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For Cox, writing was a way to reinvent himself. If Reback could sell one my father. Up until I started really paying attention, I of his books, Cox would be able to describe himself as something other than never saw it like that, but everyone else in my life did. a convicted felon. “I know I’m some dirtbag in prison,” he told me. “But I’m You’re so close to it that you can’t see it.” a dirtbag in prison that’s a published author.” Cox knew some of his interviewees might embel- Once word got out that there was a writer in cellblock B4, other guys lish their accounts—“in that environment, very few would sidle up to Cox in the yard, urging him to tell their story, or their people downplay their cons”—so he was diligent buddy’s story. The more self-aggrandizing inmates, the ones who imagined about fact-checking. He relied on official files he themselves as the inspiration for a big-budget thriller, saw talking to Cox as procured via the Freedom of Information Act, which an opportunity to get their story out there. Others wanted to expose what allows anyone to request nonclassified government they saw as corruption on the part of the Drug Enforcement Administration documents. He sent away for indictments, police or the attorney general or a shady business partner. Recounting their stories reports, court transcripts, and interview memoran- to an engaged listener disrupted the monotony of prison existence; they also dums. Some of Cox’s subjects had no idea that their got the satisfaction of having the muddle of their lives streamlined into a phone had been tapped, or that their buddy had rat- page-turner. Soon, Cox had a waiting list with more than a dozen names on it. ted them out, until Cox pulled the documents and He’d found a niche within the confines of the largest federal prison complex pieced it together. His research has helped at least in the country. There were jailhouse lawyers and jailhouse personal chefs; one prisoner petition to get his conviction overturned, he was the jailhouse true-crime writer. after FOIA documents bolstered an argument that Cox’s services were in demand enough that he had his pick of sub- the prosecution had withheld key evidence at his trial. jects. He wasn’t particularly interested in telling a drug saga. “They’re a Being a writer in prison presented plenty of obsta- dime a dozen,” he said. Unless there was a unique angle or some element cles. Cox could conduct phone interviews only in the of surprise, “it’s not enough for me to dedicate three months.” The busi- 15-minute increments the prison system allowed, and ness tycoon who attempted to build the world’s largest private militia? Sure, then only if the person accepted his collect call. For he could work with that. The prison lawyer who accidentally uncovered a information he couldn’t obtain through FOIA requests, botched cartel assassination? That was a story he wanted to tell. he relied on a fellow inmate’s mother, who served Cox expected his subjects to meet as his volunteer typist/research with him several times a week for inter- assistant on the outside. “I’m a views; he estimates that he spent at fast typist and I’m retired, so I least 100 hours talking with each per- had time on my hands,” Hilda son he wrote about. He had the time, Rausini told me. Cox sent her after all. They’d meet in the library, or one chapter at a time to type up, in the prison yard, or over tater tots in and Rausini found herself impati- the chow hall, and Cox would ask prob- ent to know what happened next. ing questions, taking notes in his own Cox’s early pieces are uneven ersatz version of a reporter’s notebook: and heavy-handed; over the a sheaf of loose-leaf paper stapled to a years, though, he’s become a rectangle of cardboard. more skillful writer, better at Cox knew his stories would work peppering his stories with reveal- only if readers identified with his sub- ing details and subtle ironies. He jects, which meant those subjects had sold one book to a traditional to be relatable, even though they’d publisher. Generation Oxy: From done bad things. Partly for that reason, High School Wrestlers to Pain and partly because he was squeamish Pill Kingpins had disappointing about violence, he avoided writing sales; it’s hard to do publicity about murderers. from prison. But Cox is savvy at “You look for a sympathetic character dissecting markets, and he fig- if you can get it, but the pool’s pretty shal- ured out an open secret about low,” Cox said. “You look for somebody publishing: that more and more, who got duped into doing something, or writers’ careers are propped up somebody who was in such a bad spot in by Hollywood. At a time when life.” His subjects were typically eager to streaming platforms are produc- talk up their exploits, but he also encour- ing huge amounts of original aged them to delve into their early lives, programming—Netflix alone when they were homeless teenagers liv- spent $12 billion on content last TAMPA POLICE DEPARTMENT ing on the streets of Miami, or struggling year, the majority of it original— with manic depression. the industry is hungry for fresh At some point in the interview pro- intellectual property. And this cess, Cox would feel a mounting sense feeding frenzy means that some of excitement as the narrative arc writers are getting hefty option cohered. “These guys don’t come out fees for stories, particularly those of the womb criminals. Usually you can Matthew Cox and Rebecca Hauck, centering on some sort of heist or pinpoint something, some catalyst. You his girlfriend and accomplice, caper or scam or scheme. As free- start to listen for it. Like the thing with were arrested in 2006. lance rates decline and staff jobs 48 A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC

dwindle, optioning stories to television has become Cox attempted to do the same thing, albeit as a media outsider. He asked central to many writers’ financial security (my own his subjects to sign contracts granting him their life rights and 50 percent of included). Some producers work this formula to their the proceeds of any future film or television adaptation. Then he reached advantage, finding a rollicking true story, securing the out to magazine writers, sending them summaries of his subjects’ stories life rights of the relevant parties, and then enlisting and promising access to his research materials. He knew his credibility was a journalist to write about it for a magazine, hoping questionable, so he provided stacks of documentation. (This is what Cox that the piece will go viral and inspire a bidding war was up to when he contacted me about the currency-trading scam last year.) for film or TV rights, and that they’ll get a cut of the Guy Lawson, a New York Times best-selling author, wrote about one of Cox’s deal. Last year, a Daily Beast story developed this way subjects for Rolling Stone. Davy Rothbart, a contributor to This American Life, was optioned in a record-setting deal worth $1 million. is developing a podcast with Cox. THE ATLANTIC AUGUST 2019 49

There was an element of hustling to the work, to When Vitale called me collect from Coleman, he was careful not to speak be sure. But Cox says it also began to shift his under- too openly, with other inmates nearby, about the information he’d provided to standing of himself. Hearing other guys’ clichés— law enforcement. “That kind of thing can be frowned upon in here,” he wrote in how nothing was their fault, how the people they an email later. But he confirmed that he’d talked to a detective and that the sher- stole from could afford to take the hit—forced him iff’s office was reinvestigating Nuzzo’s death. Having Cox write his story was to reconsider his own evasions and excuses. “Now I “liberating,” he told me. “I could have a clear view of everything I was doing.” just see it more,” Cox said during a 2013 sentence- Cox ended his story about Vitale on a hopeful note, implying that the reduction hearing. “I immediately start thinking, Boy, information Vitale had given to the authorities might be a turning point in he just so easily justified that.” Sometimes when he the case. But the sheriff ’s office has since closed the reinvestigation with- thought about his past behavior, he’d shake his head: out bringing charges. “The autopsy and evidence located on scene were What an asshole. He began making a conscious effort consistent with an overdose,” a detective wrote. “There were no signs of to listen more carefully, to focus on other people. other trauma or foul play.” Delving into other inmates’ stories could get emo- tionally complicated. In April 2018, Cox started writing about a white-collar criminal from Boca Raton named Joe Vitale. Vitale had defrauded investors, promising them impossible returns and spending their money on strip clubs and sports cars. “His story is him just being a complete greedy scumbag, to be honest,” Cox said. AT Even so, Cox wanted to hear more about a par- ticular incident in his subject’s life, one that Vitale couldn’t get out of his head. It involved his friend and associate Frank Nuzzo, who had died of an apparent overdose in October 2016. A couple of weeks into Vitale’s incarceration, he told Cox, he’d listened as a jailhouse barber blabbed about his criminal exploits THE while trimming Vitale’s cell mate’s hair. The details of one story caught Vitale’s attention. It seemed that the barber and Vitale had acquaintances in common, 2013 and—more alarming—that the barber might have been present when Nuzzo died. Vitale didn’t let on that he’d known Nuzzo; instead, he made a point of working out and eating meals with the guy, swapping stories in an attempt to gather information. Eventually, Vitale said, the barber admitted to giving Nuzzo a “hot shot”—a fatal injection of drugs—before robbing him. Vitale said that he’d told an attorney about the barber’s admission, but had been advised to keep quiet. A few weeks after Vitale told Cox this story, another prisoner poked his head into Cox’s cell. You sentence-reduction hearing, Cox’s public defender said that Cox had “done should go check up on Vitale, he said. Cox found Vitale more, given more information to the government, than any case that I have sobbing in his cell. He’d had a rough group-therapy ever had in 20 years.” He’d cooperated with the FBI; given newspaper inter- session in the prison’s drug-treatment program; views about his dealings with a corrupt member of the Tampa city council; and he’d listened as someone read aloud a letter from contributed to a fraud course that was used to help mortgage brokers and loan his father about how his son’s addiction had torn officers spot criminal activity. Cox got almost 12 years knocked off his sen- his family apart. “I guess [Cox] heard I was taking tence, and was released to a halfway house earlier this year, after having spent the letter tough,” Vitale told me on the more than a decade in custody. phone. “I was rambling on about some This winter, I met Cox for the of the things I chose to do wrong—not by first time at a gym whose owner, mistake, but I was just consciously mak- HE’D ALWAYS LIVED an old friend of his, had hired ing the wrong decisions, out of greed.” him to put his art-school train- “This isn’t a guy that cries. This is a HIS LIFE AS IF ing to use by painting murals. tough guy,” Cox said. “This is a man’s HE WERE PLAYING We talked in front of a half- man—he’s fast cars, beautiful women. finished, wall-size painting of And he broke down, couldn’t stop crying. A CHARACTER two buff gorillas snarling at each He’s bawling; I’m bawling. It’s horrible. IN A MOVIE: other, a pile of barbells at their And he starts talking about how this guy, THE SUCCESSFUL feet. Cox is a short but densely his friend, was murdered, and he didn’t muscled man with bright-white do anything.” Cox told him it wasn’t too MORTGAGE teeth and a nervous, eager-to- late: “Let’s write a fucking letter.” It was BROKER; THE WILY please air. Now that he was out a dramatic moment; it was also good of prison, Cox told me, he hoped material. Cox wrote it all down. CRIMINAL. the traits he had relied on while 50 A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC





(This is a fictitious book cover.) literally 45-minute videos on their favorite podcasts about true crime,” Cox told me, committing mortgage fraud—a gift for storytelling, careful attention to docu- his eyes widening. He’s banking on the ments, a patient ability to untangle complex systems, and a familiarity with idea that this craze will last, and also that the underworld—would serve him well in his writing career. the public wants to hear criminals tell their own side of the story. To date, his writing hasn’t been particularly lucrative, but he wants to eventually parlay it into full-time work. “Matt is always thinking of ways to Cox was anxious to know how I would do something,” one of his exes told me. “Within a few years, he’ll be rich portray him, but he also realized that sub- again.” (Cox owes $6 million in restitution, and a portion of his income will jects have only so much control over how go to his victims; the largest chunk is earmarked for the mortgage companies a writer handles the material of their life. and banks he defrauded.) “This article, which I’m extremely nervous about—I feel like it would be the first thing Cox was such an obliging subject—suggesting that we meet while he was that could come out that wouldn’t paint still at Coleman, because the prison would provide a dramatic setting for our me as a complete scumbag,” he said. “You interview; highlighting parts of court documents he thought I’d find juicy— know how many white-collar guys are get- that I felt self-conscious about my own reporterly maneuvers, my needling ting out of prison, and the first thing they questions, my hunger for pithy, revealing quotes. We both were participants want to do is bury everything? I don’t see in the true-crime economy, and we each had our own reasons for hoping this the problem with saying, ‘Yeah, that’s story would be successful. what I did. That is what I did, I went to prison, and this is what I’m doing now.’ So, Cox has an instinct for finding frothy sectors; he may have found another did I make some mistakes? I made a lot of one. True crime makes the world coherent by reducing chaos to a neat story mistakes. The point is that I’m not going to line with a clearly defined culprit. In this period of national precariousness, run from it. I’m not going to do that.” it’s no wonder the public is eager for stories that amp up our anxiety before assuaging it. Some true-crime podcasts have tens of millions of listeners; It was an awkward conversation, and the true-crime cable channel Investigation Discovery drew more viewers I left Florida still not sure what to make than CNN did last year. “There’s all these girls on YouTube that have done of Cox. Afterward, I called his former co- worker and accomplice. They’d begun to talk on the phone again, after more than a decade out of touch. She was cautiously optimistic. “He’s really into himself—he still has that. But he’s definitely different than how I knew him. Prison’s really hor- rible, and if you let it change you, it does. I think it humbled him a lot, being incarcer- ated,” she said. “To what degree? I guess only time will show us.” I wondered whether I’d made a mistake in plumbing for Cox’s “true” self. After all, he’d always lived his life as if he were play- ing a character in a movie: the successful mortgage broker; the wily criminal. In prison, he’d settled on a new narrative for himself, that of the reformed truth- teller. While he was at Coleman, this role gave him a sense of purpose, not to mention the prestige he craves. Whether it sticks may depend on whether it’s a story that people on the outside want to buy. These days, Cox spends a lot of time thinking about Frank Abagnale, the con man who, after serv- ing five years for his various crimes, became a fraud adviser to the FBI. His memoir, Catch Me If You Can, was a best seller; Leonardo DiCaprio played him in the movie adaptation. It seemed like an ideal out- come: respect and riches earned on the right side of the law. This is the arc Cox would write for himself, if he were the one in charge. “To me, this is a redemp- tion story. It’s about a guy going to prison—he’s a bad guy, okay. But he goes to prison and he does the right thing. And this is what he’s doing now.” Rachel Monroe is an Atlantic contributing writer and the author of the forthcoming Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession. THE ATLANTIC AUGUST 2019 51

C A R RY RACE, HISTORY, ME AND MEMORIES OF A VIRGINIA GIRLHOOD BY DREW GILPIN FAUST BACK ILLUSTRATIONS BY NAJEEBAH AL-GHADBAN 52 A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC

THE ATLANTIC JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2019

be known as the Old Chapel, in the quiet of an isolated crossroad, the beautiful little cemetery is so small that no one is much more than a stone’s throw from everyone else. My brother and I, the only visitors, wandered, reading epi- taphs that called up Virginia’s storied past or reminded us of figures from our childhood: the leader of my Girl Scout troop; a teacher from our elementary school; a classmate’s mother, who was an extraordinary horsewoman; and my father’s drinking buddy and his long-suffering wife. But I wanted to be sure my brother saw one plaque in particu- lar. I remembered its words dimly and had perhaps even tried to forget them altogether. But now here I was again, and I needed to remind myself. I knew it was at the back of the oldest part of the cemetery, and there I found it, partially hidden by leaves and vines, and covered with lichen that nearly obscured its inscrip- tion. But I could still read: WE TO THE GLORY OF GOD STOPPED AND IN REMEMBRANCE OF THE MANY PERSONAL FIRST SERVANTS BURIED HERE BEFORE 1865. FAITHFUL AND DEVOTED IN LIFE, THEIR FRIENDS at the cemetery. My brother had picked me up at the Philadel- AND MASTERS LAID THEM NEAR THEM IN DEATH phia airport, and we had driven south and west from there—to Baltimore and Frederick, then down through the hills of the Blue WITH AFFECTION AND GRATITUDE Ridge, past the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac Riv- THEIR MEMORY REMAINS, THOUGH THEIR WOODEN MARKERS, ers at Harpers Ferry and into the Valley of Virginia. Civil War country. The route of the Antietam and Gettysburg campaigns. LIKE THE WAY OF LIFE OF THAT DAY, The site of John Brown’s incendiary attempt to foment a slave ARE GONE FOREVER uprising. The place where we grew up. I.T.G. 1957 Apart from one brief drive-through, I hadn’t been back in I.T.G. was my grandmother. In 1957, I was 10 years old. We nearly two decades—not since a visit the year after my father died. both lived here. Now we could see next to his grave the dirt already unearthed to make a place for my stepmother’s ashes the next day. We had There is a monument to the Confederate dead in this cem- come for her funeral and in my father’s memory. etery; there are markers for unknown Confederates killed in skirmishes nearby. That is complicated enough. But what is to I had attended many burials here. The family plot houses be made of this invocation of slavery offered during my own life- uncles, aunts, grandparents, and great-grandparents, but no time? Of this tangible link between who we are now and who we graves nearly as old as those dug soon after the nearby chapel were more than a century and a half ago? Between attitudes and was built in the 1790s. Edmund Randolph, the U.S. secretary of practices that were taught to me as a child and the person I could state and the nation’s first attorney general, a Virginia governor or would become? Between the Virginia of 1957 or 1857 and the and a member of the Constitutional Convention, is a few yards one that—on the very day in February 2019 when I stood in the away, surrounded by a crowd of Randolphs, Pages, Burwells, Old Chapel cemetery—was confronting the crisis of a governor and Carters—members of the First Families of Virginia who had whose medical-school yearbook page had just been discovered migrated to this northern end of the Shenandoah Valley when the to have included a repugnant, racist photograph of a man in children of the 18th-century Tidewater gentry began to seek new blackface and another in Klan robes? lands and new opportunities. Nestled behind what has come to What had my grandmother been thinking? The language and tone are right out of what is sometimes called the “moonlight and magnolias” version of the pre–Civil War South—the romanticiza- tion of plantation culture, the erasure of slavery and its brutalities. Here on the plaque we have not slaves but “servants,” “faithful and devoted” rather than subjugated against their will. The words describe affectionate and appreciative masters—a benign domi- nation, not the cruel system of physical brutality, lives stolen, and human beings bought and sold that we know slavery to have been. The marker declares a nostalgia for an era, a “way of life” that is “gone forever.” Gone, we might say, with the wind. Margaret Mitchell’s book, published in 1936, and the movie that followed in 1939 were still exerting their influence in 1957, as they have well into our own time. And I think, too, of the “Mammy” memorial approved by the U.S. Senate in 1923, and the numerous “Mammy” monuments proposed at that time across the South. But this wasn’t 1923 or even 1936. It was 1957. Why did my grandmother go to the trouble—and expense—of erecting the plaque at this particular time? It was more than just an expression 54 A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC

