The New Yorker Issue: 22/06/2020

minutes to urge marchers to get food and water. “There was a real sense of community,” Scott said.

As a team of police in riot gear prepared to charge into a crowd, several white protesters locked arms in front of them. Scott said

this is “one of the ways that white people can use their privilege to defend people of color.”

An estimated hundred thousand protesters marched through Philadelphia to the Museum of Art, where a group formed around

a child break-dancing. The celebratory spirit was part of what Scott called “a historic day.”

Scott photographed the crowd from the top of the museum’s steps. “We only get certain moments in history where there’s an

opportunity to make real change,” he said. “I hope we take advantage of this moment while we have it.”

A REPORTER AT LARGE PUNISHMENT BY PANDEMIC In a penitentiary with one of the U.S.’s largest coronavirus outbreaks, prison terms become death sentences. BY RACHEL AVIV D eMarco Raynor, who is incar- role to guide younger men. Raynor, ton, cucumbers, and watermelons. Ar- cerated at Cummins Unit, a who had ambitions of being a psychi- kansas is one of only a few states where penitentiary in southeast Ar- atrist, likes to break down the mean- prison labor is free. (Other states pay kansas, had been approved for its most ing of words like “Negro” and “chattel” a nominal wage, such as ten cents an prestigious job: working at the gover- and “death,” and to discuss how lan- hour.) A dozen “field riders”—officers nor’s mansion. Prison labor at the man- guage shapes our identities. He and on horseback, wearing cowboy hats— sion is a “longstanding tradition, which his friends hold study sessions on patrol the inmates, and, if anyone lags, kept down costs,”Hillary Clinton wrote, the history of black people in Amer- they threaten to “call the truck”: a major in a memoir. (She noted that “onetime ica—“The black man must be awak- will drive the inmate to a group of iso- murderers” proved to be the best em- ened to the knowledge that he is not lation cells known as the Hole. ployees.) Raynor saw the position, what this society has taught him to which was unpaid, as a chance to meet be,” Raynor wrote, for a recent ses- In late March, the men at Cummins people with the power to grant him sion—and circulate books about mind- began questioning the logic of going clemency. But, shortly before he was to fulness and maintaining romantic re- into the fields during the pandemic. begin, an officer said that he had vio- lationships.“We are trying to take care Raynor, whose mother had been a cor- lated prison rules by wearing slippers of our children,” Qadir, another mem- rections officer at another prison in Ar- that he had made himself.The job was ber of the Think Tank, told me. Qadir, kansas, said,“I counselled the men that revoked.Raynor believed that the officer who is forty-four (and who feared that they were endangering their health had intentionally thwarted his oppor- using his full name would result in re- by continuing to squish into a trailer, tunity. “I still maintain my manhood, taliation), is a clerk in the prison’s shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip.” and he felt like that was too much,” kitchen. When he notices that men are Raynor said. Another officer once told sick or struggling, he provides them An inmate assigned to the Hoe him, “Man, you walk around just like with double portions,along with a note: Squad, who asked to go by his initials, you’re free.” “Don’t think you’re going to live on D.B., agreed, as did dozens of others. this. I’ve only got a certain number of When officers called their names for Raynor is forty-one, and is serving people I can help.” work, D.B. said, “we all laid down in a life sentence for shooting a man our beds.” The men were disciplined during a drunken confrontation, when In mid-March, when the corona- for “unexcused absence”—a violation he was twenty. Raynor, who is black, virus first arrived in Arkansas,the Think that carries a punishment of up to was convicted by eleven white jurors Tank discussed the story of Noah.Qadir fifteen days in isolation. “There’s a and one black woman. “I will die re- told me, “Here was a man building an global pandemic that is air-born,” one membering her name,” he told me. ark, and he is saying, ‘Get ready. Pre- man wrote in a formal grievance, on “She looked at me the whole trial like pare.’ But no one was listening.” Ray- March 26th. “I’m being forced to go I was her son, and then, when the ver- nor found the story of Moses more rel- out into the field thus putting my life dict came back, she couldn’t look at evant: “I view it more like, these are the in danger.” me.” Raynor monitors his use of lan- plagues that God is sending upon Pha- guage, so that he doesn’t assimilate to raoh, who is in love with his authority, Asa Hutchinson, the governor of institutional life. He refuses to call in order to let his people go.” Arkansas, had asked that businesses food “money”; he will not invite peo- cease “nonessential functions,”and D.B. ple to his “house” when he means his Every morning, more than a hun- couldn’t understand how the work of cell. He bristles when prisoners, work- dred men at Cummins Unit go to the Hoe Squad qualified as essential. ing unpaid jobs, describe an officer as work on the Hoe Squad. Dressed in Sometimes, he and the other men their “boss.” white, they pile into an open trailer, would spend a day removing grass with and a tractor pulls them deep into the a hoe, in order to clear land for plant- Raynor is part of a group of men at prison’s fields. Cummins sits on nearly ing; when they finished, a tractor would Cummins who call themselves the eighteen thousand acres of land and swiftly mow the same patch. It seemed Think Tank. They have all been in has a hundred and ten thousand chick- as if the prison was trying to demon- prison for more than fifteen years,many ens, two thousand cattle, and forty-one strate the needlessness of their labor serving life sentences they received horses. The men on the Hoe Squad and time. Once, when Raynor was as- when they were teen-agers or in their pull weeds, dig ditches, and pick cot- signed to the Hoe Squad, he told an early twenties. They consider it their officer that it didn’t make sense to use gardening tools rather than modern 56 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020

After inmates complained, an official argued that their conditions were not “ones that today’s society does not tolerate.” ILLUSTRATION BY JAMIEL LAW THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020 57

farming technology. The officer re­ in prison for twenty­three years,stopped tion to ask for a boil bag, so he could sponded, “We don’t want your brain. getting out of bed. Hussey lived in an separate Hussey’s sheets from the rest We want your back.” open barracks, as do about half the men of the wash. Danzie said that the nurse at Cummins, which houses nearly two there, Shirley Lubin Wilson, told him, On April 1st,the Arkansas Democrat- thousand prisoners. In these barracks, “Get the fuck away from my window.” Gazette reported that an officer some fifty metal cots are arranged in In a federal civil­rights lawsuit last year, who worked on the farm at Cummins rows, many less than three feet from Wilson was accused of wrapping a tele­ had tested positive for the coronavirus. one another, and bolted to the floor. phone cord around an inmate’s neck “You would think our captains or ser­ When the men lie down,they can smell while a second nurse blocked the sur­ geants or majors would warn us about one another’s breath. One of the men veillance camera. (A spokesperson for something like this,but they didn’t speak in the Think Tank, Dashujauhn Dan­ Wellpath, a for­profit health­care pro­ about it,” another officer, whom I’ll call zie, was the “picket man” in Hussey’s vider that runs the infirmaries in Ar­ Marie, told me. “They kept everything barracks: he did all the laundry. For kansas prisons, said that the company in the closet. If you didn’t catch the more than a week, he had noticed that “believes these allegations to be with­ news, you were in the blind.”A spokes­ Hussey wasn’t showering, eating, or out merit.” Wilson didn’t respond to a person for the Arkansas Department sending his clothes to the wash. When request for comment.) of Corrections had told the Gazette that people asked Hussey what was wrong, the infected officer didn’t work inside Danzie said, “he just nodded his head Four nurses tested the forty­six other prison walls, but Marie knew that offi­ like he was straight.” men in Hussey’s barracks for the coro­ cers couldn’t go a day without interact­ navirus, administering numerous tests ing with inmates.“The inmates run the On April 10th, Hussey passed out, without changing their gloves. All but penitentiary,”she told me.“Officers don’t and he was tested for the coronavirus. three men had it. Raynor’s barracks was lift their fingers for nothing. If the in­ When the results came back positive, also tested. Raynor said that a sergeant mates don’t do it, it’s not going to get the Hoe Squad was finally suspended. later shouted into the barracks, “Y’all done.” The next day, Marie and a few Hussey was taken to the Hole in a are negative.” But Raynor noticed that other officers wore masks to work, but, wheelchair. In an e­mail, Dexter Payne, when a man defecated a few feet away when they entered the prison,they were the director of the Division of Correc­ from him he wasn’t bothered by the told to put the masks away.“They don’t tion, had instructed all his wardens to smell. He asked his cousin to call the want the inmates frantic,” Marie said. “prepare a portion/area of your punitive prison’s central office to find out the She left her mask in her car. isolation areas to house inmates effected results of his test. He was positive. “I by the CoronaVirus.” went around the barracks telling the A few days later, a forty­nine­year­ guys, ‘I’m positive, and you probably old inmate,Daryl Hussey,who has been Danzie stripped Hussey’s bed him­ are, too.’” self. Then he went to the nurse’s sta­ Inmates in the prison’s garment shop “Can you be more specific?” were given a new task: manufacturing eighty thousand masks for prisoners and officers throughout the state. A woman named Carrie Coleman told me that her son had sewn masks at Cummins for two days while he had a fever and chills. (It wasn’t until he had a temperature of a hundred and four degrees that he was carried to the in­ firmary.) Marie said that the masks kept falling off her face; when she talked, she sucked the material into her mouth. Then she noticed that the wardens and deputy wardens were secretly wearing masks they’d brought from home un­ derneath the state­issued ones. On April 21st, Wellpath held drive­ through testing for officers. “If your test results are positive,” a memo from the Arkansas Department of Health said, “you may need to work if you do not display any symptoms.” Governor Hutchinson, in his daily press confer­ ence, explained, “In terms of the guards that might have tested positive, it is my understanding that they would only be

guarding barracks in which the inmates who said, “He could have stayed on his tenced to life without parole when he have tested positive.”He added,“So those rack and slept.”She told me,“That’s how was nineteen, after his friend shot a man precautions are in place, and certainly they look at it: ‘Tell him to sleep it off.’” and Qadir drove him away from the scene. they are logical.” But Marie couldn’t Before the coronavirus outbreak, he and make sense of the policy: all the guards By the third week of April, Qadir, the other inmates in the kitchen cooked were passing through the same entrance, the kitchen clerk, had chills and the most nutritious meals they could checkpoints, and hallways. had lost his sense of smell. He had been make with limited ingredients. They tested for the coronavirus, and while poured cans of vegetables into a fifty- An inmate named Donnie said that he waited for the results he reported to five-gallon pot and stirred them with a when an officer came to the door of his his job. Most of the other barracks, where men had tested posi- kitchen workers were refus- boat paddle.“When you are tive, he asked if she had the virus, and ing to work. Qadir, whose feeding your fellow-man, she said that she hadn’t been tested. mother had been the pres- there should be no half- “Our newspaper says you must be pos- ident of the N.A.A.C.P. in stepping,” he said. itive for corona if you’re working our West Memphis, Arkansas, barracks,”Donnie told her. He said that felt ashamed that inmates Prisoners often speak of she responded sarcastically, “Well, they might see him as a strike- a fear of adapting to incar- say your beds are six feet apart, too.” breaker. As he walked to ceration to such a degree the kitchen, he said, “I felt that they become institu- One night, an older inmate told eyes piercing my back. I tionalized, losing their in- Marie that he was struggling to breathe. knew they must feel like, Mr. Pro- dividual agency. Once the His eyes were bloodshot, and he looked black—Mr. I-don’t-go-for-this-or-for- inmates stopped working, as if he were about to faint. Marie asked that—is working for the system.” Marie saw that the officers had devel- a sergeant to escort him to the infir- oped their own kind of learned help- mary, but, she said, the sergeant told He spent the day unloading canned lessness.“When you work there, it’s like her,“Tell him to go get on that kiosk”—a goods from three tractor-trailers. “I’m you really are in the slavery days, be- computer touched by dozens of inmates physically fit, and for me to take a cause you’ve got inmates there who will each day—so that he could fill out a re- sixty-pound box and throw it five feet actually be, like, ‘What else you need, quest to visit the infirmary, known as a away—I love to do that,” he said. But boss?’” she said. “They literally come at sick call. he barely had the strength to lift a car- you like that. You drop a piece of paper, ton of ground beef. At the end of the and they come out of nowhere, running Amie Burrow, a nurse who worked day, he gathered what he had come for: to pick it up, saying, ‘I got it, I got it!’” for Wellpath until late 2019, in several enough green beans, peas, garlic, vine- Arkansas prisons, said that, when in- gar, and plastic gloves to last him sev- Prisoners at Cummins take on differ- mates put in sick calls, they typically eral weeks. “I wasn’t going to hold a ent identities depending on where in weren’t seen by a doctor for at least two press conference to explain my reason- the institution they live.“They’ve divided weeks. Sometimes the infirmary nurses ing,” he said. “But, hell, I wasn’t selling us into so-called field niggers and house would become so overwhelmed by sick out. I was there because I needed in- niggers,”Raynor said.The men who work calls that—to avoid being fined if they gredients to brave the storm.” on the Hoe Squad live on the East Hall, didn’t respond within three days, as was where the outbreak began. Raynor once the policy—they would shred them. By April 25th, more test results had worked as a porter in the infirmary, and, (Inmates who don’t have access to a come back: eight hundred and twenty- when East Hall residents came in over- kiosk write their requests on paper slips.) six inmates and thirty-three staff mem- heated or feeling faint,he would hear the “It was general operating procedure,” bers had the virus. The warden placed nurses say, “He’s just trying to get out of Burrow told me. “I watched nurses put all the barracks on lockdown. With work,” or “He’s just high.” the paper sick calls in the shredder and no inmates working, officers had to do never blink an eye.”When inmates com- the cooking and cleaning themselves. The men on the West Hall are treated plained, the nurses would say, “Oh, the “When the officers saw how nasty the with less suspicion. They work indoors slip got lost in the box,” or “You filled kitchen was,they got out of there,”Marie or in “up front”jobs,gardening or wash- out the wrong form.”Burrow said,“They said. “It had been all right for them to ing officers’cars. Some work as “domes- could easily blame it on the inmate.” go in there and call the shots. But as far tics” in a community near Cummins as being in there for long periods of known as the Free Line, where prison Marie finally called a Code Green, time,moving around and preparing din- employees and their families live. They the signal for medical emergency, on ner—you can’t do that in filth.” clean, do yard work, and even babysit. the prison radio system. A nurse arrived Sometimes a warden’s children become with a wheelchair,but the infirmary was The officers made rudimentary meals, so attached to an inmate that if the war- full. Instead, the man was taken to a like peanut-butter-and-jelly or baloney den is transferred to a new prison the holding cell. He had no bed, toilet, or sandwiches, and delivered them to the family takes their “domestic”with them. running water.“A lot of times, they for- barracks.Greens were almost never served, (The Department of Corrections de- get the inmates are there,” Marie said. an omission that disappointed Qadir nies that inmates interact with children.) “They’ll stay there for hours—hours.” but didn’t surprise him. He has been in prison for twenty-five years—he was sen- The hierarchy among inmates has After the man was taken away, Marie structured life at Cummins for more said, she was reprimanded by a sergeant, THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020 59

than a century. Founded in 1902 on the PIGEON AND HAWK site of two cotton plantations,Cummins, which was designed as a prison for black A new grad student far away from home, men, received no funds from the state; I took every step on trembling ground. it would support itself and, in years of I knew no one. Who were my friends? good harvest, make a profit.There were The other black student in the program few paid employees. Instead, the peni- ducked and rushed away when our eyes met. tentiary was largely run by inmate trust- Seminar rooms were full of hungry dogs ies, who carried guns and lived in shacks snapping up scraps of nodding approval. outside the prison. Next in the hierar- At the end of a campus reception chy were the “do-pops”: when the trust- I accepted the offer of a ride ies were about to walk through a door, from campus to my downtown room-with-bath. the do-pops popped it open. The low- est class of prisoners were the “rank men,” October. Evenings were getting cool. who worked on the Hoe Squad. If they The walk over the bridge downtown didn’t pick enough cotton or vegetables, felt dangerously long when it was dark. they were made to lie face down on the Did the young man who offered me a ride ground,sometimes with their pants low- tell me his name? What was it about him ered, as an officer whipped them with a that made me say Yes thanks, like a damn fool? five-foot leather strap. In a memoir, When we were in his car and he said oops, Thomas Murton, who, in 1968, served he had forgotten something at his place as the superintendent of Arkansas’s pris- he had to pick up, and asked if I’d mind ons, wrote, “This whole system of ex- if we stopped there, why did I say O.K.? ploitation began in the days after the Civil War, when the farmers and plan- Did we talk during the drive? Was the radio on? tation owners who were forced to free Did I just watch the businesses, their slaves looked for a new source of in thinning traffic, become a suburb cheap labor.” Murton was fired after he where his apartment complex was in a woods began digging for skeletons on the already splendid in autumn colors grounds of Cummins,where he believed so beautiful they took my words away? several inmates had been murdered. He told the press, “You can’t provide the but “this was: there are certain prohi- tracized if they showed compassion to- cure if you don’t know the disease.” bitions on how the state deals with me, ward inmates. They’d be branded as because I am a human being entitled “inmate lovers,” a term derived from In 1970, in response to a class-action to rights.The obligation is not a grace— “nigger lover.” As a poorly paid correc- suit stemming from petitions by pris- it’s a right.” tions officer, she felt a sense of camara- oners, a federal judge concluded, for the derie with the inmates. “The wardens first time in the country’s history, that Philip Kaplan,one of the lawyers who and majors wouldn’t even talk to us,”she a state’s entire prison system violated represented the inmates, told me that, said. “They thought we were too low- the prohibition against cruel and un- even after the prisons were placed under life.” After Raynor went to prison, she usual punishment. (“Particularly at federal supervision,“we had to pull teeth. quit. “I couldn’t sit around and watch Cummins,” he wrote.) The judge de- Their view was: these are more like an- what the inmates were going through,” scribed the Arkansas system as a “dark imals as opposed to human beings.”The she said. and evil world” operating according to system was desegregated, but the pris- “customs completely foreign to free oners still worked for free. As late as Bobby Roberts, a former member of world culture.”In an annual report that 1992,an internal investigation found that the Arkansas Board of Corrections, year, the commissioner of the prison black inmates were ten times more likely told me, “What always fascinated me system acknowledged that “the so-called than other inmates to be assigned the about our prison system is the implied ‘self-supporting prisons for profit’ have job of shining officers’ shoes. Today, contract that exists between the inmate been exposed as . . . destroying institu- though black people make up only fifteen and the correctional officer.” In theory, tions which stand as incongruous mon- per cent of the population in Arkansas, it shouldn’t be possible for an officer to uments to despair.” more than forty per cent of the state’s contain a barracks of some fifty men,but, prisoners are African-American. Roberts said, “there’s the written prison The case represented a “profound rules, and then there’s the way things ac- revolution in understanding the legal Raynor’s mother, Elvera, who began tually operate, which is a matter of both status of prisoners,” Judith Resnik, a working for the Department of Correc- law professor at Yale who is working tions in 1994, said that officers were os- on a book about prisoners’ rights, told me. Previously, reformers had tried to claim that certain punishments were un-Christian or unscientific or immoral, 60 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020

