Below is a guest reading list from Daniel A. Gross, a journalist and public radio producer who lives in Boston.

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Comic books bridge continents. Superman spin-offs are a hit in China; Japanese manga trickled into American culture through Frank Miller’s Ronin and even the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The Adventures of Tintin was translated from French into more than 50 languages. Alongside the superhero franchises and funny pages, a thriving genre of nonfiction comics has created new audiences and new appreciation for everything from war reporting to memoir. Here are five modern classics whose intricate illustrations have shaped the form.

1. Joe Sacco, “The Fixer and Other Stories”

The Fixer is a war story set in peacetime. In 2001, Joe Sacco traveled to Sarajevo, hoping to find the interpreter who’d helped him during the Yugoslav Wars. By this time, correspondents had cleared out and soldiers had become civilians. Memories of atrocity were starting to slip beneath the surface—but Sacco’s book excavates them. During one flashback, Sacco portrays his wartime arrival to Sarajevo, and it’s styled like film noir: hulking architecture, empty streets, long shadows. In a surreal scene at the Holiday Inn, the concierge points to the hotel on a city map. “This is the front line,” she says. “Don’t ever walk here.” Then, in the lobby, Sacco meets his fixer.

(Read an excerpt here.)

2. Lynda Barry, “One! Hundred! Demons!”

Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons! is what you get when you mix together a few cups of fact, a spoonful of fiction, and innumerable cups of coffee. Barry says her memoir was inspired by “a hand-scroll painted by a Zen monk named Hakuin Ekaku, in 16th century Japan.” Her own colorful variant on the hand-scroll, which falls somewhere between comic and collage, tells tiny stories of growing up that are both playful and profound.

3. Riad Sattouf, “The Arab of the Future”

In Arab of the Future, Riad Sattouf transforms six perplexing years in the Middle East into an elegant and ironic memoir. When the story begins, Sattouf—a former Charlie Hebdo contributor who now draws a column for l’Obs—is a wide-eyed toddler. His mother is French and his father is Syrian. “In 1980, I was two years old, and I was perfect,” Sattouf declares.

Through a child’s eyes, Sattouf builds a backdrop for the Arab world we know today. In Syria, where young men style their hairs like characters in Grease, Sattouf writes: “Using their hands, the women began to eat the remains of the meal eaten by the men in the next room.” In Tripoli, houses belong to whomever moves in, but families have to wait in food lines for baked beans and green bananas. After the disappointments of the Arab Spring, it’s easy to be cynical about the history of the Middle East. But Sattouf chooses the more challenging approach—to look for hope and humor where there’s not much to be found.

(Read an excerpt here.)

4. Art Spiegelman, “Maus”

Maus helped nonfiction comics go mainstream when, in 1992, it became the first graphic novel to with the Pulitzer Prize. In simple black-and-white strips that were serialized for more than a decade, Spiegelman tries to make sense of his Jewish father’s memories of the Holocaust. He wryly casts Jews as mice and Germans as cats, as if World War II were a horrifying version of Tom and Jerry. As Spiegelman alternates between his present and his father’s past, he sketches out his own complex relationship to his roots.

5. Marjane Satrapi, “Persepolis”

As a girl in Iran, Marjane Satrapi saw herself as a prophet and a revolutionary. “The revolution is like a bicycle,” she tells her friends in her memoir Persepolis. “When the wheels don’t turn, it falls.” In the next frame, we see dozens of people trying to pedal an unwieldy five-wheeled contraption. Needless to say, it’s not going anywhere.

Satrapi’s simple black-and-white illustrations capture a turbulent history with surprising depth. In one historical panel, British colonial rulers—embodied by a bald man sipping liqueur and a greasy man smoking a pipe—plot the takeover of Iran. In another panel, after the execution of one of her heroes, Satrapi argues bitterly with God. She can forsake her faith, but for most of her childhood, she can’t escape her home. And since she can’t leave, she starts to love Iran. “This old and great civilization has been discussed mostly in connection with fundamentalism, fanaticism, and terrorism,” she writes in her introduction. Persepolis changes that.

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Read more from this author

Ashley Dawson | Extinction: A Radical History | OR Books | July 2016 | 13 minutes (3,487 words)

Below is an excerpt from Extinction: A Radical History, by Ashley Dawson, who argues that contemporary mass extinction is a result of the excesses of the capitalist system. In this chapter, Dawson gives a brief history of the ecocidal societies that came before ours. This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

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“Gilgamesh listened to the word of his companion, he took the axe in his hand, he drew the sword from his belt, and he struck Humbaba with a thrust of the sword to the neck, and Enkidu his comrade struck the second blow. At the third blow Humbaba fell. Then there followed a confusion for this was the guardian of the forest whom they had felled to the ground. For as far as two leagues the cedars shivered when Enkidu felled the watcher of the forest, he at whose voice Hermon and Lebanon used to tremble. Now the mountains were moved and all the hills, for the guardian of the forest was killed.”
—The Epic of Gilgamesh (2500–1500 BCE)

When did the sixth extinction begin, and who is responsible for it? One way to tackle these questions is to consider the increasingly influential notion of the Anthropocene. The term, first put into broad use by the atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen in 2000, refers to the transformative impact of humanity on the Earth’s atmosphere, an impact so decisive as to mark a new geological epoch. The idea of an Anthropocene Age in which humanity has fundamentally shaped the planet’s environment, making nonsense of traditional ideas about a neat divide between human beings and nature, has crossed over from the relatively rarified world of chemists and geologists to influence humanities scholars such as Dipesh Chakrabarty, who proposes it as a new lens through which to view history. Despite its increasing currency, there is considerable debate about the inaugural moment of the Anthropocene. Crutzen dates it to the late eighteenth century, when the industrial revolution kicked off large-scale emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This dating has become widely accepted despite the fact that it refers to an effect rather than a cause, and thereby obscures key questions of violence and inequality in humanity’s relation to nature.

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By thinking through the periodization of extinction, these questions of power, agency, and the Anthropocene become more insistent. If we are discussing humanity’s role in obliterating the biodiversity we inherited when we evolved as a discrete species during the Pleistocene epoch, the inaugural moment of the Anthropocene must be pushed much further back in time than 1800. Such a move makes sense since the planet’s flora and fauna undeniably exercise a world-shaping influence when their impact is considered collectively and across a significant time span. Biologists have recently adopted such a longer view by coining the phrase “defaunation in the Anthropocene.” How far back, they ask, can we date the large-scale impact of Homo sapiens on the planet? According to Franz Broswimmer, the pivotal moment was the human development of language, and with it a capacity for conscious intentionality. Beginning roughly 60,000 years ago, Broswimmer argues, the origin of language and intentionality sparked a prodigious capacity for innovation that facilitated adaptive changes in human social organization. This watershed is marked in the archeological record by a vast expansion of artifacts such as flints and arrowheads. With this “great leap forward,” Homo sapiens essentially shifted from biological evolution through natural selection to cultural evolution.

Yet, tragically, our emancipation as a species from what might be seen as the thrall of nature also made us a force for planetary environmental destruction. With this metamorphosis in human culture, our relationship to nature in general and to animals in particular underwent a dramatic shift. During the late Pleistocene era (50,000–35,000 years ago), our ancestors became highly efficient killers. We developed all manner of weapons to hunt big game, from bows and arrows to spear throwers, harpoons, and pit traps. We also evolved sophisticated techniques of social organization linked to hunting, allowing us to encircle whole herds of large animals and drive them off cliffs to their death. The Paleolithic cave paintings of the period in places such as Lascaux record the bountiful slaughter: mammoths, bison, giant elk and deer, rhinos, and lions. Some of the first images created by Homo sapiens, these paintings suggest an intimate link between animals and our nascent drive to imagine and represent the world. Animals filled our dream life even as they perished at our hands.

Bison in a prehistoric cave painting. Via Wikimedia Commons.

In tandem with this great leap forward in social organization and killing capacity, humanity expanded across the planet. From our ancestral home in Africa, we radiated outward, colonizing all the world’s major ecosystems within the span of 30,000 years. We spread first to Eurasia, then, around 50- to 60,000 years ago, to Australia and New Guinea, then to Siberia and North and South America around 13,000 years ago, and then, most recently, to the Pacific Ocean Islands only 4,000 years ago. At the same time, humans underwent a massive demographic boom, expanding from a few million people 50,000 years ago to around 150 million in 2000 BCE. The late Pleistocene wave of extinctions cannot be understood in separation from this spatial and demographic expansion of Homo sapiens. In most places around the planet, the megafauna extinctions occurred shortly after the arrival of prehistoric humans. On finding fresh hunting grounds, our ancestors encountered animals with no evolutionary experience of human predators. Like the ultimate invasive species, we quickly obliterated species that didn’t know how to stay out of our way. The susceptibility of creatures who were unfamiliar with humans is evident from what biologists call the filtration principle: the farther back in time the human wave of extinction hit, the lower the extinction rate today.

Animals filled our dream life even as they perished at our hands.

This filtration effect means that in our ancestral home, Sub- Saharan Africa, only 5% of species went extinct, while Europe lost 29%, North America 73%, and Australia an astonishing 94%. Given the fact that biologists are only just beginning to understand the cascading, ecosystem-wide impact of the destruction of megafauna, it is hard to gauge the full impact of the late Pleistocene wave of megadeath. Nonetheless, given its planetary scale, the mass extinctions of the period are certainly the first evidence of humanity’s transformative impact on the entire world’s animal species and ecosystems. When all the big game was gone, our ancestors were forced to find alternatives to their millennia-old hunter gatherer survival traditions. Combined with climatic and demographic changes, the megafauna extinctions catalyzed humanity’s first food crisis. Pushed by these crisis conditions, humanity underwent what may be seen as its second great transition: the Neolithic Revolution. Given conducive environmental conditions—including plant species that could be domesticated, abundant water, and fertile soil—human beings shifted from nomadic to sedentary modes of food production. This shift happened remarkably rapidly, from about 10,000–8,000 BCE. The transition to agriculture, with its greater capacity for food production, led to a demographic explosion. About 10,000 years ago, around the time of the Neolithic Revolution, the global human population was four million. By 5,000 BCE, it had grown to five million. Then, in a pivotal period as settled societies developed on a major scale after 5,000 BCE, our population numbers began doubling every millennium, to 50 million by 1000 BCE and 100 million 500 years later. This demographic boom was accompanied by the growth of settled societies, the emergence of cities and craft specialization and the rise of powerful religious and political elites. Paleontologists dub this period the Holocene epoch, and it inaugurated an even more sweeping human transformation of the planet than the previous wave of extinctions. Indeed, the Neolithic Revolution must be seen as one of the most fundamental metamorphoses not just in human but also in planetary history. The domestication of plant species and the exploitation of domesticated animal power permitted human beings to transform large swaths of the natural world into human-directed agro-ecosystems. As “civilization” emerged, first in the city-states of Mesopotamia and then in Egypt, India, China, and Mesoamerica, humanity became a truly world-shaping species. Some critics have in fact dated the onset of the Anthropocene epoch from precisely this moment.

The Neolithic Revolution also generated a fateful metamorphosis in humanity’s social organization. Intensive agriculture produced a food surplus, which in turn permitted social differentiation and hierarchy, as elite orders of priests, warriors, and rulers emerged as arbiters of the distribution of that surplus. Much of subsequent human history may be seen as a struggle over the acquisition and distribution of such surplus. Significantly, writing as a technology emerged in Mesopotamia during the fourth millennium BCE out of the need to record annual food production and surpluses. The capacity conferred by cuneiform and subsequent systems of writing to transmit information and promote social organization clearly played an important role in the economic expansion of ancient societies. Indeed, writing appears to have emerged in tandem with the transformation of Mesopotamian city-states like Sumer into powerful empires. Ancient Sumer generated an explosion of inventions that would be foundational to subsequent civilizations, including the wheel, the preliminary elements of algebra and geometry, and a standardized system of weights and measures that facilitated trade in the ancient world. The Sumerians also pioneered less felicitous institutions such as imperialism and slavery. As the idea of private property emerged and human society became organized around control over the surplus, writing also became a tool to record the resulting social conflicts. Much early writing, what we would today term literature, in fact documents chronic warfare. In works like The Iliad (760 BCE), for instance, we find what may be seen as a record of the intensifying warfare that accompanied the growth of city-states and empires.The increased importance of warfare led to the rise of military chiefs; initially elected by the populace, these leaders quickly transformed themselves into permanent hereditary rulers across the ancient world. Military values and a veneration of potentates came to suffuse ancient culture, at significant cost to the majority of the populace. While The Iliad celebrates the martial virtues of Greek warriors, for example, it also offers an extended lament for the violence unleashed as humans turned their skills of organized violence away from megafauna and onto one another.

Gilgamesh battling the bull of the heavens. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The violence generated by what geologists call the Holocene epoch was directed not just at other human beings but also at nature. Indeed, what is perhaps humanity’s first work of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh (1800 BCE), hinges on a mythic battle with natural forces. In the epic, the protagonist Gilgamesh, not content with having built the walls of his city-state, seeks immortality by fighting and beheading Humbaba, a giant spirit who protects the sacred cedar groves of Lebanon. Gilgamesh’s victory over Humbaba is a pyrrhic one, for it causes the god of wind and storm to curse Gilgamesh. We know from written records of the period that Gilgamesh’s defeat of the tree god reflects real ecological pressures on the Sumerian empire of the time. As the empire expanded, it exhausted its early sources of timber. Sumerian warriors were consequently forced to travel to the distant mountains to the north in order to harvest cedar and pine trees, which they then ferried down the rivers to Sumer. These journeys were perilous since tribes who populated the mountains resisted the Sumerians’ deforestation of their land. Ultimately, these resource raids were insufficient to save the Sumerian empire. The secret to the Sumerians’ power was the creation of elaborate systems of irrigation that allowed them to produce crops using water from the region’s two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. Over time, however, the Sumerians’ dams and canals silted up. Even worse, as the river water carried into fields by irrigation canals evaporated under the hot sun, it left behind its mineral contents, leading to increasingly saline soils. The only way to cope with this problem was to leave the land fallow for long periods of time, but as population pressure increased, this conservation strategy became impossible.

Short-term needs outweighed the maintenance of a sustainable agricultural system. The Sumerians were forced, archeological records document, to switch from cultivation of wheat to more salt-tolerant barley, but eventually even barley yields declined in the salt-soaked earth. Extensive deforestation of the region also added to the Sumerians’ problems. The once-plentiful cedar forests of the region were used for commercial and naval shipbuilding, as well as for bronze and pottery manufacturing and building construction. As the Epic of Gilgamesh documents, the Mesopotamian city-states found themselves grappling with a scarcity of timber resources. The sweeping deforestation of the region also contributed to the secondary effects of soil erosion and siltation that plagued irrigation canals, as well as having a significant impact on the biodiversity of the region. As the Sumerian city-states grew, they were forced to engage in more intensive agricultural production to support the booming population and the increasing consumption of the civilization, with its mass armies and state bureaucracy.

The deserts that stretch across much of contemporary Iraq are a monument to ecological folly.

The Sumerians sought to cope with this ecological crisis by bringing new land into cultivation and building new cities. Inevitably, however, they hit the limits of agricultural expansion. Accumulating salts drove crop yields down more than 40% by the middle of the second millennium BCE. Food supplies for the growing population grew inexorably scarcer. Within a few short centuries, these contradictions destroyed ancient Sumerian civilization. The deserts that stretch across much of contemporary Iraq are a monument to this ecological folly. Not all ancient societies went the way of Sumer. For about 7,000 years after the emergence of settled societies in the Nile Valley (around 5500 BCE), the Egyptians were able to exploit the annual flood of the Nile to support a succession of states, from the dynasties of the Pharaonic Era, through the Ptolemaic kings of the Hellenistic Period, to the Mamluk Sultanate, and the Ottoman Era. The stability of Egypt’s agricultural system originated in the fact that the Nile Valley received natural fertilization and irrigation through annual floods, a process that the Egyptians exploited with only minimal human interference. Within decades of the introduction of dam-fed irrigation by the British in the nineteenth century, in order to grow crops like cotton for European markets, widespread salinization and waterlogging of land in the Nile Valley developed. The Aswan dam, begun by the British in the late nineteenth century, regulated the Nile’s flood levels and thus protected cotton crops but undermined the real secret of Egypt’s remarkable continuous civilization by retaining nutrient-rich silt behind the dam walls. As a result, the natural fertility of the Nile Valley was destroyed, replaced by extensive use of artificial, petroleum-derived fertilizers that placed Egypt even more deeply in thrall to the global capitalist economy.