of views that had persisted since the ideology of the Lost Cause race that has continued to poison Virginia and the nation more and the idealization of the Old South had solidified among white than a century and a half after slavery’s end. people in the years after Appomattox, views that she had been V IRGINIA HAS a long history to confront. Our nation’s indoctrinated to embrace from the time of her birth in Tennes- experience with slavery began there, when some 20 see in 1894. captive Africans arrived on a warship in Jamestown in The year 1957 was a crucial time in Virginia and in the South generally. Three years earlier, the Supreme Court had struck 1619. Black bondage existed in Virginia for close to a century down school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, and the longer than black freedom has. Slavery made colonial Virginia implications of that decision were beginning to become clear. In prosperous, creating a plantation society founded on tobacco September 1957, nine African American students entering the production, social and economic stratification, and unfree labor. previously all-white Central High School, in Little Rock, Arkan- It also produced a class of white owners whose daily witness to sas, were greeted by a segregationist mob supported, per the the degradations of bondage instilled in them a fierce devotion order of the governor, by the state’s National Guard. President to their own freedom. They were determined to be the masters Dwight Eisenhower was compelled to mobilize the 101st Air- not just of their households, their estates, and their laborers, borne Division to enforce integration and uphold the law. Closer but also of their society, their polity, and their destiny. George to home, Senator Harry Byrd—who lived just a few miles from Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, the Old Chapel graveyard—had called for “massive resistance” George Mason—slaveholders all. That so many of the Founding to the Supreme Court’s ruling. Engineering a plan to close rather Fathers, including the leaders of the Revolution and the authors than desegregate schools, Byrd and his aroused followers were of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the transforming the 1957 Virginia governor’s election into a ref- Bill of Rights, were slaveholders is both an irony and a paradox. erendum on race and, in a broader sense, on the morality and As Samuel Johnson remarked with scorn for the revolutionar- legitimacy of the white South’s discriminatory assumptions and ies across the Atlantic: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps practices. In the face of such for liberty among the driv- controversy and opprobrium, ers of negroes?” the plaque invoked a redemp- But in another sense, as tive narrative of the Southern the historian Edmund Mor- past, one designed to reassure I REMEMBERED THE WORDS gan argued so powerfully a society under siege that it was ON THE PLAQUE DIMLY nearly half a century ago, not just right but righteous. It slavery and freedom were proclaimed a virtuousness fash- AND HAD PERHAPS not at odds, but integrally ioned out of a fantastical history, EVEN TRIED TO FORGET intertwined, even mutu- a virtuousness to be reinforced ally constitutive. It was the OPENING SPREAD: STEVE HELBER/AP; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; LIBRARY OF VIRGINIA by the generous act of notic- THEM. BUT NOW I NEEDED unfreedom of 40 percent ing and remembering that the TO REMIND MYSELF. of Virginia’s population plaque was meant to be. that made the liberty of But why did my grandmother the rest imaginable as well choose this graveyard and as materially possible. The this statement to subdue her economic viability of both unease about the challenges to the colony and the new her taken-for-granted world—her unease, I imagine (and hope), nation depended on slave labor. And so did the viability of the about that very world itself? Why a plaque? It wasn’t filling a gap- Revolution’s political experiment and the Founders’ republican ing need. In both its language and its very existence, it protests vision. The Virginia gentry could countenance the extension of too much. freedom to some men because it was withheld from others; the Local circumstances had generated an additional motivation. exclusion of a portion of the population from the polity, their sub- The far end of the cemetery—the land beyond the plaque—had jugation and control, made possible the advocacy of equality for housed graves of enslaved people, though their locations and the rest. The nation conceived in liberty was also the nation con- markers had all but disappeared. As a child, I remember hear- ceived in slavery. The state of Virginia and the country it did so ing discussions among the adults in my family about how grow- much to create were born out of a set of conflicting commitments ing demand for graveyard plots had led to a consideration of that have destabilized the republic ever since. Yet the presence of extending the white cemetery into the area the slave cemetery this paradox at the heart of the Founders’ vision is perhaps the occupied. This was not understood as sharing—and certainly good news, for freedom has had its own driving logic, has claimed not as integrating—the space. Instead, the older graves would its own agenda, has propelled us over time toward better angels. essentially be erased from the landscape and from the minds In the earliest years of colonial Virginia, the nature and and memories of the white church and its members. extent of bondage remained undefined. While most Africans But not from my grandmother’s. The puzzling plaque rep- were unfree laborers, some exercised liberties that later would resented her discomfort with (though not, significantly, any be unthinkable. Distinctions between white indentured servants overt objection to) a plan to so callously disrespect the dead. She and bound black laborers became firm and rigid only over time. meant to remember and memorialize them with a permanent As the system of slavery was established during the 17th century, stone marker that would not rot and disappear. But as a white perpetual inherited unfreedom gradually became the exclusive southern woman imbued with a conventional understanding of fate of Africans and their descendants. the past and its racial practices, she was memorializing a world A century separated the legal codification of slavery in Vir- that had never been. And she was perpetuating a narrative about ginia and the beginnings of the revolutionary movement. The THE ATLANTIC AUGUST 2019 55

Founders had no memory of a society without bondage and no future of slavery in unprecedented debates that reflected the ten- experience of a world where blackness and degradation had not sions at its core. In the words of one delegate advocating slavery’s been conjoined—where white supremacy and black inferiority elimination, “It is ruinous to whites—retards improvement—roots had not been enshrined in both law and culture. The racial defi- out an industrious population.” Another added that it threatened nition of American slavery placed yet another contradiction at to bring about more such “melancholy occurrences” as “the tragi- the new nation’s heart, one that transcended the political diffi- cal massacre at Southampton.” But nearly all agreed that eman- culties of reconciling slavery and freedom. What did it mean to cipation would somehow have to be linked to deportation and be human? This question posed a fundamental challenge to the African colonization, because living with a population of freed execution of the laws: Was a slave a person or property? Could black people was unthinkable. The debates were never about black slaves be seen as having free will and thus legal accountability for justice, but about white safety and prosperity. their actions? Antebellum Southern judges struggled with these Slavery did not end in Virginia in 1832. It would take three more inconsistencies. “A slave is not in the condition of a horse,” a Ten- decades and hundreds of thousands of lives lost to bondage, and nessee judge insisted. “The laws [cannot] … deprive him of his later to war. Indeed, the debates in the legislature yielded new laws many rights which are inherent in man.” But a North Carolina intended to strengthen slavery’s hold. Yet these discussions dem- judge disagreed, baldly underscoring the ultimate logic of slav- onstrated that white Virginians felt profoundly and persistently ery: “The power of the master must be absolute, to render the uneasy about a way of life the state had known for two centuries. submission of the slave perfect … Such obedience is the conse- In the aftermath of the Virginia debates and the doubts and quence only of uncontrolled authority over the body.” Commit- divisions they exposed, voices in the state and beyond began ment to a republican form of government was incompatible with to defend slavery more vigorously. A proliferation of “posi- the absolute power that defined the system of slavery. tive good” arguments insisted that the institution was not just This dilemma was more than a problem of law or government. acceptable and justifiable but the best possible arrangement It was about human identities, emotions, and values. A rallying economically, politically, and even morally. Virginia could no cry of the 19th-century abolitionist movement would capture it longer afford the kind of ambivalence Jefferson had exhibited, well, with the words of a slave imploring: “Am I not a man and a proclaiming slavery an evil yet living on its fruits. As the histo- brother?” The racial definitions of slavery required white South- rian Eugene Genovese put it: “One generation might be able to erners to resist that entreaty every day. Yet denial was not always oppose slavery and favor everything it made possible, but the possible. The force of common humanity could at times reach next had to choose sides.” Nat Turner had made that choice across the chains of the color line to generate compassion, guilt, seem more urgent. By the 1830s, slavery was in many ways doubt, and of course desire. Racism muted these human instincts, weakening in Virginia, with the decline of the tobacco econ- even as laws banning interracial sex, prohibiting manumission, omy and the sale and forced migration of thousands of enslaved and outlawing criticism of slavery acknowledged their existence. people from Virginia to the cotton economy of the Deep South. Thomas Jefferson’s attraction to Sally Hemings, with whom he Yet Virginians played prominent roles in slavery’s emerging fathered five children, embodied the tragedy present at the very ideological defense. creation of American freedom. And it would not be long before Vir- White Virginians struggled with the ginians would be asked to choose sides idea of slavery even as they exercised its again. As secession fever mounted across required cruelties and reaped its benefits. the South in the wake of Abraham Lin- Jefferson observed that the existence of I WAS 9 coln’s election in November 1860, Vir- the institution was like having a “wolf by ginia remained cautious. South Carolina the ears.” The threat it posed not just to YEARS OLD rushed headlong into separation from the the ideals of white Virginian society but to WHEN NEWS union, voting to secede before year’s end, its very security and survival became viv- but the Virginia convention called to con- idly real in August 1831 when Nat Turner, REPORTS ABOUT sider the issue resisted strenuous appeals an enslaved preacher from Southampton “MASSIVE from its neighbors to join a proslavery County, asserted his claim to freedom. Confederacy. Virginia’s decision was all- The uprising he led resulted in the deaths RESISTANCE” important, for without the Old Dominion of 55 white people as well as uncounted— AND BATTLES and its human, industrial, and agricul- some estimates indicate more than 100— tural resources, the new nation had little black people attacked by both mobs and OVER chance of success. Virginia’s white popu- the militia called up to quell the revolt. SEGREGATION lation of 1.1 million was the largest of any More than a dozen captured rebels, Southern state, and it ended up supplying including Turner himself, were executed. MADE ME the most soldiers to the Confederacy. But The revolt provoked near-hysteria REALIZE THAT some advocates for secession both within and beyond the state saw another ele- among white people not just in Virginia but across the South. Could there be a Nat IT WAS NO ment at stake in Virginia’s position: They Turner in every household? Could black ACCIDENT THAT worried that if Virginia did not emphati- people, subjugated and assumed to be cally embrace the slave republic, it was inferior, share their masters’ longing for MY SCHOOL likely to abandon slavery altogether in the freedom and possess the fearlessness to WAS ALL-WHITE. decades to come. These observers noted try to attain it? When the Virginia legisla- the emergence of mixed agriculture in ture convened just weeks after Turner’s northern Virginia, an economic system execution, the lawmakers took up the increasingly like that of the Middle States 56 A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC

STEPHANIE KEITH/REUTERS; JEFF GREENBERG/GETTY rather than the Deep South. And they noted as well the decreas- the state. Political and business leaders ing proportion of slaves in the population as Virginia masters sold disavowed the race-baiting that emerged their unprofitable bondsmen south to supply labor for the cotton farther south and endeavored to main- plantations of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. tain a system of paternalistic control in order to ensure the perpetuation of racial Yet after initially voting against secession in the early spring supremacy. Force could be held in reserve of 1861, Virginia responded to the firing on Fort Sumter and Lin- if black people accepted their assigned coln’s call for an army of 75,000 men to march against the South roles within an enduring racial hierarchy. by declaring itself all in for the Confederate cause. And Virginia Yet in its essence, this was a system that did not just join the Confederacy; it became the capital and the rested on spoken and unspoken threats of chief battleground. The decision would come at enormous cost. coercion and violence. Between the end The war would destroy lands, lives, and the world white Virgin- of Reconstruction and 1950, 84 lynchings ians intended to preserve. occurred in Virginia—significantly fewer than in any other southern state, but more T H E C I V I L WA R destroyed the legal foundations of than sufficient to transmit the message of slavery, but the racism that had reinforced it for so long racial terror. persisted. Emancipation meant black Virginians were no longer property, but white people pushed back forcefully against Extralegal violence was one guaran- change, bringing an end to Reconstruction and retaining control tor of order, or at least the order the white over social, economic, and political arrangements in the state. South deemed necessary. But Virginia’s The North’s commitment to overturning the old order of the white elite preferred to uphold its control South waned in the face of white intransigence, and a new sys- with the seemingly more legitimate and tem of subjugation and injustice emerged to take slavery’s place. defensible instruments of the law. In Vir- ginia, as across the South, newly devised White Virginians of the late 19th and early 20th centuries con- Black Codes regulated postwar social gratulated themselves on the harmony of race relations within arrangements, and vagrancy laws pre- served white power to coerce labor. The public whipping post—used overwhelm- ingly for black offenders—marked disturb- ing continuities with slavery’s practices. Tellingly, it provoked not just strong black opposition across the state, but debate among white people who worried that its highly visible brutality undermined the idealized narrative of racial tranquility. In 1898, the Virginia legislature at last voted to abolish the whipping post. Yet just as one instrument of violence and coercion was abandoned, others took its place. A modernized form of unfreedom, the penitentiary imprisoned black people at rates dramatically higher than the rates for white people. In 1893, one in every 5,000 white Virgin- ians was incarcerated; the figure for black Virginians was 7.5 out of every 5,000. And African Americans were almost exclusively the victims of the emerging convict-leasing system, which rented prisoners to owners of Virginia’s quarries, mines, canals, and rail- roads. It has been called slavery by another name. For a time during Reconstruction and the years that followed, freedmen in Virginia voted and even served in the legislature, but by the turn of the century, a variety of measures, including literacy tests and poll taxes, worked to exclude African Americans from the ballot box. A system of racial separation that came to be known as Jim Crow was set firmly in place, segregating schools, transportation, and public entertainment, and forbidding inter- racial marriage. In 1896, the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson proclaimed its approval. Yet this new “separate but equal” doc- trine as the supposed logic and justification for segregation rep- resented just another in a long line of distortions and deceptions the white South embraced. “Separate” was—and was designed to be—unequal. That was the point. But elite white Virginians created a narrative of an invented past and a distorted portrait of their own time to reassure themselves of the justice of their social order and of their own THE ATLANTIC AUGUST 2019 57

58 A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC

KIM KELLEY-WAGNER/SHUTTERSTOCK; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS benevolence. The cult of the Lost Cause embraced an apoc- Racial custom was carefully yet obliquely taught. It encom- ryphal history suffused with nostalgia for a world of valorous passed all the contradictions that had confronted white Virgin- Confederates, kindly masters, and contented slaves. And it ians for centuries. We grew up in the constant company of human mischaracterized the present, extolling the “Virginia Way,” a dis- beings who were central to our lives, yet we somehow came to tinctive form of Jim Crow in which blacks and whites lived peace- understand that an unspoken hierarchy required our distance— ably together in lives of “separation by consent,” in the words of both physical and emotional—from them. An African Ameri- Douglas Southall Freeman, a Richmond newspaper editor and can man who worked for my family for decades did everything renowned Robert E. Lee biographer. Freeman acknowledged from shining shoes to mowing the lawn to driving us around the that this was a social order designed to perpetuate “the contin- county—to school, to piano lessons, to scout meetings. He was ued and unchallengeable dominance of Southern whites,” who, as present in my childhood as my brothers and my parents. He he told his readers, would work to provide assurance of safety and quizzed us on state capitals and the order of the presidents, made security to black Virginians in return for their acquiescence in the sure we remembered our lunch boxes and homework, and told status quo. “Southern Negroes,” he explained, “have far more to us jokes and riddles. He always spoke not of “driving” us here or gain by conforming than by rebellion … by deserving rather than there, but of “carrying” us, a usage that to my child’s ears com- demanding more.” Elite white Virginians had inherited a legacy municated a kind of concerned protectiveness. But I scarcely of gentility accompanied by the imperatives of noblesse oblige; knew anything about his own life. He had a daughter not far from Virginia’s black people, in turn, were “inherently of a higher type my age, but I rarely saw her, because she of course went to the than those of any other state.” Nowhere else, Freeman insisted, segregated black school. I never even knew where it was. “are the Negroes more encouraged through the influence of friendship for and confidence in them, on the part of whites, to We had—and were taught we deserved—better houses, bet- be law abiding and industrious.” But never to claim equality. ter education, a better future. Yet at the very same time, we were learning in school that our nation was founded on the belief I GREW UP IN that Virginia, on a 500-acre farm a mile that all men are created equal; we were hearing in our all-white and a half from the town of Millwood, home in the 1950s church that we were all the same before God. “Join hands, dis- to about 200 people, most of them black. My childhood ciples of the faith,” the hymn commanded, “what’er your race friends—all white—lived on surrounding farms like ours. Almost may be. / All children of the living God are surely kin to me.” all the properties had names, and although our house dated from the early 19th century, many had stood since the time of the For many white southerners of my generation, a life-defining American Revolution. Saratoga had been built by Daniel Mor- question has been how long it took us to notice. When did the gan in the 1780s to commemorate the 1777 battlefield victory. contradictions become troubling? When did they become Carter Hall, Pagebrook, and Long Branch were all erected after unbearable? What was the moment of epiphany, the circum- the Revolution by scions of the Tidewater gentry. In Millwood stance that made the inconsistencies undeniable? When did it itself, most African Americans lived in dwellings that lacked run- become imperative to confront the legacies of slavery and seg- ning water. regation, to be honest with ourselves and one another and purge This was a world in which silences distorted lives, and false- the untruths that, like malignancies, had permeated our society hoods perpetuated structures of power rooted in centuries of and our lives? “It’s that obliviousness, the unexamined assump- injustice. This was still the Virginia of the poll tax and of segre- tion, that so pains me now,” the photographer Sally Mann has gated schools. Every adult black person I knew worked for white written about her 1950s Virginia childhood. “How could I not people as either a laborer or a domestic. Nevertheless, this was have wondered, not have asked.” For her, going north to school not the Deep South. The myth of “consent” required that white and encountering the writings of William Faulkner people be able to claim—and convince themselves—that black people happily accepted their assigned places. Daily life did not threw wide the door of my ignorant childhood, and the future, include COLORED and WHITE signs on water fountains or in the heartbroken future filled with hitherto unasked questions, waiting rooms. In my small rural community, people just knew. strolled easefully in. It wounded me, then and there, with the Or learned. Even my own house was segregated. The African great sadness and tragedy of our American life, with the truth of Americans who cooked and cleaned ate in the kitchen. We ate all that I had not seen, had not known, and had not asked. in the dining room, except for Sunday supper, when the workers had the evening off and my mother, who could scarcely cook at For many, the civil-rights movement and the racist pushback all, contrived to produce a meal, while we all longed for Monday to it served as a wake-up call, forcing an end to silences, expos- and the cook’s return. Behind the kitchen was a separate servants’ ing the violence on which Jim Crow rested, and removing the bathroom. When I used it once, my mother reprimanded me for veneer of timeless inevitability that whites had strived to create. invading their privacy. And a growing assertiveness by black Virginians made it ever I never witnessed physical cruelty toward black people in more difficult to maintain the fiction of separation and subjuga- my community; I never heard the N-word. Prejudice was hid- tion “by consent.” den beneath a surface of politeness and civility that scarcely masked the assumption of superiority, of greater intelligence, of I was 9 years old when the news reports about “massive resis- entitlement. Amused condescension, mockery cast as patroniz- tance” and battles over segregation made me suddenly realize ing affection, often inflected white attitudes toward “the colored that it was not a matter of accident that my school was all-white. people.” Yet as I think back, there was a nervousness about the I wrote an outraged letter to President Eisenhower—outraged laughter, a need for mutual reassurance as the adults around me because this wasn’t just, but also outraged that I only now under- recounted tales of people so close at hand yet so mysteriously and stood, that I had been somehow implicated in this without my frighteningly different from themselves. awareness. I have wondered whether I was motivated in part by my growing recognition of my own disadvantage as a girl whose mother insisted I learn to accept that I lived in a “man’s world.” I resented that my three brothers were not expected to wear itchy THE ATLANTIC AUGUST 2019 59