When he pulled up and said I should come in, ing. “They were hollering and beefing, it would only take a minute, why did I go and they looked like animals,”D.B. said. upstairs with him, wait as the key unlocked “It was like something out of the mov- his apartment, and go inside? ies.” Donnie, who was also there, said that one man in the barracks yelled at The building was silent. A big window the guards,“We don’t know if the dudes in the living room looked at parking lots coming in are positive or negative—you with a few parked cars, and the glowing trees. can’t put them in here.” He said I’ll be right back, and disappeared into the bedroom. I turned to the view, D.B. and the other men refused to thinking of nothing, my mind a blank page step inside the barracks. “Take us back that grew emptier as the minutes passed. to where we come from,”D.B. said. For What was he doing during those minutes, fifteen minutes, they stood outside the as I stood dreaming like a fat pigeon barracks, trying to negotiate with one in the keen purview of a circling hawk? of the deputy wardens. Finally, he and Donnie said, the deputy warden shook What could he have needed to go home for, his head and muttered, “I’m just about that was so important he had to go to say,‘Fuck it.’”The men were led back there first, before he drove me home? Was he to their barracks. By the time D.B. re- wrestling with opportunity? turned, he was in tears. He is serving a ten-year sentence,for discharging a fire- Human horrors arm from his car.“They have absolutely are not inevitable. Some people stop no control over this prison,” he said. themselves, before they cross moral divides. “We don’t have nobody to reach out to. A drinking buddy might say Cool it, bro. I just want to go home and do house A cop might take his knee off a black man’s throat. arrest. I don’t want to die like this.” A young man might come out and say O.K., let’s go, and drive you home. What was his name? The men in the Think Tank tried to defuse tension between the inmates —Marilyn Nelson and the officers, a practice they’d main- tained for years. “At the training acad- sides understanding the boundaries.” During the last weekend of April, emy, the officers become indoctrinated As the outbreak spread, the contract men in a barracks on the East Hall that their job is to punish,”Kaleem Na- threw a TV through one of their win- zeem,a member of the Think Tank who broke down.Some officers stopped com- dows. When Marie came to the bar- was recently released, told me. “But we ing to work, because they were sick or racks, they began shouting that their tell them,‘As long as you hold on to the afraid. Those who showed up rarely sick calls were going unanswered, and core values that your mother and your made security rounds. They delivered that the positives were being mixed with grandmother gave you, you’re going to meals sporadically, on carts typically the negatives.Through the windows of be all right here.’” He added, “It’s all used to transport laundry or trash. One the barracks, she urged them not to riot. about pitch and tone.” man said that when he tried to submit “They don’t know the depths of it,”she a grievance an officer advised him not told them, referring to the administra- When Qadir met officers who were to expect the form to be signed by a ser- tion. “All they know is you all are here new to the job, he sometimes provided geant, the first step for resolving a com- acting the fool.” She reminded them, them with what he called “orientation.” plaint. The officer said that he’d seen “Regardless of what, you are a man be- He broke down the conditions of the grievances in a bathroom trash can. fore anything.” average prisoner.“We want them to un- derstand that we have been working for Raynor sensed that the officers blamed D.B., the inmate who had been dis- this prison for eight hours a day, every the inmates for the fact that they were ciplined for not going to the Hoe Squad, year, for free,” he said. If an inmate on now doing work that prisoners were sup- said that one night,without explanation, the Hoe Squad takes a cucumber from posed to perform. “It’s like they think a deputy warden told him and five other the farm—the inmates grow them, but we’re making them do the laundry and men to pack their belongings.They fol- they can go for years without tasting sweep the floor,” he said. He told an lowed the orders,but,as they approached one—what’s the harm in letting the officer, “This is bigger than me as an in- a new barracks, they saw through the man eat one fresh vegetable? Qadir said, mate and you as a low-level correctional windows that a few men were holding “Some go by the book,some turn a blind officer.We’ve both been subjected to the handmade knives. Another was bleed- eye, and some even feed us themselves.” same conditions.” To prevent the inmates from rioting as the crisis worsened, the Think Tank tried to get them to enlarge their per- spective, too. Qadir, who lived on the West Hall, told them,“Imagine you are THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020 61

“It’s not art, really—just something I pulled out of my butt.” ThinkTank member,cleaned the wound himself and got Jones into bed. •• Five hours later, Jones was taken to a correctional officer at home with your infection and exacerbate inflammation. the infirmary, where he heard a nurse children after a ten-hour shift, and you One man appeared to have a seizure. say that his wound had “opened up like have to turn around and drive an hour “He just laid on the ground, twitching,” a flower.” He was driven in a van to a back to work because there’s a distur- Charles Robinson,an inmate in the bar- hospital in Little Rock. For the eighty- bance here.” But each time a meagre racks, said. “He almost suffocated.” mile drive, he lay across the back seat, meal arrived it served as a trigger. “Let behind a metal grille, with his hands this be a safe zone,”Raynor warned the A combination of smoke and tear and feet shackled. He was nauseated men in his barracks, on the East Hall. gas drifted into an adjacent barracks, and had no vision in his left eye. At the “Everybody can’t go down onto the bat- where all the inmates had tested posi- hospital, Jones, who was not wearing a tlefield. Somebody has to be left behind tive for the coronavirus. Darrell Jones, mask, informed staff that he had tested to tell the story.” who has been incarcerated for thirty-five positive for the coronavirus. It was not years, realized that he needed to turn the first time that officers, transporting Down the hallway,in a different bar- off the ceiling fan. “It was pulling the positive inmates,had been cavalier about racks, the men were not easily subdued. smoke in from the hallway,”he told me. transmitting the virus. In an e-mail to On May 2nd, they became so frustrated “People sounded like they were chok- all wardens on April 21st,Payne,the Di- by the lack of attention—an officer had ing to death.” The switch for the fan vision of Correction director, had writ- refused to sign an inmate’s grievance was just outside the barracks door. As ten, “Hospitals are not wanting to treat about how they were being fed little he stepped through the doorway, a lieu- our inmates because our staff are not more than hard-boiled eggs—that a few tenant shot him in the face with a rub- following the guidelines.” men broke open the window of the ber bullet. Jones’s vision suddenly went officers’control booth and unlocked the dark, and he fell to the floor. “If you Jones returned to the prison the next doors on their hallway. “Free the boys, don’t get back in the barracks,”he heard morning and, four days later, received man! Free them, man!” an inmate was an officer say, “I’m going to shoot you a disciplinary violation. “Inmate was filmed shouting.Officers fled their posts. again.” But he was too disoriented to given several direct orders not to come About an hour later, an emergency- move; blood streamed down his face out of the barracks but he disobeyed all response team arrived in riot gear, with from a wound less than half an inch orders while coming toward staff, pos- a cart of weapons from the prison’s ar- above his left eye. Inmates dragged him ing aggression,” the ticket said. Jones mory.The officers sprayed tear gas into inside and began pounding on the win- still can’t see out of his left eye. If he the barracks. The chemical can make dows, saying that Jones needed a doc- keeps it open for more than twenty min- the respiratory tract more susceptible to tor. When no one came, Danzie, the utes, he gets a migraine. At one of the Governor’s daily press conferences, Payne acknowledged that there had been a “minor disturbance”at the prison. But, when asked if there were any injuries, he responded, “No.” Jones filled out a sick call in early May, but he is still waiting to see a specialist. He now spends his days in bed with his eyes closed, to keep his headaches at bay. He told me, “It’s like they are trying to punish us for testing positive.” When Governor Hutchinson began holding daily coronavirus press conferences, he set apart the cases at Cummins. On April 19th, he presented a graph illustrating new infections in the past five weeks: cases were dipping, he reassured the public,if incarcerated peo- ple were removed from the equation. “The number that we will have coming out of Cummins dwarfs what we’re hav- ing statewide,” Hutchinson explained. “That’s a reason, of course, to distin- guish those in the reporting system.” “It hurt,” Qadir told me. “Here it is, right now in 2020, and the Governor 62 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020

doesn’t even want us to be a statistic. kansas, denied the request, writing that scribed Coley as “one of the most en- Imagine that.If they don’t count us when federal courts should “approach intru- joyable people I have ever known.” He we’re sick and dying, then we really are sion into the core activities of the state’s was set to go before the parole board nobody.” Another man in the Think prison system with caution.” The Ar- this month. Tank told me, “A lot of guys just shake kansas attorney general had argued that their heads. They don’t think they can the risks to prisoners were not “so great On April 15th, he had been seen by change anything—the hopelessness is that they violate standards of decency,” a nurse who noted that he was too weak so big,so complex—so they’d rather not nor were they “ones that today’s society to walk and his blood-oxygen level was think about it.” does not tolerate.” ninety, which would typically indicate that a patient should be hospitalized. In late April, lawyers for the Arkan- Marie noticed that older men who Instead, Coley was sent to the Hole, sas American Civil Liberties Union, were sick didn’t bother asking for where he remained for seventeen days. Disability Rights Arkansas, and the help.“They just stay on their racks,”she His vitals were never recorded again. N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educa- said. “They know how it works. They tional Fund filed a federal lawsuit, ar- just lay there.” Some of the sickest in- The men in neighboring cells be- guing that the Arkansas prison system mates were placed in the visitation room, came increasingly concerned. “They had displayed deliberate indifference to which had been converted into a make- were telling the guards,‘He needs to go prisoners’ welfare. Fifty years after the shift hospital, where they had no access to the infirmary—he can’t breathe,’ ” system had been declared unconstitu- to showers or phones. A thirty-year-old Coley’s girlfriend, Cecelia Tate, who tional, inmates believed that they were man who spent several days there told was raising an eight-year-old daughter still being subjected to cruel and unusual me he was alarmed when an inmate with him, told me. “But the guards just punishment. Resnik, the Yale professor, who had tested negative for coronavi- kept walking by.” said that conditions had improved since rus was inexplicably moved in. The in- the sixties, but she wondered,“Is it more mate kept trying to give officers paper- Another man who had been housed weighty and terrible now because, even work documenting his test results.When in the Hole told me,“Listen, these peo- with prisoners having all these rights, that didn’t work, he threatened to break ple are supposed to come every thirty the conditions are still debilitating?” the vending machines if he wasn’t moved minutes, but they weren’t making any out of the room. One man, Roy Davis, rounds. They might come every four Cummins has had the tenth-largest died there, sitting in a wheelchair. hours, but they wouldn’t even turn their coronavirus outbreak in the nation— heads unless you were calling their nine hundred and fifty-six people, in- The Division of Correction began names.” To get attention, he said, one cluding sixty-five staff members, have listing the number of coronavirus deaths inmate banged on his toilet, and, when tested positive—but the Division of on its Facebook page. There have been that didn’t work, he warned the others Correction has made only minimal steps eleven at Cummins so far. On May 2nd, in the Hole to lift their belongings off to contain it. The inmates aren’t given after two deaths in twenty-four hours, the ground,because he planned to flood access to alcohol-based hand sanitizer, the Division noted that “both inmates the floor. The man told me, “It makes even though the medical director of in- were in their 60s and serving Life Sen- perfect sense that Coley was lying back fectious diseases for the state’s Depart- tences.” Raynor felt that the men were there dying, and no one ever noticed.” ment of Health has advocated for its use.“Maybe science will take precedence being described “like old cows. They The last time Tate talked to Coley, now in current situation,” he wrote, in were old, and we already milked them.” three weeks before his death, she asked an e-mail to the secretary of the depart- Within hours of their deaths,their names if he was planning to see a doctor. “I ment. Men are still sleeping in open were deleted from the Department of don’t know if they’re going to let me,” barracks, less than three feet apart. (A Corrections roster online. he said.Tonya Morrow, who, until Jan- spokesperson for the Department of uary,was a physician’s assistant for Well- Corrections told me in an e-mail that In the absence of any funeral service, path, at another Arkansas prison, told if inmates in every other bed follow new some of the younger men at Cummins me that, when officers called about sick instructions to sleep with their feet in gathered in small groups to share pic- inmates,“nine times out of ten the nurses the spot typically occupied by their tures and memories of Derick Coley, would say he’s just faking it or trying heads, their faces will be “separated by who was twenty-nine when he died. In to get out of something. If the officer 6 feet from the next inmate’s pillow.”) a tribute online, Cheryl Tucker, who says the inmate has been throwing up, taught G.E.D. classes at Cummins, de- the nurse will ask, ‘Well, have you seen The inmates asked that the prison the inmate throw up? Until you see the system immediately take more precau- inmate throw up, he can’t come to the tions, including releasing some people infirmary.’” Burrow, the former Well- to home confinement.One of their law- path nurse, told me, “It’s a pride issue. yers, Omavi Shukur, told me, “For so The mentality of the infirmary is: these long, we’ve argued that the rate of pop- individuals are worthless.”She said that ulation growth in prisons is unsustain- new staff members quickly “built up a able, and now that argument has be- brick wall” in order to assimilate to the come palpable.” But Kristine Baker, a culture.Those who didn’t were dismissed judge for the Eastern District of Ar- as “givers.”“They would say, ‘I can’t be- lieve you’re falling for their games,’”she THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020 63