Statues of Memnon at Thebes during the flood. David Roberts, 1848. Via Wikimedia Commons.

This history of pre-modern ecocide is not intended to suggest that human beings are inherently driven to destroy the natural world upon which they ultimately depend. While it may be true that humanity’s capacity to transform the planet on a significant scale through mass extinction dates back many millennia rather than simply two centuries, and that the Anthropocene therefore needs to be backdated substantially, it is only with the invention of hierarchical societies such as the Sumerian Empire that practices of defaunation and habitat destruction became so sweeping as to degrade large ecosystems to the point of collapse. The history of Egypt suggests that under the right material and cultural circumstances, human beings can achieve relatively sustainable relations with the natural world. It is the combination of militarism, debauched and feckless elites, and imperial expansionism, through which the Sumerians laid waste to much of the Fertile Crescent in pre-modern times, that renders ecocide so toxic as to destroy the very civilizations that carry it out. The collapse of ecocidal imperial cultures should serve as a potent warning to the globe-straddling world powers of today. Ancient Rome offers additional stark evidence for the exploitative attitude towards nature that accompanies empire. One of the most striking characteristics of the early Roman Empire is its strong expansionary drive. Following a period of political conflict between patrician elites and plebeians (or commoners) in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, large numbers of Romans began to migrate to newly conquered provinces. The treasuries of subjected lands such as Macedonia (167 BCE) and Syria (63 BCE) were looted, and a permanent of system of tributes and taxes was imposed, allowing taxes on Roman citizens to be eliminated. This imperial expansion culminated in Augustus’s conquest of the kingdom of Egypt, which allowed him to distribute unparalleled booty to the plebeians of Rome. He was the last emperor who could afford to do so. In tandem with this looting of a significant portion of the ancient world, the Romans also used their conquests to deal with shortfalls in domestic agricultural productivity. First Egypt, then Sicily, and finally North Africa were turned into the granary of the empire in order to provide Rome’s citizens with their free supply of daily bread. Deforestation caused by the Romans’ agricultural enterprises spread from Morocco to the hills of Galilee to the Sierra Nevada of Spain. Like the Sumerians, the Romans failed to engage in sustainable forms of agriculture, seeking instead to expand their way out of ecological crisis; the arid conditions that prevail across much of North Africa and Sicily today are testaments to their improvident and destructive approach to the natural world.

Roman mosaic. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The people of Rome were kept obedient to imperial rule not just by subsidized grain, but by a combination of bread and circuses. In the latter, the class of slaves whose labor sustained the Empire was forced into gladiatorial matches to the death. They were joined in these bloody spectacles by wild animals brought from the farthest corners of the empire to die in combat with humans and with one another. Lions, leopards, bears, elephants, rhinos, hippos, and other animals were transported great distances to be tortured and killed in public arenas like the Colosseum, until no more such wildlife could be found even in the farthest reaches of the empire. The scale of the slaughter was monumental. When Emperor Titus dedicated the Colosseum, for example, 9,000 animals were killed in a three-month series of gladiatorial games. While there is no evidence that the Romans drove any species to complete extinction, they did decimate or destroy numerous animal populations in the regions surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. Indeed, the Roman Empire was probably responsible for the greatest annihilation of large animals since the Pleistocene megafauna mass extinction. As was true of the Sumerians, Rome annihilated most of the large animals it could get its hands on and reduced most of the lands it conquered to desert.

To justify this carnage of wildlife, Roman attitudes towards the natural world shifted markedly. During the early days of the Republic, Romans regarded the Mediterranean landscape as the sacred space of nature deities such as Apollo, god of the sun, Ceres, goddess of agriculture, and Neptune, god of freshwater and the sea. As Rome expanded, however, these religious beliefs became largely hollow rituals, disconnected from natural processes. During the high days of the empire, Stoic and Epicurean philosophies that legitimated the status-driven debauchery of the Roman upper classes prevailed. Orgies of conspicuous consumption, in which the wealthy would eat until they vomited, only to begin eating again, became common. By the time Christianity became the official state religion of Rome in the late 4th century, there was little to differentiate Roman philosophy from the dominant attitude of the Judeo-Christian scriptures, in whose creation myth God grants human beings absolute dominion over the world he has made. Humanity, the Bible and Christian tradition held, was placed apart from nature by God, gifted with an immortal soul and a capacity for rational thought that legitimated the transformation of the natural world in the pursuit of human self-interest.

The collapse of ecocidal imperial cultures should serve as a potent warning to the globe-straddling world powers of today.

This orientation toward nature could not be sustained indefinitely. The spices and other luxury foods consumed by the dissolute Roman elite in their banquets had to be imported at great expense from locations as distant as India. The more exotic the food, the better; as recorded in the Apicius, a cookbook for elite Roman feasts, items such as thrushes and other songbirds, wild boars, raw oysters, and even flamingo were on the menu at elite banquets. Rome could not export enough goods to pay for these luxury imports, and was increasingly forced to pay with scarce gold and silver. Severe economic crises crippled the empire, forcing emperors after Augustus to end the customary distribution of free food to plebeians and to institute taxes on Roman citizens. The empire collected the funds it needed to subsidize military campaigns mainly from farmers, who consequently could not afford to invest in the production of crops and fell increasingly into debt. Environmental degradation intensified, and the empire found itself unable to produce the food surplus on which its reproduction depended. Ultimately, Rome was no longer able to pay its large and far-flung standing armies, and, after a turbulent 500-year existence, the overextended empire fell to the invading barbarian hordes of the north. Rome today is remembered mainly for environmentally destructive achievements such as the Colosseum, suggesting that subsequent cultures learned remarkably little from the unsustainable dominion and ultimate eclipse of the empire.

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From Extinction: A Radical History, by Ashley Dawson.

Black Cardigan is a great newsletter by writer-editor Carrie Frye, who shares dispatches from her reading life. We’re thrilled to share some of them on Longreads. Go here to sign up for her latest updates.

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There’s a wonderful, creepy Shirley Jackson story—you may already know it—called “The Summer People.” It’s about a couple from New York City who decide to stay at their little cottage on the lake for a month past Labor Day instead of returning as usual to the city right after the holiday. The story starts out with Mrs. Allison, age 58, doing her shopping in the nearby village and announcing her and her husband’s change in plans. The first person she tells is the grocer:

“Nobody ever stayed at the lake past Labor Day before,” Mr. Babcock said. He was putting Mrs. Allison’s groceries into a large cardboard carton, and he stopped for a minute to look reflectively into a bag of cookies. “Nobody,” he added.

“But the city!” Mrs. Allison always spoke of the city to Mr. Babcock as though it were Mr. Babcock’s dream to go there. “It’s so hot—you’ve really no idea. We’re always sorry when we leave.”

Suffice it to say, by the story’s end you understand why nobody stays on at the lake past Labor Day. In that, it’s a close cousin to “The Lottery,” that other Shirley Jackson story about the ominous summer observances of New England villages (“The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely…”).

Interestingly, the two stories were written within months of each other, in 1948. “The Lottery” came first. Jackson wrote it swiftly one “bright” morning and sent it off to her agent soon after. As she later recounted in her lecture “Biography of a Story”:

As a matter of fact, when I read it over later I decided that except for one or two minor corrections, it needed no changes, and the story I finally typed up and sent off to my agent the next day was almost word for word the original draft. This, as any writer of stories can tell you, is not a usual thing. All I know is that when I came to read the story over I felt strongly that I didn’t want to fuss with it. I didn’t think it was perfect but I didn’t want to fuss with it.

It was published in The New Yorker a few months later. As Jackson noted, “My agent did not care for the story, but—as she said in her note at the time—her job was to sell it, not to like it.” The magazine didn’t want to fuss with the story either. The only change the fiction editor requested was that “the date mentioned in the story be changed to coincide with the date of the issue of the magazine in which the story would appear, and I said of course.” This is all a digression but I find it fascinating—how the story came out so quickly; Jackson’s wisdom in not rewriting the life out of it (and the editor’s too); and how even though the story’s first reader didn’t like it, it went on to be Jackson’s most famous story. A few years ago, Ruth Franklin—whose biography of Jackson comes out in two months (hurrah!)—wrote about all the confused, upset, outraged letters The New Yorker received after “The Lottery” was published. Many had misunderstood the story to be nonfiction.

In “Biography of A Story,” Jackson says she wrote “The Lottery” in early June, but Franklin’s research places the writing of the story a couple months before, probably in April. In an email, Franklin told me that “The Summer People” was written the same summer that “The Lottery” was published, making the two stories even more intertwined. It was published a couple years later, in 1950, in the September issue of a magazine called Charm, the timing of its publication perhaps a caution to any city people thinking of staying at their summer homes past Labor Day. (“The Summer People” is collected in Come Along With Me, but, if you don’t already own it, I’d go ahead and spring for the Library of America’s Shirley Jackson volume, which is fantastic and has it too.)

The Summer People of Kelly Link

Kelly Link’s story collection Get in Trouble was one of my favorite books of last year. As it happens, it leads off with a story that’s also titled “The Summer People.” The story’s incredible. I couldn’t sleep the night after reading it, it was so strange and suggestive and beguiling. It’s set not in New England, but in a rural western North Carolina county—one a couple hours west of Asheville—where a lot of wealthy people have summer homes high in the mountains. And while Jackson’s story sticks to the viewpoint of the village outsiders, the Allisons, Link’s “The Summer People” is from the perspective of Fran, a high school girl who acts as a caretaker for out-of-towners’ homes. There are other interesting correspondences and inverses between them, and yet each story is also uniquely itself. Knowing that Link is a Jackson fan, I’ve wondered about the relationship she’d intended the stories to have. So I emailed and asked her about it:

Was Shirley Jackson’s story present for you as you were writing yours? Or was it a relationship that sprang up later?

Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that the title was always the title, and I was taking that from Shirley Jackson. And no, because I intentionally did not go back to reread Jackson’s story at any point while I was working on mine. I liked the idea of writing a story where all the play between Jackson’s story and mine would come from the reader, rather than from me. (If that makes any sense.)

Not to tread too heavily on “where do you get your ideas?”, but does your story have any interesting origins or associations that you wish people would ask you about?

The questions that I like best are the ones that I can’t anticipate! I guess that I could mention that I was under a deadline to write this story at a time in my life where we were living, temporarily, in an apartment in Allston, Massachusetts. Our daughter had just been released from the rehabilitory hospital where she had been for over six months due to complications from prematurity. A writer friend pointed out that this was, in sideways fashion, a story about caretaking and parenting and responsibility—and, I suppose, a desire to escape.

But what I knew that I wanted to write about was fairies and toy making and catalog houses. We were editing an anthology of young adult steampunk stories for Candlewick, and there seemed like there was space in the anthology for that kind of story.

Favorite Shirley Jackson story? I’d guess this changes—so favorite one *today.*

Oh, boy. It’s almost always either “The Summer People” or “One Ordinary Day, With Peanuts.” When I was a kid, I loved the stories in Raising Demons and Life Among the Savages. Over a year ago, Tin House ran a previously unpublished Jackson story, “Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons” — it was eerily great to read a Shirley Jackson story that I hadn’t ever read before.

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“Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons” was later published in Let Me Tell You, the collection of previously uncollected Jackson stories and essays that came out last year. I keep hoping for a Bolaño-esque thing where more and more Jackson stories keep being found and published. “And here are three lost novels! We found them buried in the garden.”

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Below is a guest reading list from Daniel A. Gross, a journalist and public radio producer who lives in Boston.

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As a teenager growing up in Southern California, I remember looking up one day and seeing a fine white powder falling from the sky. It was the middle of summer, and for a moment I wondered, absurdly, if it was snowing. The flakes crumbled between my fingers and left streaks like flour on my clothes. They were ash.

Every summer, swaths of California burn. Grass, brush, trees and even houses go up in smoke. In the worst years, they drift back to earth in the form of a thin gray coating on windshields and awnings. On local TV, between late-night car chases and tanned weather reporters who know every synonym for sunny, I remember images of hillsides that glowed orange and black.

It’s fire season again. So far, nearly 30 major wildfires have torn through 12 states. As this year’s blazes seem to reach their yearly peak, here are four stories about risk and resilience in the face of fire. They’re a glimpse into the lives of those who fight fires, those who flee them, and those who rebuild, literally, from the ashes.

1. Joan Didion, “Fire Season”

In 1978, Joan Didion wrote in her notebook: “Beautiful country burn again.” The line came from a Robinson Jeffers poem, and almost every summer a new fire brought it to mind. In an essay for the New Yorker, later collected in her book After Henry, Didion lays out a sort of philosophy of living with fire. She visits the Los Angeles County Fire Department and describes the “essentially military” logic of firefighting. But her real subject is a peculiar feeling, one that she and her neighbors experienced every summer: the quiet, gnawing certainty that eventually a fire will come.

2. Norman MacLean, “Young Men and Fire”

Before Norman Maclean was a writer and professor, he fought fires for the Forest Service. When he was a teenager, he nearly died in a Montana wildfire. “It came so close it sounded as if it were cracking bones, and mine were the only bones around,” he writes. It’s through that memory of terror, thirst and exhaustion that Maclean begins his book Young Men and Fire. Thirteen “smokejumpers”—firefighters who parachute into the wilderness—died in the 1949 Mann Gulch fire. With an almost obsessive attention to detail, Maclean reconstructs their story using the skill and sensitivity he honed as a novelist.

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3. Fernanda Santos, “The Fire Line”

The Granite Mountain Hotshots—named for a peak that rises above Prescott, Arizona—rose in just a few years from a “homegrown band of wildland firefighters” to an elite and tight-knit team. Fernanda Santos writes that first-year recruits earned just $12 an hour, but “like migrant farm workers chasing harvest time,” they fought fires all across the western U.S. In 2013, nineteen Hotshots perished in a fire just an hour from home. “The Fire Line” builds on Santos’ reporting for the New York Times and grapples with the challenges of researching and narrating the aftermath of tragedy. It’s a strong first book.

4. Kyle Dickman, “The True Story of the Yarnell Hill Fire”

Like Santos, Kyle Dickman—who was once a member of a hotshot crew—used extensive interviews to reconstruct the deadly Yarnell Hill Fire. Dickman’s account in Outside magazine, later expanded into a book called On the Burning Edge, weaves personal stories into a vivid and painful narrative of the day of the fire. He brings the perspective of an insider to a disaster that, for outsiders, must have seemed almost unimaginable.

5. Rebecca Solnit, “A Paradise Built in Hell”

In A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit describes “one of history’s biggest infernos before aerial warfare.” But she’s not especially interested in why San Francisco burned after the massive earthquake of 1906. Instead, she focuses on communities that rose from the ashes, like the outdoor cafeteria that for weeks sustained San Franciscans displaced by disaster. Solnit lingers in places of suffering, like New Orleans after the hurricane and New York City after the 9/11 attacks—but she chronicles a kind of resilience that she calls “redemption amid disruption.” “Few speak of paradise now, except as something remote enough to be impossible,” she writes. “But what if paradise flashed up among us from time to time—at the worst of times?”