organdy dresses and white gloves, or learn to curtsy, or sit deco- T H I S WA S T H E WOR L D in which Governor Ralph rously, or accept innumerable other constraints on their freedom. Northam came to political consciousness. He was born I was becoming acutely attuned to what was and wasn’t fair. And in 1959 to a prominent family on Virginia’s Eastern because my parents seemed to take for granted that this was both Shore, the son and grandson of circuit judges and the great-great- a white world and a man’s world, I took it upon myself to appeal— grandson of slave owners. Northam was 12 when the schools in without telling them—to a higher power: “Please Mr. Eisenhower his county desegregated. “We didn’t see color,” he has said. please try and have schools and other things accept colored peo- ple,” I wrote. “Colored people aren’t given a chance … So what if Others growing up in that time and place, particularly Afri- their skin is black. They still have feelings but most of all are God’s can Americans, did. Bryan Stevenson is a lawyer, a social-justice people.” And I acknowledged the accident of my own privilege: “If activist, and the founder of the National Memorial for Peace I painted my face black I wouldn’t be let in any public schools etc.” and Justice, commemorating the more than 4,000 lives lost to I seem to have figured out “etc.” before I recognized the realities lynching. His great-grandparents were enslaved in Caroline of the racial arrangements that surrounded me. And, curiously, I County, Virginia. He was born on the Delmarva Peninsula, just framed what I had recognized as the contingency of race and the two months after Ralph Northam, and just 90 miles to the north. arbitrariness of my own entitlement by invoking blackface. Southern Delaware in the late 1950s was nearly as much a part Many moments in the years between Brown and the Civil of Dixie as Virginia was, and Stevenson did not have the luxury of Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 imposed not seeing color. “It seemed,” he has written, “that we were all new truth on white Americans. It was a fundamental strategy of cloaked in an unwelcome garment of racial difference that con- the civil-rights movement to create such occasions. As Martin strained, confined, and restricted us.” His school was integrated Luther King Jr. explained, peaceful demonstrators would force when he was in second grade, but white and black children kept the poison out and make it visible. The beating of the Freedom apart. Housing in his town was sharply segregated, and many Riders in 1961, the jailing of child protesters in Birmingham in African Americans lived in “tiny shacks” without indoor plumb- 1963, the clubbing and gassing of John Lewis and other marchers ing. Stevenson was subjected to regular racial humiliations—told, on the bridge in Selma in 1965—all were vividly displayed to the for example, to enter through the back door at the doctor’s office American public in a manner TV had made newly possible. These to receive his vaccinations, and to wait while all the white chil- horrors challenged complacency and compelled many Ameri- dren received their shots first. When he once went swimming cans to ask themselves, “Which Side Are You On?” at a motel, he was threatened by white parents who pulled their children from the pool. Color and race have defined his life and B U T WE KNOW NOW, half a century later, that none his life’s work as a death-penalty lawyer: African Americans of this was even close to enough to overturn centu- are present on death row at three times their proportion in the ries of racial injustice. By the time of King’s murder, in national population. Not to see color, its legacies and its enduring April 1968, little sense of consoling moral clarity remained. King effects on our society, is not to see. “What’s struck me about the himself had embraced controversial new positions—taking Northam matter,” Stevenson wrote to me recently, “is how much his protests into the North, insisting on confronting economic of the white South has been acculturated to not see or think about inequality, and speaking out against the Vietnam War. Many Afri- the victimization of black people, their humiliation through Jim can American activists had broken with King, advocating Black Crow, their terror in the face of lynching and racial violence and Power rather than racial reconciliation, abandoning nonviolence, the constant degradation as human.” and denouncing King as an accommodationist. The nation has forgotten that a poll taken in 1966 revealed that nearly two-thirds Virginia voted for Barack Obama in 2008. His victory brought of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of the civil-rights leader. me to tears on Election Night as I remembered a time when it was difficult in Virginia to cast a ballot as a black person and His death muted voices of criticism and opposition and punc- completely impossible to imagine the state voting for a black tuated the end of an era: Montgomery to Memphis. Like King person. A great deal had changed, but so much had not. Only himself, those years were transformed into a myth of national a little more than a decade earlier, Virginia had made a gesture redemption—and, dangerously, of work complete. Now that the to confront its complex history when Richmond’s city coun- era seemed safely over, no longer a threat to the status quo, we cil voted to add a statue honoring the African American tennis could celebrate it. The story of the civil-rights movement became, star and native son Arthur Ashe to the parade of Confederate as Julian Bond commented with no little bitterness: “Rosa sat heroes memorialized on Monument Avenue. The city erupted in down, Martin stood up, then the white folks saw the light and controversy, heralding what would become a widening conflict saved the day.” over Confederate symbols. It was a conflict that would produce clashes across the South, but pose special challenges in Virginia, Bond was right that the movement compelled many white where a gradually emerging blue majority confronted persist- people to begin to see the light. He was also correct that there ing numbers of conservatives, traditionalists, and out-and-out remained a great deal we had scarcely begun to see, much less reactionaries—as well as countless memorials to the Southern do something about. But the emergence of the oversimplified soldiers who had fought more than 100 battles on Virginia soil. and consoling narrative of the civil-rights movement gave many The state’s vote for Obama, like that of the nation more generally, white Americans permission to not look further. The nation only briefly obscured deep and lingering racial divisions. retreated into a kind of post-’60s fatigue, as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan ascended to office with the support of a not-so- At the same time Americans were congratulating themselves silent majority that believed black people had progressed quite for having become a “postracial” nation after Obama’s victory, far enough. Many white Virginians were comforted to return to the Secret Service was responding to unprecedented numbers of the traditional narrative of racial harmony, now imbued with far threats, many explicitly racial, against the new president and his greater legitimacy after the drama—and the accomplishments— family. Obama’s arrival in the White House in important ways of the civil-rights movement. ratified the progress that the nation had made, and Obama him- self embraced that story. When Congressman John Lewis, the 60 AUGUST 2019 THE ATLANTIC

civil-rights hero, asked Obama to autograph a photo on Inau- or even multiple resignations. This is about a long and troubled guration Day, the new president wrote: “Because of you, John.” history that must be understood and confronted. But the accession of a black man to power invited backlash We have, thankfully, moved beyond the giddy and unfounded and produced outbursts of racial hatred that made clear America assumption that we are postracial. But I worry that we are still was neither postracial nor color-blind: the deaths of unarmed avoiding the most fundamental work. The media frequently report black men in cities from Ferguson to Baltimore, the shooting of accusations that one or another public figure is a racist, and usu- nine church members in Charleston by a rabid white supremacist, ally the circumstances or actions described are deeply concern- and the reversals of signal civil-rights achievements through the ing and worthy of condemnation. It is good that we are noticing. evisceration of the Voting Rights Act and assaults on affirmative But name-calling and shaming seem to me too often expressions action. In Virginia there was also the horror of Charlottesville, of a certain smugness and self-righteousness on the part of the where white supremacists and Nazis invaded Mr. Jefferson’s Aca- accuser, acts that too often simply seek to separate us into saved demical Village in a stunning juxtaposition of his highest ideals and damned, sheep and goats. And, of course, accusations supply with the consequences of his worst sins. The state’s long history endless gotcha moments to generate clicks and feed social media. of endeavoring to cover its racial inequities with a surface gentility, This pattern is also dangerous. It situates the issue of race in indi- of repressing the contradictions between power and justice, made viduals and their personal morality or choices, rather than focusing Virginia particularly vulnerable to the revelations of an era of sharp on the broader, structural, historical forces that perpetuate inequal- polarization—and an era of social media and all but obligatory ity and injustice in the United States—inequality and injustice for transparency. The supposed benevolence of paternalism could which we all, sheep and goats alike, bear responsibility. These are, no longer shield its fundamental assumptions of hierarchy and as King emphasized long ago, “evils that are rooted deeply in the supremacy. The obfuscations that had buttressed the myths of whole structure of our society.” Ralph Northam is the product of Virginia’s racial tranquility began to be exposed as the deceptions four centuries of Virginia’s—and America’s—contradictions and and equivocations they had blindnesses, and the com- always been. In Virginia, as plex, discriminatory racial in the nation, there could be order they have created. little foundation for compla- LIKE SO MANY WHITE Black families lost far more cency about racial progress. wealth in the Great Reces- We still have not VIRGINIANS BEFORE sion than white families did. addressed the roots of our HIM, RALPH NORTHAM HAS Our system of incarcera- racial divisions. We still tion imprisons one in three perpetuate the denials that BEEN CAUGHT UP IN THE African American men over enable these injustices. That CONTRADICTIONS OF THE WORLD the course of their lifetimes. is one lesson of the Ralph Black American women are Northam episode. Here is a OF WHITE PRIVILEGE three times as likely to die man who was elected gov- AND ITS OBLIVIOUSNESS from pregnancy-related ernor with strong minority causes as white women are. support, who has urged the TO BLACK INJURY. The long history of oppres- removal of Confederate sion and prejudice has statues, who seems to want shaped everything from atti- to do the right thing on mat- tudes to housing patterns. ters of race. But like so many Only by understanding this white Virginians before him, he has been caught up in the con- history can we hope to at last transcend it. tradictions of the world of white privilege and its obliviousness to In its long pursuit of a more genteel white supremacy—a unique black injury. He professed surprise and bewilderment at the rev- Virginia Way of oppression—the state has nurtured the denial, the elation that his yearbook page included a racist photograph. This failure to see, that Ralph Northam represents. The story of Vir- single photograph simultaneously invokes the histories of racial ginia compels us to recognize how important it is that we open violence and racial degradation, cruelly dismissing their grav- our eyes and actively resist the assumptions and traditions that ity by casting them in the guise of comedy and youthful foolery. would obscure our vision. To imagine we are or can be color-blind What was most striking to me about the incident is that it had is to render ourselves history-blind—to ignore realities that have not seemed of sufficient significance to Northam in 1984 for him definedusforgoodandforill.TheFoundersembracedbothslavery even to remember whether he was one of the men pictured— and freedom. We have inherited the legacy, and the cost, of both. though, on second thought, he said he believed he was not. To Bryan Stevenson frequently remarks that we are all more than associate yourself with the Klan or the performance of black humil- the worst thing we have done. Perhaps Ralph Northam is still in iation was evidently neither noteworthy nor memorable. He seems, office because enough Virginians share that view. Perhaps some- dismayingly, to be right about that. A survey undertaken by report- how we as a nation can acknowledge our worst things and finally ers for USA Today of 900 yearbooks from the 1970s and ’80s found overcome them. “The past will remain horrible,” James Baldwin dozens of photos of students from across the nation in blackface, wrote, “for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.” And in Klan garb, and even acting out mock lynchings. Perhaps this is it will poison the present as well. one reason polls have reported that African Americans oppose Northam’s resignation. They were not all that surprised. Drew Gilpin Faust, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, is a for- And they understand that even though this is about Northam mer president of Harvard University, where she is the Arthur King- and his inexcusable actions, it is also about something much sley Porter University Professor. She is the author of This Republic larger, something that cannot be solved by a single resignation, of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008). THE ATLANTIC AUGUST 2019 61

RAJ C HETT Y’S AMERICAN DREAM THE ECONOMIST WHOSE WORK DISPELLED THE MYTH OF SOCIAL MOBILITY IN THE U.S. HAS A PLAN TO MAKE IT A REALITY.

BY GARETH COOK Photographs by Carlos Chavarría THE ATLANTIC AUGUST 2019 63

RAJ CHETTY GOT HIS BIGGEST BREAK BEFORE HIS LIFE BEGAN. His mother, Anbu, grew up in Tamil Nadu, a tropical state at the families fare across generations, revealing striking patterns of southern tip of the Indian subcontinent. Anbu showed the greatest upward mobility and stagnation. In one early study, he showed academic potential of her five siblings, but her future was con- that children born in 1940 had a 90 percent chance of earning strained by custom. Although Anbu’s father encouraged her schol- more than their parents, but for children born four decades later, arly inclinations, there were no colleges in the area, and sending that chance had fallen to 50 percent, a toss of a coin. his daughter away for an education would have been unseemly. In 2013, Chetty released a colorful map of the United States, But as Anbu approached the end of high school, a minor mir- showing the surprising degree to which people’s financial pros- acle redirected her life. A local tycoon, himself the father of a pects depend on where they happen to grow up. In Salt Lake City, bright daughter, decided to open a women’s college, housed in a person born to a family in the bottom fifth of household income his elegant residence. Anbu was admitted to the inaugural class had a 10.8 percent chance of reaching the top fifth. In Milwaukee, of 30 young women, learning English in the spacious courtyard the odds were less than half that. under a thatched roof and traveling in the early mornings by bus to a nearby college to run chemistry experiments or dissect frogs’ Since then, each of his studies has become a front-page media hearts before the men arrived. Anbu excelled, and so began a event (“Chetty bombs,” one collaborator calls them) that com- rapid upward trajectory. She enrolled in medical school. “Why,” bines awe—millions of data points, vivid infographics, a country- her father was asked, “do you send her there?” Among their Chet- wide lens—with shock. This may not be the America you’d like tiar caste, husbands commonly worked abroad for years at a time, to imagine, the statistics testify, but it’s what we’ve allowed sending back money, while wives were left to raise the children. America to become. Dozens of the nation’s elite colleges have What use would a medical degree be to a stay-at-home mother? more children of the 1 percent than from families in the bottom 60 percent of family income. A black boy born to a wealthy family In 1962, Anbu married Veerappa Chetty, a brilliant man from is more than twice as likely to end up poor as a white boy from a Tamil Nadu whose mother and grandmother had sometimes wealthy family. Chetty has established Big Data as a moral force eaten less food so there would be more for him. Anbu became a in the American debate. doctor and supported her husband while he earned a doctorate in economics. By 1979, when Raj was born in New Delhi, his mother Now he wants to do more than change our understanding of was a pediatrics professor and his father was an economics profes- America—he wants to change America itself. His new Harvard- sor who had served as an adviser to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. based institute, called Opportunity Insights, is explicitly aimed at applying his findings in cities around the country and demon- When Chetty was 9, his family moved to the United States, strating that social scientists, despite a discouraging track record, and he began a climb nearly as dramatic as that of his parents. are able to fix the problems they articulate in journals. His staff He was the valedictorian of his high-school class, then gradu- includes an eight-person policy team, which is building partner- ated in just three years from Harvard University, where he went ships with Charlotte, Seattle, Detroit, Minneapolis, and other cities. on to earn a doctorate in economics and, at age 28, was among the youngest faculty members in the university’s history to be For a man who has done so much to document the country’s offered tenure. In 2012, he was awarded the MacArthur genius failings, Chetty is curiously optimistic. He has the confidence of grant. The following year, he was given the John Bates Clark a scientist: If a phenomenon like upward mobility can be mea- Medal, awarded to the most promising economist under 40. (He sured with enough precision, then it can be understood; if it can was 33 at the time.) In 2015, Stanford University hired him away. be understood, then it can be manipulated. “The big-picture Last summer, Harvard lured him back to launch his own research goal,” Chetty told me, “is to revive the American dream.” and policy institute, with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. L ast summer, I visited Opportunity Insights on its opening day. The offices are housed on Chetty turns 40 this month, and is widely considered to be the second floor of a brick building, above a one of the most influential social scientists of his generation. café and across Massachusetts Avenue from “The question with Raj,” says Harvard’s Edward Glaeser, one of Harvard’s columned Widener Library. Chetty the country’s leading urban economists, “is not if he will win a arrived in econ-casual: a lilac dress shirt, no jacket, black slacks. Nobel Prize, but when.” He is tall and trim, with an untroubled air; he smiled as he greeted two of his longtime collaborators—the Brown Univer- The work that has brought Chetty such fame is an echo of his sity economist John Friedman and Harvard’s Nathaniel Hendren. family’s history. He has pioneered an approach that uses newly available sources of government data to show how American 64 A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC

COURTESY OF RAJ CHETTY They walked him around, showing off the finished space, done C harlotte is one of America’s great urban suc- in a modern palette of white, wood, and aluminum with accent cess stories. In the 1970s, it was a modest-size walls of yellow and sage. city left behind as the textile industry that had defined North Carolina moved overseas. But Later, after Chetty and his colleagues had finished giving in the 1980s, the “Queen City” began to lift a day of seminars to their new staff, I caught up with him in itself up. US Airways established a hub at the Charlotte Douglas his office, which was outfitted with a pristine whiteboard, an International Airport, and the region became a major transpor- adjustable-height desk, and a Herman Miller chair that still had tation and distribution center. Bank of America built its head- the tags attached. The first time I’d met him, at an economics quarters there, and today Charlotte is in a dead heat with San conference, he had told me he was one of several cousins on his Francisco to be the nation’s second-largest banking center, after mother’s side who go by Raj, all named after their grandfather, New York. New skyscrapers have sprouted downtown, and the Nadarajan, all with sharp minds and the same long legs and easy city boundary has been expanding, replacing farmland with spa- gait. Yet of Nadarajan’s children, only Chetty’s mother graduated cious homes and Whole Foods stores. In the past four decades, from college, and he’s certain that this fact shaped his genera- Charlotte’s population has nearly tripled. tion’s possibilities. He was able to come to the United States as a Charlotte has also stood out in Chetty’s research, though child and attend an elite private school, the University School of not in a good way. In a 2014 analysis of the country’s 50 larg- Milwaukee. New York Raj—the family appends a location to keep est metropolitan areas, Charlotte ranked last in ability to lift up them straight—came to the U.S. later in life, at age 28, worked in poor children. Only 4.4 percent of Charlotte’s kids moved from drugstores, and then took a series of jobs with the City of New the bottom quintile of household income to the top. Kids born York. Singapore Raj found a job in a temple there that allows into low-income families earned just $26,000 a year, on average, him to support his family back in India, but means they must as adults—perched on the poverty line. “It was shocking,” says live apart. Karaikudi Raj, named for the town where his mother Brian Collier, an executive vice president of the Foundation for grew up, committed suicide as a teenager. the Carolinas, which is working with Opportunity Insights. “The Charlotte story is that we are a meritocracy, that if you come here I asked Boston Raj to consider what might have become of and are smart and motivated, you will have every opportunity to him if that wealthy Indian businessman had not decided, in the achieve greatness.” The city’s true story, Chetty’s data showed, precise year his mother was finishing high school, to create a is of selective opportunity: All the data-scientist and business- college for the talented women of southeastern Tamil Nadu. “I development-analyst jobs in the thriving banking sector are a would likely not be here,” he said, thinking for a moment. “To boon for out-of-towners and the progeny of the well-to-do, but put it another way: Who are all the people who are not here, to grow up poor in Charlotte is largely to remain poor. who would have been here if they’d had the opportunities? That is a really good question.” To help cities like Charlotte, Chetty takes inspiration from medicine. For thou- Chetty at age 9. He was later valedictorian of his sands of years, he explained, little progress high school, and he went on to earn an undergraduate degree was made in understanding disease, until and a doctorate in economics from Harvard University. technologies like the microscope gave sci- At age 28, he was among the youngest faculty members in entists novel ways to understand biology, the university’s history to be offered tenure. and thus the pathologies that make people ill. In October, Chetty’s institute released an interactive map of the United States called the Opportunity Atlas, revealing the terrain of opportunity down to the level of individual neighborhoods. This, he says, will be his microscope. Drawing on anonymized govern- ment data over a three-decade span, the researchers linked children to the parents who claimed them as dependents. The atlas then followed poor kids from every census tract in the country, showing how much they went on to earn as adults. The colors on the atlas reveal a generation’s prospects: red for areas where kids fared the worst; shades of orange, yellow, and green for middling locales; and blue for spots like Salt Lake City’s Foothill neighborhood, where upward mobility is strongest. It can also track children born into higher income brackets, compare results by race and gen- der, and zoom out to show states, regions, or the country as a whole. The Opportunity Atlas has a fractal quality. Some regions of the United States THE ATLANTIC AUGUST 2019 65

Left: A map consulted by President Abraham Lincoln in 1861, demarcating the counties with the most slaves. Right: A detail from Chetty’s Opportunity Atlas, in which areas with poor upward mobil- ity are shown in red. The similari- ties between the two documents sug- gest that it will be difficult for Chetty to change the landscape of opportunity. look better than high-mobility countries such as Denmark, while Boulevard on the other, encompassing the mostly white, mostly LIBRARY OF CONGRESS others look more like a developing country. The Great Plains affluent areas where children generally grow up to do well. Sur- unfurl as a sea of blue, and then the eye is caught by an island rounding the wedge is a broad expanse in hues of red that locals of red—a mark of the miseries inflicted on the Oglala Lakota by call “the crescent,” made up of predominantly black neighbor- European settlers. These stark differences recapitulate themselves hoods where the prospects for poor children are pretty miserable. on smaller and smaller scales as you zoom in. It’s common to see Hunger and homelessness are common, and in some places only opposite extremes of opportunity within easy walking distance of one in five high-school students scores “proficient” on standard- each other, even in two neighborhoods that long-term residents ized tests. In many parts of the crescent, the question isn’t What’s would consider quite similar. holding kids back? so much as What isn’t holding them back? It’s hard to know where to start. To find a cure for what ails America, Chetty will need to understand all of this wild variation. Which factors foster oppor- The most significant challenge Chetty faces is the force of tunity, and which impede it? The next step will be to find local history. In the 1930s, redlining prevented black families from interventions that can address these factors—and to prove, with buying homes in Charlotte’s more desirable neighborhoods. In experimental trials, that the interventions work. The end goal is the 1940s, the city built Independence Boulevard, a four-lane the social equivalent of precision medicine: a method for diag- highway that cut through the heart of its Brooklyn neighborhood, nosing the particular weaknesses of a place and prescribing a set dividing and displacing a thriving working-class black commu- of treatments. This could transform neighborhoods, and restore nity. The damage continued in the ’60s and ’70s with new inter- the American dream from the ground up. states. It’s common to hear that something has gone wrong in parts of Charlotte, but the more honest reading is that Charlotte If all of this seems impossibly ambitious, Chetty’s counter- is working as it was designed to. American cities are the way they argument is to point to how the blue is marbled in with the red. are, and remain the way they are, because of choices they have “We are not trying to do something that is unimaginable or has made and continue to make. never happened,” he told me over lunch one day. “It happens just down the road.” Does a professor from Harvard, even one as influential and well funded as Chetty, truly stand any chance of bending the Yet in Charlotte, where Opportunity Insights hopes to build American story line? On his national atlas, the most obvious fea- its proof of concept, the atlas reveals swaths of bleak unifor- ture is an ugly red gash that starts in Virginia, curls down through mity. Looking at the city, you first see a large bluish wedge south the Southeast’s coastal states—North Carolina, South Carolina, of downtown, with Providence Road on one side and South 66 A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC

HOUSEHOLD INCOME FOR CHILDREN OF LO W-IN C O M E PA REN T S OPPORTUNITY INSIGHTS/ Georgia, and Alabama—then marches west toward the Missis- his wife, Sundari, after one of his sisters got to know her through U.S. CENSUS BUREAU sippi River, where it turns northward before petering out in west- the Chettiar community. (Sundari is a stem-cell biologist.) ern Tennessee. When I saw this, I was reminded of another map: one President Abraham Lincoln consulted in 1861, demarcating Chetty had always been drawn to public economics—the the counties with the most slaves. The two maps are remark- study of government policy and how it might be improved. And, ably similar. Set the documents side by side, and it may be hard as it happened, he was embarking on his career as a revolution to believe that they are separated in time by more than a cen- in the field was under way. In the past, economists had to rely tury and a half, or that one is a rough census of men and women heavily on surveys, but the advent of cheap, powerful comput- kept in bondage at the time of the Civil War, and the other is a ing allowed for a new kind of economics—one that drew on the computer-generated glimpse of our children’s future. extensive administrative data gathered by governments. Survey participants number in the hundreds or thousands; administra- I n 2003, after earning his doctorate, Chetty tive data can yield records in the hundreds of millions. moved to UC Berkeley for his first job. He was, at the time, the only person in his immediate In November 2007, Chetty came across an ad from the IRS family—his parents and two older sisters, both seeking help organizing its electronic files into a format that biomedical researchers—who had not published would be easier to use for research. He immediately recognized a paper. Education was highly prized. He was taught that it would that completing the job would make it possible for scholars to be sacrilege to ever step on a book. When he visits his parents at go far deeper into tax data. He and John Friedman began the their home, north of Boston, his mother still makes him a favorite process of registering to be federal contractors—which involved, dish with bhindi (Hindi for “okra”), which, she told me, is sup- among other things, certifying that their workplace met federal posed to be good for the brain. safety standards, and calling on Friedman’s brother, who lived in Both of Chetty’s parents descend from the Chettiar caste, a Washington, D.C., to take a cab out to Maryland to hand-deliver mercantile group historically involved in banking, and the kids their application materials, in triplicate. were raised to carry on their cultural heritage. They learned Tamil in addition to Hindi. Chetty’s sisters married men with Chettiar Like many good ideas, the project seems obvious in retrospect, backgrounds. Chetty rejects the caste system, though he first met but the truth is that nobody could have known how useful the data would prove to be—and it worked only because Chetty and his colleagues have an almost superhuman degree of patience. Nathaniel Hendren, who has known Chetty for seven years, told me he’s never seen Chetty happier than one Friday evening THE ATLANTIC AUGUST 2019 67

in the summer of 2014, when they were sitting in some IRS cubi- the economists found, had gone on to earn 31 percent more than cles at the John F. Kennedy Federal Building in downtown Boston. those who hadn’t moved, and 4 percent more of them attended (The only way to access the government’s data was inside a fed- college. They calculated that for an 8-year-old child, the value of eral building, on secure servers, with the computers logging their the extra future earnings over a lifetime was almost $100,000, a requests.) That night, Chetty and Hendren were wrestling with substantial sum for a poor family. For a family with two children, thousands of lines of code designed to pull together responses the taxes paid on the extra income more than covered the costs scattered across hundreds of millions of 1040s, W2s, and other of the program. “The big insight,” Kathryn Edin, a sociology pro- forms (taxpayer names are kept separate to protect privacy), while fessor at Princeton, told me, “is that it took a generation for the ensuring that nothing in the code introduced errors or subtle effects to manifest.” biases. At some point, Hendren recalled, he heard Chetty yell “Sweet!” Hendren looked over and Chetty, smiling, explained that his flight out of Logan airport that night had just been delayed: more time to work. Over the past two decades, economists have tried to structure their work, as much as possible, to resem- ble scientific experiments. This “credibility revolu- tion” is an attempt to explicitly link causes to effects, and sweep aside the old criticism that correlation is not the same as causation. One of the advantages of the large tax database Chetty and his colleagues con- structed is that it allows “quasi-experiments”—clever statistical methods that approach the power of a true experiment without requiring a researcher to, say, randomly assign children to live in different cities. For example, Chetty and Hendren looked at chil- dren who changed cities. They found that the later a child moved to a higher-opportunity area, the less effect the move seemed to have on future earnings. But they also devised additional tests to ensure that the effect was causal, such as looking at siblings who moved at the same time: a quasi-experiment in which two children grew up in the same family, but were exposed to a new area for a shorter or longer period depending on their age at the time of the move. The result was a highly credible conclusion, based on mil- lions of data points, that moving a child to a better neighborhood boosts his or her future income—and the younger the child, the greater the benefit. There was, however, a significant problem: Their conclusion contradicted one of the most influential poverty experiments of recent decades. In the 1990s, the federal government launched Moving to Oppor- tunity, a program designed to relocate families living in public housing to safer neighborhoods, where they had access to better jobs and schools. Thousands of families in five cities were randomly selected to receive housing vouchers and support services to help them move to lower-poverty areas. After a decade of study, researchers concluded that while these “mover” families experienced some physical and mental-health benefits, test scores among the kids didn’t rise, and there were no signs of financial benefit for adults or older children. In 2014, Chetty, Hendren, and the Harvard econo- mist Lawrence Katz asked the IRS and the Depart- ment of Housing and Urban Development, which had overseen the program, for permission to take another look at what had happened to the children. When the earlier follow-up had been done, the youngest kids, who had moved before they were teenagers, had not Chetty believes that if upward mobility can be measured yet reached their earning years, and this turned out to with enough precision, it can be understood. “The big-picture goal,” make all the difference. This young group of movers, he told me, “is to revive the American dream.” 68 A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC

the 1980s—the expected household income at age 35 is a dismal $17,800, on average. But in East Forest, a white, working-class neighborhood in southeast Charlotte, the expected future income jumps to $32,600. There are places like East Forest in cities around the country. Chetty and his team have taken to calling them “opportunity bar- gains”: places with relatively affordable rents that punch above ast July, I took a tour of Char- their weight with respect to opportunity. He doesn’t yet know lotte with David Williams, the 34-year-old policy director of why some places are opportunity bargains, but he considers the Opportunity Insights and the man responsible for translat- discovery of these neighborhoods to be a breakthrough. John ing Chetty’s research into action on the ground. Williams and members of his team crammed Friedman told me that if the government had been able to move into the back of a white Ford Explorer with color printouts of various Charlotte neighbor- families to opportunity-bargain neighborhoods in the original hoods as they appear on the atlas. Brian Col- lier, of the Foundation for the Carolinas, Moving to Opportunity experiment—places selected for higher sat in the front seat, serving as a guide. As the driver headed northeast, the high- opportunity, not lower poverty—the children’s earnings improve- rises of “Uptown” shifted abruptly to low- slung buildings and chain-link fences. Collier ments would have been more than twice as great. pointed out a men’s shelter in the rapidly gen- trifying neighborhood of Lockwood, where Chetty’s team has already begun to apply this concept in he’d recently seen a drug deal go down a block away from a house that had sold for half a mil- another of its partner cities, Seattle, working with two local housing lion dollars. We continued on to Brightwalk, a new authorities to navigate the thorny process of translating research mixed-income development with long rows of townhomes, before turning west for a loop into measurable social change. It’s hard for poor families to man- around West Charlotte High School, a once- lauded model of successful integration. In the age an expansive housing search, which requires time, transpor- 1990s, though, support for busing waned, and in 1999, a judge declared that race could not tation, and decent credit. The group created a program with be used as a factor in school assignment. Now the student population is virtually all minority “housing navigators,” who point participants toward areas with and overwhelmingly poor, and the surround- ing neighborhood is deep red on the atlas. relatively high opportunity, help with credit-related issues, and The homes are neat, one-story single fami- lies, a tad rough around the edges but nothing even give neighborhood tours. Landlords need encouragement like the burnt-out buildings in Detroit, where Williams previously worked on economic as well. They can be wary of tenants bearing vouchers, which development for the mayor. “It reminds you how hard it is to tell where real opportunity is,” mean government oversight and paperwork. The Seattle pro- Williams said. “You can’t just see it.” Opportunity is not the same as affluence. gram has streamlined this process, and offers free damage insur- Consider a kid who grows up in a household earning about $27,000 annually, right at the ance to sweeten the deal. 25th percentile nationally. In Beverly Woods, a relatively wealthy, mostly white enclave Tenants have just started moving, but the program is already in South Charlotte with spacious, well-kept yards, he could expect his household income successful: The majority of families who received assistance to be $42,900 by age 35. Yet in Huntersville, an attractive northern suburb with nearly the same moved to high-opportunity areas, compared with one-fifth average household income as Beverly Woods, a similar kid could expect only $24,800—a stark for the control group, which was not provided with the extra difference, invisible to a passing driver. This dynamic also functions in poorer services. Chetty estimates areas. For a child in Reid Park, an African American neighborhood on the west side of that the program will increase Charlotte, near the airport—a place that has struggled to recover from a crime epidemic in each child’s lifetime earn- ings by $88,000. In Febru- “WE ARE NOT ary, President Donald Trump signed into law a bill that TRYING TO provides $28 million to try DO SOMETHING similar experimental pro- THAT IS grams in other locations. The UNIMAGINABLE bill enjoyed overwhelming bipartisan support, and this OR HAS NEVER spring Chetty was invited to HAPPENED,” brief the Department of Hous- CHETTY TOLD ing and Urban Development. ME. “IT HAPPENS He told me he’s hopeful that the program can be expanded JUST DOWN to the 2.2 million families that THE ROAD.” receive HUD housing vouch- ers every year. “Then you’d actually be doing something about poverty in the Ameri- can city,” he said. “What I like about this is it’s not some pie- in-the-sky thing. We have something that works.” Charlotte is among the cities interested in implementing the Seattle strategy, but officials also want to use the atlas to select better building sites for affordable housing. In the past, much of the city’s affordable housing was constructed in what Chetty’s data reveal to be high-poverty, low-opportunity areas. “Let’s not just think about building X units of new affordable housing,” THE ATLANTIC AUGUST 2019 69

Williams said. “Let’s really leverage housing policy as part of a (The number of male inventors had little effect.) Even which fields larger economic-mobility agenda for the community.” inventors worked in was heavily influenced by what was being Opportunity bargains, however, are not an inexhaustible resource. The crucial question, says the Berkeley economist invented around them as children. Those who grew up in the Bay Enrico Moretti, is whether the opportunity in these places derives from “rival goods”—institutions, such as schools, with Area had some of the highest rates of patenting in computers and limited capacity—or “non-rival goods,” such as local culture, which are harder to deplete. When new people move in, what related fields, while those who spent their childhood in Minneap- happens to opportunity? And even if an influx of families doesn’t disrupt the opportunity magic, people aren’t always eager to olis, home of the Mayo Clinic, pick up and leave their homes. Moving breaks ties with family, friends, schools, churches, and other organizations. “The real tended to invent drugs and conundrum is how to address the larger structural realities of inequality,” says the Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson, “and medical devices. Chetty is cur- not just try to move people around.” rently working with data from F or all he’s learned about where opportunity resides in America, Chetty knows surprisingly IN THE CRIMSON Facebook and other social- little about what makes one place better than another. He and Hendren have gathered a SECTORS OF media platforms to quantify range of social-science data sets and looked for CHETTY’S ATLAS, the links between opportunity correlations to the atlas. The high-opportunity places, they’ve THE PROBLEM and our social networks. found, tend to share five qualities: good schools, greater levels of social cohesion, many two-parent families, low levels of income Sociologists embrace many inequality, and little residential segregation, by either class or race. The list is suggestive, but hard to interpret. IS BOTH THE ways of understanding the For example, the strongest correlation is the number of intact families. The explanation seems obvious: A second parent usu- ABSENCE OF world. They shadow people ally means higher family income as well as more stability, a OPPORTUNITY AND and move into communities, broader social network, additional emotional support, and many THE PRESENCE OF wondering what they might other intangibles. Yet children’s upward mobility was strongly find out. They collect data and correlated with two-parent families only in the neighborhood, not necessarily in their home. There are so many things the data ITS OPPOSITE: do quantitative analysis and might be trying to say. Maybe fathers in a neighborhood serve as mentors and role models? Or maybe there is no causal connec- SWIFT CURRENTS read economics papers, but tion at all. Perhaps, for example, places with strong church com- THAT CAN DRAG their work is also informed by munities help kids while also fostering strong marriages. The A PERSON DOWN. psychology and cultural stud- same kinds of questions flow from every correlation; each one ies. “When you are released may mean many things. What is cause, what is effect, and what are we missing? Chetty’s microscope has revealed a new world, from the harsh demands of but not what animates it—or how to change it. Chetty has found that opportunity does not correlate with experiment, you are allowed many traditional economic measures, such as employment or wage growth. In the search for opportunity’s cause, he is instead to make new discoveries and focusing on an idea borrowed from sociology: social capital. The term refers broadly to the set of connections that ease a person’s think more freely about what way through the world, providing support and inspiration and opening doors. is going on,” says David Grusky, a Stanford sociology professor Economics has long played the role of sociology’s annoying older brother—conventionally accomplished and wholeheart- who collaborates with Chetty. I asked Princeton’s Edin what she edly confident, unaware of what he doesn’t know, while still com- manding everyone’s attention. Chetty, though, is part of a younger thought would end up being the one thing that best explains the generation of scholars who have embraced a style of quantitative social science that crosses old disciplinary lines. There are strong peaks and valleys of American opportunity. She said her best guess hints in his research that social capital and mobility are intimately connected; even a crude measure of social capital, such as the is “some kind of social glue”—the ties that bind people, fostered number of bowling alleys in a neighborhood, seems to track with opportunity. His data also suggest that who you know growing up by well-functioning institutions, whether they are mosques or can have lasting effects. A paper on patents he co-authored found that young women were more likely to become inventors if they’d neighborhood soccer leagues. The staff at Opportunity Insights moved as children to places where many female inventors lived. has learned: When an economist gets lost, a sociologist can touch his elbow and say, You know, I’ve been noticing some things. I n Charlotte, Chetty still aspires to practice “pre- cision medicine,” but he told me his initial goal is more modest: to see whether he and his team can find anything that helps. Opportunity Insights is planning housing and higher-education initia- tives, but social capital is at the center of its approach. It is working with a local organization called Leading on Opportunity, and look- ing at nonprofits that are already operating successfully, including Communities in Schools, a national group that provides compre- hensive student support, as well as a job-training program called Year Up. Chetty is also using tax data to measure the long-term impacts of dozens of place-based interventions, such as enterprise zones, which use tax and other incentives to draw businesses into economically depressed areas. (He expects to see initial results from these analyses later this year.) Chetty may not have many answers yet, but he is convinced that this combination of data, col- laboration, and fieldwork will make it possible to move from edu- cated guesses to tailored prescriptions. “There are points when the pieces come together,” Chetty told me. “My instinct is that in social science, this generation is when that is going to happen.” Chetty’s pitch to the nation is that our problems have techno- cratic solutions, but at times I sense that he is avoiding an argu- ment. Surely our neighborhoods can be improved, and those 70 A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC

improvements can help the next generation achieve better out- and the prospects that were beginning to open up for Jones there, comes. But what of the larger forces driving the enormous dis- and moved to New Jersey, where she grew up. When I last spoke parities in American wealth? Poor people would be better off if with her, she’d found work at an Amazon warehouse. their children had better prospects, but also if they had more money—if the fruits of our society were shared more broadly. “I ne Friday evening, I was in Chetty’s Stan- can take money from you and give it to me, and maybe that is ford office when a ballerina arrived. Sanvi, good and maybe it is not,” he said. “I feel like there are a lot of Chetty’s 3-year-old daughter, wore a pink people working on redistribution, and it is hard to figure out the tutu with matching hair ribbons and tights. right answer there.” To focus on the question of who gets what is She declined—vigorously—the white sweater also, of course, politically incendiary. offered to ward off the evening chill. Chetty and I had spent hours discussing his research, but when the nanny dropped Sanvi off, Chetty believes there is more progress to be made through a it marked the end of the day. Chetty gathered his things and moral framing that is less partisan. “There are so many kids out whisked her up in his arms. “Hold me properly, Apa,” Sanvi there who could be doing so many great things, both for themselves admonished. Outside, we got into Chetty’s aging silver Acura and and for the world,” he said. Chetty’s challenge to the system is headed to an Indonesian restaurant for takeout. Sanvi bubbled measured and empirical; it’s one that billionaires and corporations with enthusiasm. “I want to be a fairy princess,” she announced can happily endorse. But his stance is also a simple matter of per- from the back seat. “Can I be a fairy princess?” Chetty glanced sonality: Chetty is no agitator. He told me, “I like to find solutions in the rearview mirror and assured Sanvi that when she grows up, that please everyone in the room, and this definitely has that feel.” she can be whatever she wants. After stopping for the food, we pulled up to a light-brown In Charlotte, even the circumscribed version of social change ranch house, with beautiful plantings out front. Inside, the house that Chetty is attempting looks daunting. Last summer, before was clearly Sanvi’s. Taking a seat in the open kitchen, I was sur- the Opportunity Insights team came to town, I drove around rounded by a tapestry of exuberant finger paintings taped to the to the back of West Charlotte High School, to a hamlet of pale- walls, interspersed with pages neatly torn from coloring books yellow temporary-classroom buildings, each set on concrete (penguins, parrots, bunnies, each splashed with color). A pair of blocks. One building has been given over to Eliminate the Digi- persimmon trees were fruiting out back. tal Divide, known as E2D, a nonprofit that takes donations of old Chetty told me that his interest in poverty dates back to the laptops, then refurbishes and distributes them for $60 apiece to horrifying want he observed on the streets of New Delhi. But only students who have no computer of their own. According to E2D, when he built the first version of his atlas did he see what he should half of the county’s public-school students have been unable do about it. “I realized,” he said, “we could have the biggest impact to complete a homework assignment because they don’t have on poverty by focusing on children.” access to a computer or the internet. Chetty thinks about revolution like an economist does: as a compounding accumulation of marginal changes. Bump the Inside the E2D building is a bright room ringed by a series of interest rate on your savings account by one notch, and 30 years workstations where West Charlotte student-employees inspect later, your balance is much improved. Move a family to a better laptops, set up hard drives, and test the final products. White- zip code, or foster the right conditions in that family’s current boards, photos, and posters with inspirational phrases like COL- neighborhood, and their children will do better; do that a thou- LEGE BOUND! cover the walls. By the door, a pair of yellow couches sand times, or ten thousand, and the American dream can be serve as a waiting area. When the boys get their computers, they more possible, for more people, than it is today. work hard to suppress a smile, whereas the girls are prone to let In the 1930s, the poet Langston Hughes published what loose. Sometimes they jump up and down, and sometimes they cry. remains one of the most honest descriptions of that dream: I met Kalijah Jones, a young black woman in a pale-pink sleeve- A dream so strong, so brave, so true less blouse and matching skirt. She had started working at E2D That even yet its mighty daring sings during her senior year, in 2017. Not long into our conversation, she In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned said, “I love my life!”—this despite the fact that she was living in a That’s made America the land it has become homeless shelter at the time. The poem, though, is laced with a counterpoint of protest: For Jones, the biggest benefit brought by E2D was not the com- “America was never America to me”—not to the “man who never puter or the job, but the social capital the program provided. Last got ahead”; “the poorest worker bartered through the years”; or year, she said, E2D’s West Charlotte lab was recognized with a “the Negro, servant to you all.” Still, for all its outrage, the poem local technology award, and the founder invited Jones and some ends with a paradoxical yearning: “O, let America be America of her co-workers to join him for the awards ceremony at the again,” Hughes wrote. “The land that never has been yet.” Knight Theater, where the Charlotte Ballet performs. One of the other honorees was Road to Hire, a program that pays high-school Hearing stories of the American dream as a boy in New Delhi, graduates as it trains them for jobs in sales and tech. The head of Chetty adopted the faith. When he became a scientist, he dis- Road to Hire was at the ceremony, and he gave Jones a business cerned the truth. What remains is contradiction: We must believe card, which led to a paid spot in the program’s training program. in the dream and we must accept that it is false—then, perhaps, we will be capable of building a land where it will yet be true. But in the crimson sectors of Chetty’s atlas, the problem is both the absence of opportunity and the presence of its opposite: Gareth Cook is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and a contribut- swift currents that can drag a person down. There are, in these ing writer at The New York Times Magazine. He is based in Boston. places, a few narrow paths to success, and 99 ways to falter. Jones made it through high school despite living in a shelter, and was accepted to Western Carolina University with financial aid. But she decided not to go, in part because she couldn’t imagine leav- ing her struggling mother and sister behind to live on a campus three hours away. Last winter, the three of them left Charlotte, THE ATLANTIC AUGUST 2019 71

What new research reveals about sexual predators, and why police fail to catch them 72 A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC

AN EPIDEMIC OF DISBELIEF By Barbara Bradley Hagerty

ROBERT SPADA WALKED INTO THE DECREPIT WAREHOUSE IN DETROIT AND SURVEYED THE CHAOS: Thousands of cardboard boxes and large plastic bags from a woman he raped in May 2007. The kit from his PHOTOGRAPHS BY JESSICA DIMMOCK were piled haphazardly throughout the cavernous sixth victim arrived in June 2010. Another a month space. The air inside was hot and musty. Spada, an later. Two more in August 2011. His 10th victim, four assistant prosecutor, saw that some of the windows months after that. Not until he raped his 11th victim, were open, others broken, exposing the room to the in January 2012, did the sequence end, because that summer heat. Above the boxes, birds glided in slow, woman saw Eric Wilkes two days after the assault and swooping circles. called the police, who arrested him. Eleven years, 11 violent rapes—all while Wilkes’s identity was preserved It was August 17, 2009, and this brick fortress of in sealed containers that no one had bothered to open. a building housed evidence that had been collected by the Detroit Police Department. Spada’s visit had The untested rape kits would continue to accumu- been prompted by a question: Why were police some- late for years after Spada’s visit. But that August day times unable to locate crucial evidence? The answer became a defining moment for survivors of sexual lay in the disarray before him. assault. Spada called Kym Worthy, the county prosecu- tor, and told her what he’d found. “I was livid,” Worthy As Spada wandered through the warehouse, he recalls. “I wanted to test them all immediately.” She made another discovery, one that would help uncover began talking to reporters, and the decrepit warehouse a decades-long scandal, not just in Detroit but across in Detroit with the broken windows became a power- the country. He noticed rows of steel shelving lined ful symbol of police negligence. with white cardboard boxes, 10 inches tall and a foot wide, stacked six feet high. What are those? he asked Since then, Detroit and other jurisdictions across a Detroit police officer who was accompanying him. the country have shipped tens of thousands of kits to Rape kits, the officer said. labs for testing. The results have upended assump- tions about sexual predators—showing, for example, “I’m assuming they’ve been tested?” Spada said. that serial rapists are far more common than many “Oh, they’ve all been tested.” experts had previously believed. Spada pulled out a box and peered inside. The containers were still sealed, indicating that the evi- But the rape-kit scandal has turned out to be only dence had never been sent to a lab. He opened four a visible symptom, a mole on the skin that hints at a more boxes: the same. pervasive cancer just below the surface. The deeper “I tried to do a quick calculation,” he later told me. problem is a criminal-justice system in which police “I came up with approximately 10,000.” officers continue to reflexively disbelieve women Spada’s estimate was conservative. Eventually who say they’ve been raped—even in this age of the 11,341 untested rape kits were found, some dating back #MeToo movement, and even when DNA testing more than 30 years—each one a hermetically sealed can confirm many allegations. From the moment a testament to the most terrifying minutes of a woman’s woman calls 911 (and it is almost always a woman; life, each one holding evidence that had been swabbed male victims rarely report sexual assaults), a rape or plucked from the most private parts of her body. allegation becomes, at every stage, more likely to And in all likelihood, some microscopic part of her slide into an investigatory crevice. Police may try assailant—his DNA, his identity—sat in that kit as well. to discourage the victim from filing a report. If she Or kits. insists on pursuing a case, it may not be assigned to a Eric Eugene Wilkes was known to Detroit police for detective. If her case is assigned to a detective, it will robbery and carjacking. Not for rape. Yet Wilkes’s DNA likely close with little investigation and no arrest. If was in boxes scattered throughout the warehouse, an arrest is made, the prosecutor may decline to bring even as he walked free. His DNA first arrived there charges: no trial, no conviction, no punishment. more than 18 years ago, after he raped a woman waiting for a bus on December 26, 2000. It next appeared after Each year, roughly 125,000 rapes are reported another rape four months later. Three days after that, across the United States. Sometimes the decision to police shelved the untested kit from his third victim. close a case is surely correct; no one wants to smear One can imagine a certain rhythm to the process, an innocent man’s reputation or curtail his freedom as police hoist kit after kit onto the metal shelves, not because of a false report. But in 49 out of every 50 rape knowing that they hold in their hands the identity of cases, the alleged assailant goes free—often, we now a serial rapist. Here’s the evidence box from a deaf know, to assault again. Which means that rape—more woman Wilkes assaulted in June 2006. There’s one than murder, more than robbery or assault—is by far the easiest violent crime to get away with. 74 A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC

“RIGHT THERE,” LIZ GARCIA SAYS, pointing to mouth, and made her shower as he watched. Before Liz Garcia was a second-floor window of a modest white house in leaving, he told her to count to 500. attacked in her Cleveland. “That’s the window of the bedroom that home in Cleveland I was raped in.” March 23, 2004, she recalls, was a “He closed the shower curtain, and I heard him by a serial rapist bright, crisp day. With her twin girls in school and her go down the stairs. I am standing there. Do I get out? who had eluded the paramedic training almost complete, she decided it Do I count? And all of a sudden”—Garcia yanked her police for years. was just the day to wash her Ford Explorer. She ran hand from right to left—“he opens up the shower upstairs to the bathroom for a towel. Looking in the curtain. I didn’t even hear him come back up the mirror, she saw the door swing open behind her. She stairs. It was terrifying.” turned and saw black shoes. Her gaze traveled upward: black pants, black gloves, black jacket, black ski mask. Satisfied that Garcia had not moved, the man fled. Although the police didn’t yet know it, a serial rap- Over the next two hours, the man dragged Gar- ist had been stalking Cleveland since the mid-1990s. cia from room to room. She thought of running or He’d begun with vulnerable women: women willing jumping out a window, but he was bigger, muscular; to sell sex for drugs or money, an unlucky woman he seemed to anticipate her moves. He raped her whose car ran out of gas, one teenager who was skip- three times. He was prepared and meticulous. He ping school, another with a prosthetic leg. This should wore gloves and a condom. He spread a towel on have put the police on high alert, Tim McGinty, a Garcia’s bed, and took it with him when he left. “He former Cuyahoga County prosecutor, told me. Vul- had shaved his legs and chest”—she could feel the nerable people—drug addicts, prostitutes, people stubble—“so he wouldn’t leave hair behind. He knew living in poor neighborhoods—are the “canaries in what he was doing.” He ordered her to wash out her the coal mine. If you’ve got a serial rapist out there, who does he hit first? He hits the vulnerable people.”



Richard Bell (left), By 2004, the rapist had graduated to home inva- years, some of Sowell’s intended victims had escaped the prosecutor sions and more prosperous victims. One week after and reported his attempts to rape them. But the police the attack on Liz Garcia, a 55-year-old schoolteacher had never thoroughly investigated their claims. At leading a task force was raped in her home. Only then, after attacks on least one woman had completed a forensic exam. in Cleveland that two middle-class women, did the police make a pub- The police had tested the rape kit—but only for drugs lic plea for leads. The department received an anony- in her system, not for the rapist’s DNA. has convicted more mous tip: an envelope with a newspaper clipping and than 400 rapists in an arrest record for a former probation officer named The Sowell case became a scandal, and it raised Nathan Ford. The police apprehended Ford and larger questions: Why weren’t attacks on women cold cases swabbed him. As part of a pilot study, the department being investigated? How many rape kits did the had sent some 250 rape kits off for DNA testing— police department have in storage? How many had and Ford’s DNA matched eight of them. But not Liz been tested? Garcia’s. The police tested her kit but didn’t find her assailant’s DNA. “They told me I would never know Under pressure from then–Ohio Attorney General who the attacker was,” she says. Mike DeWine, the city’s police department began sending off kits for testing in 2011. Officials called it a At the time, if you were raped in Cleveland and “forklift” approach because every box, no matter how you were poor or otherwise vulnerable, police would old, was shipped to a state lab. At first the progress was likely make a couple of phone calls and move on. You slow. But in January 2013, Tim McGinty, who had just can see this play out in the police files documenting been elected Cuyahoga County prosecutor, created a the response to Nathan Ford’s early attacks. All of task force devoted to testing the kits and reinvestigat- Ford’s victims who came forward had forensic exams, ing cases. He brought in 25 detectives, mostly out of but detectives were more likely to shelve the kits retirement, and assigned half a dozen assistant pros- than send them to a lab. Rarely did a detective visit ecutors to the effort. He allowed two reporters from the victim, witnesses, or the crime scene. If a victim The Plain Dealer to sit in on their weekly meeting. couldn’t come to police headquarters on the detec- tive’s timetable—because she couldn’t find transpor- Within weeks, DNA results started arriving tation or child care or get time off from work—she from the lab: More than a third of the rape kits were was labeled “uncooperative.” The case was closed. In pinging in the FBI’s Combined DNA Index Sys- other instances, the detective wrote that he couldn’t tem, known as CODIS. Created in the 1990s, the locate the victim, and this was enough to end the database contains DNA profiles collected at crime investigation. Yet when investigators reopened scenes across the country, many of them linked to sexual-assault cold cases 20 years later, they almost the name of a known criminal. Cleveland inves- always found the victim within a few hours. tigators were soon identifying rapists who had eluded detection for decades. “It was much more fruit- When the Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office ful than we ever in our wildest dreams imagined,” hired a team of researchers at Case Western Reserve recalls DeWine, now the governor of Ohio. Some University, in 2015, to pore through police files and weeks, Richard Bell, the prosecutor in charge of other records connected to thousands of untested the task force, would announce 20 new DNA matches. rape kits in Cleveland, they quickly spotted the same pattern. In a random sample of cases, mainly from Investigators sometimes had only a few days to the mid-’90s, they found that the notes from many build a 20-year-old case—to locate victims and wit- police investigations barely filled a single page. In nesses and gather their sworn statements—before the 40 percent of cases, detectives never contacted the statute of limitations ran out. “There was one hit where victim. In three out of four, they never interviewed we turned it around in two days and brought it into the her. Half of the investigations were closed in a week, grand jury at 4:15 p.m., before the 4:30 end of day,” Bell a quarter in a day. As for rape kits—the one type of recalls. Cases with fewer than 10 days remaining were evidence that might definitively identify a rapist— labeled, in red ink, ALL HANDS ON DECK. police rarely sent them to the lab for testing. Granted, testing a kit could cost more than $5,000 in the late Since Cuyahoga County began forklifting its kits, ’90s and 2000s. But during part of that time, the state prosecutors have indicted nearly 750 rapists in cold was paying police departments to send in evidence. cases and convicted more than 400 of them. (Detroit, And even when the cost of testing a kit dropped to less which got a later start, has convicted some 175 men.) than $1,000, police still tucked away the evidence in “They would never have resurrected the [closed cases] storage. Ultimately, Cleveland would accumulate without this project,” Bell says. some 7,000 untested kits. For more than a decade, Liz Garcia had won- NATHAN FORD’S RAMPAGE wasn’t enough to per- dered whether her rapist would return to kill her and suade the Cleveland police to begin addressing the her daughters, as he’d promised. She suffered panic rape-kit backlog. What did persuade them was a attacks, sometimes five a day. She avoided answering serial killer. In October 2009, the police discovered the door. She showered with the curtain open. She left the bodies of 11 women buried in the home and back- the light on all night. She slept on the couch, with her yard of Anthony Sowell, a convicted rapist. Over the back to the wall. “I had knives under my pillows. I hid knives all over the house,” she told me. Not until she found a detective’s card tucked in her door more than a decade later did she cease to regard the world outside her home like a prey without cover. THE ATLANTIC AUGUST 2019 77