said.(Burrow was terminated after mak- new outbreak: two hundred and twenty- come visible: political leaders must ing complaints about what she wit- eight inmates had tested positive. One reckon with the fact that prisons are nessed. Wellpath said that retaliation is had already died. part of our communities. The bound- against its policy, and denied that sick aries of penitentiaries are porous: in- calls are shredded.) In response to the pandemic,Hutchin- mates come in and out, as do officers, son allowed six hundred and forty-eight medical staff, venders, lawyers, and rel- Officers finally came to Coley’s cell— prisoners who were serving sentences atives. Diseases come in and out, too. not to check on him but to clear it so for nonviolent, nonsexual offenses, and The risk of tuberculosis, for instance, is that someone else could move in. He were within six months of their release, twenty-three times higher inside prison was told that it was time to return to to go home. Since February, twenty-six walls—poor ventilation, social density, the general population. But, when he states have released more than twen- and minimal sun exposure are fertile stood up, he collapsed. When a nurse ty-seven thousand prisoners.The Think conditions for the spread of disease— arrived, he was lying on the floor, his Tank was disappointed that a distinc- but cannot be contained within them. lips pale. Several men watched through tion was made—by nearly every politi- A 2015 study in Emerging Infectious Dis- their windows as Coley, who had been cal leader discussing the need for more eases found that in Dourados, a city in handcuffed, was taken to the infirmary space in prisons—between nonviolent Brazil, more than half the cases of tu- in a wheelchair. A man shouted Coley’s offenders and violent ones.In 2008,Qadir berculosis among people who had never name several times as he rolled by. He had drafted a bill titled “Restoring Those been incarcerated were linked to strains didn’t respond. Forgotten,” which he sent to the Gov- of the disease inside the nearby prison. ernor and several legislators. The bill The doctor on call, William Patrick proposed that men who, like him, had Vivian Flowers, a state representative Scott,advised the infirmary staff by tele- been sentenced to life without parole from Pine Bluff who contracted the coro- phone.(Scott’s medical license has been when they were twenty-one or younger navirus in late March, told leaders of the suspended three times. In one instance, should have the opportunity to prove Division of Correction that she doubted the state medical board concluded that that they had reformed. “In evaluating their conclusion that the men at Cum- he had “exhibited gross negligence and our penal system,” he wrote in a peti- mins had recovered. (Last year, Flowers ignorant malpractice,” by treating pa- tion accompanying the bill, “there is a proposed a constitutional amendment tients while intoxicated.) Coley was very thin line between correcting and to outlaw prison labor, but it was voted given chest compressions by the nurses, condemning a life.” As Qadir expected, down.) Flowers wanted to be tested again one of whom had been involved in the there was no response. Between 2012 before she returned to the Arkansas Gen- incident in which an inmate was al- and 2017, Arkansas’s prison population eral Assembly, which was holding its legedly choked with a telephone cord. grew more than any other state’s, with meetings in a basketball arena, so two According to the coroner’s report,Coley the number of elderly prisoners rising weeks after her first test she got another was “worked on and then passed away.” more rapidly than any other age group. one: she still had the virus.Ten days later, she tried again. She was still positive, The prison’s chaplain told Tate she Laura Fernandez, one of the lawyers even though she hadn’t had symptoms had two days to enlist a funeral home representing the prisoners, reflected on in twenty-three days. “This thing is still to claim Coley’s body. Tate didn’t have the state’s decision to count inmate in- working its way around the prison,”Flow- the money,so the state sent her his ashes. fections separately.“It’s like a Greek trag- ers told me. “When the workers leave, they are going to bring it back home.” At the Governor’s press conference edy,” she told me. “They don’t realize on May 16th, Payne stood in front this thing is coming right back at them.” By the middle of May, the restrictions of a backdrop that read “Arkansas: Ready Jefferson County, which encompasses at Cummins had begun to ease.The for Business,”and announced good news Pine Bluff—the city closest to Cum- men were told to eat in the cafeteria again, from Cummins: there were only twelve mins—had, at one point, more deaths one barracks at a time. On D.B.’s first positive cases. The rest, he said, were per capita from the coronavirus than any day back, he saw the warden, Aundrea “considered to have been recovered.” other county in the state.Lincoln County, Culclager, wiping tables herself. When Based on my conversations with more where Cummins is situated,had the sec- an inmate asked if she was afraid of ex- than thirty inmates or their families, it ond-highest rate of cases in the nation. posing herself to infected prisoners, D.B. seems that almost no one had been re- heard her reply, “No, God got me.” He tested. They had simply had their tem- Prisoners are hidden in most realms said,“I wasn’t impressed—I just thought peratures taken. Some had been asked of life, but, when it comes to infectious it was sad. How can we progress when to put their fingers in a pulse oximeter, disease, the harms of incarceration be- we got the warden of the whole prison which measures blood-oxygen levels. In not able to make big decisions, because a letter to the Governor, Raynor wrote, she’s doing a minimum-wage job?” “Watching a press conference witness- ing your saying almost 900 people have Qadir spent his first day back in the recovered at the Cummins Unit and then kitchen “assessing the damages.”He told I walk by a guy that can’t get out of the me, “Imagine your daughter playing bed makes me question my sanity level.” with your makeup, and you come back to see the mess. That’s what this was.” Meanwhile, at a state prison thirty- five miles from Cummins, there was a 64 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020

After the cafeteria opened, a field “And don’t come back.” rider came into Raynor’s barracks and said, “Y’all better start getting ready to •• go back to Hoe Squad.” Raynor’s job was doing laundry, but he shouted back, of killing a white stranger,though it was As they watched the protests follow- “We are never going back out there.” unclear if the man was murdered (he ing the death of George Floyd on the was discovered in a ditch,and no weapon news, they felt that this alternative life Later that day, Raynor, who has was ever found) and Danzie has always might be within reach. The protesters, founded a small organization called For- maintained his innocence. He, Qadir, Qadir said, looked to him like babies, giveness, Reform, and Freedom, which and Raynor make sense of their life sen- and that gave him hope. “The genera- fosters reconciliation between offenders tences by reminding themselves of un- tion on the front lines doesn’t know the and victims, was woken up by four related wrongs that they committed as fear of my generation,” he said. “They officers.They put him in handcuffs.One teen-agers,for which they were not tried. don’t know the fear of my mother’s gen- officer sat on his bed, rifling through “I have to realize there’s karma,” Dan- eration.They don’t know the fear of our his belongings and throwing papers and zie said. “That’s one of the reasons I ancestors. And yet they still have the clothes on the floor.“Why is all this ag- give so much of myself to youth. Every same spirit that I feel when I go before gression taking place?” Raynor asked. time one of these guys go free, they are classification every year”—the annual They didn’t answer.They didn’t find any taking a piece of you with them. So process by which inmates are assigned contraband, but they led him out of the eventually all of you will be free.”Kaleem jobs.They file into the classification office barracks and down the hallway to the Nazeem, who was released in 2018, after one at a time and stand on footprints prison’s holding cells, where men had twenty-eight years in prison, told me etched into the floor. Majors who over- been urinating through the bars and that, when people compliment him on see different parts of the prison—the defecating on the floor, since officers his adjustment to freedom, he says, fields, the chickens, the cattle, the infir- were coming too infrequently for them “You’re looking at the student—the mary, the kitchen—sit at tables around to go to the bathroom.As Raynor stood teachers are still locked up.” them.“They look at you, size you up like in front of the holding cells, he heard a a horse,and make bids on where you will lieutenant ask the other officers, “Why Qadir and Raynor reassure each other work,” Qadir said. “I get this gut feeling are we locking him up if he didn’t do that they won’t die in prison. “God is in my stomach: the blood that pumps nothing?” They allowed Raynor to re- going to make a way out of no way,” into my veins is the blood of my forefa- turn to his barracks. He wondered if, Qadir said.They share the same dream: thers.” He went on, “Some people say, after his comment to the field rider, he if they are ever released, they will open ‘Don’t question God.’ I question him all was being warned. their own organic farms. Raynor said, the time: Help me understand so I can “Imagine me having forty acres and a endure and be on the road to recovery.”  Some of the men I spoke with were catfish pond.” afraid to use their names; they thought that they would be put in the Hole, or sent to the Hoe Squad, as punishment. When I asked Raynor why he chose to go on the record, he told me, “I want the men in here to know that someone they know was willing to sacrifice them- selves for them.” The coronavirus cri- sis, he said, had brought to the surface what most inmates had previously only sensed. “I always knew in the back of my mind: You don’t care at all about us,” Raynor said. “It’s scary, because ev- erything has come to fruition.”He sees the prison as a “microcosm of America, with its own ghetto and suburbs”—the East Hall and the West Hall. He wor- ries that one misguided act from an officer will cause the men on the East Hall to start rioting again. He said,“We suffer from things that we didn’t even know we suffered from.” I noticed that the men in the Think Tank used convoluted rationalizations to make peace with punishments that they knew to be unjust. Danzie, who is black,was convicted by an all-white jury THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020 65

FICTION Scholastique Mukasonga 66 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020 ILLUSTRATION BY LUCY JONES

O n TV, on the radio, they never that little part of her—the part that in her memory; she could call up their called it genocide. As if that still tied her to those she’d left behind image anytime she liked. She sat down word were reserved. Too seri- in Rwanda, despite the distance and at her table, took her head in her hands, ous. Too serious for Africa. Yes, there the time gone by and the impossibil- closed her eyes, focussed her mind, and were massacres, but there were always ity of rejoining them—formed a bond pictured, one by one, all the faces that massacres in Africa. And these massa- that grounded her identity and affirmed death might already have erased. cres were happening in a country that her will to go on. That bond would no one had ever heard of. A country fade, and in the cold of her solitude its Then, toward the end of June, she that no one could find on a map.Tribal disappearance would leave her some- got a letter. There was no mistak- hatred, primitive, atavistic hatred: noth- how amputated. ing where it had come from: the red- ing to understand there. “Weird stuff and-blue-bordered envelope, the exotic goes on where you come from,” people She felt very fragile. “I’m like an bird on the stamp, the clumsily written would tell her. egg,” she often told herself. “One jolt address. . . . She couldn’t bring herself and I’ll break.”She moved as sparingly to open it. She put it on her bookshelf, She herself didn’t know the word, as she could; she lived in slow motion. behind the Rwandan baskets. She pre- but in Kinyarwanda there was a very She walked as if she were seeking her tended to forget it.There were so many old term for what was happening in way in the dark, as if at any moment more urgent and more important things her homeland: gutsembatsemba, a verb, she might bump into an obstacle and to do: make dinner, iron a pair of jeans, used when talking about parasites or fall to the ground. Climbing a staircase organize her class notes. But the letter mad dogs, things that had to be erad- took a tremendous effort: a great weight was still there, behind the baskets. Sud- icated, and about Tutsis, also known as lay on her shoulders. She found her- denly, she found herself tearing open inyenzi—cockroaches—something else self counting the steps she still had to the envelope. She pulled out a sheet of to be wiped out. She remembered the climb, clutching the bannister as if she square-ruled paper,a page from a school- story her Hutu schoolmates at high were at the edge of an abyss, and when child’s notebook. She didn’t need to school in Kigali had told her, laughing: she reached her floor she was breath- read the few sentences that served as “Someday a child will ask his mother, less and drained. an introduction to a long list of names: ‘Mama, who were those Tutsis I keep her father, her mother, her brothers, her hearing about? What did they look She tried to find an escape in mind- sisters, her uncles, her aunts, her neph- like?,’and the mother will answer,‘They less household tasks. Again and again, ews, her nieces. . . . This was now the were nothing at all, my son. Those are she maniacally straightened her studio list of her dead, of everyone who had just stories.’” apartment.Something was always where died far away from her, without her, and it shouldn’t be: books on the couch, there was nothing she could do for them, Nevertheless, she hadn’t lost hope. shoes in the entryway, Rwandan nest- not even die with them. She stared at She wanted to know. Her father, her ing baskets untidily lined up on the the letter,unable to weep,and she began mother, her brothers, her sisters, her shelf. She was sure she’d feel better if to think that it had been sent by the whole family back in Rwanda—some everything was finally where it belonged. dead themselves. It was a message from of them might still be alive. Maybe the But she was forever having to go back the land of the dead. And this, she slaughter had spared them for now? and start over again. thought, would probably be their only Maybe they’d managed to escape into grave, a column of names she didn’t exile, as she had? Her parents, on the If only she had at least a photograph even need to reread, because she knew hill, had no telephone, of course, but of her parents. She rifled through the them so well that they echoed in her she called one of her brothers, who suitcase that had come with her through head like cries of pain. taught in Ruhengeri. The phone rang all her travels.There were letters, there and rang. No one answered. She called were notebooks filled with words, use- She kept the letter from her dead her sister, who’d married a shopkeeper less diplomas, even her Rwandan iden- with her at all times. She never showed in Butare. A voice she’d never heard be- tity card, with the “Tutsi” stamp that it to anyone.Whenever someone asked, fore told her, “There’s nobody here.” she’d tried to scratch away. There was “What happened to your family?,” she She called her brother in Canada. He a handful of photographs of her with always answered, “They were killed, was the eldest. If their parents were her girlfriends in Burundi (which they’d they’re all dead, every one.”When peo- dead, then he’d be the head of the fam- had taken at a photographer’s studio ple asked how she’d heard, she told ily. Perhaps he had news, perhaps he in the Asian district in Bujumbura, be- them, “I just know, that’s all. Don’t ask had advice, perhaps he could help her fore they parted ways, so they wouldn’t me anything more.” She often felt the begin to face her terror. They spoke, forget), there were postcards from her need to touch that piece of paper. She and then they fell silent.What was there brother in Canada, a few pages of a gazed at the column of names without to say? From now on, they were alone. diary she’d quickly abandoned, but she reading them, with no tears in her eyes, never did find a photo of her parents. and the names filled her head with pleas From now on, she would be alone. that she didn’t know how to answer. She knew a few people from home, of For that,she rebuked herself bitterly. course, friends she’d made at the uni- Why hadn’t she thought to ask them What she didn’t want to see: pic- versity here, where she’d had to start to have their picture taken and send tures on television, photographs in her studies all over again, her African her a copy? Was she a neglectful daugh- newspapers and magazines, corpses degrees being worthless in France. But ter? Had she forgotten them as the years went by? No, they were still there THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020 67

lying by roadsides, dismembered bod- GEORGE FLOYD ies, faces slashed by machetes. What she didn’t want to hear: any rumor that You can be a bother who dyes might summon up images of the frenzy his hair Dennis Rodman blue of sex and blood that had crashed over in the face of the man kneeling in blue the women, the girls, the children. . . . in the face the music of his wrist- She wanted to protect her dead,to keep watch your mouth is little more them untouched in her memory, their than a door being knocked bodies whole and unsullied, like the out of the ring of fire around saints she’d heard about at catechism, the afternoon came evening’s bell miraculously preserved from corruption. of the ball and chain around the neck of the unarmed brother ground down Most of all, she didn’t want to sleep, to gunpowder dirt can be inhaled because to fall asleep was to deliver her- like a puff the magic bullet point self to the killers. Every night they were of transformation both kills and fires there.They’d taken over her sleep; they the life of the party like it’s 1999 bottles were the masters of her dreams. They of beer on the wall street people had no faces; they came toward her in who sleep in the streets do not sleep a gray, blood-soaked throng. Or else without counting yourself lucky they had just one face, an enormous rabbit’s foot of the mountain face that laughed viciously as it pressed lion do not sleep without into hers, crushing her. making your bed of the river boat gambling there will be No, no going to sleep. no stormy weather on the water Of course, she should have wept. bored to death any means of killing She owed the dead that. If she wept, time is on your side of the bed she could be close to them. She imag- of the truck transporting Emmett ined them waiting behind the veil of till the break of day Emmett till tears, nearby and unreachable. Maybe the river runs dry your face that was why she’d gone so far away, the music of the spheres why she’d headed off into exile: so that Emmett till the end of time there would be someone to weep for all those whose memory the killers had —Terrance Hayes tried to erase, whose existence they’d tried to deny. enter the land of the dead. He’d got the her parents’ house to that of her new But she couldn’t weep. tears he deserved,and although the pain family, her sobs—too loud to be sin- of the loss was still there, you knew that cere—showed everyone that she was “My father just died,” one of her it would slowly ease, that you’d be able leaving the paternal enclosure against friends told her. to live with it, and that the lost loved her wishes. The ingobyi always de- “I’ll go to his funeral,”she answered, one would leave a peaceful memory in manded its tribute of tears. without thinking. the world of the living,a welcome mem- ory—maybe that was what white peo- She sadly recalled the little ceme- She immediately regretted making ple meant when they talked about “the tery where she and her three fellow-ref- that promise. Was it right for her to grieving process.” And, with that, the ugees had liked to meet. This was in honor someone else’s dead if she couldn’t loved one was allowed to set off for his Burundi, in Bujumbura, at the semi- weep for her own? In her mind, she final home. The body was carried on nary that had temporarily taken them summoned up images of Rwandan an ingobyi, a long stretcher made of in after they fled from Rwanda. In ex- women weeping over their lost loved bamboo slats. The women would keep change for halfhearted hospitality, the ones, able to weep because the body their eyes fixed on him, accompanying four companions-in-exile did house- was there in front of them, before it was him on his voyage, as if lending him keeping, helped in the kitchen, served buried.Yes,the women of Rwanda knew their support one last time before he the abbots at dinner, washed dishes. how to mourn. First, they wept sitting was admitted to the other world, the They tried to ward off the insistent cu- up very straight, still and silent, their unknown world of the spirits. The in- riosity of the seminarians, who were tears falling like raindrops from euca- gobyi also served as a bride’s palanquin made restless by the presence of girls. lyptus trees. Then came the keening on her wedding day. She, too, was ex- They were forever having to invent new and the wailing; the women shivered pected to weep. As she was taken from excuses to turn down the abbots’ invi- and quaked, racked head to toe by vi- tations to come pick out a book or have olent sobs. Finally, they huddled be- neath their pagnes,disappearing,sound- less but for their sighs as they choked back their tears, and then even those slowly waned. Now the loved one could 68 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020