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Elizabeth Letts | The Perfect Horse: The Daring U.S. Mission to Rescue the Priceless Stallions Kidnapped by the Nazis | Ballantine Books | August 2016 | 19 minutes (4,567 words)

The excerpt below is adapted from The Perfect Horse, by Elizabeth Letts. The book describes an American colonel’s quixotic mission in the waning days of World War II: to rescue Europe’s purebred horses from a secret Nazi stud farm mere hours before the starving Soviet army arrived and likely slaughtered the animals for food. In this excerpt, Letts explains the origins of the Nazis’ secret horse breeding project. This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

* * *

Like Hitler himself, the horses, once quintessentially Austrian, would be given a distinctly German stamp.

A herd of mares left Austria in October 1942. The herd made the 350-mile trip northwest from Piber to Hostau, Czechoslovakia, without incident, and were settled into the Third Reich’s most sheltered stud farm, located in Bohemia, just a few miles from the Bavarian border. Beyond the farm’s serene green pastures, golden valleys stretched toward distant mountains crested by dark waves of evergreens. The Böhmerwald, or Bohemian Forest, served as more than a beautiful backdrop for the farm; it formed a natural barrier between Germany to the west and Austria to the south and had withstood invasion and attack for centuries. During the Nazi era, this locale was known as “the Bohemian bastion.” Among Germans, it was thought to be the safest place to ride out the war, least likely to be invaded from east or west. It was here that Gustav Rau had secreted the Lipizzaner, as well as the finest Arabians from Janów, including Witez. Even in the middle of a war, here, all was deceptively tranquil.

Quiet villages dotted this part of Bohemia, each graced by a Catholic church with an onion-domed spire. Flanking each cluster of tidy whitewashed houses were well-kept farms growing crops that thrived in the region’s rich agricultural soil. But in the wake of Hitler’s annexation of the area following the Munich Agreement of 1938, its bucolic appearance was deceiving. Once a multicultural region where Czechs, Germans, and Jews lived side by side in peace, Bohemia, now called the Sudetenland, had turned into a firm cornerstone of Hitler’s Third Reich. When the Nazis annexed the area in September 1939, the local German-speaking population had lined the streets cheering to welcome Hitler’s forces. Local Czechs and Jews had either fled or been forcibly evicted. Those who remained had been transported to concentration camps. By 1942, when the first Lipizzaner arrived in Hostau, the local Nazi apparatus held a firm grip on the region, but Czech partisans also operated in the area, finding refuge in the hideaways offered by the Bohemian Forest. Though the border with Bavaria, Germany, was less than fifteen miles to the west, the mountainous barrier made it seem much more remote.

The stud farm at Hostau, located next to the village of the same name, had been known for breeding cavalry horses long before Hitler’s time. The most prominent local landowners, the Trauttsmansdorff family, had historically served as imperial equerries for the Habsburg Crown. In addition to the main complex of stables adjacent to the village, there were pastures in three neighboring villages—the entire establishment covered fifteen hundred acres and could accommodate more than a thousand stallions, mares, and foals. All in all, it was more than twice as big as Alfred Vanderbilt’s showplace, Sagamore Farms, which Rau had visited in 1938.

Rau had selected this expansive facility to put into motion the most exalted part of his grand plan. Throughout 1942, he had systematically transported all of the purebred Lipizzaner from the stud farms of Italy, Austria, and Yugoslavia to this sheltered location for safekeeping. He had also sent a personal emissary on a mission to purchase purebred Lipizzaner from wealthy noblemen who raised smaller strings of purebreds for private use. By the end of 1942, Rau had gathered almost every Lipizzaner in the world into a single location.

Austrian-born Hitler’s goal, expressed in Mein Kampf, was to bring all of the German-speaking peoples of Central Europe, including Austria, into the fold of the Third Reich. Just as Hitler aimed to eliminate “impure strains” and combine the different Germanic groups into a single “Aryan race” of people, so Rau planned to use the science of selective breeding to erase the individual differences characterizing the several strains of purebred Lipizzaner that had emerged since the end of World War I and replace them with a single mold: pure white, imperial, identical, and ideally suited for military use. Like Hitler himself, the horses, once quintessentially Austrian, would be given a distinctly German stamp.

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Gustav Rau believed that these intelligent and tractable animals possessed a nearly ideal temperament. But he had a less favorable opinion of the breed’s conformation. The Lipizzaner had some very specific breed characteristics: a relatively small stature, a Roman or convex profile (this was less pronounced in some stallion lines than others), a very straight shoulder that resulted in a choppier gait, low withers (the bony prominence at the base of the neck that the saddle rests against), and a short back. All of these qualities were especially well suited to the art of classical riding, which differed from modern riding in many respects, but Gustav Rau was determined to remold the Lipizzaner according to a template that he held in his mind’s eye.

Rau’s vision of the ideal military horse had been forged in the crucible of World War I. As a young man during the Great War, Rau had served as a cavalry soldier; his abdomen was latticed with battle scars, including a stoma from a lance wound sustained during a mounted charge. Despite evidence of mounting technological change, Rau remained stubbornly antiquated, convinced that vehicles could never replace horses. Instead, he believed that the military horse could be perfected, through selective breeding, to outperform any machine. According to Rau, “The military horse . . . should be noble, but not too forceful, energetic, but not excited.” He aimed to breed a horse with endless endurance and an efficient digestive system that could run on little grain. But the cause to which Rau had devoted his life was being threatened by an endless supply of motor vehicles that rattled off Germany’s assembly lines, each one identical to the next.

As head of the Polish stud farm administration, Rau had modernized the production of horses, increasing the number of stallions, mares, and foals born in Poland year upon year, and feeding the voracious pipeline of horses to the war. Yet horses—living, breathing animals that require fodder, exercise, nurture, and care—could not be fabricated like nuts and bolts in a factory.

As the war continued to escalate, Rau pedaled ever more furiously, trying to produce a perfect standardized horse. He believed that with aggressive inbreeding, he could rapidly expand the number of Lipizzaner without sacrificing anything in quality; in fact, he believed that the Lipizzaner could be enhanced and changed, elongating the back, increasing the height of the withers, and changing the slope of the shoulder. He had predicted that he could completely change the breed in just three years. Perhaps Rau envisioned hundreds of thousands of purebred Lipizzaner fanning out in formation across the German empire, each as reliable and identical as Germany’s BMW automobiles— even better, as they would require neither scarce rubber nor costly gasoline.

* * *

We have to promote inbreeding of the best bloodlines.

Without access to a modern understanding of genetics, Rau’s views regarding horse breeding were rudimentary, drawn largely from later discarded nineteenth-century notions of blended inheritance, in which an offspring’s traits were supposed to be a fifty-fifty mix of mother and father. For example, a tall father and short mother should produce a child whose height was exactly midway between the two parents’ heights. The problem with this theory was that if it were true, then over time, the population would become increasingly homogenous as the blending process evened out outliers. Not only did this not occur, it was precisely the opposite outcome of the highly differentiated forms that resulted according to Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

When Darwin devised his theory of evolution, he knew that traits were passed from parent to offspring, though he did not understand quite how. The father of the science of genetic inheritance was Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian friar whose experiments with pea plants, published in 1866, provided the first demonstration of the principles of inheritance. But Mendel’s findings were not widely disseminated during his lifetime, and throughout the late nineteenth century, scientists continued to believe that offspring could inherit characteristics acquired by parents from their environment. Lamarckism, named for French scientist Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), supposed that children inherited characteristics that had been developed in the parents— for example, giraffes elongated their necks by reaching into high branches for food, and these longer necks then were passed along to their offspring. But later in the nineteenth century, scientists were beginning to question that line of thought. German scientist August Weismann (1834–1914) postulated that there was a substance, which he called the “germ plasm,” that could be passed from one generation to the next without changing its essential form, discounting entirely the influence of nurture or environment on inherited traits. He performed an experiment in which he cut the tails off six generations of white mice to prove that the next generation would still be born with tails. While the purpose of Weismann’s experiment was scientific and not social, the increasing belief that inherited traits were not mutable or affected by the environment contributed an underpinning to Nazi racial beliefs. Weismann’s germ plasm theory seemed to provide a scientific rationale for bigotry, leading some to argue that no matter how assimilated a Jew might appear, every Jewish baby was born with certain immutable (and, in the bigots’ view, negative) characteristics.

In his approach to horse breeding, Rau followed Weismann’s theory. He believed that purebred horses had an uncorrupted substance that was passed along ancestral lines. This germ plasm was inherently fragile and needed to be protected from corruption from outside influences, such as “mixed blood.” Rau wrote, “We have to promote inbreeding of the best bloodlines to get identical germ plasm to prevent corruption and to preserve it.” Not understanding the dangers of inbreeding, Rau believed that increasing purity would improve quality.

With a modern understanding of genetic inheritance, animal breeders are now well aware of the problems that can accrue in animals bred too closely—one result is that inherited genetic defects or susceptibility to disease can increase. But these insights were not available to Rau. And so, like a painter working with a palette of colors, Rau tried to fashion the perfect horse from each of a million small equine details— the angle of the shoulder, the set of the eye, the curve of the barrel, as well as elements of temperament that once were considered ineffable and not suitable to manipulation: courage, intelligence, fortitude, and spirit.

A chart explaining the Nuremberg Laws, which established a pseudo-scientific basis for racial discrimination. Via Wikimedia Commons.

To lead this enterprise on the ground, Rau had chosen his personal protégé, forty-six-year-old Czech-born German Hubert Rudofsky. As a civilian, Rudofsky had been considered one of Czechoslovakia’s foremost experts on equine breeding. He first attracted Rau’s attention when horses bred in this region of Bohemia had made a strong showing in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

Now a colonel in the German Army, Rudofsky was over six feet tall, a bachelor known for his dapper manner and immaculate dress. He owed his love of horses to a youthful fascination with mounted dragoons, uhlans, and hussars, whose silver bayonets, shiny knee-high boots, and colorful regimental uniforms had impressed him as they paraded through the world of his childhood. Rudofsky had learned to ride at the age of ten, instructed with great precision by a cavalry squadron commander. And so, when World War I broke out, the seventeen-year-old Rudofsky eagerly enlisted in the Austrian cavalry. At the war’s end, he was awarded a silver medal for courage.

In peacetime, Rudofsky was a civil servant who directed stud farms in both the Czech and Slovak regions of the country, where he maintained excellent relationships with his fellow citizens. When the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia, like all other eligible ethnic German men, Rau was called up to serve in the German Wehrmacht. Through the patronage of Count von Trauttmansdorff, a family friend, he joined the 17th Bamberger Rider Regiment, later to become famous when Claus von Stauffenberg and four other members of the regiment plotted to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944. Soon after, Rudofsky was pressed into service training carriage drivers at a Wehrmacht training center. A year later, Rau summoned Rudofsky to serve in the stud farm administration of Poland. Rudofsky acquitted himself well, so he was put in charge of what was at the time the largest stud farm in Europe, at Debica, in occupied Poland, which housed more than four hundred mares at its height. Among the horses at Debica, Rau had placed forty-four Lipizzaner mares, as well as two Lipizzaner stallions imported from Yugoslavia, among the few he had kept outside of Hostau.

Hubert Rudofsky was an expert at carriage driving, possessed of an advanced diploma in this complicated art. The ability to drive a fourin-hand is one of the equestrian world’s most rarefied skills. Traditionally, four harnessed horses pulling a heavy carriage or coach required two drivers, one to control each pair of reins. During World War I, the demand for ambulance carriages to evacuate wounded soldiers led a German count to develop the four-in-hand driving method known as the Achenbach system, which for the first time allowed a single driver to control all four horses.

“Four-in-hand” refers to the four reins, one for each horse, that a driver controls in a single hand—the left. With the right, the driver holds a long carriage whip anchored between the thumb and little finger, freeing up the middle three fingers to control the reins during turns. The whip, with a weighted silver base and braided leather lash, is held erect at a precise angle to avoid accidentally obstructing the view or dislodging the hat of a passenger. Driving a four-in-hand requires no fewer than thirty-one separate pieces of harness equipment. Even more, it requires a deep knowledge of horsemanship. One turn-of-the-century enthusiast’s journal put it thus: “To become an expert driver and thorough coachman one should be more or less a lover of horses; indeed a large percentage of the best drivers have been associated with horses the greater part of their lives, have ridden everything from a rocking-horse to a runaway thoroughbred, and had become competent drivers of single horses and pairs long before they essayed the tooling of a four.” Only highly trained drivers, such as Rudofsky, had the requisite skill to drive a four-in-hand, an expertise that took no fewer than five years of practice to master. Imperial coaches pulled by matching pairs of Lipizzaner once whisked the members of the Habsburg monarchy around Vienna on official and royal business. With Rudofsky’s expertise and Rau’s white horses, these same conveyances could be used to display the reach and might of the Third Reich.

* * *

Rau kept his pistol pointed at the SS officer’s heart.

In the fall of 1943, Rudofsky would show off his skills at a grand parade to be held at the stud farm in Debica. The staff of the stud farm had spent weeks preparing the horses for this special occasion. On the day of the parade, a large viewing stand, draped with freshly cut tree boughs and a scarlet swastika banner, filled with Nazi officials and high-ranking German military officers. Lining up along the railings of the grand exhibition fields were beleaguered Polish citizens of the occupied town who had come out to watch the fine horses, hoping for a few hours of distraction.

Rudofsky, splendidly clad in a full dress uniform, oversaw the proceedings and prepared for his turn in the driver’s box. He meticulously inspected each horse from top to toe, checking the brass-studded imperial harnesses as he gave hurried last-minute instructions to the grooms.

The parade began with uniformed grooms entering the vast exhibition field on foot, leading a group of fine yearlings. As they circled in front of the viewing stands, a heavy rain started to fall. The horses’ hooves churned the wet ground into soupy mud, which flicked up to stain the horses’ legs and bellies. Despite the bad weather, the audience did not move. A few people pulled out umbrellas. Most of the officers on the viewing stand seemed impervious to the storm, simply letting the rain soak their wool uniforms and drip off their visored caps.

Rudofsky was focused on the horses, so at first he did not notice that a hubbub was brewing, but soon he heard a commotion. Near the spot where he was preparing horses for their entrance to the field, Gustav Rau was engaged in an increasingly heated conversation with an SS officer. Rau’s adjutant, Rudolf Lessing, stood next to him, visibly struggling to maintain his composure. Rudofsky realized that while the Poles had been lining up to watch the horse parade, a regiment of SS soldiers had moved in behind them. The grounds of the stud farm and all of the spectators were now entirely surrounded by armed SS storm troopers.

The SS officer had approached Rau to explain that he had orders to arrest every member of the crowd. All of the Polish men between the ages of eighteen and thirty would be sent to a forced-work camp to manufacture German munitions. The horse parade, which had drawn a large crowd, was simply being used as a trap.

Gustav Rau pulled a pistol from his hip and pointed it directly at the SS officer.“You have no authority here,” he said. “This horse farm is under the jurisdiction of the German Army.”

Rudofsky watched, scarcely daring to draw a breath. Out on the large exhibition field, the horses continued to prance and dance. The group of officers up on the viewing stand was too far away to hear the altercation.

Rau kept his pistol pointed at the SS officer’s heart. Neither man moved until, with a curt nod, the officer stepped back. He agreed to remove his men. Only then did Rau lower his pistol. A few minutes later, the SS regiment withdrew. The assembled crowd never realized what had happened.

When the time came for the grand finale, Rudofsky sat aboard the driver’s box of his immaculate carriage, ready to take his turn in the arena. His feet were braced against an angled toe box, which provided the traction needed to control the two pairs of horses. In his white-gloved left hand, he held the four reins; in his right, he balanced the ten-pound whip. His back was ramrod-straight and his face showed no emotion, but as he circled in front of the viewing platform, crowded with smiling, applauding officers and Nazi Party officials, the cold rain dripped down his face like tears.