The Justice Depart- The lab had retested her rape kit using newer technol- What struck her first was the sheer number of ment has awarded ogy; this time it detected male DNA and identified her repeat offenders: Of the rape kits containing DNA attacker: Nathan Ford. The police also discovered more that generated a CODIS hit, nearly one in five $154 million to victims whose kits had been shelved for years, bring- pointed to a serial rapist—giving the Cleveland 54 jurisdictions for ing Ford’s total to 22 rape kits. By then he was already investigators leads on some 480 serial predators to in prison and serving a life sentence. Garcia could put date. On a practical level, this suggested that every rape-kit testing, away her knives. She still sleeps with the light on. allegation of rape should be investigated as if it might but the effort hasn’t have been committed by a repeat offender. “The way WHEN THE MEMBERS of Cleveland’s task force we’ve traditionally thought of sexual assault is this yet resulted in began shipping rape kits to the state lab, they didn’t ‘he said, she said’ situation, where they investigate the many convictions. imagine they’d end up fomenting a small revolution sexual assault in isolation,” Lovell told me. Instead, in criminology. Yet those evidence boxes uncovered detectives should search for other victims or other Opposite: Tim new clues about the behavior of sexual assailants violent crimes committed nearby, always presuming McGinty, the former and overturned some basic assumptions—about how that a rapist might have attacked before. “We make often they offend, whom they attack, and how they those assumptions with burglary, with murder, with Cuyahoga County, might be captured. almost any other crime,” Lovell said, “but not a sex- Ohio, prosecutor ual assault of an adult.” who created the Rachel Lovell, the lead researcher at Case West- task force there. ern, reviewed the results of the tests and found her- Another surprise for police and prosecutors self with a new and superior class of information. In involved profiling. All but the most specialized crimi- the past, most research on rapists relied on prison nologists had assumed that serial rapists have a signa- records or “self-reports”—that is, surveys of people ture, a certain style and preference. Gun or knife? Alley who answered questions anonymously about their or car? Were their victims white, black, or Hispanic? behavior. But here, in her hands, were the biological Investigators even named them: the ponytail rapist, name tags of thousands of men who had commit- the early-morning rapist, the preacher rapist. ted a rape and walked away. It was a larger and far more objective sample of sexual offenders. It was But Lovell recalled sitting in Cleveland’s weekly the difference between a pencil sketch and a color task-force meeting, listening to the investigators photograph. describe cases. They would say: This guy approached two of his victims on a bicycle, but there was this other 78 A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC

attack that didn’t fit the pattern. Or: This guy assaulted commit another crime. In 2007, Victor Rondon was stopped for jaywalking his stepdaughter, but he also raped two strangers. “I was in Las Vegas and, in an impulse he surely regrets, punched the police officer. always like, ‘This seems so very different,’ ” Lovell The DNA from Rondon’s swab matched that of Alexenko’s rape kit. Rondon said. “This is not what we think about a serial offender. was convicted of rape, sodomy, sexual abuse, burglary, and robbery. Usually we think of serial offenders as particularly methodical, organized, structured—the ones that “These are not the Napoleons of crime,” Tim McGinty told me. He paused, make TV.” reflecting on those 7,000 rape kits sitting in storage in Cleveland while the perpetrators were free on the streets. “They’re morons. We were letting Eric Beauregard, a criminologist at Simon Fraser morons beat us.” University who has interviewed 1,200 sexual offend- ers, says profiling may fail because a predator’s reality LIZ GARCIA CONSIDERS HERSELF FORTUNATE. At least the Cleveland falls short of his fantasy. Most offenders tell him that police submitted her rape kit for testing, even if they weren’t able to identify they do hunt for a certain type of victim, but “what they her assailant until they retested it 12 years later. But what about the other vic- had in mind and what they selected did not match at tims, the ones who endured an invasive forensic exam, expecting the police all,” he says. “If they are looking for a tall blonde with to marshal that evidence to catch their assailants? “How can somebody just big breasts, at the end of the day, it was: She was there, let them sit there?” Garcia asks. “You know, the women calling and calling, she was available, she was alone. Those were the cri- trying to find answers. You’re giving them some story, and all along this rape teria.” Nathan Ford’s victims, for example, were black, kit is sitting there, not even being tested. ‘No, we don’t have anything fur- white, Hispanic, and Asian; 13 years old and 55; on the ther.’ But you could have if you would have tested that kit! You could have west side of the city and on the east. avoided other rapes if you would have tested that kit.” “Thank God we have DNA,” Dan Clark, one of This is the question that haunts every advocate, researcher, and enlight- the Cleveland investigators, says. “Because trying ened detective or prosecutor I spoke with: How many rapes could have been to put together a pattern where there is no pattern prevented if the police had believed the first victim, launched a thorough is impossible. It’s no wonder we didn’t catch that investigation, and caught the rapist? How many women would have been many people.” spared a brutal assault? Most rapes, of course, are not committed by strang- The federal government estimates that police departments have ware- ers. Eighty percent of the time, the rapist is someone housed more than 200,000 untested sexual-assault kits. But no one really a woman knows—they met at a party or a bar; he’s her knows, because cities and states fight to keep those numbers secret. The Joy- colleague, friend, mentor, coach. So police saw little ful Heart Foundation, an advocacy group started by Mariska Hargitay, who reason to send off those rape kits: The man’s identity stars in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, has identified more than 225,000 was never in doubt. But the Cleveland study illumi- kits through public-records requests. But given that 15 states and many large nated another insight—one that shows the tragic con- cities have declined to even count the untested rape kits in their possession, sequences of failing to test “acquaintance rape” kits. the group believes there may be several hundred thousand more. Historically, investigators had assumed that some- one who assaults a stranger by the railroad tracks is In 2015, the Obama administration launched the Sexual Assault Kit Initia- nothing like the man who assaults his co-worker or tive (SAKI)toencouragecitiesandstatestosenduntestedkitstolabs,opennew his girlfriend. But it turns out that the space between investigations, and prosecute the assailants who had slipped under the radar acquaintance rape and stranger rape is not a wall, but for years or decades. So far, the Justice Department has awarded $154 million a plaza. When Cleveland investigators uploaded the DNA from the acquaintance-rape kits, they were sur- prised by how often the results also matched DNA from unsolved stranger rapes. The task force identi- fied dozens of mystery rapists this way. The Case Western research also showed that the great majority of rapists are generalists, or “one-man crime waves.” “They will steal your car, they will steal your watch, and they will steal sex, so to speak, if they can get away with it,” says Neil Malamuth, a psycholo- gist at UCLA. “They are antisocial folks who will com- mit all sorts of antisocial behavior, including but not limited to sexual aggression.” And eventually, experts say, generalists slip up and get caught. Consider the story of Natasha Alexenko. She was raped in the stairwell of her New York City apart- ment building in 1993. The investigation turned up no suspects, and CODIS did not yet exist. Ten years later, the database was up and running, though sparsely populated. When police plugged in the rap- ist’s DNA, they found no match. With the statute of limitations about to expire, prosecutors were able to indict the John Doe whose DNA was found in Alex- enko’s rape kit. Then they waited, hoping he would

After Amber to 54 jurisdictions. “It has exceeded our expectations,” performance of the 41 sites, my first thought was: All Mansfield was says Angela Williamson, who has headed the program those zeros! Did the $5.1 million awarded to Wiscon- assaulted and since its inception. When she sees the dedication of sin really buy only four charges and zero convictions? raped by a child- the detectives and prosecutors who are working long What about Connecticut, which received $3.3 million hood friend, police hours on cases that can date back decades, she is over- in that time: not a single reported charge or convic- checked only her whelmed with gratitude: “You want to cry.” tion? Or Iowa, which can’t show a single charge or record, not his. conviction for $3 million of federal largesse? Mobile, Opposite: The “There is no money better spent than the Jus- Alabama; New Orleans; Delaware—collectively, they knife she leaves tice Department spends here, dollar for dollar,” received $6.3 million, but can boast only four arrests Tim McGinty said. “I don’t think there will ever be and not a single conviction or plea deal. in her door. another time in history when so many criminals can be arrested so easily, so quickly, so inexpensively, and Williamson says the numbers are “not a fair snap- with such certainty.” shot of the hard work that’s being done.” She says it can take months to inventory kits and send them off If aggregate numbers and a drumbeat of positive for testing; more time still to receive a name from news stories are the proper measures, then the SAKI the lab and then launch an investigation; and pos- program has been a huge success. The Justice Depart- sibly years to find the suspect and victim and make ment reported that some 61,000 rape kits have been an arrest, much less convict him at trial. Detroit and inventoried, and nearly 45,000 tested. Police have Cleveland just got a head start. “The longer that these opened (or reopened) 5,500 investigations, and pros- grants are out, and the longer these sites have been ecutors have won 498 convictions or plea agreements. funded, you’re going to be seeing numbers start to pour in,” Williamson told me. I was briefly persuaded: But drill down a bit, and you see that two places In the past few months, several of those sites have account for most of the progress. In response to a launched new investigations. But then I remembered Freedom of Information Act request, the Justice that Cleveland had moved from testing kits to secur- Department reported that of the 41 SAKI sites that ing indictments in less than 10 months. Once the task began receiving money in 2015, Cleveland and force received a lab result, it could gather enough evi- Detroit accounted for 38 percent of all new investiga- dence in a 20-year-old cold case to arrest a suspect in tions in the first three years. (Numbers for 2018 are less than 10 days—because it had the will to do so. not yet available.) When a suspect was charged, it happened in Detroit or Cleveland 69 percent of the Meaghan Ybos calls the SAKI program “a big cha- time. As for winning a conviction at trial or securing a rade.” Ybos was raped in her family’s home in 2003, plea agreement, 82 times out of 100, the prosecutors when she was 16. The Memphis police shelved her in Detroit or Cleveland were the ones going out for a rape kit for nine years. In the meantime, five other celebratory beer. women and a 12-year-old girl were raped by the same man. When Ybos discovered, in 2012, that her kit had Everywhere else, the distance between aspiration and accomplishment is startling. When I looked at the

never been tested, she began a public fight with the AMBER MANSFIELD’S STORY offers a glimpse into city, talking to reporters, questioning officials at pub- that black box. Mansfield, who is 39 years old and lic hearings, and finally suing the city in 2014. The lives in Minnesota, admits to having a “colorful” his- Memphis police admitted to having 2,000 untested tory. After her parents lost everything to their crack kits, a number they later raised to more than 12,000. addiction when she was 9, she bounced among fos- Still, SAKI officials and women’s-advocacy groups ter homes, lived on the streets, and spent time in a have praised Memphis: With the $4.5 million the city juvenile-detention center. When she turned 18, she received from the SAKI program, it has sent all its was left to fend for herself. In her early 20s, she picked kits for testing, and according to numbers submitted up a conviction for drug possession (and served one to the Justice Department, it has opened more than year) and a misdemeanor charge of prostitution. 1,000 new investigations, and won more than two Since 2005, however, she has had no serious run-ins dozen convictions or guilty pleas—more than most with the law. She earned her high-school diploma, other SAKI grantees. Ybos counters that city officials fled her sketchy Minneapolis neighborhood, and, for years misled the public about untested kits and nine years ago, gave birth to a daughter, who is the continue to fight victims seeking compensation. The center of her life. They now live in the town of Mora, funding and praise Memphis has received—“that population 3,500, in a white-clapboard house with a could be seen as rewarding the worst actors,” she says. bicycle in the front yard and an SUV in the driveway. It’s true that the national backlog of untested kits I visited Mansfield on a rainy day last fall. She is shrinking. States are also passing laws to ensure greeted me shyly, and as we settled into a deep that rape kits don’t languish in storage rooms in the couch in her living room she began to unspool her future. But you can test every kit in the country and story. In 2011, Mansfield started corresponding not solve a single case if you don’t follow up on the with Keith Washington, a childhood friend who leads. Rebecca Campbell, a psychologist at Michi- was then in prison for assaulting a police officer. Or gan State University who analyzed the lapses by police in Detroit and now so he said. “Pretty much everything was a lie,” she trains detectives at SAKI sites, says that officials in some of those jurisdic- told me. She would learn, too late, that he had been tions have told her they intend only to test kits—not to actually prosecute the convicted of raping and beating his girlfriend. After men who are identified. Rachel Lovell, of Case Western, has heard this too. he was released, in May 2015, they began spending “If you’re not investigating or following up on the testing of those kits, what’s time together as friends. He wanted more, but she the point?” she asks. “It simply becomes a piece of paper in a file.” Why would officials decide not to pursue these cases? Campbell and Lovell point to the same factor: law enforcement’s abiding skepticism of women who report being raped. This is a problem with no easy fix, says Dan Clark, the Cleveland detective, who conducts training programs across the country for SAKI. Clark tries to teach investigators to take a woman’s alle- gation of rape as seriously as they would a report of assault or robbery. But in private conversations afterward, he says, it becomes clear the message didn’t sink in: Officers continue to tell him they think that many women lie about being raped, and that their claims aren’t worth investigating. “This is that sort of intractable belief that we could not seem to shake.” Campbell compares her training sessions to the movie Groundhog Day: “I’m hearing the same things I heard in Detroit back in 2010, 2011. It’s just in a different city, but it’s the same basic idea over and over again.” She stresses that these are the departments with good intent—the ones that have applied for money and committed to addressing the rape-kit crisis. After many of her sessions, Campbell feels euphoric, sensing that at least in that room and on that day, people have signed on to the message. “Then when that feeling wears off, I think about: Who isn’t at this meeting? Who didn’t apply for SAKI funds? And that’s the majority of law-enforcement agencies and prosecutors’ offices throughout the U.S.” Do we know how those departments are doing? I ask. “It’s a black box.” THE ATLANTIC AUGUST 2019 81

Michael Sauro, hesitated; he had a record, and she had a daughter to Sauro developed a hard-nosed cynicism during who headed consider. On the night of July 22, 2015, Washington his years on the job. “People lie,” he reminded me flew into a rage, took Mansfield’s car keys, and locked several times as we sat in his living room. He then Minneapolis’s her in the bedroom of his sister’s house. He hit her, explained that when prostitutes report a rape, it’s sex-crimes unit pinned her to the ground, tightened his hands around typically just a deal gone bad; they want revenge her neck. “This is what it feels like for the last breath for nonpayment. But, I countered, Mansfield’s one and oversaw to leave your body,” he told her before she passed out. prostitution charge had been a dozen years earlier. Amber Mansfield’s When she regained consciousness, he begged her to “Yeah,” Sauro said, “but that lifestyle keeps dragging forgive him, but a few hours later, he raped her. you back.” case, says the unit thoroughly After a forensic exam at the hospital, two police Had anyone taken 20 minutes to enter Wash- officers arrived to take her statement. They peppered ington’s name into a criminal database, he or she investigates her with pointed questions; the interaction seemed would have seen that Washington was a Level 3 sex “99 percent more like an interrogation than an interview. She offender, considered the most violent and most likely of the time.” read the doubt in the officers’ faces. “It’s my word to reoffend. Instead, Sauro “redlined” the investiga- against his word,” she said. “I mean, a sex offender tion, shutting it down without assigning it to a detec- and a prostitute. You do the math.” tive. Washington was never interviewed by the police. But he did hear about the allegation, prompting him It was, apparently, a quick calculation. to threaten Mansfield by phone and text. “It was all Mansfield assumed they would run a background day, every day,” she said. check on her, as well as on Washington. She was half correct. The officers looked at her record but not his, Mansfield called the station again and again to and sent the report to Lieutenant Michael Sauro, who learn the status of her case. She never received a headed Minneapolis’s sex-crimes unit. I recently met response. “Finally I just couldn’t take it anymore,” with Sauro, who is now retired, to discuss Mansfield’s she said. “I called the up-aboves and just told them: case. He recalled seeing that she had a prostitution ‘Listen, you guys are putting me in more danger than charge on her record. “I’m thinking, Whoa, wait a you’re doing any good. I’m done. Fuck all you guys. second here. How much resources am I going to spend if That’s it.’ ” you’re that—how should I say—careless with your own self?” Sauro told me. “So after reading three or four Sauro remembers the conversation. “When she paragraphs, I said, ‘To hell with this. We’re not going said, ‘Nah, I don’t want to prosecute it anymore,’ I to spend any time on this.’ So that’s probably why I did wasn’t going to beg her to follow through,” he told not even waste my time running his criminal history.” me. He paused. “But if I would have known he was a Level 3, I would have begged her, okay?” 82 A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC

Months later, Keith Washington was arrested for assaulting two women prosecutors declining all but the inevitable wins and a few hours apart; he had choked them and left them unconscious and par- think: Why investigate this case when it will never see a tially undressed on the street. “If they would have done their job and got courtroom? “And that,” Stahl says, “is where the vic- him,” Mansfield said, “these other two ladies would have been all right.” tim is often left out in the cold.” (Sauro dismissed this claim as “conjecture.”) In the end, Washington was convicted for assaulting one of the women and is serving a 15-year sen- Sauro sees it differently. “Why would I present a tence; the other case was dropped because the woman was unavailable to case for charging that’s not going to be prosecuted?” testify. Police questioned him about assaulting Amber Mansfield. He denied he told me. “If you want paper shuffled, let’s start the allegation and, given the complications in the case—her history, their shuffling the paper. Let’s go cut down some more history—prosecutors declined to try him for the attack. trees. But that’s not justice.” More than three years later, Sauro seemed genuinely chagrined that a IT MUST BE an unenviable job for any detective or rapist had slipped by him. But in the next breath, he noted that his six-person prosecutor, trying to discern the contours of truth sex-crimes unit was handling more than 400 cases a year. “I mean, when in the half-light of the most intimate of crimes, one you’re so busy, sometimes you miss stuff,” he said, adding that the unit thor- in which there are usually no witnesses and no evi- oughly investigates “99 percent of the time.” dence except the woman’s word to prove that the sex happened against her will. And, of course, a person Perhaps. But how would anyone know? The lapses in Mansfield’s case can regret sex the next morning; communication didn’t come to light until Washington assaulted the two other women; only between two people can fail; what begins as a consen- then did a detective call her, ask about her assault, and persuade her to tes- sual act can take an unwanted turn. All of this makes tify against him in the other woman’s trial. How many other cases have been it tricky to prove assault beyond a reasonable doubt. closed with little or no investigation and locked away in a filing cabinet, leav- ing the victims with no answers and no recourse? But even given these challenges, the skepticism shown by police and prosecutors—who are not I learned about Mansfield through a devastating series of articles in the juries, after all—is extraordinary. Officials don’t talk Minneapolis Star Tribune. The paper analyzed the police files from nearly about their methods publicly, and rarely reveal their 1,500 sexual-assault cases across the state that had been closed in 2015 and thinking, much less their motives or biases. But two 2016. “You look through these case files and you see a witness name, and cities—Detroit and Los Angeles—allowed research- you’re thinking, Okay, they’re going to interview this witness,” recalls Brandon ers to read thousands of pages of police reports and Stahl, one of the reporters. “And they don’t. You see evidence that could be to interview detectives and prosecutors. What the tested or collected—and they don’t do that, either.” researchers found is a subterranean river of chauvin- ism, where the fate of a rape case usually depends on In 65 percent of the cases, Minneapolis investigators failed to interview the detective’s or (less often) prosecutor’s view of the the victim. Even when detectives had the name of the suspect, more often victim—not the alleged perpetrator. than not, they didn’t question him. In the end, only 9 percent of the cases resulted in a conviction. No doubt, the detectives struggled under a crushing Usually only a certain type of victim will see her rap- workload. The paper found that sex-crimes detectives juggled three times ist prosecuted, says Cassia Spohn, the director of the the caseload of homicide detectives. But these numbers? They were so low, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona says MaryJo Webster, who analyzes data for news stories at the paper, that State University. Along with Katharine Tellis, a crimi- the team kept rechecking its methodology. “We kept thinking, Oh, we’ll get nologist at California State University at Los Angeles, more data, and it’ll be wrong, and we’ll find something different,” she says. “The Spohn published an exhaustive report in 2012 that pattern just held and held and held.” analyzed sexual-assault investigations and prosecu- tions in Los Angeles County. “We heard over and over Sauro called the series a “hit job.” “I want to make one thing perfectly detectives use the term righteous victim,” she told me. clear: There was never a case—misdemeanor or felony—that I thought was A woman who didn’t know her assailant, who fought prosecutable that we did not investigate.” Prosecutable is the operative word back, who has a clean record and hadn’t been drinking here. Legally, police are supposed to investigate an allegation based on prob- or offering sex for money or drugs—that woman will able cause, not on whether they think a case can be proved to a jury beyond a be taken seriously. Spohn recalled a typical comment: reasonable doubt. That’s for a prosecutor to decide. But redlining means that “ ‘If I had a righteous victim, I would do all that I could police shut down an investigation without informing a prosecutor of its exis- to make sure that the suspect was arrested. But most tence, and fail to gather evidence in what might turn out to be a winnable case. of my victims don’t look like that.’ ” After poring over hundreds of investigations, Stahl noticed a “reverse In cases of acquaintance rape, detectives domino effect.” Prosecutors look down the road to juries, which, studies expressed doubt and blamed the women. They spoke show, tend to be older than the general population, more conservative, and skeptically of “party rapes,” in which women drink more skeptical of rape allegations by vulnerable victims such as Mansfield; predicting that the jury won’t convict, they decline to prosecute. Police see MANSFIELD CALLED THE POLICE STATION AGAIN AND AGAIN TO LEARN THE STATUS OF HER CASE. SHE NEVER RECEIVED A RESPONSE.

“OUT OF 10 CASES,” SAID ONE LOS ANGELES DETECTIVE, “EIGHT ARE FALSE REPORTS.” too much “and make bad choices.” One described “buyer’s remorse,” where assaulted her. At first she thought the man was her a woman who has been out partying has sex with a man “willingly” and later husband, and she waited a few seconds before kicking regrets it. “Out of 10 cases,” one detective said, “eight are false reports.” him off the bed. Afterward, she called the police, and two weeks later, as officers listened in and recorded a Rebecca Campbell heard similar language from investigators in Detroit. phone conversation between the two, the man apol- In her 2015 report (a 550-page postmortem of Detroit’s rape-kit scandal), ogized for assaulting her. The officers were elated. detectives often said that women “got what they got” if they knew the man. But the prosecutor had reservations: No jury would She asked one detective whether a man can rape an acquaintance. “Truly believe she mistook the intruder for her husband. He rape?” he asked. “Sometimes. But not most of the time.” declined to bring charges. In some cases, police didn’t believe that sex had occurred at all. Consider What recourse does a victim have when police or this report by a Detroit detective, after a 14-year-old girl claimed she was prosecutors refuse to take her seriously? Virtually abducted by two men and raped inside a burned-out house. “This heffer is none, it seems. She can’t force the police to inves- trippin,” the detective wrote. “She was clean and smellin good, ain’t no way tigate and she can’t make prosecutors try her case, that shit happened like she said … The jig was up. She didn’t want to talk no because the state has vast discretion in how it han- mo. So her mama took her to the hospital, but they got the fuck outta here.” dles criminal cases. Some women—in San Francisco, That investigation warranted two pages, which ended: “This case is closed: Houston, and Memphis—have tried to sue in federal UTEEC.” Unable to establish the elements of the crime. court. They claimed that the state violated their due- process rights by failing to test their rape kits and fully To police officers who haven’t been trained to spot signs of trauma, many investigate their claims, and that government policies rape victims appear to be lying. Why was she laughing when she gave her discriminated against women by giving rape cases a statement? Why was she so flat and unemotional? One Detroit detective told lower priority than violent crimes more commonly Campbell that a victim should be “a complete hot mess. They should be cry- committed against men, such as aggravated assault ing. They should be very, very traumatized.” But research finds that many and robbery. Those lawsuits have been dismissed or victims don’t respond in a predictable fashion. This goes for their behavior withdrawn. A class-action suit in Austin, Texas, may during the assault as well as after: Why didn’t she fight? Why didn’t she run? have a better chance of showing gender discrimina- Liz Garcia used to tell people that she would fight like crazy if a stranger tion based on one striking fact: Of the more than 200 ever came into her house. “I don’t say that anymore. I could have had all sexual-assault cases police referred to prosecutors the weapons in the world in my house. But I couldn’t grab a weapon. He was from July 2016 to June 2017, eight resulted in plea taller, bigger; there was no fighting him.” One survivor told me she offered agreements, but only one case went to trial. The vic- her assailant a glass of iced tea, hoping her courtesy would dissuade him. tim was a man. Another tried to politely decline the assault: You don’t have to do that. It’s fine. Yet another pretended she was enjoying herself, hoping he wouldn’t Yet even as police and prosecutors seem stuck in kill her afterward. time, our culture is moving forward. This moment feels fundamentally different from previous decades, If detectives blame or disbelieve a woman, their next step is to close the when a sensational rape trial would trigger a surge case by persuading her to withdraw the complaint. In Detroit, Campbell says, of outrage and promises of reform, only to see the detectives sometimes opened interviews by noting that the victim would be scandal ebb from consciousness. Too many women charged for false reporting if she said anything that was untrue or couldn’t be have disclosed their #MeToo moments; too many corroborated. Worried about being prosecuted, the woman would withdraw rape kits have been pulled out of storage rooms. the allegation, and the officer would walk her to the door. One survivor told And if the success of the Cleveland task force proves Campbell that the entire process seemed aimed at “culling the herd.” anything, it is this: Rape cases are winnable. Serial rapists could be swept from the streets and untold But even when the victim does everything right, even when the police build numbers of women could escape the worst moments a strong case against a suspect—even then, a prosecutor might decline to bring of their life, if police and prosecutors would suspend the case to trial. Prosecutors, particularly elected ones, are measured by their their disbelief. wins and losses and may be unwilling to spoil their record with problematic cases. “They only allow certain victims to go to trial, where they feel they have Barbara Bradley Hagerty is an Atlantic contributing really rock-solid evidence,” Campbell says. “They’ve got to have the perfect writer and the author of Life Reimagined: The Science, victim, the perfect crime, the perfect witness—and anybody who deviates Art, and Opportunity of Midlife. This article is part of from that is not going to have their day in court.” Maybe the woman has a our project “The Presence of Justice,” which is supported checkered past. Maybe she had too much to drink that night. Maybe she knew by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur the suspect, triggering the nearly bulletproof defense of consent. Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge. Sometimes, even a confession is not enough. One woman told me about a man who had been on a tour she led of her family’s organic farm. Later that night, while her husband was traveling, the man snuck into her bedroom and 84 A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC



FICTION Wolves of Karelia 86 A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC

By ARNA BONTEMPS HEMENWAY Illustrations by Alexandre Luu

Simo Häyhä, whose life this story imagi- shards hit my face so hard that I fell back- out for a whole day of stalking the slopes natively elaborates on, was a renowned wards, and I stared at the place where with his rifle and skis. By the time the sniper during the Winter War between the bullet had obliterated the tiny piece Soviets shelled Mainila, though, his flur- Finland and the Soviet Union. The fight- of antler, poking maybe five centimeters ries of activity took place in the command ing, which began in November 1939 and above the snow, just between my feet. If tent. When the Russians began pour- ended in a Russian victory in mid-March, I’d said 149 meters, or taken six steps in- ing toward our lines, and Major General was fiercest along Finland’s eastern bor- stead of five, my father’s round would’ve Hägglund asked his famous question, I der, in Karelia. passed through my stomach. myself watched as Papa gave his famous response: “Yes, Kollaa holds. Unless our When I got back to the cabin, he was al- orders are to run away.” ready inside, the rifle half-disassembled. Once, two days after Christmas, we “One hundred forty-eight meters,” he managed to capture a sorry Russian said, and glanced at me before going back who’d gotten lost and wandered almost to wiping the bolt, which was as close as right into our camp. He didn’t even have he ever got to good cheer. Then he said a weapon. We blindfolded him, spun him what he always said. “You’re only wrong around until he was so dizzy that he could once, Simuna.” D I S TA N C E THE WHITE DEATH It was M who first called me Kettuseni, “my little fox.” “Do you see?” my father said. The Russians, as was their wont, had their When I think of those I breathed in and out, the air shallow own name for me, the White Death. My 98 days in the forest, I hear men called me the Magic Shooter, which only that name. in my chest. I was 10. On the way back I also hated. I am Simo Häyhä, corpo- from his dawn hunt, my father had sliced ral of the Sixth Battalion, Regiment 34; barely stand, then marched him in circles, the tip off a reindeer antler and placed previously of Bicycle Battalions 1 (Third telling him the whole time that we were it somewhere in the array of space and Company) and 2 (First Company); previ- taking him to the Terror of Morocco. By field behind our cabin. My job was to find ously of the Civil Guard volunteers, all in the time we brought him into the tent and it. We were on our stomachs in the snow, service to the glorious and proud Finnish took off his blindfold, he was shaking with under the stand of trees where, in sum- cause. Or I was, anyway, until 1940, when fear and Papa insisted we drink with him mer, our horse Teemu lowered his gray everything (we thought) was over and it all night. Whether thanks to the spirits or face in the shade. We’d been here for two turned out I was in fact still alive, and our company, he came back to life in front hours, waiting while I looked and looked someone decided to make me a second of us. Before dawn we marched him off for the tip, which would be our target. lieutenant for it. toward his own lines, pointed him where to go, and set him loose. He cried the “Yes?” my father said. I’ve liked only two nicknames in my whole way, begging to stay. A month later, I nodded. entire life. My father and mother both when we retook those woods, M told me “Where?” called me Simuna, which means “God he found the man, frozen stiff, propped “The fang,” I said. This was the shat- has listened,” though I suspect what they against a tree where his own officer had tered birch trunk that had split the year each imagined he heard was different. It shot him in the forehead for deserting. before last in a storm and now stood, jag- was M, though, who first called me Ket- ged and lonely, at the edge of the far field. tuseni, “my little fox.” When I think of THE ZERO “Well, five steps before it.” those 98 days in the forest, I hear only “How far from our position?” he said. that name. When I dream of M now, I I was born the last of four brothers, too He would aim only and exactly as I wake myself sometimes, the sound of it young to join them in the civil war when instructed. Such was his test. floating around the room, before I under- it came in early 1918. Antti was shot “One hundred forty-eight meters,” Isaid. stand that my own lips uttered it. through the nasal cavity by a Red Guard My father turned his round, dull eyes marksman on a drizzly evening in Tam- to me. “You’re sure?” Our regiment commander, Lieutenant pere. Juhana was wounded in the close I nodded. Juutilainen, was known far and wide as the fighting at Joutseno, and taken pris- “Go mark it, then,” he said, and moved Terror of Morocco, due to his time there oner. By that time, the Reds had heard the rifle from where it lay between us. with the French Foreign Legion, fighting Progress was slow in the snow. As I the Berbers in the Atlas Mountains. We approached the fang, the sun hit the ice ourselves called him Papa. He was a quiet covering the old silver wood and made it man with a sad, clownish face who spent sharp with light. I turned and faced the most of his time drinking in his officer’s place I knew my father was, though you’d tent, where it was warmest and where never be able to see him, not if you looked he let me sleep between my hunts. This for a whole month. I counted five steps was more or less how he’d spent his time back toward him and stopped. in the Atlases too, I gathered: drinking to The shot rang like a bell in the frozen stay warm in the frigid air, then venturing clearing that pocketed the cabin and the shed and our two fields. The spray of ice 88 A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC

about the prison camp and mass grave at I always kept my rifle zeroed at 150 “Do you need me to tell you?” he said. Kalevankangas. meters. If you can’t get within 150 meters “No,” I said. of a kill, my father used to say, you don’t He tipped his cap over his face. I was 12. Spring brought the German deserve to make it. The same was true 20 “Range?” I said. I couldn’t believe his Imperials to the streets of Helsinki and years later, in those frozen woods with impertinence, his laziness. the Whites to Vyborg, victorious. In May, M. Whenever there was a lull, I found a M only sighed, and didn’t move. the Whites took Fort Ino, near the Neva dwarf pine on a slope and watched the top “Range 1-9-2 meters,” I said, testing him. Bay, on the Karelian Isthmus. The war of it disappear in a puff of snow. You could “Don’t be silly,” he said. “It’s un- was over, and finally Juhana was returned tell when you’d missed or just hit the ice, becoming.” to us. The power of speech had deserted instead of the trunk. I never missed. “Range 2-1-1 meters,” I said. him, and we were all left to imagine “Correct,” he said. “Doesn’t that feel exactly what had driven it away. He was ROLLING HELL better?” only good for fieldwork by then. We were silent. I went through my M came wheeling around the bend on his routine and waited so long that I thought Summer came, and Mother sang bicycle, singing. This was the first time I for sure he’d fallen asleep. I fired my first Tuomas and me psalms in the evening ever met him. He was reporting for the round at the target. while she mended our clothes. Antti was marksman training camp. We’d been “Hit,” M said quietly, as if to himself. gone, Juhana was just beginning to work paired together, and I was sitting on the “You didn’t even look,” I said. again, and I was needed around the farm firing platform with the other shooters, “I listened,” he said. to help Father with the timber, so it was Later in our training, when new Tuomas who was sent to the road proj- waiting for the spotters. M could be groups would arrive at the camp, they’d ect at Miettilä to work. The summer was almost as silent as me when he wanted, ask who he and I were. All the other brutal, and each time Tuomas returned but this was just before the war, and he marksman teams had taken up code from the work site on the weekends, he sang at the top of his lungs. He had a names by then to confuse the Russians. looked more shrunken and sallow. The deep, dark river of a voice, and even then Silent Doom. Death From the Trees. foreman himself came all the way out I closed my eyes and let it wash over me. That sort of thing. M and I refused. Soon to the farm to tell my father about the enough everyone would have a name for afternoon, the hottest anyone could When we were in position for the first me anyway. But when the new recruits remember—about the way Tuomas drill, I patiently waited for him to give the would arrive and see M and me returning had straightened up as if someone had usual range, wind condition, firing pat- from the supply depot, singing together called his name, before crumpling to tern, etc. But he didn’t. Instead he lay on on our bicycles, weaving over the ruts, the ground with sunstroke. Then he his back with his head against the sand- laughing and gamboling like two fawns, was gone too. bag and closed his eyes to the sun. they’d sneer, “And what are you, oh fear- some brothers?” That winter, during the few hours “Aren’t you going to inform me?” I said And M would put his arm around my of morning light, my father set a single to him. shoulders and grin. bullet upright on the table in front of me, “Oh, us?” he’d say, a crown of daffodils before sending me out with my rifle. I car- He spoke without opening his eyes. chained around his hat. “We’re Rolling ried the round inside my glove as I walked, “No,” he said. Hell.” and felt the brass get hot and slick in my “You’re not?” I said. Winter began, and the big cogs of the palm. If you can’t do it with one, I’d heard He shrugged. world around us turned toward war. We him tell Antti, you can’t do it with two. In “I know who you are,” he said. were to have one last break before head- the first week, I missed my shot two days I blew air between my teeth, exasper- ing to the front. Many of the men went in a row, and each night my father made ated. I thought he was impudent. home. M and I both loved the forest and me sit at the table as everyone else ate decided instead to go hiking for all four potatoes from the cellar, my plate empty days. He’d spent a lot of time out there in front of me. My father wouldn’t look at as a child and told me he knew an un- me. My mother wouldn’t look at him. marked path. The first day he drove us hard, cast- On the third day, hunger had sharp- ing a look back at me only occasionally to ened my senses. I disappeared into the see whether I was keeping up. He barely woods; time disappeared into the day. I spoke to me, and my heart began to feel came back in the dark with two hares. I’d like a sharp piece of steel. I imagined a fir- waited, lying alongside a log, until they ing mechanism exploding from a home- passed one in front of the other. My father made round—the jagged pieces of barrel met me on the porch, and pulled me into and stock. It began snowing as we pitched an embrace so rough I thought at first he our tent, and though I was exhausted, I was wrestling me. I could smell the cold lay awake in the dark. and the forest on the stiff hide of his over- The next morning was clear and coat. Then he took me by the shoulders bright. M took my hand and led me out and held me away from him so that he could look into my face. He took a breath as if to tell me something, but said noth- ing. I did not miss again. THE ATLANTIC AUGUST 2019 89