a talk in their rooms. When the siesta gees had gone their separate ways, she cheeks, and she heard a loud sob escape hour came, the girls went out into the still missed the haven she’d found in her. Now there was no stopping it. She garden to talk about all that had hap- that cemetery. And today she realized let the tears flow; she didn’t try to hold pened to them and to consider their how much she wished she could be them back or wipe them away. It was uncertain future. Beyond the banana back by those strangers’ graves, where as if a wave of solace had erupted from grove, they discovered a small forgot- she’d shed so many tears. the very heart of her sorrow.She couldn’t ten cemetery with a handful of wooden stop whispering the lamentation that crosses, whose white paint was peeling, There was a sort of minivan,of a dis- accompanies the dead in Rwanda. She the black letters of the names almost creet, elegant gray, parked in front could feel her neighbors’ uncomfort- entirely faded. “Let’s say a prayer,” Es- of the church. Two men in dark suits able, reproachful stares. She heard a pérance said.“You must always do some- were waiting, bored, on the steps. She murmur run through the rows in front thing for the dead.” went in and tiptoed down the side aisle of her and behind her. She fled, here until she reached an empty seat with a and there jostling a kneeling woman as They returned to those graves day view of the choir and the altar. There she hurried past.Her footfalls resounded after day, hurrying out to the little cem- was a priest standing at a microphone, against the stone floor as if to denounce etery early in the afternoon, as soon as talking about the consolation of the af- her: what right did she have to weep the dishes were washed and the siesta terlife. Nothing to do with her dead. for that man she didn’t know, that man hour had begun. It became their secret She spotted her friend in the front row, surrounded by a family who mourned domain, their refuge, a safe place, far no doubt surrounded by her family. She him with a proper, polite sadness? She from the irritable stares of the miserly was shocked to see that the women was a parasite of their grief. old nun, far from the indiscreet, ardent weren’t weeping,although some had red gazes of the abbots and the seminari- eyes, and she was sorry to find that they She wished she could forget what ans. They pulled the weeds from the weren’t draped in the elaborate mourn- had happened at the church: that vi- graves and laid out purple flowers, cut ing veils she’d seen in old photos. The sion of her father’s corpse, her fit of from the bougainvillea that climbed men were all wearing solemn expres- tears. She avoided her friend so she the façade of the Father Superior’s small sions that seemed forced to her. wouldn’t have to answer her questions. house. “These could be our parents’ But a strange thought nagged at her, graves,” Eugénie said. “They may have Soon her eye was drawn to the coffin, insistent, obsessive, telling her that her been killed. Maybe because of us, be- which was sitting on a pedestal, arm- dead had given her a sign, and she was cause we left, they were killed.” They fuls of flowers laid out all around it. She afraid to understand too clearly what stood side by side and held one an- couldn’t help admiring the coffin’s they were trying to say to her. None- other as you do for a Rwandan greet- gleaming, polished wood, its handsome theless, she found that the long strolls ing. Then they burst into tears, and molding, its gilded handles. The old she liked to take through the streets of their shared lament brought them some man, she understood, was lying in that the city inevitably brought her to a comfort and solace. padded box dressed in his best suit, and church, where she always hoped to see maybe, as she’d heard people say, they’d a gleaming gray or black hearse parked They’d each chosen a grave to con- made up his face so they could tell them- in front. More than once she did, and sider their own. Sometimes it belonged selves that death was only a restful sleep. then an irresistible force drew her in- to their parents, sometimes to a brother, side, with the crowd of mourners. She a sister, a fiancé. . . . And they mourned She began to hate that old man, who’d knew exactly where to sit: always be- the absence of that loved one, or pos- died a painless death, her friend had hind a pillar, but with a view of the sibly the death, if he or she turned out told her—“a good death,”the friend had coffin. She stared at it long and hard, to have been killed in reprisal for the said, over and over. And as she stared hoping she might once again see through girls’ going away. The dirt was cracked at the coffin she felt as if she could see the wood and find one of her dead in- and eroded from the heat and the rain, inside it, as if the wood had become side it: her mother wrapped in her pagne, so they covered the graves with peb- transparent. And the body she saw in her younger sister in her schoolgirl bles taken a handful at a time from the that silken, gently lit bubble was her fa- dress . . . It didn’t always work, but the wide walkway that led to the calvary. ther’s body,dressed in the spotless pagne tears came every time. And she was They found a few slightly chipped vases that marked him as an elder and the convinced that, because she was there in the sacristy, and they placed them white shirt he wore for Sunday Mass. with them—those who had come to before the crosses, which they’d care- Suddenly she felt tears rolling down her mourn a son killed in a traffic accident fully straightened.They filled the vases or a brother dead after what they called with flowers they’d borrowed from the a long illness or a father felled by a heart altar of the Holy Virgin. And then, sit- attack—they would also weep for her ting by the graves, their arms around dead, just a little. In exchange, she told their legs, their chins on their knees, herself, I’m sharing their sorrow for the they silently let their tears flow, always one they lost.They can’t possibly mind. on edge,fearing that a seminarian might happen onto them and mock them for She thought that her dead wanted their strange rituals. her to be present at funerals so that they, too, could have their share of mourning Long after that little group of refu- THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020 69

and tears. In the past, she had never Népomucène’s cabaret. He sold banana Halfway up the hill, in the middle read the newspaper; now she opened it beer and Fanta,even Primus sometimes, of deserted fields, a patch of almost im- feverishly every morning to read the but not often. One time, I remember penetrable forest had survived. Fig trees obituaries. She became a regular at the it to this day, my father bought me an towered over the sea of pointed dra- church near her apartment. That went orange Fanta when he came back from caena leaves. Her father had told her on for some months, but eventually her the market. He must have got a good that those were the vestiges of the en- strangely faithful attendance was no- price for his coffee.” closure of an old king. This place was ticed. One day, as she was trying to dis- now haunted by his umuzimu, his spirit, creetly leave the church, a young priest “You really want to go there?” the and he had perhaps been reincarnated stopped her outside the front door. driver said, sighing. “You know, it’s no in the python that guarded this sacred use. There’s nothing left. It might not wood where no one dared set foot.“Stay “Madame, please . . .” be good for you.In any case,you shouldn’t away,” the old ones said. “The python She couldn’t push him away, and she go by yourself: you never know, you has been furious ever since the abapa- couldn’t go back inside. might run into a madman, and besides dris forbade us to bring it offerings. If “Madame, please, allow me, I’d like there are people who still want to ‘finish you go near him, he’ll swallow you!” a word with you. . . . I’ve noticed that the job,’ so being there all alone, with She couldn’t help thinking that this you come to almost every funeral, and those people who died up there . . .” gloomy forest and its python were now that you weep as if you knew the de- the masters of the hill and would end ceased. That can be upsetting for the “I made a promise. Maybe I’ll find up devouring her. families, for everyone who’s suffered a what I’ve come here for. . . . I prom- loss. Perhaps I can help you? I’d like ised, I have to go.” She reached the stand of banana nothing more than to listen to you, help trees, whose glossy leaves had once con- you . . . if there’s anything I can do.” “I’ll come back this evening, before cealed the enclosure. Many of the trees “No, let me be. I promise you’ll never the sun goes down. I’ll honk, and then had fallen and were dull brown with see me again.” I’ll wait for ten minutes. Look, I have rot. The leaves of those still standing She wandered the city streets, which a watch just like you do, ten minutes, hung tattered and yellow.A few of them had become a labyrinth of her despair, no more. I’ve got people waiting for me, bore sad, stunted fruit. with no way out. She sensed that the too, at home.” very tenuous, very frail bonds that had She found her pace slowing as she connected her to her own dead through “I’ll be here. See you this evening.” neared the enclosure. She wasn’t sure the losses of others were now broken The Toyota pickup drove off in a she’d have the strength to see this jour- forever. She felt herself sinking into cloud of red dust, loaded with bananas, ney through to the end, to face first- an aloneness that would never end. All mattresses, sheet metal, maybe ten pas- hand what she’d already been told about. she had left was that piece of note- sengers, and a few goats squeezed in. But now she was standing by the pali- book paper, now tattered, and its list The noise of the engine faded away.She sade. The wall of interlaced branches of names that she couldn’t bring her- spent a long moment looking around had collapsed and come apart,and what self to read but whispered to herself her. The dirt road snaked between the were once uprights were now shrubs over and over, like a hypnotic refrain hillside and the swamp, but the shal- with vigorous greenery or scarlet flow- of sadness and remorse. lows where her mother once grew sweet ers, which struck her as indecent, as if, She went home and tried to immerse potatoes and corn were now clogged she thought, those simple stakes had herself in her most recent class notes, with reeds and papyrus. Népomucène’s been brought to life by the death of the to neatly copy them out on a fresh sheet cabaret was a ruin, its flaking mud walls people who had planted them. Noth- of paper, but she found the names of showing their skeleton of interlaced ing was left of the rectangular main her dead filling the page. Now she was bamboo. The start of the path up the house but a shattered stretch of wall. afraid: she was going to lose her mind, hill was half hidden by tall fronds of She searched for some trace of the hearth she had already lost her mind, these dried grass. For a moment, she won- and its three stones, but she found only things she’d been doing weren’t what dered if this really was Gihanga. But a little pile of broken tiles. She couldn’t her dead wanted at all. They weren’t soon she got hold of herself. She should hold back a surge of pride: somehow here, in this land of exile, in these for- have known that everything would be her father had roofed his house with eign churches.They were waiting back different: death had come to this place. tiles! But she also observed that the kill- home, in the land of the dead that It was death’s domain now. ers had gone to the trouble of taking Rwanda had become. They were wait- The hill was steep, but the path soon most of them away.They’d had all kinds ing for her. She would go to them. turned rocky, and the tangle of brush of reasons for murdering their neigh- that slowed her down at first gradually bors: the neighbors were Tutsis; they “Stop,” she told the driver. “This is thinned. She tried to make out what had a house with a tile roof. In the back the place. That’s the path to my were once cultivated parcels of land in courtyard, the three big grain baskets house, and if you keep going it takes the thick growth that had invaded the were slashed and overturned, and the you up to the eucalyptus plantings at hillside. The plots marked off for the calves’ stable was a mound of ash and the very top of the hill. And that hut coffee plants were easy to spot, but charred straw. Not wanting to break over there at the side of the road, that’s shaggy, dishevelled bushes bore witness them any further, she took care not to to their abandonment. A few oversized, walk on the shards littering the ground, sterile maniocs rose from the weeds, smothering the last stalks of sorghum. 70 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020

SKETCHBOOK BY BARRY BLITT

all that remained of the big jugs the not on the altar.There may still be some is that your father isn’t here. His bones family had used to collect rainwater. in the folds of the Virgin Mary’s veil, if are still up there where he lived, at Gi- Amid the debris of the collapsed aw- you look closely. Once it was all cleaned hanga,but don’t you go looking for them. ning that had once covered the hearth, up, the Monsignor came. He wanted They’re someplace where you shouldn’t she thought she saw a patch of fabric Mass to be said here again, like before. see them.All right,let’s go now,you don’t and hoped it might be a piece of her All it would take was some holy water. have to write anything in the book— mother’s pagne. But when she came But the survivors objected. They said, that book’s for the bazungu, the white closer she realized that it was only a yel- ‘Where was your God when they were people,assuming they’ll come,or for the lowed taro leaf. killing us? The white soldiers came to grand gentlemen from Kigali in their take the priests away, and He went off four-by-fours. There’s nothing for you She knew she wouldn’t find what she with them. He won’t be back. Now the to write. You’re on the side of the dead. was looking for in the ruined enclosure. church belongs to our dead.’The mayor But let me tell you again: don’t go look- As soon as she’d got to the town, before and the prefect agreed. It seems they’re ing for your father’s remains,you mustn’t heading to the hamlet of Gihanga,she’d going to turn it into a house just for see him where they left him.” gone to the mission church where the our dead—a memorial, they called it. Tutsis had sought shelter, where they’d I’ll show you where our dead are wait- She stepped over the back court- been slaughtered. Four thousand, five ing in the meantime.” yard’s broken fence and found herself thousand, no one quite knew. Outside in another banana grove, which seemed the front door she’d seen a little old man He took a key that hung around his more overgrown than the one she’d just with a white beard and a broad, fringed neck on a string and opened a door be- come through.But,even with the weeds, straw hat sitting behind a wooden table. hind the altar, at the back of the apse. she could make out a path. It led to a He was the guardian of the dead. He Beyond it was a vast, dark room stacked thicket that exuded a horrible stench, had a notebook in front of him.Visitors to the ceiling with large bags, like those veiled by a buzzing, humming fog of were invited to write a few words on used for carrying charcoal. mosquitoes, gnats, and fat green flies. their way out, as at an art gallery. The A black puddle had spread all around old man gave her a long stare, nodded, “These are for skulls,”the guide said, it,like stinking lava.Pallid,almost trans- then finally said, “I know you—you’re pointing at the bags against the wall to parent worms twisted and writhed Mihigo’s daughter. Did you come to see his left, “and the ones straight ahead of wherever the flood hadn’t yet dried to the dead?” you are for bones. We’ve got everyone a sickening crust. who was here in the church, and all the “Yes, they were calling me.” bones we could find in the hills, left be- She forced her way through the tall “You won’t find them here. Here hind by the jackals and the abandoned grass and sat down for a moment on there’s only death.” dogs. Even the schoolchildren went to the termite mound where people used “Let me go in.” gather bones during vacations and days to wait their turn every morning. The “Of course. Who could deny you off. I hear there are going to be display smell was almost more than she could that? I’ll come with you, follow me, but cases, like at the Pakistani’s shop in the bear. The air felt thick and heavy. She then I have something to tell you.” marketplace. Your family’s here in these wasn’t sure she could go on, wasn’t sure “As you see,” the old man said, “the bags,but no one can tell you whose bones she had the courage to climb the last abapadris and their houseboys washed are whose. You can make out only the few metres to that putrid thicket. But everything clean. There’s nothing left, babies’skulls,because they fit in the palm she told herself that she had to see this not one drop of blood, not on the walls, of your hand. But what I can tell you through to the end, that in just a few steps her journey would be over. She “Hold up—there are too many guys in there right now.” staggered up the final slope, tried to wave away the blinding mist of gnats, and bent over the side of the latrine. She thought she could see something shaped like a human body in the filth, and maybe—but surely this was an il- lusion—the horrible black glistening of what used to be a face. A violent nau- sea washed over her, and she vomited as she ran back to the termite mound. She closed her eyes, only to see once again what she’d just glimpsed in the latrine, that same fleshless face with its vile, viscous mask. She opened her eyes to make the vision of horror go away. She was sure that she would never again close her eyes without that monstrous face appearing from the deepest dark- ness. She ran down the hill and took

shelter amid the crumbling walls of Népomucène’s cabaret, next to the road. To keep her eyes open, she stared at a bamboo rack, still dotted with a few clods of red clay. Trembling with fever and nausea, she sat there for hours, watching for the truck to come back, like a promise of deliverance. All night long, she struggled against “The people upstairs are talking about us. We should sleep in the room she’d rented at bark them another opera.” the mission,trying to hold back the flood of visions and nightmares that would •• wash her into their world of terror if she let herself drift off for even a moment. That strength lives in you. Don’t let each other in silence. Her visitor picked When the curfew hour came and the anyone try to tell you to get over your up a small gourd that he’d set down at generator was turned off, the mission loss, not if that means saying goodbye his feet. He dropped a single straw into was submerged in pitch-darkness. She to your dead. You can’t: they’ll never it. “I made this sorghum beer for the saw the glow of a fire through the nar- leave you, they’ll stay by your side to dead I watch over,” he said. “Share it row window: the watchmen warming give you the courage to live, to triumph with them as I do.” themselves on this cold,dry-season night. over obstacles, whether here in Rwanda She wished she could join them,hold out or abroad, if you go back. They’re al- He handed her the gourd and she her hands toward the flames, talk with ways beside you, and you can always sucked up the liquid. She closed her the men. But, of course, a girl couldn’t depend on them.” eyes.A gentle bitterness filled her mouth, mingle with strangers in the middle of like something she’d tasted long before. the night. She remembered that she’d Now the rising sun was illuminat- seen a hurricane lamp on the little table, ing her tiny room. She sat on the edge “Now,” the guardian of the dead and surely a box of matches next to it. of the bed, elbows on her knees, head said, “what is there for you to fear?”  She felt around for the matches, struck in her hands,listening.She let the guard- one, and lit the lamp’s wick. It felt as ian’s words sink into her, and slowly de- (Translated, from the French, though that trembling,blue-tipped flame spair loosened its grip. by Jordan Stump.) were watching over her, keeping at bay the dark forces that lurked all around. They sat for a long while, looking at NEWYORKER.COM She lay down on the bed and finally fell into a dreamless sleep. The author on mourning from exile. There was someone in her room when she awoke. In the dim early- morning light,she recognized the guard from the church, sitting in the room’s only chair. “You went to your house in Gihanga,” the old man said. “Don’t tell me what you saw or thought you saw there. You went right through to the end. There’s nothing beyond it, and no way out of it.You won’t find your dead in the graves or the bones or the latrine. That’s not where they’re waiting for you. They’re inside you. They survive only in you, and you survive only through them. But from now on you’ll find all your strength in them—there’s no other choice, and no one can take that strength away from you. With that strength, you can do things you might not even imagine today. Like it or not, the death of our loved ones has fuelled us—not with hate, not with vengefulness, but with an energy that nothing can ever defeat. THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020 73