German stamp depicting the four-in-hand driving method, 1941. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Just a few weeks later, Rudofsky was admitted to a hospital in Krynica, Poland, suffering from chest pains and severe agitation. The doctors were unable to find any physical cause for his ailments. He had suffered from a heart condition since childhood, but he showed no cardiac symptoms now. Rather, his symptoms appeared to be the result of severe stress. Upon his release from the hospital, Rau, perhaps realizing that this highly skilled horseman could no longer handle the fraught conditions in occupied Poland, sent him back to his home region of Bohemia, where he would assume the job of overseeing the Reich’s greatest equine treasures: the Lipizzaner.

Rudofsky returned from Poland to find his home much changed. Hostau, a village of only a few thousand inhabitants, was located just adjacent to his family’s home in the seat of a county where the Rudofskys were prominent citizens. The stud farm itself was in tip-top shape, with no luxury spared to care for its precious horses. But the war had fractured and splintered this quiet community. Within Rudofsky’s own family, sentiments toward the Third Reich were bitterly divided. His father’s first cousin owned the local bank and had personally bankrolled the departure of at least one family of Jews when the Nazis took over the area in 1939. His younger brother, Waldemar, a physician, had joined the German Army and was stationed at a field hospital in the Ukraine. His younger sister was director of the local Nazi women’s organization.

As a young man, Rudofsky had considered himself Austrian; his father had been a personal consultant to the Austro-Hungarian emperor Franz Joseph, but between the end of World War I and the German annexation, young Rudofsky had served the Republic of Czechoslovakia, proud of his role in bringing the republic to prominence in horse breeding on the world stage. Privately, Rudofsky disdained the Nazis. But after 1939, he had donned the Wehrmacht uniform without complaint. In his eyes, he had no choice; the civilian horse-breeding system he worked within had been swallowed whole by the German Army, and his expertise made him a valuable military commodity. But in the eyes of the Czech citizens who had been chased from their homes when Hitler’s forces arrived, he and his German-speaking compatriots were traitors. When Rudofsky returned to Bohemia, now “cleansed” of its ethnic minorities, he found his homeland sadly diminished.

Being closer to home did have one advantage for Rudofsky. Though he did not have any children of his own, he had a ten-year-old nephew, Waldemar’s son, Ulli, whom he adored as his own child. The angel-faced altar boy gazed upon his suave uncle with tremendous pride each time the six-foot-tall officer strode into Mass at the Church of St. James in his full cavalry uniform, the heels of his shined high-top boots clicking on the stone floor. The devout Rudofsky carried in his pocket a military card stating that if he were in extremis, he wanted to receive final unction.

Rudofsky made it a point to keep watch on the young boy. When he stopped at his mother’s Italianate villa not far from Hostau for dinner, he never failed to quiz young Ulli, a clever and studious boy, on his arithmetic tables. Nobody had heard from the boy’s father in quite some time. The adults around the Rudofsky dinner table understood that the doctor might be languishing somewhere in a prisoner-of-war camp, or was perhaps already dead.

The stables full of white horses made a powerful impression on young Ulli. In the winter of 1943, soon after his uncle returned home from Poland, Rudofsky arranged for Ulli and his older sister, Susi, to visit the majestic horses at Hostau. Like something out of a fairy tale, a carriage pulled by two snow-white horses appeared in front of the children’s house, and a handsome uniformed coachman stepped off the driver’s box. His ornate uniform—which looked Polish or Russian— impressed the young children. The driver opened the carriage door and tucked Ulli and Susi into warm blankets sewn together like sleeping bags. The air was crystalline as the Lipizzaner trotted toward Hostau, their hooves ringing against the frozen ground. From inside the snug carriage, the children could see the straight back of the coachman up on his box and the snowy expanses of rolling fields, the Bohemian Forest dark and forbidding in the distance.

When they arrived at Hostau, their uncle greeted them. He took them to the stables so that they could see the white horses up close. Ulli was surprised to discover that when you blew on the white coats of the Lipizzaner, their skin was blue-black underneath. But when his uncle lifted him up onto the bare back of a coal-black horse named Tyrant, the boy was terrified to be up so high and screamed out, “It’s hot up here.” His uncle, perfectly comfortable around the beautiful animals, laughed and lifted him back down. Returning to their home, once again tucked snugly into the carriage, the children were left with an indelible impression of the seemingly magical horses that had been entrusted to their uncle’s care.

* * *

Rudofsky’s farm followed precepts laid out in a book called Regulation of the Stud Farm, written in 1656.

Rudofsky ran the stud farm at Hostau with unstinting precision. Every morning, his valet laid out his perfectly tailored and pressed uniform and buffed his boots to a high shine. At the stable, grooms had already hitched up his Lipizzaner mares. The silver tip of his braided leather carriage whip shone with the well-polished patina of use. This carriage master who could drive a four-in-hand with such ease had never learned to drive a car, and so his upright, elegant figure with the pair of white horses was a familiar sight all over town. As he pulled up in front of the large structure that served as an administrative building for the stud farm, his stable masters always had a report ready. No detail was to be considered too small to bring to his attention.

The day-to-day routine in Hostau was steeped in centuries-old tradition. Rudofsky’s farm followed precepts laid out in a book called Regulation of the Stud Farm, written in 1656. Grooms were in charge of the horses’ everyday care, feeding, grooming, exercise, and pasturing, a job that lasted from sunup to sunset. A good Landstallmeister, or rural stud farm director, would never tolerate a groom who was rough or slapdash with the splendid creatures in his charge. These horses were to be treated with the utmost care and kindness. Rudofsky followed these precepts to the letter.

Every Monday, Rudofsky inspected all the horses. Up and down the long aisles of the stables, grooms fussed with their charges, making sure every detail was perfect, from the tips of the horses’ well-formed ears to the very ends of their silky tails. Rudofsky watched attentively as each horse was led from its stall by a groom who then coaxed his charge to prick forward its ears, stand square on all four feet, and make the best possible impression.

Details of each horse were recorded in the voluminous stud farm books: the horse’s health, temperament, soundness, and physical characteristics. Pertinent information was passed up the line to Gustav Rau. Rudofsky was a consummate expert in the complex details of stud farm management, but decisions about pairings of mares and stallions remained in the hands of his superior.

One thing is clear: Rau’s plan to increase the number of specially bred Lipizzaner was successful. By 1944, the pastures around Hostau were filled with placid white broodmares with frolicking dark-coated foals at their sides. The first of Rau’s new breed of Lipizzaner were being born, though it was too soon to tell what the outcome would be; it would take years to fully evaluate the performance of these close-bred newborns, and several generations before selective mating could substantially alter the offspring. But for now, the German project to reshape Europe’s oldest and most refined breed, to place upon it the unmistakable mark of the Third Reich, was continuing unimpeded.

In German, the word Rasse means both “race” of people and “breed” of animal. Rau’s program at Hostau to produce a pure white race of horses shows parallels with one of Nazi Germany’s most infamous “other” breeding projects: the Lebensborn. At special “birth clinics,” SS officers mated with specially selected women who exhibited quintessential Aryan traits. The babies were baptized in a special SS rite, cradled beneath a symbolic SS dagger while incantations pledged that these Aryan babies would have lifelong allegiance to Nazi beliefs. The horses foaled at Hostau were also given a special rite: They were branded with the letter H, which was pierced through with a dagger. This was the mark of Rau’s pure new race of white horse.

* * *

From the book THE PERFECT HORSE by Elizabeth Letts.
Copyright © 2016 by Elizabeth Letts.
Reprinted by arrangement with Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Claire Harman | Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart | Knopf | March 2016 | 32 minutes (7,925 words)

The excerpt below is adapted from Claire Harman’s biography of Charlotte Brontë. It tells the story of how the Brontës burst onto the literary scene using male pseudonyms. The sisters slowly came out to a select few, beginning with their father. But Charlotte retained her male identity even in correspondence with her publishers and fellow authors, until tragedy compelled her to reveal the truth. This story comes recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

* * *

When the servant came in with the coals, he found Mr. Thackeray weeping over Currer Bell’s love scenes.

Six sets of Jane Eyre arrived at the Parsonage on publication day, 19 October 1847, presumably much to the interest of the postmaster, Mr. Harftley. Reviews began flooding in immediately, from the daily papers, religious journals, provincial gazettes, trade magazines, as well as from the expected literary organs such as the Athenaeum, Critic and Literary Gazette. Charlotte had been anxious about the critical recep­tion of “a mere domestic novel,” hoping it would at least sell enough copies to justify her publisher’s investment—in the event, it triumphed on both fronts. The response was powerful and immediate. Reviewers praised the unusual force of the writing: “One of the freshest and most genuine books which we have read for a long time,” “far beyond the average,” “very clever and striking,” with images “like the Cartoons of Raphael . . . true, bold, well-defined.” “This is not merely a work of great promise,” the Atlas said, “it is one of absolute performance”; while the influential critic George Henry Lewes seemed spellbound by the book’s “psychological intuition”: “It reads like a page out of one’s own life.” It sold in thousands and was reprinted within ten weeks; eventu­ally, even Queen Victoria was arrested by “that intensely interesting novel.” Only four days after publication, William Makepeace Thackeray, whose masterpiece Vanity Fair was unfolding before the public in serial form at exactly the same time, wrote to thank Williams for his complimentary copy of Jane Eyre. He had “lost (or won if you like) a whole day in reading it”; in fact it had engrossed him so much that his own printers were kept waiting for the next instalment of Becky Sharp’s adventures, and when the servant came in with the coals, he found Mr. Thackeray weeping over Currer Bell’s love scenes.

Who was Currer Bell? A man, obviously. This forthright tale of attempted bigamy and an unmarried woman’s passion could have been written only by a man, thought Albany Fonblanque, the reviewer in John Forster’s influential Examiner, who praised the book’s thought and morals as “true, sound, and original” and believed that “Whatever faults may be urged against the book, no one can assert that it is weak or vapid. It is anything but a fashionable novel . . . as an analysis of a single mind . . . it may claim comparison with any work of the same species.”

Charlotte could hardly keep up with responding to the cuttings that her publisher was sending on by every post, and even received a letter from George Henry Lewes while he was writing his review for Fraser’s Magazine, wanting to engage in a detailed analysis of the book. “There are moments when I can hardly credit that anything I have done should be found worthy to give even transitory pleasure to such men as Mr. Thackeray, Sir John Herschel, Mr. Fonblanque, Leigh Hunt and Mr. Lewes,” Currer Bell told his publisher; “that my humble efforts should have had such a result is a noble reward.” It must have been difficult for Emily and Anne to be wholly delighted for their sister, with their own books apparently forgotten, though when Newby saw the success of Currer Bell he suddenly moved back into action with the production of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, hoping to cash in on the excitement.

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At home, the time had come to inform her father of the reason for the sudden flood of post from London, and his daughters’ animation. Patrick Brontë told Elizabeth Gas­kell later that he suspected all along that the girls were somehow try­ing to get published, “but his suspicions could take no exact form, as all he was certain of was, that his children were perpetually writing—and not writing letters.” Sometime in November or early December 1847, between the publication of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, Charlotte sought out her father in his study after his usual solitary dinner, with a copy of her novel to show him and two or three reviews, including one that was critical—a characteristic piece of scru­pulousness. Mrs. Gaskell wrote down Char­lotte’s own report of the scene:

“Papa I’ve been writing a book.” “Have you my dear?” and he went on reading. “But Papa I want you to look at it.” “I can’t be troubled to read MS.” “But it is printed.” “I hope you have not been involv­ing yourself in any such silly expense.” “I think I shall gain some money by it. May I read you some reviews.” So she read them; and then she asked him if he would read the book. He said she might leave it, and he would see.

When he came in to tea some hours later it was with the announce­ment, “Children, Charlotte has been writing a book—and I think it is a better one than I expected.” The scene made a pleasantly comi­cal end to the secrecy that the girls had found obnoxious at home, however essential it seemed elsewhere, and Reverend Brontë’s pride in his daughter’s success became one of Charlotte’s deepest pleasures in the following years.

Emily and Anne were not well served by their publisher, and the copies of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey that arrived just before Christmas proved to be cheaply produced and full of errors uncorrected from the proofs. Worse still, Newby had indulged in some chicanery in his advertising of the book, suggesting that it was by the author of Jane Eyre. The reception was mixed, and the coverage far less extensive than that of Currer Bell’s bestseller; reviewers seemed consternated by Wuthering Heights’s shocking violence and “abominable paganism”—even the multiple narrators unsettled them. Not all the judgements were negative, however. The force and originality of Ellis Bell’s book were indisputable, as was the mind behind it, “of limited experience, but of original energy, and of a singular and distinctive cast,” as the critic in Britannia said, while Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly recognised that the author “wants but the practised skill to make a great artist.” Emily was gratified by these few but potent marks of recognition and kept cuttings of five reviews in her writing desk, including one unidentified one, the best of all, which praised the novel’s vital force and truth to “all the emotions and passions which agitate the restless bosom of humanity” and “talent of no common order.”

Appearing as an adjunct to such a strange and powerful story, Agnes Grey never had a chance of being judged on its own merits. The Atlas, crushingly, said that, unlike Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey “left no painful impression on the mind—some may think it leaves no impres­sion at all.” It also looked pallid in comparison with Currer Bell’s gov­erness novel, which had in fact post-dated it.

But the appearance of two more novelists called Bell—one of whom was wickedly sensational—made a prime subject of gossip. Though none of the published works bore any biographical information about the authors, it became generally understood that the Bells were broth­ers, possibly through Charlotte’s reference to them as “relatives” in her correspondence with publishers, and with the writers to whom she had sent Poems. One of those writers, J. G. Lockhart, seemed much more interested in the gossip than in the work they had sent him and passed on to his friend Elizabeth Rigby the news that the Bells were “broth­ers of the weaving order in some Lancashire town.” Another school of thought, fuelled by Newby’s false advertising, favoured the idea that “the Bells” were all one person.

Her growing friendship with George Smith’s second-in-command, William Smith Williams, was one of the great pleasures that came to Charlotte through publication, and for almost a year she conducted a very open and lively correspondence with him in the person of the androgynous “Currer Bell,” with no revelation of her real name, sex or circumstances. The freedom that this gave her was unique in her life: she wrote to Williams not as a man or a woman, but the free spirit, unsnared, that her heroine Jane had defined and defended.

From the frankness with which Currer Bell tackles the question in one letter of what Williams’s daughters might do to earn an indepen­dent living, it is clear that Williams had shared (in his missing side of the correspondence) many details of his family life and circumstances with his new correspondent, whoever “Currer Bell” was. He could hardly have been in serious doubt that the author of Jane Eyre and of these letters was a woman, but the fiction of her non-womanness was maintained scrupulously in their early correspondence.

* * *

To all the rest of the world we must be ‘gentlemen’ as hereto­fore.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was published in late June 1848, stoking press interest in “all these Bells,” as one paper called them, who sud­denly seemed to be flooding the market with sensational novels—four in nine months. It encouraged the worst in Thomas Newby, who suggested to an American publisher that the Bells’ works, including this new one, were all the product of a single pen, Currer’s, and when Tenant of Wildfell Hall was advertised in this way—“by the author of ‘Jane Eyre,’ ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘Agnes Grey’ ”—the American firm Harper’s, which had an agreement with Smith, Elder to pub­lish Currer Bell’s next book, was understandably offended. George Smith could only pass on his own sense of affront to his author in Haworth by post, and ask for an explanation.

This was a dreadful letter for Charlotte to receive, threatening to ruin her hitherto excellent relations with Smith, Elder and tainting her and her sisters with blame for what had been Newby’s casual double-dealing. She was so mortified that only direct action seemed appropri­ate, and instead of getting out her desk to write a letter of explanation, she set about packing a small box instead and had it sent down to Keighley Station by carrier. After a heated discussion with Emily and a hurried meal, she and Anne set off on foot for four miles in pouring rain, caught the train to Leeds and from there took the night train to London. Emily was having no part in this rash adventure, and Patrick Brontë does not seem to have been either consulted or informed.