Panama Fedora to the middle of the frozen lake we’d were to fight. Some didn’t even have camped beside in the night. The snowfall winter clothes. Only the officers had real Classic sun protection handwoven in had turned it into a pure white field. tents. The rest made do with improvised Ecuador from toquilla fiber. shelters, anywhere they could hover “Well?” I said. I wanted to go home. I around their tiny fires, a tidy constella- Grosgrain ribbon band. Reinforced 4½\" felt embarrassed. tion of targets. crown, 2½\" brim. Finished in USA. But M’s face was bright, happy, flashing At whatever cue, they’d been ordered S (6¾-6⅞) M (7-7⅛) L (7¼-7⅜) with something. He dropped to his knees to charge out toward the trees, where XL (7½-7⅝) XXL (7¾) and made big sweeping motions with his the men were felled, one atop another, arms, clearing the surface of the ice. by the machine guns. That winter was #1648 Panama Fedora $114 delivered so cold—colder than any of us had ever I thought I was dreaming. Suddenly seen. So cold that the blood from the Shop online or request our catalog we were standing on air. On ice so per- newest layers of bodies turned black and fectly clear, it might have been air. Fifty froze over the bodies stacked at the bot- #KB-65-2BN feet below, I could see the algae on the tom. There wasn’t much snowfall, and stones at the bottom of the lake. ^#1622 #1649 Some of our fleeing units “It only happens when the water had hauled even more frozen 800-324-4934 davidmorgan.com freezes very, very slowly,” M said. “The Russian bodies out of the winter has to be so patient, and then one woods and propped them 11812 N Creek Pkwy N, Ste 103•Bothell, WA 98011 day there it is, a miracle.” He looked at upright, their arms stilled in me, letting out his breath. “I thought various eerie semaphore. you’d like that.” the blackened wall of blood and bodies Later, of course, I would come to seemed orderly in the half-light of the know well the scent of him—rich soil day. M and I stood and looked at it for and tobacco and sweat—carried under a long time. his snow cape and coat and uniform. His taste. The rough scratch of his stubble The world is never very big. A map is and its delicious burn. But when we were just a piece of paper. My Karelia was just out in the silent hours upon hours of our a corridor of wild land north of the vast hunts, when we lay behind an embank- waters of Lake Ladoga. You could be at ment and waited for the first suggestion the shore in a day on foot if you wanted. of dawn, breathing slowly and evenly to You could be at my father’s cabin in four. reduce moisture plumes and to lower That day in the clearing we were some- our body temperatures, I thought only thing like 200 kilometers from the center of that morning. Laughing and falling of Leningrad, imagine. But the forest is on each other. Shuffling around in the endless. The winter stopped everything impossible clarity of that place. with its cold, even space. D I S TA N C E Near the end, in our last week of war, only a few days before I was shot, The winter makes everything itself, I told we passed back through this clearing— M the day we found the black wall of bod- a rare thing in a place where you could ies. He’d spent a lot of time in the brush never trace the same path twice, even as a child, it was true, but the rest of the with careful planning. We were retreat- time he lived in the city, and at first he ing, everyone could see it was over, and didn’t understand what we were looking things were bad. I’d gone on my last hunt at. We’d heard there’d been heavy fight- days before. Some of our fleeing units in ing right away, but there were few roads their bitterness had hauled even more in our area, and the Russians quickly frozen Russian bodies out of the woods found themselves stalled in pockets of and propped them upright, their arms the forest as we crept around them. stilled in various eerie semaphore. The idea was to disturb the Russians before The clearing—a meadow in summer— they overran us. Those corpses were was dim and quiet. Our boys had set up their machine-gun positions among the trees, where they would have clear lines of fire but couldn’t be spotted. The Rus- sians had made their camp in the middle of the open space, for who knew what reason. This was at the beginning. We didn’t yet know how unprepared they 90 AUGUST 2019 THE ATLANTIC

black too, and they made the clearing A WIDE-RANGING look like the stunted remains of a wild- HISTORY OF ASSISTED fire. They were all facing the black wall REPRODUCTIVE and looked strangely as though they TECHNOLOGIES AND were trying to join their friends. My THEIR ETHICAL father used to say, If you need a map to IMPLICATIONS. know where you are, you’re already lost. Both times we passed through the clear- “It is rare that one runs into ing we paused. Then we kept going. a book this prescient on what was to be the technology that That first time, as we reentered the for- vanquished barrenness. Epochal est, M nodded to the horizon, where the if well-grounded, the searing, sun was lurking, as high as it would get that indeed gripping, narrative remains day, a thin, golden-red line of color. ever-captivating from prologue to epilogue.”—Eli Y. Adashi, MD, “The sky is burning,” he said. “What a MS, The Warren Alpert Medical waste.” School, Brown University THE HUNT $29.95 hardcover/ebook It was so cold that if your eyes got too press.jhu.edu close to the holes of the mask, your cor- neas froze. So cold that you needed a ENDLESS body within your body. Papa measured CREATIVITY. the temperature by planting one of his bottles in the snowbank outside his UNLIMITED tent: If the alcohol turned to slush it was POSSIBILITIES. about –25 Celsius or below. At those tem- peratures, nobody moved but us. M and WhiteWalls® I would sleep through the few hours of weak light, then rise and head out as the Magnetic Dry-Erase Wall Panels forest gathered the darkness. Once we’d found a Russian camp, we would sit and An uninterrupted magnetic dry- wait until we were part of the stillness. erase steel writing surface with Then I’d pick a position. nearly invisible seams and a sleek frameless edge design We’d urinate on the berm of snow, letting it freeze so the muzzle flash Easy- wouldn’t kick up any powder for the Installation Russians to see. If we could make a snow cave or small space under the eaves of Printed Styles a tree, we would, and I’d sit there and Available watch the woods in front of us while M slept or lay there staring up at noth- Custom ing, waiting. We’d trained ourselves to Fit Option breathe slowly and carefully, keeping the moisture in the mask. Otherwise our WhiteWalls.com | 800-624-4154 breath would billow out and become a solid thing in the air. It wasn’t hard to see the Russians. We were always close, 150 meters or less. They tried to make their camps where they could take cover behind low piles of deadfall or snow or whatever they could find. To make a perfect shot, you have to know every bit of the woods around you. You have to disappear into the air, to become the weight of the hard rime making the trees into statues. Then it would be time. M watched me take off my outer gloves—knit—which I THE ATLANTIC AUGUST 2019 91

tm placed under the barrel to smooth the stove and M would record the kills in the recoil. Then he watched me take off my captain’s little book. Then Papa would INCREASE AFFECTION mask. I put snow in my mouth to keep go out to stalk the camp’s perimeter, and my breath invisible. I had about 10 min- sleep would come like a coup de grâce. Created by utes before the flesh of my face would Winnifred Cutler, freeze. I’d nod to M and we’d both face Many years afterward, during a fox Ph.D. in biology the target field. hunt led by the president of Finland from U. of Penn, himself, he requested that I show the post-doc Stanford. A scope isn’t the world, my father said group some of my firing positions. It was Co-discovered on my last trip home before I went to war. autumn then, 1970, and a different uni- human pheromones What do you see through a scope? Nothing. verse of trees and leaves and fallen logs. in 1986 We had whole conversations “Is this what you remember?” the pres- Author of 8 books made of just the wind, a ident asked, crouching and looking down sideways movement of iris my rifle with me. “What did it feel like? on wellness that seemed to catch what How did you wait for so long?” little light there was. SAVE $100 with our M’s eyes were all that were visible of 6-Pak special offer A picture. So I used the iron sights, as I him as we both lay back under the tree had since I was a child. What do you see or against the berm, buried together in PROVEN EFFECTIVE IN 3 DOUBLE BLIND down the iron sights? Everything, as it the snow. The solid feel of his body there STUDIES IN PEER REVIEW JOURNALS is. The minuscule area of pale color that beside me. We had whole conversations was a Russian face. The solid dark of a made of just the wind, a sideways move- INCREASES YOUR Russian’s torso. I fired and the shapes ment of iris that seemed to catch what fell with small mists spraying out behind. little light there was. Between magazines, ATTRACTIVENESS The first shot was confusion for them, the M would stay awake, watching to see second brought shouting, the third panic. whether the Russians would send a patrol Unscented Athena 10X tm For Men $99.50 Then a kind of stillness as they waited out to find our position, and I would gaze Fragrance Additives 10:13 tm For Women $98.50 to see whether the cover they’d found up at him and think, Look at me. Look at me. would be enough to save them. Another Cosmetics Free U.S. Shipping mad scramble after the fourth shot. Then WOLVES OF KARELIA a wait, the skin of my own face losing ♥ Julie (CAN) “I tried the pheromone for the first feeling. A minute of quiet. Then a sliver The wolves ate well that first spring after time last night. My husband professed his love of head, or movement; a ventured look the fighting, and the next spring, and the for me 4 times in 30 mins... Let's just say that out to try to see. The fifth shot always next, it’s true. For 10 years after the war, this result is way above baseline, shall we?’” occasioned the strangest of the reactions. their population grew uncontrollably, and Once in a while a man cried. Twice a Rus- packs traveled all the way to the farm. I ♥ Ed (TN) 26 orders “Your 10X product is the sian bellowed with terror and madness. had returned; it was just me and my best product I ever bought! You ask But I was already back behind the berm, father by then. what it does? Well, for one thing, in my mask, breathing, not even hurrying it has increased my love life!” to refill my magazine. I was never spotted. He insisted on hunting, though he’d I didn’t have a body. The forest was my grown old and slow. I would sit on the Not in stores 610-827-2200 body. My rounds came from anywhere. roof of the cabin and watch him coming The men looked and saw only whiteness. home, sometimes with a kill, sometimes Athenainstitute.com not. In either case, the wolves would A long wait, stillness, silence. The Rus- be following at a careful distance. I’d Athena Institute, 1211 Braefield Rd., Chester Spgs, PA 19425 ATM sians tended to their casualties, believing see them coalesce into being out of the I’d fled. I’d wait impossibly long, until the shadows of the trees. They did not, as far few hours of daylight began to wane. And as I know, ever attack, though they eas- then in that frozen twilight, we’d repeat ily could have. Still, they did follow him the process. Then we’d wait even longer every day, at their distance, waiting before we crawled away. By the time we for him to fall. My father never hunted returned to our camp and stepped into wolves. He thought it disrespectful. Papa’s tent, the frozen creases of our furs under our snow capes would be sharp The wolves scattered the bones, start- as knives. We’d sip warm soup from his ing that first spring, their faces perpetually crimson with the offal of the corpses. In later years, when I’d go out hunting again, I’d find a bone here and there: a jagged femur, the marrow sucked out; the little puzzle of a vertebra, so weathered and so cold that if you found it midwinter, it would shatter at the touch of a boot’s toe. 92 A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC

On the day my father didn’t come back AMERICA’S from his hunt, I went out to find him. He ORIGINAL wasn’t hard to track and hadn’t gotten very far. I shot every wolf I saw on my way to Walk-Behind retrieve his body. Instead of dragging and Brush Mower! cleaning the carcasses, I just left them there to mark his trail—a long, loose cor- The DR® Field & Brush 1A3F1X © 2019 ridor of the dead. As soon as he was buried, Mower is Now Better I found an apartment in the city on a rise than Ever! that looked out over the lake. The forest FASTER. Up to 20 HP and 34\" The wolves scattered the wide cut for faster mowing! bones, starting that first spring, their faces EASIER. Power steering gives perpetually crimson with the you fingertip control. offal of the corpses. NEW CHOICES: including PTO looked small and still from there, nothing and tow-behind models for really to see. I hunted only foxes after that. tractors and ATVs. “Five hundred and forty-two confirmed Mows and mulches kills,” the occasional reporter says now, weeds, brush, even when one comes to visit. “What does that saplings up to feel like?” 3\" thick! “Only 259 were with the rifle,” I tell Own an ATV or Tractor? them. “The rest were submachine. I don’t MOW WHILE YOU RIDE... know how they counted those.” Tow-Behind Models offset to left or right! “Still,” they press. “Do you ever think of it?” *Assembled in the USA using domestic & foreign parts. I don’t, really, to tell the truth. Not that FREE SHIPPING 6 MONTH TRIAL I tell them that, or much of anything. I do dream of the wolves sometimes, though. I SOME LIMITATIONS APPLY see them just as I fall asleep. I’m standing alone outside the cabin, and they fill every Go Online or Call for FREE DVD & Info Kit! gap across the field, where the forest be- gins. None of us moves, and I know they DRfieldbrush.com are waiting for me. TOLL 888-213-1358 THE 98TH DAY FREE Running. Our breathing the only sound in the woods. It was the first week of March. In February, the Russians had run out of patience. They poured half a million troops onto the isthmus, 3,000 tanks, 1,300 aircraft. We were maybe 75,000 men in total. M and I had decided to go on one last hunt but had not gone far be- fore we heard and then saw the dark wave, streaming like water toward us from every direction. So we ran back to our men. In front of us, our unit’s trench appeared and the men were yelling and THE ATLANTIC AUGUST 2019 93

we were leaping over the embankment Which was true. I felt the burning itch and had coffee, and stayed in the café all and turning to fire, as was everyone else. of it as the flesh and skin worked the bits afternoon, talking and laughing about the Then the Russians were upon us. Flesh to the surface, where they’d fall into the men we used to know, the strange and came apart around us. I looked to M as washbasin, trailing a tiny ribbon of blood. funny things that had happened some- he reloaded and I watched a round tear times in the woods. He did impressions through his torso sideways, taking him He looked not at me, but at the ceiling. of the doctors who’d come and gone, and to the ground, just like that. I’d only just “The Terror made it through,” he said. I did too. He explained that there had turned to fire when suddenly I was on the “Can you believe that?” eventually been a surgery for his lungs, ground too. I felt something hot and wet and he’d been freed. in my mouth before I lost consciousness. What was the difference, really, between my presence “You know, I loved the war, actually,” he An explosive bullet had torn through and an awful dream? said finally, looking at his mug. “But only the left side of my jaw, I found out later. when I was with you.” Illegal, even in war, but the Russians were I looked at my hands and nodded. desperate, and had half-convinced them- “Terror always does,” I said. We agreed we should have dinner selves we were invisible, ghosts, immor- “Can you believe they gave away Vy- soon, maybe see a film, and went our sep- tal. I’m told I was dragged to the rear in borg?” M said, as if it had just happened. arate ways. That was the last time I ever the retreat—they tried to save me even A nurse came by to check something, saw him. Eventually I heard he’d moved, though, as one of the men put it, half my and we sat quietly until she was gone. and 12 years after that I saw by chance in face was gone. I’m told I was thrown on “I might live in the city now,” I said. “I the paper that he’d died, alone in a veter- a pile of the dead before someone heard might get an apartment.” ans’ home. me gurgling and got me to the medics. My M didn’t say anything. coma lasted seven days. “Let me take you home,” I said. “I will “You’ll live forever!” my doctor said bring you back for the treatments, easy to me at my last checkup, laughing. “We I woke on the day the armistice enough.” should all be so lucky!” was signed, giving Russia our Karelia M turned on his side away from me. I and everything else it wanted. It was could see his jaw held tightly. Each year, the morning after the first March 12, 1940. We thought we’d seen I’d forgotten, somehow, what I brutal freeze of the winter, I drive all the end of war. It was three years before looked like. How monstrous. The slurred the way back to where the farm was and I recovered enough to go out in public. sound of my voice. What was the differ- go into the forest. I take my rifle but no Still, I tried not to. I stayed on the farm. ence, really, between my presence and rounds, not wanting to disturb the silence. People who saw me looked away, their an awful dream? Not that I could disappear again into any- faces rippling with nausea. Even now, at I thought I couldn’t touch him, be- thing, old man that I am. And what does it night, it still looks as if the darkness is cause of all the dressings. all come to, such a life? My father cuffing pulling at the edge of my face, leaving a the back of my head gently as I brought in jagged edge of skin and flesh—as if I’m firewood. The Terror of Morocco, drunk, already half-gone. dancing in his long underwear on Christ- mas. The yellow of M’s daisy-chained THE HEART HUNTS ALONE LIFE WITHOUT END crown as he held it in his teeth. The clear sun slanting down as we stood on air and I found M in a military hospital. He was That’s the hymn they sing in the chapel of spun, laughing and laughing. still there, three years after we were shot, the little town where I live now. I hear it on in the city. He was what they called then Sunday mornings in the winter, the soft I’m a coward, in the end. I always a “permanent,” having survived but with timbre of the muted voices sliding down come back out of the woods to the car. I lungs that needed to be drained often the streets on the ice. always drive back through the darkness, enough that the doctors believed he’d be into another evening, another morning, there forever. I ran into M once more, years and another evening. I can’t even say how it years later. It was 1979 by then. He’d felt, M’s solid warmth beside me in the I sat in the chair by his bed. It was made it out of the military hospital after forest as we waited for the light to begin. summer and the sheets were very white. all, it turned out. We’d both moved to this I can’t even say his name. He was almost unrecognizable, a heavy same town, unknowingly. We stopped beard turning his eyes sharp and dark. Arna Bontemps Hemenway is the author of Elegy on Kinderklavier, the winner of the “You’ve grown a beard,” I said. “I just 2015 PEN/Hemingway Award. His fiction grow shrapnel.” has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, among other places. He is currently an associate professor of creative writing at Baylor University. The Atlantic (ISSN 1072-7825), recognized as the same publication under The Atlantic Monthly or Atlantic Monthly (The), is published monthly except for a combined issue in January/February by The Atlantic Monthly Group, 600 New Hampshire Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20037 (202-266-6000). Periodicals postage paid at Washington, D.C., Toronto, Ont., and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: send all UAA to CFS (see DMM 707.4.12.5); NONPOSTAL AND MILITARY FACILITIES: send address corrections to Atlantic Address Change, P.O. Box 37564, Boone, IA 50037-0564. Printed in U.S.A. Subscription queries: Atlantic Customer Care, P.O. Box 37564, Boone, IA 50037-0564 (or call 800-234-2411). Privacy: We occasionally get reports of unauthorized third parties posing as resellers. If you receive a suspicious notification, please let us know at [email protected]. Advertising (646-539-6700) and Circulation (800-234-2411): 600 New Hampshire Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20037. Subscriptions: one year $39.95 in the U.S. and poss., add $10.00 in Canada, includes GST (123209926); add $20.00 elsewhere. Canada Post Publications Mail Agreement 41385014. Canada return address: The Atlantic, P.O. Box 1051, Fort Erie, ON L2A 6C7. Back issues: send $15.00 per copy to The Atlantic, Back Issues, 1900 Industrial Park Dr., Feder- alsburg, MD 21632 (or call 410-754-8219). Vol. 324, No. 2, August 2019. Copyright © 2019, by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. 94 A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 THE ATLANTIC

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