THE CRITICS BOOKS DOUBLE EXPOSURE Brit Bennett reimagines the literature of passing. BY SARAH RESNICK I n 1954, a pair of identical twins— passing. From the antebellum period great­grandfather who was a slave to ABOVE: LUCI GUTIÉRREZ creamy skin, hazel eyes, wavy until the end of Jim Crow, countless his own father; nothing of her father, hair—flee a small town in Loui­ black Americans crossed the color line who was lynched right in front of her. siana and the narrow future it affords: to pass as white—to escape slavery or Desiree has left her husband,“the dark­ nothing but more of the same. Desiree threats of racial violence, or to gain ac­ est man she could find,” and reunited and Stella Vignes are sixteen and cess to the social, political, and eco­ with her first love. Both sisters have headed to New Orleans. They scrape nomic benefits conferred by whiteness. young daughters about the same age, by for a while, and eventually Stella Narratives that dramatized this passage and each has inherited her father’s fea­ applies for a position as a secretary at became a fixture of popular fiction,writ­ tures: Kennedy has blond hair and blue a fancy department store, a job only ten by black and white, male and fe­ eyes; Jude has “blueblack” skin. white girls get. She doesn’t mention male authors alike. Charles W. Ches­ she’s black, and no one asks. She’s ap­ nutt, James Weldon Johnson, and Nella Bennett is working within not one prehensive—has she done something Larsen wrote about it, as did William but two genres—drawing on the well­ wrong?—but her sister is adamant: why Dean Howells and Kate Chopin. “Im­ worn elements of passing literature as should the two of them starve “when itation of Life,” the 1933 novel by Fan­ well as the oft­used device of long­lost Stella, perfectly capable of typing, be­ nie Hurst, was twice made into a movie twins—and she leans into their pre­ came unfit as soon as anyone learned (in 1934, by John M. Stahl, and in 1959, scribed melodrama. Her omniscient that she was colored?” Stella gets the by Douglas Sirk). These stories repeat narration roves among story lines, in­ job. Every morning, on the ride to some version of a generic arc: the “tragic troducing us to a cast of stock charac­ the office, she transforms into her dou­ mulatto,” often a woman, chooses to ters: Barry, the drag queen; Peg, the ble, Miss Vignes—“White Stella,” as leave home and pass for white; in time, women’s libber; Blake, the white mod­ Desiree calls her—and every night anguished by the betrayal of her black erate voter; Sam, the violent patriarch; she undergoes the process in reverse. identity, she returns to her family, only Loretta, the mother in a “respectable” It’s “a performance where there could to be met with a harsh fate—some­ black family. As Jude and Kennedy get be no audience. Only a person who times death. older, they conform to types, too. Jude knew her real identity would appreciate is a talented black athlete on scholar­ her acting, and nobody at work could By the late twentieth century, the ship at U.C.L.A., and Kennedy is a ever know.” For a while, the twins are melodrama of these narratives—the “rich bitch” living on her parents’ dime. brought together by the joint pleasure predictable characters, the sad desti­ More than once, the plot turns on an of pulling off the performance. But nies—had mostly been cast aside. But outrageous coincidence. gradually the gap between them wid­ in “The Vanishing Half ”Bennett roots ens: “Desiree could never meet Miss out these withered tropes and reani­ But, as the novel unfolds, we begin Vignes. Stella could only be her when mates them in a fresh, surprising story. to recognize how deftly Bennett is re­ Desiree was not around.” One day, The novel begins thirteen years after arranging the generic pieces of her story. Stella disappears, leaving her sister a the lives of the Vignes twins forked. Her frictionless prose whisks us across note: “Sorry honey, but I’ve got to go Stella lives in an upscale subdivision in a period of nearly forty years, the plot my own way.” Los Angeles. Desiree has returned to unwinding nonsequentially, a charac­ the town that she and her sister fled. ter’s thought or action in the present “The Vanishing Half ” (Riverhead), Stella is a housewife with a maid. De­ rousing a story from the past. It is, to the second novel by Brit Bennett, tells siree is a waitress at the local diner. borrow an observation that Kennedy the story of the Vignes sisters’ diverg­ Stella has married a man who believes makes about how memory works, like ing paths. In doing so, it belongs to a she is white and who knows nothing “seeing forward and backward at the long tradition of literature about racial of her past: nothing of her great­great­ same time.” The electricity inside this space—past, present, and the stretch 74 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020

In “The Vanishing Half,” the story of two sisters divided by the color line yields new models of identity and authenticity. PHOTOGRAPH BY MIRANDA BARNES THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020 75

between—comes from watching seem- other. Many of her characters seek out that he’d always been Reese. By Tucson, it was ingly predictable characters collide in an audience not to assume a fictionalized Therese who felt like a costume. unexpected ways. truth but to reveal an inner one.This am- bition is all about exposure: we hear it in Reese is purposeful as he sheds The narrative of passing inevitably the phrase “coming out,” which captures Therese, aligning the way he self-iden- confronts questions of performance: the trepidation of unveiling something tifies with the way he is perceived by the dissonance between the authentic vulnerable and honest. Barry, a high- the outside world. Stella, meanwhile, self and the projected self, the drama of school chemistry teacher during the week, “had become white only because every- seeing and being seen. But, in Bennett’s becomes Bianca, a drag queen, on the one thought she was.” To herself, she novel, Stella, the archetypal passing weekends. He keeps his two lives sepa- admits that her performance is just that: figure, is hardly the only performer. All rate. But, between performances, Barry “This life wasn’t real.” of Bennett’s characters wrestle with the “thought about [Bianca], shopped for roles they have been assigned.The vital her, planned for her eventual return”; she But who decides what’s “real,”the actor dynamic between actor and spectator was always there, “lingering on the edge or the audience? It’s a tantalizing yields different models of selfhood. Is of his mind.” Reese, one of Jude’s first question, one that any performance ex- identity something you take on,or some- friends in Los Angeles, has been simi- ploits. In moments when we feel seen— thing you take apart? Something you larly torn between identities.He and Jude the sort of “recognition scenes” that so erect, or something you expose? meet around Halloween,at a party,where, much theatre turns on—reality can ap- tellingly,each is wearing a literal disguise. pear, however fleetingly, complete. In Stella’s daughter, Kennedy, is an ac- She thinks Reese is cute, and finds ex- Bennett’s novel, only those who accept tress in the most conventional sense. At cuses to visit him at work. Early in their the imperative of exposure seem to stand age eleven, she is cast as a Chinese rail- friendship, which slowly becomes a ro- a chance of being seen. When Desiree road worker in a school play about the mance, he tells her that he’s trans. (Ben- leaves her marriage, her husband hires gold rush. She has only seven lines, but nett sets this conversation in a darkroom— Early, a private eye, someone whose pro- her mother helps her memorize them. Reese dreams of being a professional pho- fession is to look. In one of the book’s Stella, who often seems dismayed at her tographer—playing with different notions coincidental twists, he happens to be child’s mediocrity, is suddenly encour- of exposure.) Born in Arkansas asTherese, Desiree’s first love.What initially sounds aging. “I mean, it was completely ridic- he ran away from home after his father sinister—Early sneaking photos of her— ulous,” Kennedy remembers, years later. caught him dressed up in a man’s shirt becomes one of the novel’s most poignant “You couldn’t even see my face. But my and tie, kissing a girl. By the time Jude relationships: he watches over Desiree. mother told me I did a good job. She meets him, “no one could tell that he’d Reese, too, wields a camera with care, was . . . I don’t know, she seemed excited ever been her, and sometimes, he could snapping candids of Jude, even though for once.”(The dramatic irony is potent: hardly believe it either.” she “felt vulnerable seeing herself through a supposedly white child is affirmed by his lens.”(“Finally,”her grandmother says. her secretly black mother when she “be- In some ways, Reese’s story sounds “One good picture of you.”) comes” Chinese.) By the time Kennedy uncannily like Stella’s: an escape from conjures up this scene, she is a college a small town where everyone has al- Reese and Early reflect back the best dropout and a wannabe Broadway star, ready decided who you are; a fresh start versions of the women they admire. But convinced that acting is “the only thing in a city where no one knows your past. identities can’t,in the language of photo- she was good at.” Kennedy, who has Jude herself is tripped up by these ap- graphy, be captured. As Jude changes— never felt she truly knows her mother, parent similarities. When Reese asks moving from one city and one dream or is known by her, sees acting as a way whether she thinks about her missing to another—her mother is her constant out: rather than contend with her moth- aunt, Jude sounds bitter: “I mean, what audience. Not long after Jude’s friend- er’s mysteries, she avoids them, opting kind of person just leaves her family be- ship with Reese turns into her first ex- to inhabit a succession of ready-made hind?”The words are out of her mouth perience of love, she gets a phone call lives. “Acting is not about being seen,” before she realizes that this is exactly from her mother. “There’s something one teacher tells her. It’s about “becom- what Reese has done. different about you,” Desiree says. Jude ing invisible so that only the character plays dumb. “Ma’am?” she replies: shone through.” But is it? When Reese makes the long drive from Arkansas to Los Angeles,from “Oh, don’t ma’am me. You heard what I The teacher articulates a theory of his old life to his new life, his becoming said. There’s somethin different. I can hear it acting—and of being a self—that hinges is described not as the perfection of a role in your voice.” on erasure. For Kennedy, the joy of act- but as the expression of a true self: ing is in trying on a new identity; being “Mama, there’s nothing wrong with my successful at it,she discovers,means con- He cut his hair in Plano, hacking off inches voice.” cealing one’s own. One night, Kennedy in a truck stop bathroom with a stolen hunt- experiences the sensation of leaving her ing knife. Outside of Abilene, he bought a blue “Not wrong. Different. You think I can’t body onstage, and calls it the “greatest madras shirt and a leather belt with a silver tell?” performance she would ever give.” stallion buckle. . . . In Socorro, he began wrap- ping his chest in a white bandage, and by Las Desiree sees through her daughter’s show, If effacement is one model of self- Cruces, he’d learned to walk again, legs wide, but her act of exposure is an act of love. hood, Bennett’s novel also contains an- shoulders square. He told himself that it was What’s more, she sees what her daugh- safer to hitchhike this way, but the truth was ter has not fully acknowledged herself, what is both painful and joyful to ac- cept: Jude is becoming someone new.  76 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020

BOOKS then escaped scot-free to a secret life in South America.Mengele’s name became MEASURING MAN synonymous with pure evil of the sinis- ter, educated sort: the movie “Marathon Josef Mengele’s malignant “science.” Man,” with Laurence Olivier as the Dustin Hoffman-torturing dentist,mak- BY ADAM GOPNIK ing dental visits difficult for a genera- tion, was inspired by Mengele. Have we come, at last, to the end of the Spanish Inquisition!”), while Henry morally instructive Nazis? After VIII and the Tudors, who burned men, Marwell’s life has much new to tell eight decades, Nazis may seem to have too,and brutalized thousands,are a soap us, both about Mengele himself and, retreated into a class with orcs and opera before they are a sermon. more significant, about the social and cable-TV sharks, fantastic creatures scientific milieu that allowed him to flour- representing evil, rather than historical Two new books suggest that we may ish. There is nothing surprising in edu- figures who actually were evil. It is fine not have come to the end, and that, on cated people doing evil,but it is still amaz- to say we should look past the History the contrary, our struggle to understand ing to see how fully they construct a Channel Nazis—“Hitler and the Oc- how evil happens is still best helped by rationale to let them do it, piling plau- cult”—to the real thing,but there comes understanding how evil happened. The sible reason on self-justification, until, a time when the iconic imagination re- subject of David G.Marwell’s “Mengele” like Mengele,they are able to look them- ally does overwhelm the historical imag- (W. W. Norton) is one of the leading selves in the mirror every morning with ination. No one any longer objects to orcs: Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death bright-eyed self-congratulation.Mengele, jokes about the Spanish Inquisition, at Auschwitz, who oversaw selections though he had a medical degree,thought which burned skeptics and Jews alive, on the train ramp—sending some fam- of himself as a scientist. He trained as a but which exists now first of all as a ily members off to be gassed or worked physical anthropologist at the highest Monty Python sketch (“Nobody expects to death,while conducting bizarre med- levels of German academia.The offspring ical experiments on others—and who of a solid Bavarian Catholic family— during his later years in exile, he wrote A pretense of empirical rigor armored the Nazis’ study of racial difference. tearful memoirs about his mother’s Cath- olic pieties—he studied in Bonn and Vi- enna, and, in 1933, worked in Munich, under the Scottish-German anthropol- ogist Theodor Mollison. It was Molli- son, Marwell writes, who “perfected a series of measuring and recording de- vices that helped to standardize and in- crease the precision of the essential mea- surements that were the basis of physical anthropology.”Even in the early thirties, Mollison was an eager Nazi,and the par- ticular kind of anthropology he taught turned very easily to a völkisch ideology; it was a purely descriptive science that easily lent itself to pseudoscience, what Stephen Jay Gould memorably dubbed “the mismeasure of man.” Mollison be- came famous for his “deviation curves,” graphs that seemed to show differences among racial kinds. All ideas, and ideals, are capable of being twisted into their opposites. Reli- gious doctrines preaching nonviolence and loving thy enemy quickly turn into a search for enemies not to love.The in- tention and its perversion are usually transparent. We even have a good word for this bad practice: hypocrisy. But sci- entific theories, which get their credibil- ity from their ability to explain the ac- tion of a limited domain of objects, can explode into false models for unrelated ILLUSTRATION BY GÉRARD DUBOIS THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020 77

“Why, yes, I am a writer.” of windshield sizes and bumper dents, but you would have no idea that they all •• had the same motor inside, much less how it worked. subjects without conscious hypocrisy. little measurable uniformity among Jews. The Darwinian idea of the struggle for But people make numbers mean what Even by the politicized standards of existence, designed to explain the chis- they want them to mean, as in baseball the field, Mengele was a mediocre stu- elling of birds’ beaks, becomes in a gen- negotiations, and in this case the num- dent. His doctoral thesis, Mollison eration the idea that poor people deserve bers were taken to mean that the Jews judged, though it “suffers from a some- to be poor. Einstein’s idea that the mea- were not subtly different but utterly what clumsy manner of presentation surement of time is relative can warp Other. Analyzing the numbers with and expression, may be described as into the idea that morality is. The mis- sufficient acuity to see what they really fulfilling the requirements”—academese, steps can be hard to track.The perver- did or didn’t show was complicated, like in any era, for a B-minus. Mengele was sion of a scientific practice takes a sec- explaining why high batting averages good enough to study with the big names ond; its rectification takes a semester. aren’t a good guide to winning baseball and win their support, but not good games: you have to be willing to hang enough to go far in their world. The German anthropological prac- around for the explanation, rather than tice of measuring people and typing rushing to sign the contract. And so the He went on to write another doc- them according to race,in which Mengele idea of objectifying standards of human toral dissertation, in medical genetics, was trained, had, as the Columbia his- measurement was easily married to the studying the heritability of cleft palates, torian Andrew Zimmerman has shown, (anti-Darwinian) idea that what you which reinforced Nazi legislation requir- begun on a large scale half a century be- were measuring was not individual vari- ing the sterilization of Germans with fore Mengele was schooled in it. It was ations but racial essences—that races genetic disorders. By the late nineteen- pioneered in the eighteen-seventies, were like species, and came in fixed, un- thirties, he had been put to work as an under the direction of the impeccably changing kinds, discernible and deduc- expert consultant on racial types, eval- liberal scientist Rudolf Virchow, who ible from fixed measures. uating such variables as blood types, eye was a leading voice against anti-Semi- color, eyebrow shapes, and fingerprints, tism at the time, vying with a notorious Mengele,studying human mandibles to determine if a subject in a court case anti-Semitic agitator for a seat in the under Mollison’s supervision,concluded was a full Jew or a half Jew. In one in- Reichstag,and winning.And,indeed,di- that “the jaws of the examined racial stance, a Jew named Heinz Alexander viding schoolchildren into “Blonds”(Nor- groups indicate in their front sections was accused of the racial crime of mis- dic types) and “Brunets”(everyone else), such distinct differences that they per- cegenation for having had an affair with Virchow found that “Brunets occurred mit one to distinguish between the races.” an Aryan. He defended himself by in- among all the schoolchildren a bit more It was like trying to study the internal- sisting that he was not,in fact,fully Jew- than 14 percent; among the Jews it was combustion engine by surveying all the ish but the bastard of an Aryan father. 42 percent.”Looking at the numbers, we parked cars on a street. You would end (Mengele wasn’t convinced.) might think that there was remarkably up with a significant-seeming taxonomy Reading about Mengele’s prewar train- ing, one is struck by the enormous in- vestment of resources, intellectual and financial,that was poured into this weirdly minute and futile science of racial differ- ence. When Mengele, newly enlisted in the S.S.on the brink of war in 1938,sought to marry a twenty-one-year-old named Irene Schönbein,the Racial Office of the S.S. traced her ancestry back to 1648 to look for any signs of non-Aryan taint, and, unable to confidently establish the racial identity of her paternal grandfather, refused to enter her into its “clan regis- try.”(Nazi rules about “racial purity”were inspired by,but did not go as far as,Amer- ican “one drop”and “blood fraction”laws, enacted in the South, which stipulated that even a remote black ancestor ren- dered an individual nonwhite. As with Hitler’s likening of his conquest of the East to the American conquest of the West, our worst history encouraged the Nazis’ worst instincts.) Racism doesn’t, one would think, 78 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020