Telling Mary Taylor about these eventful few days, in a wonder­fully comic letter, Charlotte described how on arrival in the capital early the next morning she and Anne made for the Chapter Coffee House, not knowing where else to go:

We washed ourselves—had some breakfast—sat a few minutes and then set of[f] in queer, inward excitement, to 65. Cornhill. Nei­ther Mr. Smith nor Mr. Williams knew we were coming they had never seen us—they did not know whether we were men or women—but had always written to us as men.

No. 65 Cornhill, the magical address to which Charlotte had been writing for the past year, turned out to be a large bookseller’s shop “in a street almost as bustling as the Strand”:

—we went in—walked up to the counter—there were a great many young men and lads here and there—I said to the first I could accost—

“May I see Mr. Smith—?” he hesitated, looked a little surprised—but went to fetch him—We sat down and waited awhile—looking a[t] some books on the counter—publications of theirs well known to us—of many of which they had sent us copies as presents. At last somebody came up and said dubiously

“Do you wish to see me, Ma’am?”

“Is it Mr. Smith?” I said looking up through my spectacles at a young, tall, gentlemanly man

“It is.”

I then put his own letter into his hand directed to “Currer Bell.” He looked at it—then at me—again—yet again—I laughed at his queer perplexity—A recognition took place—. I gave my real name—“Miss Brontë—”

It is significant that Charlotte’s personal acquaintance with her pub­lisher began with a laugh and a double-take. He never quite got over his amazement at the incongruity of it, that this strange little woman in glasses and old-fashioned travelling clothes was Currer Bell. And she, given the advantage of surprise, was able to make this first scrutiny of him without self-consciousness. What she saw was a tall, charming man of twenty-four, elegantly dressed and brimming with excitement at meeting her. He hurried his visitors into an office, where rapid explanations were gone into on both sides, accompanied by strong mutual condemnation of the “shuffling scamp,” Newby. At the first opportunity Smith called in his colleague Williams to share the revelation of their best-selling author’s identity, and now it was Charlotte’s turn to be surprised, for Williams, her confidential cor­respondent of the past year, appeared in the guise of “a pale, mild, stooping man of fifty,” stammering and shy. The shock to both of them must have been profound, having communicated so freely and equally, to meet at last and have to fit their epistolary personalities into these unlikely casings—one of them female. There was “a long, nervous shaking of hands—Then followed talk—talk—talk—Mr. Williams being silent—Mr. Smith loquacious.”

Smith was fully animated, and immediately had a dozen plans for the entertainment of the Misses Brontë and their introduction to London society. “[Y]ou must go to the Italian opera—you must see the Exhibition—Mr. Thackeray would be pleased to see you—If Mr. Lewes knew ‘Currer Bell’ was in town—he would have to be shut up,” et cetera, et cetera. Delightful though all these suggestions were, Charlotte cut him short with the warning that the sisters’ incognito had to be strictly preserved. She and Acton Bell had only revealed themselves to him to prove their innocence in the matter of Newby’s lies. “[T]o all the rest of the world we must be ‘gentlemen’ as hereto­fore,” she told him.

“You are altogether a human being, Jane? You are certain of that?” Illustration for the second edition of Jane Eyre. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Nevertheless, Smith was determined to fête them, offered them the hospitality of his own home and, when that was refused, came up with the idea of introducing the sisters not as authors but as his “country cousins,” the Misses Brown. “The desire to see some of the personages whose names he mentioned—kindled in me very strongly,” Charlotte told Mary, “but when I found on further examination that he could not venture to ask such men as Thackeray &c. at a short notice, with­out giving them a hint as to whom they were to meet, I declined even this—I felt it would have ended in our being made a show of—a thing I have ever resolved to avoid.” The sisters retired to the Coffee House, exhausted, where Charlotte took smelling salts—the conventional if rather potent remedy of the time against headache and pains—to pre­pare herself for a promised call later in the day from Smith and his sis­ters. But when the Smiths turned up, young and lovely in full evening dress (right down to white gloves), it was with the expectation that the Misses Brown would accompany them to the Opera—which Charlotte and Anne had “by no means understood.” But, despite their unpre­paredness, and the effects of the analgesic, Charlotte decided on the spur of the moment that it would be better to go along with the plan, so within minutes she and Anne were being helped into the Smiths’ carriage, where Williams was also in full fig. “They must have thought us queer, quizzical looking beings—especially me with my spectacles,” Charlotte related with deep amusement. “I smiled inwardly at the con­trast which must have been apparent between me and Mr. Smith as I walked with him up the crimson carpeted staircase of the Opera House and stood amongst a brilliant throng at the box-door which was not yet open. Fine ladies & gentlemen glanced at us with a slight, graceful superciliousness quite warranted by the circumstances—Still I felt pleasurably excited—in spite of headache sickness & con­scious clownishness; and I saw Anne was calm and gentle which she always is—”

Also in the audience that night, watching the Royal Italian Opera Company perform The Barber of Seville, were the Earl and Countess of Desart, Viscount Lascelles, the author Lady Morgan and the philan­thropist Angela Burdett-Coutts, a glamorous glimpse of real High Life for the two Brontës after all their years of imagining it in their writ­ings. Charlotte was so impressed by the splendour of the Opera House building and company that she pressed Williams’s arm and whispered, “You know I am not accustomed to this sort of thing.” Making such an aside to a man she had only just met would have been unthinkable at home, but Charlotte found herself so far outside her milieu that night that she could behave naturally without impunity. And her authorial persona protected her further. It was not Miss Brown on the arm of dashing young George Smith, nor even Miss Brontë, but Currer Bell.

* * *

Ellis the ‘man of uncommon talents but dogged, brutal and morose,’ sat lean­ing back in his easy chair—Acton was sewing.

Unknown to Charlotte, the trip to London with Anne was to be the last bright spot in her life for a very long time. Bran­well was sinking rapidly, worn out by the physical toll of his addictions and “intolerable mental wretchedness.”

Branwell died in his father’s arms, aged thirty-one. “My Son! My Son!” Patrick cried out piteously, refusing to be comforted, alone in his room. He never thought that his remaining children might have needed his comfort in return after their ordeal. “My poor Father naturally thought more of his only son than of his daughters,” Charlotte remarked sombrely.

*

Emily had caught a chill, it seemed, on the day of the funeral, and had a persistent, racking cough. Charlotte at first blamed the weather and the stress of Branwell’s death, but the cough per­sisted, worsened, and she began to be deeply alarmed: “Emily’s cold and cough are very obstinate; I fear she has a pain in the chest—and I sometimes catch a shortness in her breathing when she has moved at all quickly—she looks very, very thin and pale.” But her sister was not a good patient—not patient at all. “Her reserved nature occasions one great uneasiness of mind—it is useless to question her—you get no answers—it is still more useless to recommend remedies—they are never adopted.” By early November, Emily’s harsh dry cough and breathlessness, and her frightening emaciation, were getting worse.

Charlotte at first described Emily as “a real stoic in illness,” trying to see her intransigence in the best possible light, but the sick woman’s refusal to accept any help or sympathy or to make any adjustments to her daily routine became increasingly distressing to her sisters: “you must look on, and see her do what she is unfit to do, and not dare to say a word.” “I have again and again incurred her displeasure by urg­ing the necessity of seeking advice, and I fear I must yet incur it again and again.” This recalls “the unconscious tyranny” that Constantin Heger observed in Emily’s treatment of Charlotte that may not have been unconscious at all. “When she is ill there seems to be no sun­shine in the world for me,” Charlotte told Williams. “I think a cer­tain harshness in her powerful and peculiar character only makes one cling to her more.” Indeed, Emily seems to have fully understood her power over Charlotte—over the whole household—and been strangely determined to test it at this juncture, imposing on them what Char­lotte later called “forced, total neglect.”

George Smith’s gifts of books and periodicals diverted the house­hold during these awful months, though the growing notoriety of the brothers Bell, the guessing games about their true identities and the temptation to rank them as competitors were signs of notice more agi­tating than gratifying. From her later remarks about Wuthering Heights, it is clear that Charlotte thought it an immature work that Ellis Bell would improve on, given time; the undervaluing of Ellis Bell’s poetry, on the other hand, was a source of increasing annoyance to her. Smith had bought the unsold, unloved stock of the 1846 volume and reissued it in 1848 after the success of Jane Eyre. But still there was insufficient appreciation, in Charlotte’s view, for the genius of Ellis Bell, especially now that Currer’s novel, the most successful of the four by far, always seemed to dispose critics in his favour. It was hard to read aloud to her ailing sister notices that spoke of Ellis’s and Acton’s “comparative inferiority . . . from the greater quietness of a small or the triteness of a common subject.” Charlotte thought such critics “blind . . . as any bat—insensate as any stone.”

“It removed my veil from its gaunt head, rent it in two parts, and, flinging both the floor, tramped on them.” Via Wikimedia Commons.

Among the articles that Smith, Elder forwarded to Haworth was one from North American Review, considering all four of the Bell novels in the light of the “Jane Eyre fever” currently sweeping the eastern United States. A feverish confusion certainly surrounded the authorship of each novel—the American editions attributed Wuthering Heights to “the author of Jane Eyre” and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall to the “author of Wuthering Heights”—and taken together, the Bells, pow­erfully clever though they were, seemed to embody all that was brutal and offensive. The reviewer deplored the fact that Heathcliff’s creator “seems to take a morose satisfaction in developing a full and complete science of human brutality,” while Acton Bell succeeded in depicting profligacy without making virtue pleasing. Charlotte enjoyed describ­ing to Williams the actual home life of this depraved crew:

As I sat between them at our quiet but now somewhat melan­choly fireside, I studied the two ferocious authors. Ellis the “man of uncommon talents but dogged, brutal and morose,” sat lean­ing back in his easy chair drawing his impeded breath as he best could, and looking, alas! piteously pale and wasted—it is not his wont to laugh—but he smiled half-amused and half in scorn as he listened—Acton was sewing, no emotion ever stirs him to loquac­ity, so he only smiled too, dropping at the same time a single word of calm amazement to hear his character so darkly pourtrayed [sic].

Charlotte found particularly amusing the reviewer’s suggestion that the Bells might be a brother-and-sister or husband-and-wife team (their work bearing “the marks of more than one mind, and one sex”): “Strange patch-work it must seem to them, this chapter being penned by Mr., and that by Miss or Mrs. Bell; that character or scene being delineated by the husband—that other by the wife! The gentleman of course doing the rough work—the lady getting up the finer parts.” But one can sympathise with the reviewer, trying to make sense of the new phenomenon represented by the Bells. No one had written novels like this before, with so much unaccountable power.

* * *

Dying all the time—the rattle in her throat while she would dress herself.

On the evening of 18 December, Charlotte read to Emily from one of Emerson’s essays, that had arrived in the latest parcel from George Smith. Emily drifted off to sleep and Charlotte put the book down, thinking they would continue the next day. But the next day, “the first glance at her face” assured Charlotte her sister was dying.

Martha Brown told Mrs. Gaskell that on her last morning, Emily got up, “dying all the time—the rattle in her throat while she would dress herself; & neither Miss Brontë nor I dared offer to help her.” Emily’s violent display of denial went as far as trying to take up her sew­ing, though the servants saw that her eyes had already begun to glaze over. This was the fight that Charlotte described later to Williams, and that Emily forced her to witness, “the conflict of the strangely strong spirit and the fragile frame . . . relentless conflict—once seen, never to be forgotten.”

Charlotte told Mrs. Gaskell that she went out on to the moor on that bleak December day, desperate to find any small spray of heather to take to her dying sister, though the flowers were all brown and with­ered at that time of year. Emily did not recognise them. Two hours before she died, she said, “If you will send for a doctor, I will see him now,” but of course it was too late. Dr. Wheelhouse may not even have got to the Parsonage in time to see Emily die “in the arms of those who loved her.”

She was buried three days later, on a clear, frosty morning. Arthur Nicholls took the service, and the chancel flagstones, hardly settled from Branwell’s funeral less than three months earlier, were levered up again. The coffin was the narrowest that William Wood ever recalled making for a grown person. It measured five foot seven by only sixteen inches wide. Keeper, who had stayed by Emily’s deathbed and followed her coffin to the church, now lay outside the bedroom door, howling.

*

Anne’s cough, weakness and the pains in her side were all too clearly indicative of the same disease, though no one wanted to believe it possible. When Ellen Nussey came to visit at the turn of the new year, she found the family “calm and sustained” but very anxious about Anne. Reverend Brontë had inquired after the best Leeds doctor, and a Mr. Teale subsequently came to examine the invalid, whom Ellen thought was looking “sweetly pretty and flushed and in capital spirits.” But when the doctor left and Patrick Brontë came into the room, it was clear that the news was bad. This most undemonstrative of fathers sat next to his youngest child on the sofa and drew her towards him, say­ing, “My dear little Anne,” as if they were already parting.

With her new understanding of consumption, Charlotte guessed rightly that the family had been harbouring it for years, “unused any of us to the possession of robust health, we have not noticed the gradual approaches of decay; we did not know its symptoms; the little cough, the small appetite, the tendency to take cold at every variation of atmo­sphere have been regarded as things of course—I see them in another light now.” Anne submitted to all the treatments that Emily would never countenance: she was examined with a stethoscope, she used a respirator, she was blistered, she took cod-liver oil (that smelt “like train oil”) and iron tonics, she accepted help walking round the room, she rested (in what used to be Emily’s chair), but still she did not im­prove. Charlotte’s instinct was to take the patient somewhere warmer, but travel was not recommended by the doctor until the weather improved, so they waited out the coldest months of the year on the edge of the frozen moor, hoping to get to the seaside—Scarborough was Anne’s longing—as soon as the weather improved.

The trip to Scarborough finally went ahead at the end of that month, too late to be more than a distressing last wish. The journey, broken for a night in York, was arduous and the semblance of a holiday seemed to Charlotte like a “dreary mockery.” “Oh—if it would please God to strengthen and revive Anne how happy we might be together! His will—however—must be done.” Anne was a model patient, the opposite of Emily: she bore the discomforts and anxieties of the journey with what Ellen emotionally termed “the pious courage and fortitude of a martyr” and, with heroic selflessness, tried to minimise the distress to her two companions. She was also doubtless trying to set an example to Charlotte, whose stricken face must have caused the dying girl deep pain.

Their lodgings on the front included a bedroom and sitting room overlooking the sea in one of the best properties in the town, known to Anne from her holidays with the Robinsons. On the Saturday, they went on to the sands and Anne had a ride in a donkey carriage, taking the reins from the boy driver so that the donkey would not be driven too hard, and advising him how to treat the animal in future. It was the last active thing she ever did. The next evening she was wheeled to the window to watch a spectacular sunset lighting the castle and distant ships at sea, and the day after that she died.

* * *

To you I am neither Man nor Woman—I come before you as an Author only.

Almost two years after Jane Eyre’s first publication, criticism of it was still appearing, and Charlotte still felt defensive about it. In August 1849 a review in the North British Review followed the by now common presumption that the “Bells” were one and the same, and concluded that Currer Bell, if a woman, “must be a woman pretty nearly unsexed.” Charlotte deeply resented the implied double standard, which it had been her objective to circumvent: “To such critics I would say—‘to you I am neither Man nor Woman—I come before you as an Author only—it is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me—the sole ground on which I accept your judgment.’ ”

Worse than any remarks about her own work, though, were deni­grations of her sisters’: the reviewer said he could not finish Wuthering Heights, he found it so disgusting, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was not much better, with scenes of “naked vice” that he refused to believe possible among the gentry. Such lashing rebukes were “scarce support­able”; Charlotte was glad Emily and Anne weren’t alive to read them, but her anger on their behalf grew.

“And I am a hard woman – impossible to put off.” Via Wikimedia Commons.

