hands around woman instead of further constraining stares at it “belligerently,” or meditates. her body,applying “energy”to her illness. her—there is something reminiscent of Sometimes he holds her feet to keep Thomas Aquinas’s insistence that God This focus on light sharpens as the them “grounded.” Ellen implores him isn’t a Big Thing among other things, play winds on, hinting at the visual fa- not to: the gesture reminds her too much competing with us creatures for glory cility that makes “Losing Ground”such of Christ washing the feet of his disci- and space to breathe but, rather, the a sensual feast for the eyes. But, in lieu ples. Like the woman from “Remem- ground upon which we stand—a kind of film’s ability to make the sublime un- brance,” she doesn’t want to fall victim of stage. “Gloria Dei vivens homo,” the spoken (in one beautiful frame of “Los- to iconography. She fights her desire early Church father Irenaeus said: “The ing Ground,”a woman dressed in a red to sing along with Joe to the refrain of glory of God is the living man.” shirt and a billowing yellow skirt stands an old spiritual: “Somebody’s crying, dancing in front of a calm, blue-black Lord / Come by here.” Joe keeps apply- But the woman’s faith, such as it is, lake, an image that’s spiritual and strik- ing pressure to various regions of her isn’t orthodox, or strictly Christian. On ing enough to occasion a library of mys- body,and—like so many of us,witnesses the contrary, she’s frustrated by her fix- tical texts), in “The Reading” Collins to strange happenings but unequipped ation on the tradition of her youth. She navigates there by way of an exasper- to interpret them—she feels waves of riffles through tropes—“the Old Rug- ating clash between the races. relief and consolation, skeptic though ged Cross, the Fountain Filled with she is. Even as a thrill runs through her, Blood”—and snorts derisively at her Helen wants to unload the facts of her she cries, “I don’t even believe.”  mastery of them, at the idea that “you life on Marguerite,who’s not at all inter- ested.The psychic—who never makes it THE NEW YORKER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT ©2020 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. VOLUME XCVI, NO. 10, April 27, 2020. THE NEW YORKER (ISSN 0028792X) is published weekly (except for four combined issues: February 17 & 24, June 8 & 15, July 6 & 13, and August 3 & 10) by Condé Nast, a division of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. PRINCIPAL OFFICE: Condé Nast, 1 World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. 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CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose three finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this week’s cartoon, by Kaamran Hafeez, must be received by Sunday, April 26th. The finalists in the April 13th contest appear below. We will announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the May 11th issue. Anyone age thirteen or older can enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com. THIS WEEK’S CONTEST “” .......................................................................................................................... THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION “Grounds still warm . . .” “Past the alligator, through the ring John Semanchuk, Charleston, S.C. of fire, first door on your left.” “Americanos.” Gregory W. Kirschen, Woodbury, N.Y. Andrew Eichen, Boone, N.C. “Decaf. They can’t be far away.” Bill Clough, Modesto, Calif.

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