normally demand quantitative data on calm and scrupulous care with which est standards. . . . The notion of Mengele as quite this scale in order to prosper.Anti- he approached the task of sorting out unhinged, driven by demons, and indulging Semitism in medieval times managed the soon-to-die from the (briefly) saved, grotesque and sadistic impulses should be re- with gossip about blood-based matzo. a sangfroid that he maintained, as one placed by something even more unsettling. But this racial stuff was not merely in- less confident colleague suggested, be- Mengele was, in fact, in the scientific vanguard, strumental; it was obsessive. The Nazi cause he alone accepted that all of the enjoying the confidence and mentorship of the intelligentsia really believed. An obses- Jews were already “dead upon arrival.” leaders in his field. The science he pursued in sive anatomy and a specialized language He was sorting out ghosts, not people. Auschwitz, to the extent that we can reconstruct of racial difference created an essential it, was not anomalous but rather consistent with intellectual armor, a shield from scru- It was Mengele’s conduct of experi- research carried out by others in what was con- tiny. An alternative intellectual universe ments that made his reputation for pure sidered to be the scientific establishment. was constructed, with its own sciences evil so potent. He established his own and academic establishment, to insure research institute at Auschwitz,affiliated To this, one might add a single footnote: that everyone involved would see him- with a traditionally respectable academic the German “scientific establishment” self as normal, as a scientist doing sci- one,the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of An- had long ago sold its soul, and measur- ence. It was this self-sealing intellectual thropology, in Berlin. And his sincerely ing stick, to the Devil. The scientists in wholeness that distinguished the Nazis constructed carapace of normal science Berlin and Graz who readily accepted dis- from the commerce-minded conserva- is what makes the work especially chill- embodied heads and eyes and skeletons tives with whom they often allied, and ing. His notorious twin studies, for ex- from Mengele’s institute had been mor- eventually consumed. Mengele’s career ample, have often been imagined to be ally corrupted long before the samples is a reminder that Nazism was not, as wild efforts to increase German fecun- arrived. No one suggests that Mengele’s the left long insisted, capitalism with dity by finding a secret method by which twin or eye-color research was of lasting the gloves off. It was craziness with a all German women would have twins. value,despite its diabolical origins.(This white coat on—a faith driven, as most In fact, Marwell shows, these studies might be said, for instance, of the Nazis’ big historical movements are, by pas- were a continuation of the kind of re- rocket research: the science was sound, sionate ideas, not parsable interests. search that was going on elsewhere in the even if the missiles went to the wrong world. Identical twins were widely seen cities.) The genetics of eye color was Mengele, after serving with the as the Rosetta stone of genetics, which never going to be cracked by the grue- Waffen S.S. Viking division— would allow scientists to crack the code some business of collecting a lot of eyes. creepy even by Nazi standards, it was of culture versus nature.Working with an The anthropologists in Berlin and Mu- made up largely of foreign Aryan vol- equally appalling woman scientist named nich had already convinced themselves unteers—was finally posted to Ausch- Karin Magnussen, Mengele “harvested” that their fanatic inventorying and arti- witz, in May of 1943.This was regarded eyes from Sinti twins in the camp who fact-collecting impulse was so virtuous as a plum assignment for S.S. troops; had a condition called heterochromia of that it made questions of morality empty. you could kill people there without the the iris, resulting in eyes with different Mengele was not, it turns out, a mad sci- threat of being killed. Once in Ausch- colors. The aim was not one of fiendish entist. It was worse than that. He was witz, Mengele became famous as the engineering, to change eye color, which participating in a mad science. worst of villains precisely because he would have been merely cosmetic. No, it seemed to love his job. Tributes to his Marwell surveys,with a kind of aghast calm spirits and good humor morbidly was to collect hard data in advance of dis- wonder, the comforts of life for Nazi fill the pages of recollections, including covering “the applied genetics”of “pater- doctors living amid so much death.They those of the Jewish scientists who were nity and ancestry determinations,”which had a special “subcamp,” twenty miles press-ganged into his service. would sort out Übermenschen fromUnter- from the gas chambers, that served as a menschen. Mengele’s work in Auschwitz rustic retreat. There were regular conju- Marwell does show, however, that was what we would call “pure research.” gal visits, and a steady flow of dinner Mengele gets the “credit” for more se- Marwell,who clearly did not entirely ex- parties among the S.S. officers and their lections than he could possibly have pect to find what he did find, writes: wives. All this as the smoke rose in the made on his own.As one survivor wrote, camp nearby. Mengele was happy in this “If a member of the SS is repeatedly He pursued his science not as some rene- world—photographs show him smiling, named in public in connection with es- gade propelled solely by evil and bizarre im- and even the inmate-slave who drew his pecially monstrous deeds, it is possible pulses but rather in a manner that his mentor baths called him “polite.” Whenever some that survivors will project their experi- and his peers could judge as meeting the high- sense of morality intruded on this tightly ences on to him. . . . More than once I enclosed communal sphere, the special heard survivors say that Mengele did unity of the bad actors held the group this or that to them, even though together. Again and again, the S.S. lead- Mengele had not yet arrived in Ausch- ers, from Himmler on down, empha- witz at the time.”Crimes committed by sized to their followers that they had al- the entirety of the Auschwitz staff were ready crossed the bar: if they failed in ascribed to him. He appears to have their task, the children of the survivors been singled out because of the sinister would come for them. It is the collective logic of all extremism. Within a group of killers, only acts of sadistic cruelty in THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020 79

which all are made to join can guaran- sumed name of Wolfgang Gerhard, and how widespread, pan-European, and tee solidarity. And so we see the omni- then,pressured by the West German and ideologically complete European anti- presence of hazing rituals among mo- Brazilian police, disclosed the location Semitism was. From France through torcycle gangs and mafiosi: you make of his grave. But the Germans and the Poland and on into Romania and Hun- your bones by burning your bridges.The Israelis—as well as Americans, who by gary,each country had,in the nineteenth fanatic leader convinces his adherents now had taken up the Mengele hunt, at century, an anti-Semitic establishment, not that this is the only way forward but the political urging of the New York sen- often anchored in the Catholic right that there is no way of turning back. ator Al D’Amato—were unconvinced but just as often in the Socialist left, that they had the right corpse.They gave which was, in its language, as virulent Mengele’s flight from Europe after Mengele and his associates too much as the later, Hitlerian kind. Anti-Sem- the war was startlingly slow.Stop- credit for fiendish movie-style secrecy— itism that envisioned the removal and, ping off in Munich, perhaps to collect extensive plastic surgeries and faked implicitly,the extermination of the Jews records of his research which he had deaths—when he had mostly been kept was everywhere. Nobody needed en- sent on from Auschwitz, he spent more safe by lassitude on the part of his pur- couragement to persecute Jews.The cir- than three years under an assumed name suers and moral indifference on the part cumstances of war made it possible, but as a hired hand at a Bavarian farm.(One of his protectors. many, throughout Europe, had been of perhaps a hundred bitter ironies in eager to do so as soon as they could. his post-Auschwitz life: most S.S. men, In June of 1985,teams of pathologists, like their victims, had been tattooed, in forensic anthropologists, and other in- His second line of inquiry is more their case to receive the right blood type vestigators from both Germany and the subtle: Why did they want to persecute if they were wounded and needed a United States—including Marwell him- the Jews so badly? He distinguishes clas- transfusion. This made them easy to self,working for the Justice Department’s sic medieval-style anti-Semitism, in identify after the war, but Mengele had Office of Special Investigations—de- which Jews were simply aliens, from a managed to evade the marking, proba- scended on São Paulo to determine if modern strain, in which they had be- bly out of vanity.) the body was indeed Mengele’s. In the come, unacceptably, betters. A new sort strangest irony, the methods used to of competition had arisen in which the He made his way, in 1949, to South identify the criminal were essentially Jews had seized a first-mover advantage. America, with the help of the Red versions of the physical anthropology In the nineteenth century, they arrived, Cross—along with the Catholic clergy’s that Mengele had been trained in.Mea- before anyone else, at an understanding “ratline,” one of the two most efficient surements were taken, the pubic sym- that, in the new world of modernity, escape routes for ex-Nazis—obtaining physis was examined for wear; femurs competitive advancement—doing well a passport more or less on demand.Once were cross-sectioned, and ribs were in- on exams—would provide an alternative he arrived in South America, moving spected to assess how “cupped”they had to advancement through bloodlines.Why from Argentina to Paraguay and even- become. Finally, the Germans intro- the Jews did so well in societies that de- tually settling in Brazil,he was protected duced a brand-new technique: two high- pended on some form of test-taking is a by a makeshift network of German and resolution videos—one of the corpse’s complicated historical question, though Austrian expats.Mengele shared a coffee- skull,the other of a photograph of Men- it may be as simple as that the tradition and-cattle operation for years in Brazil gele when alive—were superimposed. It of Talmudic study could easily be“exapted” with a Hungarian couple who kept his was Mengele,and “closure,”that strange for the purpose.Paradoxically,only when secret in exchange for a new farm, paid beast, was captured at last. All that mi- the “national” groups entered this com- for by his protectors. croscopic Teutonic precision was now petition themselves and began to catch directed not to the malignant fantasy of up did their hatred of the Jews take on The Israelis tried to keep track of creating racial categories but to distin- a new ferocity. “As the gap in education him, but never tried to kidnap him.This guishing one man from all others.What closed, the degree of friction between was,in part,a matter of politics.No doubt exists is individuals, and what we can Jews and majority populations increased,” Israel had to balance its desire to cap- capture is their quiddities; the larger col- Aly writes. “Envy is born of social prox- ture war criminals against the price of lectivities—of nation, class, mind, char- imity, not of the distance between two alienating potentially helpful South acter—to which they belong are still too cleanly separated groups.” American governments. And, logisti- manifold for measurement. cally, Mossad, like any government The 1894 Dreyfus case, the original agency, had limited means and many Götz Aly, the German historian falling domino of what was to come, fits missions.Infuriatingly,Mengele’s life on whose “Hitler’s Beneficiaries” is this pattern perfectly, and it makes sense the run did not include much running: one of the more highly praised works that it happened in France, the first Eu- he managed the farm, kept a wary eye on the Third Reich published in the ropean nation to insure “careers open to on his imagined pursuers,and had plenty past two decades, has just brought out talent.” Captain Dreyfus’s great sin was of time to get married, go on holidays, a new book in English,“Europe Against not being a Dreyfus but being a captain. and even correspond regularly with his the Jews: 1880-1945”(Metropolitan),and And though Aly doesn’t cite this instance, son,Rolf,who lived in Germany.Mengele it throws some postscript-like light on his scheme maps perfectly onto the lives died in 1979, during one of those holi- the Mengele case. Aly has two motives of the Nazis: Hitler was enraged at the days; he had a stroke while swimming. in writing his book. First, to show just Jews in Vienna not because Jews were practicing the arts instead of agriculture His friends buried him, under his as- 80 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020

but because they wouldn’t let him into BRIEFLY NOTED art school. Goebbels was a failed philo- sophical novelist, not a rabble-rouser. Lincoln on the Verge, by Ted Widmer (Simon & Schuster). In The circles of populist authoritarians, February, 1861, crowds in eight states greeted the train carry- then and now, tended to be filled with ing Abraham Lincoln, as President-elect, from Springfield, Il- embittered B-minus competitors. linois, to the nation’s deeply divided capital. In an account of some hundred speeches and countless handshakes that oc- And so we come to the last and still curred along the way,Widmer, a former White House speech- the most morally instructive thing about writer, traces Lincoln’s rapid growth as a statesman. The train studying the Nazis now: we can see how draws “wild multitudes”both in towns “awakened”to the anti- tightly the elimination of the Jews was slavery cause and in those whose allegiance is uncertain, and bound to a hatred of cosmopolitanism. Lincoln is shown ably working the press to rally support.Wid- Although huge numbers of the Jews mer portrays a politician who has a populist touch but exer- who perished in the mass killings were cises this power responsibly, achieving what Frederick Doug- poor religious Jews from Eastern Eu- lass later called “wonderful success in organizing the loyal rope, many peasants and peddlers and American people for the tremendous conflict before them.” small merchants, the main enemy, as Mengele understood, had always been The Shapeless Unease, by Samantha Harvey (Grove).This ex- the educated Jews of Western Europe. perimental memoir of a year plagued by insomnia moves be- When an S.S. doctor wondered aloud tween vivid descriptions of sleepless nights and meditations why all the poor Jews of the East had on consciousness, death, and the nature of time. Harvey cap- to be killed, he recalled Mengele ex- tures the gravity of her affliction (“I go up to bed at night, I plaining that “it was precisely from this get beaten up, I come downstairs in the morning”), while also reservoir of people that the Jews drew maintaining levity and grace. Sometimes she watches Netflix, new power and refreshed their blood. half dreaming about what she sees; at other times her eddy- Without the poor but supposedly harm- ing mind bumps into ideas about the universe (“Everything less Eastern Jews,the civilized West Eu- is made up of space and is more space than it is form”). Her ropean Jews would not be capable of forays offer an engrossing vision of how our lives are knit to- survival.Therefore, it is necessary to de- gether—day to day, night to night, and thought to thought. stroy all Jews.”The masses of poor reli- gious Jews in Poland were almost acci- A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth, by Daniel Mason dental to the effort; the real target was (Little, Brown). The characters in these robust short stories, the élite, who brought with them the set mostly in the nineteenth century, struggle as captains of bacillus of cosmopolitanism. their destinies. A doctor increasingly believes his body to be inhabited by an “imposter”; a Frenchwoman takes a hot-air In Tom Stoppard’s great new play, balloon to new heights, hoping to find “a tear in the very fab- “Leopoldstadt,”the study of a thoroughly ric of the heavens.” In the only story that takes place in pres- assimilated Jewish family which begins ent-day America, the narrator remembers an uncle, an im- in Vienna’s golden period before the migrant from Eastern Europe, who became a fan of Civil Great War—a Star of David sits atop War reënactments and of WrestleMania—confrontations their Christmas tree—the final, shatter- with predetermined outcomes. “I wonder whether there was ing scene is set in the nineteen-fifties. something about the cartoon violence that served as a par- A man whose immediate family escaped ody of all violence, and perhaps as a catharsis for the real kind in time comes home and asks, happily, that he’d seen,” the narrator writes. about the relatives he had known as a boy. He lists one name after another: Clean Hands, by Patrick Hoffman (Atlantic Monthly). This sly Ernst? Auschwitz. Hanna? Auschwitz. thriller begins during rush hour at Grand Central Terminal, All his flawed and idiosyncratic relatives when a junior associate at a law firm is pickpocketed and his turn out to have been murdered by the phone, full of incriminating documents about a major bank, Mengeles of the world. The audience, is passed through a chain of petty criminals. A blackmailer unique in my experience, is silent at the gets hold of the documents and the law firm, in the hope of end, almost unable to applaud the ac- tracking the phone, hires Valencia Walker, a former C.I.A. tors. But the invocation is exact: it was officer, who marshals a seemingly inexhaustible network of the destruction of such harmless and ex-military and law-enforcement types.The plot is fast-paced, happy Viennese cosmopolitan families and its twists—Walker’s motivations are as suspect as every- that Hitler, who discovered anti-Semi- one else’s—lead ever deeper into corporate intrigue and gov- tism as a cure-all for his frustrations as ernment espionage. a young and unsuccessful artist in Vi- enna, most desired. He was willing to destroy European civilization in order to achieve it, and he did.  THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020 81