In the long months of reclusion, Charlotte felt she had been insuf­ficiently vigilant of her own and her sisters’ reputations, and a notice in The Quarterly Review from December 1848, which had been perceived through the fog of Emily’s death, now seemed to require an answer urgently. In a long article, which first heaped praise on Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, the anonymous reviewer (Elizabeth Rigby, the friend with whom J. G. Lockhart had been exchanging gossip about the Bells) had lambasted Currer Bell for his vulgarity and, while admitting in pass­ing many virtues of pace, style and feeling in the book, maintained a harsh and sarcastic attack on the debut novelist.

Jane Eyre, in spite of some grand things about her, is a being totally uncongenial to our feelings from beginning to end . . . the impression she leaves on our mind is that of a decidedly vulgar-minded woman—one whom we should not care for as an acquain­tance, whom we should not seek as a friend, whom we should not desire for a relation, and whom we should scrupulously avoid for a governess.

Jane Eyre was a dangerous, “anti-Christian” book:

There is throughout it a murmuring against the comforts of the rich and against the privations of the poor, which, as far as each individ­ual is concerned, is a murmuring against God’s appointment—there is a proud and perpetual assertion of the rights of man, for which we find no authority either in God’s word or in God’s providence—there is that pervading tone of ungodly discontent which is at once the most prominent and the most subtle evil which the law and the pulpit, which all civilized society in fact has at the present day to contend with. We do not hesitate to say that the tone of the mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebel­lion at home, is the same which has also written Jane Eyre.

However it was the passages that expressed disgust at Ellis Bell’s novel—“too odiously and abominably pagan to be palatable even to the most vitiated class of English readers”—that roused Charlotte to respond. Her anger on behalf of Emily was perfectly justified, but the nine-month delay in answering was not, nor was her idea—to address The Quarterly in a preface to her new book—a good one. The “Word to The Quarterly” that she drafted had an uncomfortably flippant tone, and targeted the most minor points raised, such as whether Currer Bell had an adequate knowledge of ladies’ fashion in the 1820s, which had convinced Rigby that the author of Jane Eyre was a man.

Smith and Williams did not like the piece at all and asked Char­lotte to change it for something that would engage the public’s sympa­thies rather than stir up an image of a disgruntled carper. They were much more aware than she of her fame, and how such a display could damage her reputation, things for which Charlotte cared little at this stage. Smith believed that a preface that alluded to her personal cir­cumstances and the deaths of Ellis and Acton Bell might provide a useful context to Shirley, but Charlotte dismissed such an idea severely. “What we deeply feel is our own—we must keep it to ourselves,” she told Williams. “Ellis and Acton Bell were, for me, Emily and Anne; my sisters—to me intimately near, tenderly dear—to the public they were nothing—beings speculated upon, misunderstood, misrepre­sented. If I live, the hour may come when the spirit will move me to speak of them, but it is not come yet.” In the meantime, Shirley went into print in October with no preface at all.

Elizabeth Rigby was hardly wrong in noticing Jane Eyre’s revolu­tionary bent, however much Charlotte remained in denial about it. When the second edition of Jane Eyre appeared early in 1848 (just as revolution was breaking out in France, Germany and Italy), a reviewer in the ultra-respectable Christian Remembrancer had accused the book of “moral Jacobinism” on every page. “Never was there a better hater,” the author said of the novel’s angry heroine; “ ‘Unjust, unjust,’ is the burden of every reflection upon the things and powers that be. All virtue is but well masked vice, all religious profession and conduct is but the whitening of the sepulchre.” It is easy to see how a book like Jane Eyre could strike readers as all the more subversive because of its surface conventionality. “To say that Jane Eyre is positively immoral or antichristian, would be to do its writer an injustice,” the Remembrancer concluded. “Still it wears a questionable aspect.”

* * *

Why can the Press not be content to take Currer Bell for a man?

Charlotte had said back in July 1849 that, although she felt she might have lost any ability to enjoy society again, she did sometimes crave it, and a change of scene. Smith and Williams were keen to encourage her to come to London and engage with other writers; they understood how useful it might be to her critical reception as much as to her own well-being to emerge now and then from her Yorkshire fastness. Charlotte had no desire to go to parties and be lionised—in fact the idea filled her with revulsion—but being able to meet “some of the truly great literary characters” of the day, Thackeray, Dickens, Harriet Martineau, tempted her strongly. “However this is not to be yet—I cannot sacrifice my incognito—And let me be content with seclusion—it has its advantages. In general indeed I am tranquil—it is only now and then that a struggle disturbs me—that I wish for a wider world than Haworth.” Her isolation was problematic artistically, though, as she was aware on completion of Shirley. Until she heard from Williams that he liked the book, she had no confi­dence in it at all, not having been able to share it with her sisters, or with anybody.

The publication of Shirley also left her very vulnerable, not just from some of the reviews, which she knew she took too much to heart (“Were my Sisters now alive they and I would laugh over this notice,” she told Williams of one slightly bad one), but from the frenzy of interest locally in the identity of Currer Bell, hugely provoked by the appearance of a book that was all about the West Riding, albeit thirty years in the past. Charlotte already suspected that her post was being opened on purpose in Keighley, and that her retirement was resented there.

To the disappointment of no longer being able to “walk invisible” was added the annoyance of Currer Bell’s gender always being a matter of concern to readers and critics. “Why can [the Press] not be content to take Currer Bell for a man?” she asked James Taylor, the editor at Smith, Elder with whom she had begun to correspond (and who had taken a special interest in Shirley, coming to the Parsonage in Septem­ber to pick up the manuscript personally). “I imagined—mistakenly it now appears—that ‘Shirley’ bore fewer traces of a female hand than ‘Jane Eyre’: that I have misjudged disappoints me a little—though I cannot exactly see where the error lies.” The most aggravating judge­ment had come from her former champion, G. H. Lewes, whose review of Shirley in The Edinburgh Review criticised the coarseness of the book, and the inferiority of female creativity in general, concluding (in a reprise of what Robert Southey had said in 1837) that “the grand function of woman . . . is, and ever must be, Maternity.” Charlotte was so angry that she sent him a single sentence: “I can be on my guard against my enemies, but God deliver me from my friends!”

Even if they hadn’t read Jane Eyre, the reviewers all treated Shirley as a woman’s work, and harped annoyingly on speculation about the authoress. Gossip about Currer Bell had spread wide by this date, and from her sofa in the Casa Guidi in Florence Elizabeth Barrett Brown­ing wrote to thank her friend Mary Russell Mitford for the latest snippet—that Jane Eyre had been written by a governess from Cowan Bridge School: “I certainly don’t think that the qualities, half savage and & half freethinking, expressed in ‘Jane Eyre,’ are likely to suit a model governess,” the poet observed wryly. “Your account falls like dew upon the parched curiosity of some of our friends here, to whom (as mere gossip . . .) I couldn’t resist the temptation of communicating it. People are so curious . . . about this particular authorship.”

The signatures of Currer, Elllis, and Acton Bell. Via Wikimedia.

A similarly avid interest in Currer Bell’s identity was shown by Harriet Martineau, a novelist who had much in common with Char­lotte. Martineau, who came from an intellectually distinguished Uni­tarian family, had come to notice in the 1830s with her essays on social reform, Illustrations of Political Economy, and her bestselling novel, Deerbrook. Charlotte was an admirer of the novel and in tribute sent Martineau a copy of Shirley on publication. Little did she imagine how closely the accompanying note would be examined by its recipient for clues as to Currer Bell’s sex. “The hand was a cramped and nervous one,” Martineau recalled in her autobiography, “which might belong to any body who had written too much, or was in bad health, or who had been badly taught.” Martineau had noticed what might or might not have been a genuine slip of the pen when Currer Bell changed the pronoun “she” to “he” in his/her covering letter, but was convinced anyway, from some domestic details in Jane Eyre, that the author could only have been a woman. She therefore addressed her reply on the outside to “Currer Bell Esqre” but began it “Madam.”

There was no point struggling too long against this tide, especially when it brought with it very welcome messages such as the one that Smith, Elder forwarded in November from Elizabeth Gaskell, prais­ing Shirley in such generous and sympathetic terms that it brought tears to Charlotte’s eyes. “She said I was not to answer it—but I can­not help doing so,” Charlotte told Williams. “[S]he is a good—she is a great woman—proud am I that I can touch a chord of sympathy in souls so noble. In Mrs. Gaskell’s nature—it mournfully pleases me to fancy a remote affinity to my Sister Emily—in Miss Martineau’s mind I have always felt the same—though there are wide differences—Both these ladies are above me—certainly far my superiors in attainments and experience—I think I could look up to them if I knew them.” In her reply to Mrs. Gaskell, Currer Bell used the female pronoun with­out demur.

Eagerness to know such people began to work on Charlotte in a beneficial way. She came to realise, gradually and imperfectly, the effect that her presence on the literary scene had been having ever since the publication of Jane Eyre—its effect on readers, writers and the culture generated between them. That world had its own life and momentum and would go on without her whether she joined it or not, though she began to think it time to assert herself. Just before she fell out with him over his disappointing review of Shirley, Charlotte had confessed to George Henry Lewes that during the previous year she had sometimes ceased “to care about literature and critics and fame” altogether, that she had temporarily “lost sight of whatever was promi­nent in my thoughts at the first publication of ‘Jane Eyre.’ ” “[B]ut now I want these things to come back—vividly—if possible.” Something else was also impelling her to find new distractions—the anniversary of Emily’s death looming, memories of which were revived with intol­erable poignancy by the returning season. By the middle of November, she told Williams that she had “almost formed the resolution of coming to London,” and then—nearly as abruptly as her trip to London with Anne in 1848—she was packing her bags and heading for a fort­night’s stay with George Smith and his family in the “big Babylon.”

* * *

Thackeray couldn’t resist making a remark about his cigar.

Smith was keen to treat his guest to some stimulating outings: Charlotte saw Macready, the most famous actor of the day, both in Macbeth and in Othello (though she shocked a dinner party by being insufficiently impressed with him) and went to the National Gallery, where she was delighted with an exhibition of some of the paintings that Turner had bequeathed to the nation. Smith had a whole list of people he wished Charlotte to meet: Lady Morgan (author of The Wild Irish Girl), Catherine Gore (one of the fashion­able “silver-fork” novelists), Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens. As it was, he tested Miss Brontë’s sociability to a new extreme by inviting two gentlemen to dinner one evening: Dr. John Forbes, with whom Charlotte had been in correspondence during Anne’s last illness, and William Makepeace Thackeray. Smith had forewarned the novelist not to upset Miss Brontë by indicating that he knew she was Currer Bell, but Thackeray couldn’t resist making a remark about his cigar, quoting from Jane Eyre, when the gentlemen rejoined the ladies after dinner. Charlotte was discomposed (not surprisingly, since Rochester’s cigar habit was one of Constantin Heger’s bequests to her novel) and shut down the conversation “in a chilly fashion,” as Smith was sorry to see, but Thackeray apparently went off to his club none the worse for his reprimand, saying, “Boys! I have been dining with ‘Jane Eyre.’ ”

For all its interest, Charlotte found the evening very taxing, and knew that nerves had made her “painfully stupid” with the man whose works she so admired. She fared much better with an introduction she arranged herself, writing to Harriet Martineau as Currer Bell to ask if she could call. Martineau and her relations waited in suspense to see who would turn up at the appointed hour: “whether a tall moustached man six feet high or an aged female, or a girl, or—altogether a ghost, a hoax or a swindler!” Miss Martineau needed the aid of an ear trumpet, so was hoping that the visitor’s real name was properly announced; she told her cousins they were to shout it distinctly into the horn if not. When a carriage was heard at the door and the bell rung, “in came a neat little woman, a very little sprite of a creature nicely dressed; & with nice tidy bright hair.” Charlotte did reveal her real name, but the Mar­tineaus were sworn to keep it secret, and Charlotte must have been pleased with them and with the frisson her dramatic arrival caused, for she relaxed and was able to talk to them very naturally.

*

If Smith had hoped that this injection of activity and interest into Miss Brontë’s life would bring her out of her shell, he was wrong—she was and remained very self-conscious in company—but the closer contacts she made, with Elizabeth Gaskell particularly, fed her craving for intelligent discussion and a sympa­thetic audience.

Charlotte may have been encouraged by Elizabeth Gaskell’s inter­est in her life, and her deeply sympathetic response to the story of her siblings’ deaths from consumption (which Gaskell, incidentally, immediately assumed the emaciated Miss Brontë had also contracted), to consider doing what she had previously refused, and write something biographical about them. The adverse criticism that the works of Ellis and Acton Bell had attracted and the fading of interest in them since their deaths—which the public didn’t know about, of course—hung on Charlotte’s conscience. While she was fêted and rewarded, while she visited celebrities and banked large cheques from her publisher (£500 for the copyright of Shirley), her sisters were forgotten. Having asked George Smith to buy back the rights to Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey from the recalcitrant Newby, Charlotte offered to write a biographical preface to a new edition, in line with what he and Wil­liams had suggested in 1849. In prose of sombre power and beauty, she outlined her family’s remote country upbringing, close sibling bonds and love of their moorland home, their delight in composition and—after Charlotte’s chance discovery of Emily’s poems—their efforts to get the poems, and then their novels, published and read. It made an irresistible narrative.

[Their works] appeared at last. Critics failed to do them justice. The immature but very real powers revealed in Wuthering Heights were scarcely recognised; its import and nature were misunder­stood; the identity of its author was misrepresented; it was said that this was an earlier and ruder attempt of the same pen which had produced Jane Eyre. Unjust and grievous error! We laughed at it at first, but I deeply lament it now. Hence, I fear, arose a prejudice against the book.

Emily’s character comes strongly before the reader: proud, uncompro­mising, distant, stoical. Her death, and that of Anne, were told briefly, but from a depth of personal pain that made this one of the most moving memorials of the age, to two tragic young women whose real names were only just being revealed:

Never in all her life had [Emily] lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not linger now. She sank rapidly. She made haste to leave us. Yet, while physically she perished, mentally she grew stronger than we had yet known her. Day by day, when I saw with what a front she met suffering, I looked on her with an anguish of love and awe. I have seen nothing like it; but indeed I have never seen her parallel in anything. Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone.

“An interpreter ought always to have stood between her and the world,” Charlotte said, brilliantly fulfilling that role herself in this poignant tribute to doomed and unrecognised genius. Of Anne, whose person­ality was, as in life, eclipsed by the heroic Emily, Charlotte said, “[she was] long-suffering, self-denying, reflective, and intelligent,” but that “a constitutional reserve and taciturnity placed and kept her in the shade, and covered her mind, and especially her feelings, with a sort of nun-like veil, which was rarely lifted.” As character studies, these could hardly have been more suggestive and intriguing. The mystery of “the Bells” was solved—the legend of “the Brontës” begun.

* * *

From the Book:
CHARLOTTE BRONTË by Claire Harman
Copyright © 2015 by Claire Harman
Published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC

Clara Bingham | Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul | Random House | May 2016 | 30 minutes (8,161 words)

 
Below is an excerpt from Witness to the Revolution, an oral history of the political and cultural movements of the 1960s and early ’70s. In this excerpt, witnesses recall the month when everything seemed to fall apart. This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

* * *

You can jail the revolutionaries, but you can’t jail the revolution.

—FRED HAMPTON, SPEECH, 1969

*

December 1969 was plagued by violence and despair. As bloodshed in Vietnam escalated, so did violence at home. The ranks of Americans who considered themselves “revolutionaries” swelled to as many as a million, and militant resistance threatened nearly all government institutions related to the war effort. Nonviolent civil disobedience of just months earlier, with the October and November Moratoriums, had evolved into violent clashes with police, rioting, arson, and bombings. In the fifteen-month period between January 1969 and April 1970, an average of fifty politically motivated bombings occurred each day.