A CRITIC AT LARGE book of stories. A brief obituary in the Times called her “one of the nation’s EVERYTHING THAT RISES most promising writers.” Some of her readers dismissed her as a “regional How racist was Flannery O’Connor? writer”; many didn’t know she was a woman. BY PAUL ELIE We are still learning who Flannery In 1943,eighteen-year-old Mary Flan- versity. Then they went to Massachu- O’Connor was.The materials of her life © 1954; RENEWED 1982. PERMISSION GRANTED BY MARY FLANNERY O’CONNOR CHARITABLE TRUST. nery O’Connor went north on a sum- setts, and visited Radcliffe, where one story have surfaced gradually: essays in mer trip. Growing up in Georgia—she cousin was a student. O’Connor dis- 1969, letters in 1979, an annotated Li- ALL RIGHTS RESERVED / COURTESY FLANNERY O’CONNOR COLLECTION, ROSE LIBRARY, EMORY UNIVERSITY spent her childhood in Savannah, and liked both schools, and said so in letters brary of America volume in 1988, and a went to high school in Milledgeville— and postcards to her mother. (Her fa- cache of personal items deposited at she saw herself as a writer and artist in ther had died two years earlier.) Back in Emory University in 2012,which yielded the making.She created illustrated books Milledgeville, O’Connor studied at the the “Prayer Journal,” jottings on faith “too old for children and too young for state women’s college (“the institution and fiction from her time at Iowa. Each grown-ups” and dryly titled an assem- of higher larning across the road”). In phase has deepened the portrait of the blage of her poems “The Priceless Works 1945, she made her next trip north, en- artist and furthered her reputation. of M. F. O’Connor”; she drew cartoons rolling in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Southerners, women, Catholics, and and submitted them to magazines, not- where she dropped the Mary (it put her M.F.A.-program instructors now ap- ing that her hobby was “collecting re- in mind of “an Irish washwoman”) and proach her with devotion. We call her jection slips.” became Flannery O’Connor. Flannery; we see her as a wise elder, a literary saint, poised for revelation at a On her travels, she and two cousins Less than two decades later,she died, typewriter set up on the ground floor visited Manhattan: Chinatown,St. Pat- in Milledgeville,of lupus.She was thirty- of a farmhouse near Milledgeville be- rick’s Cathedral, and Columbia Uni- nine, the author of two novels and a cause treatments for lupus left her un- able to climb stairs. A habit of bigotry, most apparent in her juvenilia, persisted throughout her life. O’Connor is now as canonical as Faulkner and Welty. More than a great writer, she’s a cultural figure: a funny lady in a straw hat, puttering among peacocks, on crutches she likened to “flying buttresses.” The farmhouse is open for tours; her visage is on a stamp. A recent book of previously unpub- lished correspondence, “Good Things Out of Nazareth” (Convergent), and a documentary, “Flannery: The Storied Life of the Writer from Georgia,” sug- gest a completed arc, situating her at the literary center where she might have been all along. The arc is not complete, however. Those letters and postcards she sent home from the North in 1943 were made available to scholars only in 2014, and they show O’Connor as a bigoted young woman. In Massachusetts, she was dis- turbed by the presence of an African- American student in her cousin’s class; in Manhattan, she sat between her two cousins on the subway lest she have to sit next to people of color. The sight of white students and black students at Co- lumbia sitting side by side and using the same rest rooms repulsed her. It’s not fair to judge a writer by her juvenilia. But, as she developed into a keenly self-aware writer, the habit of bigotry persisted in her letters—in jokes, 82 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020

asides, and a steady use of the word able and full of barbed, contrarian in- a full spread of archival material and “nigger.” For half a century, the partic- sights. That they are books was part of documentary effects.The actress Mary ulars have been held close by executors, O’Connor’s design. She made carbon Steenburgen reads passages from the smoothed over by editors, and justified copies of her letters with publication in letters; several stories are animated,with by exegetes,as if to save O’Connor from mind: fearing that lupus would cut her an eye to O’Connor’s adage that “to herself. Unlike, say, the struggle over life short, as it had her father’s, she used the hard of hearing you shout, and for Philip Larkin, whose coarse, chauvin- the letters and essays to shape the post- the almost-blind you draw large and istic letters are at odds with his lapi- humous interpretation of her fiction. startling figures.” There’s a clip from dary poetry, it’s not about protecting John Huston’s 1979 film of her singu- the work from the author; it’s about Even much of the material left out lar first novel,“Wise Blood,”which she protecting an author who is now as be- of those books is tart and epigram- wrote at Yaddo and in Connecticut be- loved as her stories. matic. Here is O’Connor, fresh from fore the onset of lupus forced her to Iowa, on what a writing program can return home. Erik Langkjaer, a pub- The work largely deserves the love do for a writer: lishing sales rep O’Connor fell in love it gets. O’Connor’s fiction is full with, describes their drives in the coun- of scenarios that now have the feel It can put him in the way of experienced try. Alice Walker tells of living “across of mid-century myths: an evangelist writers and literary critics, people who are usu- the way” from the farmhouse during preaching the gospel of a Church With- ally able to tell him after not too long a time her teens, not knowing that a writer out Christ outside a movie house; a whether he should go on writing or enroll im- lived there: “It was one of my brothers grandmother shot by an escaped con- mediately in the School of Dentistry. who took milk from her place to the vict at the roadside; a Bible salesman creamery in town.When we drove into seducing a female “interleckshul” in a Here she is on life in Milledgeville, Milledgeville, the cows that we saw on hayloft and taking her wooden leg.The from a 1948 letter to the director of the hillside going into town would have late story “Parker’s Back,”from 1964, in Yaddo, the writers’ colony in upstate been the cows of the O’Connors.” which a tattooed ex-sailor tries to ap- New York: pease his puritanical wife by getting a In May,1955,O’Connor went to New life-size face of Christ inked onto his Lately we have been treated to some pa- York to promote her story collection, back, is a summa of O’Connor’s effects. rades by the Ku Klux Klan. . . . The Grand “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,”on TV. There’s outlandish naming (Obadiah Dragon and the Grand Cyclops were down The rare footage of O’Connor lights Elihue Parker), blunt characterization from Atlanta and both made big speeches on up the documentary. She sits, very still, (“The skin on her face was thin and the Court House square while hundreds of in a velvet-trimmed black dress; her ac- drawn as tight as the skin on an onion men stamped and hollered inside sheets. It’s cent is strong, her demeanor assured.“I and her eyes were gray and sharp like too hot to burn a fiery cross, so they bring a understand you are living on a farm,” the points of two icepicks”), and pun- portable one made with electric light bulbs. the host prompts.“Yes,”she says.“I only gent speech (“Mr. Parker . . . You’re a live on one, though. I don’t see much walking panner-rammer!”).There’s the On her first encounter, in 1956, with of it. I’m a writer, and I farm from the way the action hurtles to an end both the scholar William Sessions: rocking chair.” He asks her if she is a comic and profound, and the sense, as regional writer, and she replies: she put it in an essay, “that something He arrived promptly at 3:30, talking, talked is going on here that counts.” There’s his way across the grass and up the steps and I think that to overcome regionalism, you the attractive-repulsive force of religion, into a chair and continued talking from that must have a great deal of self-knowledge. I as Parker submits to the tattooer’s nee- position without pause, break, breath, or gulp think that to know yourself is to know your dle in the hope of making himself a until 4:50. At 4:50 he departed to go to Mass region, and that it’s also to know the world, holy image of Christ. And there’s a pre- (Ascension Thursday) but declared he would and in a sense, paradoxically, it’s also to be an occupation with human skin, and skin like to return after it so I thereupon invited exile from that world. So that you have a great coloring, as a locus of conflict. him to supper with us. 5:50 brings him back, deal of detachment. still talking, and bearing a sack of ice cream O’Connor defined herself as a nov- and cake to the meal. He then talked until sup- That is a profound and stringent elist, but many readers now come to her per but at that point he met a little head wind definition of the writer’s calling. It lo- through her essays and letters, and the in the form of my mother, who is also a talker. cates the writer’s art in the refinement core truth to emerge from the expan- Her stories have a non-stop quality, but every of her character: the struggle to over- sion of her body of work is that the now and then she does have to refuel and every come an outlook that is an obstacle to nonfiction is as strong and strange as time she came down, he went up. a greater good, the letting go of the the fiction. The 1969 book of essays, comforts of home. And it recognizes “Mystery and Manners,” is both an as- Reviewers of O’Connor’s fiction were that detachment can leave the writer tute manual on the craft of writing and vexed by her characters’ lack of interi- alone and apart. a statement of precepts for the religious ority. Admirers of the nonfiction have artist; the 1979 book of letters, “The reversed the charge, taking up the idea At Iowa and in Connecticut,O’Con- Habit of Being,” is bedside reading as that the most vivid character in her nor had begun to read European fiction wisdom literature, at once companion- work is Flannery O’Connor. The new and philosophy, and her work, old-time film adroitly introduces the author-as- in its particulars, is shot through with character.The directors—Mark Bosco, contemporary thought: Gabriel Mar- a Jesuit priest who teaches a course on cel’s Christian existentialism, Martin O’Connor at Georgetown, and Eliza- beth Coffman, who teaches film at Loyola University Chicago—draw on THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020 83

Buber’s sense of “the eclipse of God.” sight of a black boy in the woman’s com- nice to meet him; here it would not. I observe She saw herself as “a Catholic peculiarly pany prompts his mother to give the boy the traditions of the society I feed on—it’s only possessed of the modern consciousness” a gift: a penny with Lincoln’s profile on fair. Might as well expect a mule to fly as me and saw the South as “Christ-haunted.” it. Things get grim after that. to see James Baldwin in Georgia. I have read one of his stories and it was a good one. All this can suggest points of simi- The story was published in “Best larity with Martin Luther King, American Short Stories” and won an O’Connor-lovers have been down- Jr., another Georgian who was infused O. Henry Prize in 1963. O’Connor de- playing those remarks ever since. But with Continental ideas up north and clared that it was all she had to say on they are not hot-mike moments or loose then returned south to take up a brief, “That Issue.” It wasn’t. In May, 1964, talk.They were written at the same desk urgent calling. Born four years apart, she wrote to her friend Maryat Lee, a where O’Connor wrote her fiction and they grasped the Bible’s pertinence to playwright who was born in Tennessee, are found in the same lode of corre- current events, and saw religion as the lived in New York, and was ardent for spondence that has brought about the tie that bound blacks and whites—as civil rights: rise in her stature. This has put her in her second novel,“The Violent Bear champions in a bind—upholding her It Away,” from 1960, which opens with About the Negroes, the kind I don’t like is letters as eloquently expressive of her a black farmer giving a white preacher the philosophizing prophesying pontificating character,but carving out exceptions for a Christian burial. O’Connor and King kind, the James Baldwin kind. Very ignorant the nasty parts. shared a gift for the convention-upend- but never silent. Baldwin can tell us what it ing gesture, as in her story “The En- feels like to be a Negro in Harlem but he tries Last year,Fordham University hosted during Chill,” in which a white man to tell us everything else too. M.L. King I dont a symposium on O’Connor and race, tries to affirm equality with the black think is the ages great saint but he’s at least supported with a grant from the author’s workers on his mother’s farm by smok- doing what he can do & has to do. Don’t know estate. The organizer, Angela Alaimo ing cigarettes with them in the barn. anything about Ossie Davis except that you O’Donnell, edits a series of books on like him but you probably like them all. My Catholic writers funded by the estate, O’Connor lectured in a dozen states question is usually would this person be endur- has compiled a book of devotions drawn and often went to Atlanta to visit her able if white. If Baldwin were white nobody from O’Connor’s work, and has written doctors; she saw plenty of the changing would stand him a minute. I prefer Cassius a book of poems that “channel the voice” South. That’s clear from her 1961 story Clay. “If a tiger move into the room with you,” of the author. In a new volume in the “EverythingThat Rises Must Converge.” says Cassius, “and you leave, that dont mean series, “Radical Ambivalence: Race in (The title alludes to a thesis advanced you hate the tiger. Just means you know you Flannery O’Connor” (Fordham), she by the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de and him can’t make out. Too much talk about takes up Flannery and That Issue. Pro- Chardin,who saw the world as gradually hate.” Cassius is too good for the Moslems. posing that O’Connor’s work is “race- “divinized” by human activity in a kind haunted,” she applies techniques from of upward spiral.) A white man, living That passage, published in “The whiteness studies and critical race the- at home after college, takes his mother Habit of Being,” echoed a remark in a ory, as well as Toni Morrison’s idea of to “reducing class”on a newly integrated 1959 letter, also to Maryat Lee, who had “Africanist ‘othering.’” O’Donnell pre- city bus.The sight of an African-Amer- suggested that Baldwin—his “Letter sents a previously unpublished passage ican woman wearing the same style of from the South” had just run in Parti- on race and engages with scholars who hat that his mother is wearing stirs him san Review—could pay O’Connor a have offered context for the racist re- to reflect on all that joins them. The visit while on a subsequent reporting marks. Although she is palpably an- trip. O’Connor demurred: guished about O’Connor’s race prob- lem, she winds up reprising those earlier No I can’t see James Baldwin in Georgia. arguments in current literary-critical It would cause the greatest trouble and distur- argot, treating O’Connor as “transgres- bance and disunion. In New York it would be sive in her writing about race”but prone to lapses and excesses that stemmed from social forces beyond her control. The context arguments go like this. O’Connor was a writer of her place and time, and her limitations were those of “the culture that had produced her.” Forced by illness to return to Georgia, she was made captive to a “Southern code of manners”that maintained whites’ superiority over blacks, but her fiction subjects the code to scrutiny. Although she used racial epithets carelessly in her correspondence,she dealt with race cou- rageously in the fiction, depicting white

characters pitilessly and creating up- you came from, you old wart hog.”This a note to say that she was checking in standing black characters who “retain arouses Turpin to quarrel with God as to the hospital, signing it “Mrs.Turpin.” an inviolable privacy.” And she was ad- she surveys a hog pen on her property, She died at home ten weeks later. mirably leery of cultural appropriation. and calls forth a magnificent final image “I don’t feel capable of entering the mind of the hereafter in Turpin’s eyes—the Those remarks show a view clearly of a Negro,” she told an interviewer—a people of the rural South heading heav- maintained and growing more intense reluctance that Alice Walker lauded in enward. Some say this “vision” redeems as time went on. They were objection- a 1975 essay. the author on That Issue. Brad Gooch, able when O’Connor made them. And in a 2009 biography, likened it to the yet—the argument goes—they’re just All the contextualizing produces a dream that Martin Luther King, Jr., remarks, made in chatty letters by an seesaw effect, as it variously cordons off spelled out in August, 1963; O’Donnell, author in extremis. They’re expressive the author from history, deems her a drawing on a remark in the letters, de- but not representative.Her “public work” product of racist history, and proposes (as the scholar Ralph C. Wood calls it) that she was as oppressed by that his- picts it as a “vision O’Connor has been is more complex,and its significance for tory as anybody else was. It backdates wresting from God every day for much us lies in its artfully mixed messages, for O’Connor as a writer of her time when of her life.”Seeing it that way is a stretch. on race none of us is without sin and in she was a near-contemporary of writers King’s “I Have a Dream” speech envi- a position to cast a stone. typically seen as writers of our time: Ga- sioned blacks and whites holding hands briel García Márquez (born 1927), Maya at the end of time; Turpin’s vision, by That argument,however,runs counter Angelou (1928),Ursula K.Le Guin (1929), contrast, is a segregationist’s vision, in to history and to O’Connor’s place in Tom Wolfe (1930), and Derek Walcott which people process to Heaven by race it. It sets up a false equivalence between (1930), among others. It suggests that and class,equal but separate,white land- the “segregationist by taste” and those white racism in Georgia was all-encom- owners such as Turpin preceded (the last brutally oppressed by segregation. And passing and brooked no dissent, even shall be first) by “bands of black niggers it draws a neat line between O’Con- though (as O’Donnell points out) Geor- in white robes, and battalions of freaks nor’s fiction and her other writing where gia was then changing more dramati- and lunatics shouting and clapping and race is involved, even though the long cally than at any point before or since. leaping like frogs.” effort to move her from the margins to Patronizingly, it proposes that O’Con- the center has proceeded as if that line nor, a genius who prized detachment, After revising “Revelation” in early weren’t there. Those remarks don’t be- lacked the free will to think for herself. 1964, O’Connor wrote several letters to long to the past, or to the South, or to Maryat Lee. Many scholars maintain literary ephemera. They belong to the Another writer of that cohort is Toni that their letters (often signed with nick- author’s body of work; they help show Morrison,who was born in Ohio in 1931 names) are a comic performance, with us who she was. and became a Catholic at the age of Lee playing the over-the-top liberal and twelve. Morrison published “Playing in O’Connor the dug-in gradualist, but Posterity, in literature, is a strange the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary O’Connor’s most significant remarks on god—consecrating Dickinson and Mel- Imagination” in 1992. “The fabrication race in her letters to Lee are plainly sin- ville as American divines, repositioning of an Africanist persona” by a white cere. On May 3, 1964—as Richard Rus- T. S. Eliot as a man on the run from a writer, she proposed,“is reflexive: an ex- sell, Democrat of Georgia, led a filibus- Missouri boyhood and a bad marriage. traordinary meditation on the self; a ter in the Senate to block the Civil Rights Posterity has favored Flannery O’Con- powerful exploration of the fears and Act—O’Connor set out her position in nor: the readers of her work today far desires that reside in the writerly con- a passage now published for the first outnumber those in her lifetime. After sciousness.”Invoking Morrison,O’Don- time: “You know, I’m an integrationist her death,the racist passages were stum- nell argues that O’Connor’s fiction is by principle & a segregationist by taste bling blocks to the next generation’s en- fundamentally a working-through of anyway.I don’t like negroes.They all give counter with her, and it made a kind of her own racism, and that the offending me a pain and the more of them I see, sense to sidestep them. Now the reluc- remarks in the letters “tell us . . . that the less and less I like them. Particularly tance to face them squarely is itself a O’Connor understood evil in the form the new kind.”Two weeks after that, she stumbling block,one that keeps us from of racism from the inside, as one who told Lee of her aversion to the “philos- approaching her with the seriousness has practiced it.” ophizing prophesying pontificating that a great writer deserves. kind.” Ravaged by lupus, she wrote Lee The clinching evidence is “Revela- There’s a way forward, rooted in the tion,” drafted in late 1963. This ex- work.For twenty years,the director Karin traordinary story involves Ruby Turpin— Coonrod has staged dramatic adapta- a white Southerner in middle age, the tions of O’Connor’s stories. Following a owner of a dairy farm—and her encoun- stipulation of the author’s estate,she uses ter in a doctor’s waiting room with a every word: narration, description, dia- Wellesley-educated young woman, also logue,imagery,and racial epithets.Mem- white, who is so repulsed by Turpin’s bers of the multiracial cast circulate the condescension toward people there that full text fluidly from actor to actor, char- she cries out, “Go back to hell where acter to character, so that the author’s words, all of them, ring out in her own voice and in other voices, too.  THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020 85

DANCING and purged of anxiety as I have at the end of class. SOLO ACTS Dancers spend their lives digging in- Choreography under lockdown. side their bodies, searching for hidden reservoirs of emotion. That’s part of BY JENNIFER HOMANS what class is about—but it is rarely, as it is now, solitary work. Taken alone, In recent weeks, the vinyl surface ing the limbs in repetitive exercises that class can become mechanical. An ac- known as marley, which covers the every dancer knows by heart, like a complished teacher draws on centuries floor of many dance studios and stages, daily prayer. of knowledge and also on close obser- has been cut into pieces and shipped vation—of mood, aura, carriage, the around the world to professional danc- Ordinarily, dancers begin class stubbornness in a joint of the foot, the ers exiled to their homes. I have been slowly, holding a barre or the back of fear lodged in a knotted muscle—to watching some of these dancers, stand- a chair for support, until they feel their touch just the right spot to make the ing on these outposts of abandoned legs, feet, and spine and find their “cen- dancer’s whole skeleton realign. A hand theatres, in their kitchens and living ter”—center of body,of gravity,of mind. between the shoulder blades or a finger rooms, as they take their daily ballet As brain and body begin to cohere, pressed into a palm can suddenly reveal class on Zoom, Instagram, YouTube. dancers move to the center of the stu- a secret or unexpected source of expres- They are doing it for one another and dio—space mirroring body—for more sion—“That’s it!”—and everyone pres- for themselves: class preserves the body, expansive movements, like turns and ent sees the change.You can’t access that but above all it tames the mind. It is leaps. Class holds a reassuring prom- kind of revelation by yourself or on logical, rigorous; there are rules to be ise: work hard and you will improve. Zoom. And, since most kitchens and followed, tasks to perform, ideals to At its best, it can feel like a purifica- living rooms are without much of a “cen- achieve. It breaks things down, order- tion. As a former dancer, I have never ter” to move into, many dancers find felt my body so lightened, steadied, themselves confined to the barre, hold- ing on, in their most dependent and Jamar Roberts designed, performed, and shot “Cooped” alone in a basement. vulnerable state. Watching their lonely devotion to the basics of their craft— bending the knees or arching the back— we feel their grit and heartbreak. Their class is truncated, a communal rite cut down to a startlingly raw solo form. Dancers are also performing online. You can watch Misty Copeland and a group of ballerinas dancing Michel Fo- kine’s elegiac “Dying Swan” in their homes. You can see stars of the Paris Opera Ballet passing steps like foot- balls, punting from one dancer to the next, kitchen to patio, to Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet.”More fun,the Aus- tralian Ballet’s “Wilis in Corps-en-tine (A ‘Giselle’ Skit),” or, more interesting and less sentimental, Mark Morris’s new video dances, choreographed on Zoom. One is titled “Lonely Waltz,” another “Lonely Tango.” George Balanchine rightly said that watching dance on TV was like read- ing about a murder in a newspaper—a poor approximation of the terror of the real event. And, for all its offerings, the new online dance world feels cramped and constrained. Dancers are a kind of urban wildlife, and as they crop their bodies to Zoom squares we can almost feel their horizons shrinking.They can, too. Watch a dancer in Valencia, tak- ing out his garbage, break into an ach- 86 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020 PHOTOGRAPH BY ELLIOTT JEROME BROWN, JR.

ing, full-bodied solo for a cheering au- fall, for the Alvin Ailey company, he YOUR LEGACY dience hanging from windows, before made “Ode,”a dance in response to gun BROUGHT TO LIFE bowing back into his quarantine pen. violence. Rather than stricken bodies FAMILY CREST RINGS These outpourings are touching, des- or the sound of gunfire, it features six Research Included perate, and, ultimately, a kind of re- elegant black men, bare-chested and J O H N - C H R I S T I A N .C O M quiem: Remember us! wearing simple pants,set against a spray Or call (888) 646-6466 of colorful flowers.Their bodies appear In New York, dance will not be the almost ornate, and their movement, to Wear our new same. Much has been lost, but there the at times harsh free jazz of Don Pul- official hat to show was a surfeit of bling, especially in the len’s “Suite (Sweet) Malcolm (Part 1: ballet world. Less could really be more. Memories and Gunshots),” from 1975, your love. The basic structures—where and how has a stubborn poise. At the end, five dance is performed—are not all that of the dancers fuse together in a kind 100% cotton twill. will be questioned. The virus has al- of human chain, not just hand to hand Available in white and black. ready changed our sense of our bodies, but body to body—“one long arm,” newyorkerstore.com/hats which seem suddenly mysterious,weakly Roberts has called it—and this one long defended. Our sense of time, the danc- arm lowers a lifeless man to the ground er’s tool and trade, has also been jar- in a heap. As they fade off the stage, he ringly disrupted, but in this, at least, is left there, alone, where he began, be- dancers are prepared.Living in the pres- neath the flowers. The dance is not a ent is part of the training. “What’s the lament, not the blues, but a more gen- matter with now?”Balanchine famously tle act, a wreath laid on a grave. said. “You might be dead tomorrow.” At the end of May, in a commission In this moment of collective grief, from the Guggenheim’s “Works & Pro- I am reminded that dance has always cess” series, Roberts produced an ex- been death’s close companion, a way of traordinary five-minute dance titled mourning since at least the Middle Ages. “Cooped.”He choreographed,designed, During the Black Death,artists depicted directed, performed, and shot (on an the Dance of Death,with skeletons glee- iPad) this “fever dream,”alone,in a base- fully accompanying rich and poor alike ment, surrounded by shadows that seem to the grave. In the early nineteen- to close in on him—an effect ingeniously hundreds, as a child in Petrograd, Bal- created by a floor lamp and a flashlight. anchine lived through war and revolu- The tense music was composed,arranged, tion,suffered from malnutrition,and saw and performed (remotely) by David Wat- the piles of bodies and mass graves that son (bagpipes) and Tony Buck (drums). were populating the city. Few choreog- raphers were more preoccupied with At the opening of the dance, Rob- death and grief, or brought a more erotic erts comes into view seemingly hang- and heightened sense of life and joy to ing upside down from the ceiling. The the stage. image is shocking, but he is glistening and beautiful, swaying as his elbows The First World War also produced sweep the floor. His arms cross over his Mary Wigman, a founder of German head and he uses them like legs to push Expressionist dance and an influence on off into a suspended state, then he early American modern dance. Deeply quickly reattaches, insect-like, to an- affected by her work with crippled and other ceiling or surface. In this Kaf- traumatized veterans, including her kaesque space, gravity and weight do brother, and by her own suffering from not operate in normal ways. Nor does tuberculosis, she developed a style of his body. At one point, he shudders in- movement that was weighted and con- side, quaking to the edge of his human tracted from the gut and back. Her solo form; at other times he is quieted but dances, performed barefoot, had heavy weird, his fingers moving anxiously overtones of piety and redemption, with across his torso. By the end, he is some titles such as “Death” and “Sacrifice.” kind of creature in an awkwardly col- Later in the century, anguish over the lapsed backbend, supported precari- bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ously by the balls of his feet and the produced its very own dance form in the crown of his head. As his long arm ashen bodies of Butoh. And the Aids reaches across his body, his hand grasps epidemic gave us, among other works, his chin and turns his face abruptly from Bill T. Jones’s “D-Man in the Waters.” the camera.  Today, we have Jamar Roberts. Last THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020 87

THE CURRENT CINEMA the soaring soundtrack, by Terence Blanchard—to the brutally hectic. Lee REMEMBRANCES always likes to give us plenty of movie for our money, and the cornucopia, in “Da 5 Bloods” and “The King of Staten Island.” this case,is stuffed to bursting point.Some of the stuffing is borrowed: the plot about BY ANTHONY LANE wartime gold being shared among fellow- grunts is lifted from “Charade” (1963), if Alive to the needs of our time, and befell them to relax into mere compan- you please,starring Audrey Hepburn and not content with giving us one film, ionship. So frequent are the gestures of Cary Grant, while Wagner’s “Ride of the Spike Lee, as generous as he is scathing, togetherness,as the guys bump fists and Valkyries,”which roared from loudspeak- has two new works on release. The first, pledge themselves to unity, that you ers mounted on helicopters in “Apoca- “3 Brothers,” lasts ninety-five seconds wonder if they’re trying to prove some- lypse Now”(1979), here accompanies the and comprises three pieces of footage, thing that they fear no longer holds fast. gentle chugging of a riverboat,as the gold skillfully conjoined. Each piece shows hunters embark upon their quest. Eddie the death of an African-American man We meet them as they gather, in the rightly scoffs at “those Hollyweird moth- at the hands of police. Two of the men, present day, at a hotel in Ho Chi Minh erfuckers trying to go back and win the City. Their notional purpose is to find Vietnam War,” meaning Sylvester Stal- lone, in the second “Rambo” flick (1985), In Spike Lee’s film, four Vietnam veterans search for the remains of a comrade. and the strangely smiling Chuck Norris, in “Missing in Action”(1984).Yet the cli- Eric Garner and George Floyd, are all and to repatriate the remains of their max of “Da 5 Bloods,” reluctant to shake too real, and the third, Radio Raheem, platoon leader, Norman (Chadwick old habits,pits a bunch of stranded Amer- is a character in Lee’s “Do the Right Boseman), the fifth blood of the title, icans against gun-toting Vietnamese, Thing” (1989). What the mini-movie whom they revered, and who was killed amid ancient ruins. Looks pretty Holly- demonstrates is not so much the coin- in the wake of an encounter with the weird to me. cidence of fact and fiction (each victim Vietcong.On the quiet,though,our he- has the breath squeezed out of him) as roes have an ulterior motive. “Our pla- So, what else do we have? Tricky pa- the fulfillment of a prophecy.“I told you toon was ordered to find a C-47 C.I.A. rental relations, for one thing: Otis dis- so,” Lee seems to say, in a rage of regret. plane that went down with a payroll for covers that he has a love child in Viet- the native people,”Otis explains.“Uncle nam, while Paul is tracked down en His second new film,“Da 5 Bloods,” Sam was paying them in gold bars, for route to the treasure by his son, David is a little longer, at more than two and their help against the VC.Well,we found ( Jonathan Majors),who is worried about a half hours. It largely tells the story of the gold.” It was secreted there, await- his old man. Then come the French: four men: Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis ing retrieval at a later date. Thus, the the saintly Hedy Bouvier (Mélanie Thi- (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis), veterans’journey is both an act of hom- erry), who runs an outfit called LAMB, and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.). Years age and a search for buried treasure. or Love Against Mines and Bombs,and ago,they were comrades-in-arms,in the a white-suited sinner named Desroche Vietnam War; now, as senior citizens, No surprise, perhaps, that the tone of ( Jean Reno), who, to judge by the size they are both more and less than friends, “Da 5 Bloods” should career all over of him, must be the chairman of LOUP, too tightly bound by everything that the place, from the solemn—listen to or Love of Unregistered Pâtisseries. To be honest, none of these subplots add much to the film’s essential force; as in “Miracle at St. Anna” (2008), Lee’s tale of African-American troops in Italy, set mostly in 1944, his footing becomes less sure when he strays from familiar ground. On the other hand, because this is a Spike Lee enterprise, much of it does grip the gaze and summon up the blood. Now and then, the screen narrows; the fringes of the frame close inward like curtains being half drawn, as we turn back in time to the Vietnam War. We see Paul and his buddies in combat fa- tigues, fully armed, and, to our conster- nation,we realize that they are still being played by the same aging actors, with the same wrinkles and the same creaky knees. No prosthetics, no C.G.I. The 88 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020 ILLUSTRATION BY AJ DUNGO

effect is at once comical and oddly mov- willful impoverishment.As Norman puts something wrong with me up there,” he ing,a rebuff to the laborious digital youth it,in a rousing flashback,“the U.S.A.owe tells her, indicating his head, and there’s that was applied to De Niro and his co- us.”It’s a hell of an argument, and I wish no hiding the root of the wrongness: his evals in Scorsese’s “The Irishman,” last I could feel it ring out across a crowded father, a firefighter, died seventeen years year. Lee is suggesting that these folks movie theatre; mind you, such are the earlier,in heroic circumstances.No won- haven’t changed as they once hoped to social and political convulsions of recent der Scott looks and behaves like an over- do—that the shape of their adult exis- weeks,in the aftermath of George Floyd’s grown kid. His life is in embers. tence was somehow formed and fixed death, in Minneapolis, that it’s easy to by the traumas in Southeast Asia. And imagine viewers watching “Da 5 Bloods” Fans of “Saturday Night Live,” hav- by the training, too; when a kid throws online and being swayed, even at home, ing followed Davidson’s rise to fame,will firecrackers in the street,in modern-day by the surge of its indignation. know how closely—indeed alarmingly— Ho Chi Minh City, the middle-aged he is being used here as a template for Americans drop to the ground as if It seems wholly fitting that, where Scott. Both have mental-health prob- dodging tracer bullets. “BlacKkKlansman,” a more focussed lems; both have Crohn’s disease; and both film,was calmed by the central presence employ comedy not to deflect from their In short, Lee’s new movie—like the of John David Washington, as an un- adversities but to tunnel into them.(One great “BlacKkKlansman” (2018)—is a flappable cop,the core of the new movie major change: Davidson’s father, also a history lesson wrapped in an adventure, should belong to Delroy Lindo, as fireman, perished on 9/11.) If you have the caveat being that history is never Paul—wrathful, tearful, and barely in a taste for this near-reckless candor, and done with us, and that we struggle to control. He’s a Trump voter, in a MAGA for the snarls of pride with which Scott shrug it off our backs. In the throes of cap; he’s a mess, who ends up address- defends his slackerdom, you will relish his feature films, Lee is never not a doc- ing the camera,like the witness to a nat- this movie, at least in its early phase.The umentarian; he doesn’t hesitate to inter- ural disaster; and he breaks your heart. later stages, be warned, contain scenes rupt the flow of chatter with a still pho- I won’t forget the sight of him as he of emotional uplift, in which Scott gets tograph of Milton L. Olive III, say, who marches off into the jungle by himself, a dose of male bonding at the local fire- fell on a grenade to save his comrades, shouting the Twenty-third Psalm as if house.He becomes a dogsbody,and learns in 1965,and was,we hear,“the first brother issuing a command. “The Lord is my how to fold the American flag. So that’s to be awarded the Medal of Honor in shepherd, I shall not want,”he cries, bit- how you cure depression. ’Nam.”But you don’t dishonor a sacrifice ing hard on the final “t.” So much for by asking what it was for. That’s why green pastures.He went to war,the poor By the end, in truth, I found myself “Da 5 Bloods” kicks off with a clip of soul, and never came back. swamped by Scott, and wondered if he Muhammad Ali, denying that he has might have made more impact as a sec- any quarrel with the Vietnamese, and The weight of the past presses down, ondary character—maybe as a foil to moves on to Bobby Seale,from 1968,who in a very different way, on Judd Ap- his widowed mother, Margie, who is declaims, “Here we go, with the damn atow’s “The King of Staten Island.”The played to perfection by Marisa Tomei. Vietnam War, and we still ain’t gettin’ movie is about the gangling Scott Carlin Not since Barbara Stanwyck has an ac- nothin’ but racist police brutality, etc.” (Pete Davidson), who is twenty-four, tress blended zest and pathos into such lives with his mother,and has vague plans expressive chords. Margie, eager to sup- And there it is, deep in that “etc.” to be a tattoo artist. His sister, Claire port her son, sports one of his tattoos There’s the link between then and now. (Maude Apatow), is off to college, leav- on her arm. “Is that a cocker spaniel?” Why fight and die for your country, Lee ing Scott to hang out with his errant she is asked. “No,” she replies. “That’s implies, if your country will choke you friends.He has sex with Kelsey (Bel Pow- my daughter, Claire.”  anyway? When Paul and the gang go for ley), but any satisfaction is muffled by gold, they aren’t raiding a lost ark; they the antidepressants he takes. “There’s NEWYORKER.COM are claiming reparation, for centuries of Richard Brody blogs about movies. 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. 17, June 22, 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. Eric Gillin, chief business officer; Piper Goodspeed, head of brand revenue strategy; James Guilfoyle, executive director of finance and business operations; Fabio B. Bertoni, general counsel. 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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 P. C. Vey, must be received by Sunday, June 21st. The finalists in the June 1st contest appear below. We will announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the July 6th & 13th 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 “I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait for this day to end.” “I can usually identify a bird by the song, Rosanna Gallen, Berlin, Germany but I think he’s doing a cover.” “One last thing . . .” Michael Holmes, Moseley, Va. Abe Rosenberg, Los Angeles, Calif. “Tell me about a time you identified a problem that others didn’t see coming.” Scott Smith, Toronto, Ont.