At the vanguard of this domestic rebellion was the Black Panther Party, which, in reaction to police brutality and FBI harassment, publicly declared war against the police. Two dozen Black Panther chapters had opened across the country, and in 1969 the police killed 27 Panthers and arrested or jailed 749. J. Edgar Hoover announced that the Black Panther Party was “the greatest threat to [the] internal security of the country,” and he assigned two thousand full-time FBI agents to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and otherwise neutralize” the Panthers and other New Left organizations. In a 1969 speech to Congress, Hoover declared that the New Left was a “firmly established subversive force dedicated to the complete destruction of our traditional democratic values and the principles of free government.”

Meanwhile, the Vietnam War raged on. From 1961 until 1971, the U.S. military dropped more than 19 million gallons of toxic chemicals— defoliants or herbicides, including Agent Orange—on 4.8 million Vietnamese. In 1969, 11,780 American troops were killed, bringing the death toll to 48,736. It was not a festive Christmas for those in the peace movement. John Lennon and Yoko Ono displayed huge billboards in Los Angeles, London, and other cities that read: “War is over! If you want it. Happy Christmas from John & Yoko.” On New York City’s Fifth Avenue during the holiday shopping rush, a woman blocked the street with a sign that read, “How Many Shopping Days Until Peace?”

* * *

KARL ARMSTRONG
(student, University of Wisconsin–Madison)

I remember sitting in the student union with my brother Dwight and watching news accounts of the My Lai massacre, and I couldn’t believe our country had sunk to such low depths. Even before the My Lai story came out, I had come to the realization that we were basically fighting these peasant people in Vietnam, and it was a very asymmetric sort of war, using all of this technology and bombs, killing hundreds of thousands of people who were basically fighting back with limited resources.

At some point I felt like I became Viet Cong. My allegiance had switched. I thought, I would rather be with these people and lose, than be an American and win. And that’s when I realized that I was no longer an American. I was really a citizen of the world.

I was of the opinion that any kind of demonstration against the war was important, but I just didn’t feel it was going to go anywhere. The war could carry on, and the demonstrations would be ignored. They could do that for the next ten years and it’d be the same thing. I had no problem with the demonstrations, they were my brothers and sisters out there, but I realized that I was in a very special place, because I didn’t have a family of my own and I wasn’t tied up in corporate America. I didn’t have a job. I felt like I wasn’t risking anything. I was a free actor, and I had a responsibility. I decided I would remove all the obstacles in front of me in order to help bring this war to an end.

* * *

DECEMBER 4, CHICAGO: FRED HAMPTON

MARK RUDD (Weathermen leader)

When Fred Hampton was murdered on December 4, [1] it confirmed our whole strategy, which was that a war was taking place already, and we’d better get ready to respond to it.

BERNARDINE DOHRN (Weathermen leader)

Fred Hampton had talked to his friends and to his mom about being a lawyer. He had Bill Kunstler’s book by his bed. He was one of those absolutely charismatic, magnetic people. He was young, twenty-one, but had a great sense of people, and a theatrical ability to make gestures that were very powerful—for example, commandeering ice cream trucks in the summer for kids, and then getting arrested for it. Even in his high school days with the NAACP he did things like demand access to segregated swimming pools on the west side of Chicago.

By the time I knew him he was saying, “I’m high on the people. I’m high on freedom,” and he’d become the chairman of the Black Panther Party here in Chicago. We shared a printing press with the Panthers. They were down the block from us. We agreed about some things and disagreed about other things, but they knew us pretty well and we knew them pretty well. We had an intense relationship with the Panthers; we saw them all the time.

FRED HAMPTON (1969 speech)

A lot of people don’t understand the Black Panther Party’s relationship with white mother country radicals. . . . What we’re saying is that there are white people in the mother country that are for the same types of things that we are for stimulating revolution in the mother country. And we say that we will work with anybody and form a coalition with anybody that has revolution on their mind. [2]

BERNARDINE DOHRN

I knew the National Lawyers Guild people and the People’s Law Office people very well, so on December 4, when Fred was murdered, they immediately took charge of the situation and seized the crib—as the apartment was called—door for evidence of bullet holes. We, the Panther Party survivors, and the People’s Law Office responded in a way that kind of reenacted the murder of Emmett Till—with a massive, public, visual look at what the police had done. And of course the police and the FBI—who we now know conspired to murder him—were both on the scene, and participants.

ERICKA HUGGINS (Black Panther Party member)

When Fred Hampton was murdered, I knew immediately, even though I was incarcerated at the time,[3] that Fred did not die just at the hands of the police officers that invaded his home. It was a setup, and later it was proven that it was set up—that he was drugged. He was killed in his sleep in the middle of the night by the police who arrived in borrowed Chicago Phone Company trucks. So it was orchestrated. J. Edgar Hoover, who was the head of the FBI for forty-seven years, created COINTELPRO as the counterintelligence program. You can read their mission online. I wish I was making it up; I wish it hadn’t occurred. But the fear that is at the root of racism will prompt people who have that fear to do very inhumane things.

Fred was an amazing human being. He was very dedicated to working with all communities. If you just listen to him and just watch him on video, you’ll see why J. Edgar Hoover wanted him dead.

FBI surveillance and harassment was something we were all used to. Our phones were tapped and we were followed all the time. They would leave notes on our car windows threatening us, “Hi John, hi Ericka. We’re watching you.” Every night when we would leave the party office in South Central, unmarked police cars would shine their floodlights on the windows and the doors of the office. This is how we left the office every night. We got used to it. I always remember that whole period in Los Angeles as living in a state of war. But we weren’t warring; something was warring against us.

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VIVIAN ROTHSTEIN (SDS organizer)

I was organizing high school kids. They were all white, living in Berwyn and Cicero—very right-wing white communities in the Chicago suburbs. I got to know Fred Hampton in Maywood, where he was head of the NAACP chapter, and I invited him to come and talk to the students. These kids’ parents were so racist; they’d never talked to a black person before. Fred would sit with them for a whole evening and talk to them. He was so warm and understanding and charismatic. They fell in love with him. He was just wonderful.

When he was killed, I took the students that I was working with to where his body lay in state in a Baptist church in Chicago. It was this incredible scene. The kids I worked with knew him before he was this big public figure. He was lying in state with a rifle by his side in the coffin, and beads, and the Black Panther Party newspaper. All these Black Panthers were standing guard around the coffin with their berets and their black leather jackets. I was with a group of white girls and we stood in line for hours, and then we finally went by his casket. I almost passed out in his casket because I’m Jewish and we don’t do viewings. But it was quite an experience having this gaggle of young teenage white girls going through a black church with all of these Panthers around, and they all loved Fred, so they were all crushed. [4]

CATHY WILKERSON (Weathermen member)

When Fred Hampton was killed it felt like the police were going to end democracy in the United States. It also felt like the warmongers, the “U.S. must rule the world” people, and anti-women and anti-black leadership of the country were going to win and solidify control. We were young. We were in a complete panic. It was pretty scary.

MARK RUDD

When the Panthers came along, and they were carrying guns and spouting “by any means necessary,” and the government reacted by taking them seriously, and murdering them, we said, “It’s war. And we’ve got to be out there, and not just applauding from the sidelines.” See, there’s always a tendency for white people to hold back and applaud from the sidelines, but we identified that as being racist, to not take any risks. We didn’t want to be liberals. To be a liberal was to be a hypocrite, and to be a betrayer. So part of our thinking was, Which side are you on? “Avenge Fred Hampton!” became our battle cry.

Black power then became an enormous challenge to white kids. Would we be good Germans? Would we be racist and ignore what’s happening? Or would we support the people who are fighting and taking the risks? That became the challenge for the Weathermen. Most young whites don’t understand the extent of the challenge that the black movement posed to the Weather Underground, and to the movement.

MICHAEL KAZIN (Harvard SDS leader)

The Panthers saw themselves as urban guerrillas. I mean, the whole carrying guns and taking them to the statehouse in Sacramento and taking on the police—they saw themselves as being in an almost fascist country. Huey Newton used to say, “If the pigs are going to act like Nazis, we’re not going to act like Jews.” Which, you know, for a Jew like me, made me feel a little strange. But I understood what he meant. If you didn’t have the Panthers on your side, then you were doing something wrong, because they were the black vanguard.

BERNARDINE DOHRN

It took seven more years to prove it in the court case Iberia Hampton v. Hanrahan, which the People’s Law Office represented. I always tell my law students Fed Supp. 600 is one of the most astonishing cases you’ll ever read, because the federal appellate court found that there was a conspiracy to murder Fred Hampton, and then an elaborate cover-up and the FBI and the Chicago Police Department had lied and withheld documents ordered by the court and had an informer present inside the Panthers who had given them a map of the apartment where Fred and his wife were sleeping. So it was a deliberate assassination. But we knew that; we assumed that from the beginning. [5]

JULIUS LESTER
(writer, photographer, civil rights activist)

It’s very interesting, the different reactions of whites and those of us who were in SNCC had to the murder of Fred Hampton. Our feeling at SNCC was that the rhetoric of the Panthers led to his death. The Panthers had this rhetoric of violence, and if it’s one thing that white America knows, it’s violence. You don’t challenge somebody on their strength. So you don’t get violent with white America, because they’re itching to kill you. Our feeling was that Fred Hampton did not have to die. That was the Panthers’ doing. So our response was very different than the response of SDS. The other deaths of the Panthers were senseless as far as we were concerned. You don’t challenge white policemen with guns; they’re eager to kill you. WESLEY BROWN (draft resister, Black Panther member) After Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were assassinated, I realized that I had implicated myself in the kind of rhetoric that could bring about my own undoing. We [the Panthers] got revved up in a frenzy of rhetoric and began to believe our own bullshit about revolutionary change. Huey Newton [6] famously called it “revolutionary suicide.” And so I think all of us had to acknowledge that we were in some ways collaborating in a presentation of ourselves in a flamboyant way that would bring the very thing that we said is going to happen, to us. And then we were surprised when they believed what we said we were trying to do. I didn’t even know if I believed it. I had to examine if what I was doing had contributed to an ongoing struggle for people to better the circumstances of their lives, and where that becomes less the issue, and more about whether you are going to try to kill the police, or bring revolution to the streets.

To what end is it going to serve if I get up in the face of authorities where the pushback can be lethal? What does that achieve if confrontation and escalation of confrontation is the primary strategy to get attention for things that need to be paid attention to? So that’s what I had to ask myself.

FBI REPORT

December 6, 1969: Several Chicago Police cars parked in a precinct parking lot at 3600 North Halsted Street, Chicago, were bombed. No suspects have been developed in this matter and no organization claimed credit until almost five years later when the WUO [Weather Underground Organization] admitted that it was responsible in their book “Prairie Fire.” The WUO stated that they had perpetrated the explosion to protest the shooting deaths of Illinois Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark on December 4, 1969, by police officers.

* * *

DECEMBER 6, NORTHERN CALIFORNIA: ALTAMONT

PETER COYOTE (Digger, communard)

The story of Altamont is that Sam Cutler, [7] the manager of the Rolling Stones, came to Peter Berg [8] and myself, because we were known for throwing these huge parties, where there was no violence, no trouble, no nothing. The reason there was no violence and no trouble was because we never made the concerts hierarchical—there was never one stage, there were multiple stages. If you throw a party for the summer solstice, everyone is equal under the sun, so what’s to fight about? You can be exactly who you want to be. You’re not taking anything away from anybody.

Peter and I both said the Rolling Stones are not an occasion for a party. There will be one stage, the Stones will own it, and everyone else will be the audience. That’s not the spirit of San Francisco. We’ll have a party, we’ll have six stages, and the Rolling Stones can have one of them. We’ll give everybody redwood trees to plant and yards of silk and this and that, and come up with a party. And Sam said, “Oh, no, we can’t do that for the Rolling Stones.”

We also knew by that time that the Rolling Stones were going to make a documentary, so it’s not a free concert. [9] The audience was going to be extras. So free doesn’t mean there’s no admission ticket. Free means the audience are co-creators of the event. You don’t need security. You only need security when there’s a treasured space that has to be kept clear of everybody else. So the idea of bringing in the Hells  Angels [10] was a terrible mistake. We said, wrong place, wrong time, there’s going to be trouble, and none of us went, and there was trouble.

GREIL MARCUS (Rolling Stone music critic)

I went to Altamont, December 6, with a couple of friends, but I went there as a Rolling Stone writer, to write about it. We drove to the Altamont Speedway in Northern California and got there with no problem. Somehow we missed all of these horrible traffic jams. We knew that the Hells Angels were going to be there providing security. You could tell from the minute you got there—it was quite early, nine in the morning—that the crowd was angry, unfriendly, and pushy. Nobody made room for you—and that was before the Hells Angels started beating people up.

There was this big Hispanic guy, probably six four, very fat, and he took off all his clothes and started dancing. This is right in front of the stage where I was sitting. And he was acting like, “Oh, we’re all free, and I’m dancing to the music, and I’m full of enthusiasm,” but people began to move away because he was trampling people. So the Hells Angels leaped out and started beating him, and they beat him to the ground, and kept beating him. The crowd just immediately clears this huge area. They finally drag him backstage and the crowd comes back like some gigantic insect colony. From that day on it was just ugly. And it was angry. And it was mean, and there were a lot of crazy fucked-up people there.

The Hells Angels killed Meredith Hunter [who was black], because he was right at the front of the stage with his white girlfriend, and they didn’t like that, and they jumped off the stage and started chasing him and beating him. He was stabbed before he pulled a gun out, but he did pull a gun.

MICHAEL RANDALL (Brotherhood of Eternal Love acid dealer)

I was at Altamont. I left before all that happened. You could’ve been there and not known it was going on. It was really huge, three hundred thousand people. I was there for the music, but I had a meeting that I had to go to and one hundred and twenty million doses of acid to sell all over America, so I was busy.

GREIL MARCUS

For all of us involved, we understood it as the end of something, as this overwhelmingly symbolic end of so much that we had believed in and invested ourselves in. And it just so happened that the Rolling Stones had put out an album at that time, Let It Bleed, and the album was about the end of the sixties. That was its explicit subject. “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”—what an ultimate anti-sixties thing to say. That song and “Gimme Shelter” were about the moral collapse of the counterculture, just to put it in a nutshell.

When they were playing “Gimme Shelter” at Altamont, which was in the middle of their set, I was pushed off the stage, and later I was on top of the VW van behind the stage when the van collapsed. I could tell that something terrible was happening, because you heard screaming, and you heard Keith Richards berating the Angels, and Mick Jagger pleading with them. I said, “The hell with it,” and I left. I started walking away in the dark to go back to my car. At one point I tripped, because it was pitch dark. I was lying on the ground and I could hear them playing “Gimme Shelter,” which at that point I’d heard on the record, and had been overwhelmed by. I heard them playing it and I thought I’d never heard anything sound as good as this sounds. It was so powerful.

Oh, a storm is threat’ning
My very life today

I went back to my car, where I found my radio had been stolen. People believed they were moral and high-minded. People believed that they had somehow escaped the endemic moral, political, and economic corruption of American society, and they found out that day that that wasn’t true.

JOHN HARTMANN (music agent, manager)

It was sort of like the funeral where they buried King Hippie. Altamont was a big damaging blow to the hippie peace and love ethic. This wasn’t peace and love, this was violence and death. The Stones’ image was as bad boys, not good boys like the Beatles. The Beatles, who started out dirty, became clean in the minds of the public. With the Stones, the whole thing was about the devil, and cross-dressing, and everything that was taboo, you could see manifested in various songs like “Sympathy for the Devil.” So they were the bad boys; they made a huge mistake, because they got the Hells Angels to be the security for Altamont.

GREIL MARCUS

It was probably the worst day of my life in a lot of ways. When it was over, we had a meeting at Rolling Stone among those of us who had been there, and we thought, this was so awful, that we shouldn’t even dignify it by covering it. Jann [Wenner] said, “No, we’re going to cover this from top to bottom. We’re going to use every resource we have and we’re going to lay the blame.” The whole issue was devoted to Altamont as this day of calamity, horror, and bad faith on the part of all different kinds of people.

* * *

MID-DECEMBER, NEW YORK, CHICAGO: SDS

MARK RUDD

I was one of the people who implemented the closing of the SDS New York regional office and the closing of the national office. That decision was made in conjunction with the decision to go underground. Now I consider the closing down of those SDS national and regional offices to be the largest single political error that I’ve ever made.

CATHY WILKERSON

I remember being at the SDS national office in Chicago when the cops were lined up outside. We called the University of Wisconsin, who kept an archive on SDS, and said, “Do you want the remaining papers?” And they came down at the drop of a hat with a van and literally shoveled the papers off the floor into the van, because the [SDS] office had been trashed by the cops.

MARK RUDD

I had a Volkswagen van, and I remember picking up the mailing addresses for the whole New York region; they were in a couple of big boxes. We had a loft on 131 Prince Street that somebody had given us, and Ornette Coleman was practicing the saxophone above us. I remember around the end of December picking up these mailing stencils and taking them with Ted Gold to the West Street Pier, at the end of Fourteenth Street, and dumping them into the garbage barge that was parked there. That was the end of SDS. If I had been an FBI agent, I couldn’t have done it better.

BERNARDINE DOHRN

We felt a lot of despair, and that’s always unhealthy—it’s a human feeling, obviously, but it’s also politically very unhealthy. We felt the holidays taking over—Christmas lights by Thanksgiving, and people going about their lives as if bombs weren’t raining on the Vietnamese—was unspeakable. And everything that captured the public mind—Nixon’s stupid stuff and ultimately the Charles Manson [11] murders—things that obsessed people were just sideshows and circuses. We had to find a way to bring people’s attention back to the crisis of our time, which in our mind was the Vietnamese struggle and the black freedom movement.

By the time of Flint, a lot had happened. The Days of Rage had happened. We had had lots of arrests, and lots of charges against us. The [Chicago Seven] conspiracy trial was ending, and SDS as such didn’t exist. There was still a campus movement around the country, and a huge antiwar movement, but there was also a growing military assault against Vietnam, and against Laos and Cambodia, and Fred Hampton had been assassinated. All of that was right before Flint.

* * *

DECEMBER 27, FLINT, MICHIGAN: NATIONAL WAR COUNCIL

MARK RUDD

The War Council meeting in Flint, Michigan, December 27–31, was kind of a strange hybrid, because on the one hand it was the continuation of an SDS tradition, which was bringing people together a few times a year for conferences and conventions. SDS typically had three of them. And this was the same kind of thing. But we called it the National War Council meeting and sent out pamphlets calling it a “wargasm.” And it was more like a rally. It also was crazy because it was obviously infiltrated by many, many undercover cops.

Flint was insanity. The venue was a dilapidated dance hall in the black neighborhood. There was a giant cardboard machine gun, and pictures of Che [Guevara] and Fred Hampton all over the walls, and orgiastic dancing to Sly and the Family Stone, but we made up our lyrics. “Che vive, viva Che! Che vive, viva Che.” Sly and the Family Stone were very cool. [12]

Stand
In the end you’ll still be you
One that’s done all the things you set out to do
Stand
There’s a cross for you to bear
Things to go through if you’re going anywhere
Stand
For the things you know are right
It’s the truth that the truth makes them so uptight
Stand
All the things you want are real
You have you to complete and there is no deal
Stand, stand, stand
Stand, stand, stand

TOM HAYDEN (founder, SDS)

The meeting in Flint was in late December, just a month and a half before the [Chicago Seven] trial ended. I went there and taught a karate class. But frankly, I thought it was spooky. I think people might’ve been on speed—it could be that simple. They were already in another world. The inner group had made a decision to go underground; they weren’t sharing it.

I was feeling very bourgeois. I was with my girlfriend, and some other couple, and a kid might’ve been with us. It was no place for couples. They had smashed monogamy, which was a way of giving yourself to the revolution. Monogamy was a form of possessive individualism to be abandoned.

If I had been footloose and not on trial, it might’ve been seen slightly different. If I hadn’t been in a relationship where there was a small child at stake, it might’ve been different. I think it’s more that I was older, and I had this residual foundation of the early sixties in my soul, which the Weathermen were dismissive of. My rock foundation was the early sixties. Theirs was the mid to late sixties. It doesn’t sound chronologically like it’s much distance in time, but it’s an eternity. If you were a college freshman in ’64 as opposed to a freshman in ’57, that’s an eternity. The only thing I can add, now that I look back on it, was that I was becoming out of touch. I mean, these people were having flat-out naked, wild orgies as a political act.

MARK RUDD

I’ve always respected and adored Tom Hayden, and I was really very, very pleased that he came to Flint. You have to understand that from 1962 to 1969, SDS leadership had gone through three generations in seven years. I’d be of the last generation, and Tom being of the first. I think he was the only person there from that first generation.

Tom Hayden has a very clear view of it. He says in one of his essays, as the violence escalated in Vietnam, the violence at home escalated in response. That’s it, that’s a simple way to look at it, and I agree with him.

My FBI files report has me saying at Flint, “We are going to meet and map plans to avenge the deaths of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.” My own madness slipped out of my mouth when I said, “It’s a wonderful feeling to kill a pig or blow up a building.”

BILL AYERS (blog, March 3, 2008)

Bernardine was reported to have said in the middle of a speech at an SDS meeting in Flint, Michigan, “Dig it! First they killed those pigs and then they put a fork in their bellies. Wild!” I didn’t hear that exactly, but words that were close enough I guess. Her speech was focused on the murder just days earlier of our friend Fred Hampton, the Black Panther leader, a murder we were certain—although we didn’t know it yet—was part of a larger government plot, the Gestapo-like tactics of an emerging police state. She linked Fred’s murder to the murders of other Panthers around the country, to the assassinations of Malcolm X and Patrice Lumumba, the CIA attempts on Fidel’s life, and then to the ongoing terror in Vietnam. “This is the state of the world,” she cried. “This is what screams out for our attention and our response. And what do we find in our newspapers? A sick fascination with a story that has it all: a racist psycho, a killer cult, and a chorus line of Hollywood bodies. Dig it! . . .” So I heard it partly as political talk, agitated and inflamed and full of rhetorical overkill, and partly as a joke, stupid perhaps, tasteless, but a joke nonetheless—and Hunter Thompson for one, was making much more excessive, and funnier, jokes about Charles Manson then, and so was Richard Pryor.

ROBIN MORGAN (radical feminist)

When I was noticeably pregnant with Blake, I ran into Bernardine. This was right around the time when she made the pronouncement about Sharon Tate—that the Manson people stuck a fork in her belly after they killed her, adding, “Wasn’t that cool?” I was pregnant and she said, “Is that a pig child?” And I said, “You mean is the father white?” Because if the father was black then the child was acceptable. “As a matter of fact, as it turns out the father is white,” I said. And she said, “So why are you having it?” I said, “What would you have me do, abort a planned, wanted child? Or perhaps I should just stick it in a trash can when it’s born.” She said, “Now, that would be a good idea.” So, frankly, I have never quite forgiven Bernardine, despite her claims of having revised her virulent anti-feminist politics.

BERNARDINE DOHRN

I feel self-critical about those days. I think that that’s the period of time when I feel like the metaphor of bringing the war home took over my language, and the way that I thought about the movement. I can understand that, because I feel like we had this fierce sense that somebody had to stand up and object to the war, and the bullets were flying. People were dying in the thousands every week in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, and were being assassinated at home. So that part I can understand, but obviously I feel now that the language of war, even revolutionary war, made us harsh, made me harsh; and made me speak about war without doing everything to avoid it without recognizing the horror and the harm; and how it turns people, even people who are fighting for freedom, into something else. So I think that period was harsh.

I have vivid memories of that December: the horror of people going shopping, and Christmas bells. You know how in an election cycle like this you can get really cynical about the American people. We can’t talk about the world? We can’t be part of the world? We can’t talk about the environment? That was the feeling times a thousand, because of having the images of war on TV, and having the vets coming home, and knowing from the Vietnamese what the cost was on the ground.

The iconic antiwar propaganda And Babies uses a photograph of the My Lai Massacre. It was created December 26, 1969.

MARK RUDD

The decision was made at Flint that I would step out of the Weather Bureau. I was suffering enormous self-doubt. I didn’t question the rightness of our strategy or of our method, but I questioned my ability to do it. I knew I was posing and it didn’t feel right, and so I experienced this as depression. The other members of the Weather Bureau, which was the leadership of the Weatherman faction of SDS, could see that I was flagging, I was wavering. So, by mutual agreement, we agreed I would demote myself out of the top leadership, down into what you might call a regional leadership position.

Also one of the craziest things that happened was after Flint, I went to Ann Arbor and shacked up with a girlfriend of mine, and we both did acid for the first time. You can imagine what that was like—total paranoia, plus the feelings of exhilaration around psychedelics. I took my first acid trip on December 31, 1969, and took my last acid trip on December 31, 1970, and in between I became a fugitive.

I spent the month of January traveling around the country, trying to recruit people in the organization to go underground. By the time that I got to New York in February, I was still aboveground, and I was still using my own ID. I still had contact with my parents and old friends, and was using regular telephones. But we set up a series of houses in Manhattan that were completely clandestine. We rented apartments under clandestine names and we began living there and operating. And that included an armed robbery to finance the operation.

There were circles of support. And it involved some people being willing and able to go underground and other people wanting to help. It’s not as if there was a clear line between those in the organization and those outside the organization.There were sort of circles of agreement and of support. And I suspect that lawyers felt maybe that they should have been on the front lines but their skill kept them doing legal stuff. We were getting money from wherever we could get money. It wouldn’t matter. We’d get it from our parents; we’d get it from anybody who had money.

TOM HAYDEN

As my day job, I was working inside the system, which the Weathermen considered wrong, and they thought I should go underground with them. I wouldn’t do that because I didn’t feel that I fit in with them. However, I didn’t know if they were right or wrong. This is what was so existential about it. Maybe a police state was coming. Certainly towards the Panthers it seemed to be coming. The Berrigan brothers had gone underground. There were different undergrounds. There was a Catholic underground against the draft. There were Panther undergrounds. There were draft resistance undergrounds. Drug dealer undergrounds, marijuana undergrounds. All across America, a lot of people were breaking one law or another. So it wasn’t a completely strange idea.

So in that sense, I took seriously the Weathermen analysis of repression and I thought it was legitimate, but I wasn’t going to do it. I knew all sides of the debate but I wasn’t leaving my legal defense work in the court [at the Chicago Seven trial]. And I wasn’t giving up on the idea of persuading public opinion, or persuading an appellate judge. It could be that I was trained all my life to use words, and to abandon words for guns just didn’t seem the best use of my talents.

BRIAN FLANAGAN

In December of ’69 we started dumping the collectives, and starting other collectives that were doing violent stuff. The mass collectives that were living openly in apartments we dumped and started going into safe houses and doing arson and various low-level bombings. All of the big names went underground.

* * *

DECEMBER 27, MADISON, WISCONSIN: CHRISTMAS BOMBINGS

KARL ARMSTRONG

It was winter break, so there was no one on campus. I felt like I was out there in the emotional wilderness. I had reached an emotional low point, where I said, “I really have to act.” The armory was half a block away from where I was living, and half of the building was devoted to ROTC. There had been lots of demonstrations at the armory. First of all, I thought it was a beautiful building. I played basketball there. But I realized what it meant symbolically. I was of very mixed mind about it. It went against my grain to destroy property, but I knew that the symbolism was really important.

On December 27, 1969, at two o’clock in the morning, I walked up to the building, threw a jar of gasoline in, and burned the building. Basically it was my declaration of war. I was now at war with the United States. To me it was laughable: It felt like puny acts against the war machine. But it was important, because this was a way of committing myself. After the first act I said, “There’s no turning back.” It was just a matter of marshaling resources, picking the right targets, and trying to be smart. I truly felt out there, and yet, in another sense, I felt really comfortable because I was finally active.

WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL,
DECEMBER 29, 1969 (front page)

FIREBOMBS DAMAGE UW
ROTC BUILDING

Firebombs were thrown through three windows of the ROTC building at Linden and Babcock Dr. on the University of Wisconsin campus early Sunday, damaging several desks and scorching the ceiling of a lecture hall.

No one was injured.

KARL ARMSTRONG

After the firebombing of the armory, I talked to my brother Dwight and I said, “I’d like to do an aerial bombing of the Badger ordnance plant.”* And he said, “Are you crazy? What are you talking about?” And I said, “Well, remember the firebombing of the ROTC building a couple of nights ago? That was me.” I said I thought a bombing of the Badger ordnance plant on New Year’s Eve would be the perfect symbolic bombing against the war. The Badger ordnance plant was producing the bulk of the rocket powder used in Vietnam. It was a huge plant. I picked New Year’s Eve for the symbolic starting the New Year. I thought that symbolically it was the time to do it.

My brother had been a gas jockey at the airport, so he did the flying. We went to Morey Airport and we pulled an ROTC training plane out of the hangar. Dwight wasn’t a certified pilot, and he had never flown at night before. Lynn, my girlfriend, Dwight, and I loaded up a big metal ashtray from the fraternity house and a couple of mayonnaise bottles filled with ammonium nitrate. I knew about bombs from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. But we didn’t have a detonator. So I knew they probably wouldn’t go off. The symbolic act seemed more important than the actual damage, [13] because if the bombs did go off, we’d probably have been blown out of the air. We followed the road up to the Badger ordnance plant, and we could see Lynn from the air as she was going in to make the phone call to warn them at the plant that we were going to bomb it in protest of the Vietnam War. I didn’t think anyone would be working there because it was New Year’s Eve.

We flew over in a snowstorm and I dropped one of the bombs out. I told my brother, “I don’t think I hit anything except snow. You have to go a lot lower.” And he said, “If we go any lower, and that bomb goes off, we are dead ducks.” And I said, “You’re going to have to go lower if we’re going to hit anything.” So we made another pass, and by that point I was thinking, Well, it’s just symbolic anyway. And I just dumped the bombs out of the door as we flew over the fuel tanks.

We landed at the airport outside of Prairie du Sac, left the plane in the middle of the runway, and ran to the car with Lynn to go back to Madison. When we got back to Madison, I thought, Maybe we should call the newspapers and tell them what we did. So I called the State Journal and I said, “I just firebombed the Badger ordnance plant.” And the guy says something like, “Yeah, yeah. And what’s your name, please?” And I said, “No, we firebombed the Badger ordnance plant from the air.” Then I remember calling The Daily Cardinal and I believe the Kaleidoscope, the two student newspapers, and told them the bombing was because of the Vietnam War. Basically I wanted to lock into people’s minds that we were acting like Nazi Germany. That this aerial bomb was symbolic of the Allies’ bombing of munitions plants in Germany. It was my way of bringing the war home, so people would be able to see it in a different light.

BILL DYSON (FBI agent)

These leads start coming in and the supposition then was “This guy must have been a Vietnam pilot, because he landed with the wind!” I mean, there’s a snowstorm, he comes in, and he lands the wrong way. And it was like, “Oh my God, this guy stole the plane, and he was actually able to land it? He must be really a tremendous pilot!” And hell, the guy didn’t have a license, and it was miraculous that he was able to land the plane that way. They dropped the fuel. I don’t know where the bombs went. They had no detonator. Maybe it was the Weathermen, we didn’t know. [14]

STEVE REINER (editor of The Daily Cardinal)

After the Christmas bombings by what we would later call the “New Year’s Gang,” there was a debate at the Cardinal about the difference between property damage and personal damage. I think the fact that no one was hurt and that these episodes all seemed to be calculated to destroy property, but not to harm people, helped us rationalize it. We made a distinction between political sabotage and terrorism. I think it was obvious that these guys never intended to hurt anybody. We rationalized it because the levels of frustration, anger, and exasperation that were welling up in all of us had reached a crescendo. We rationalized it because no one was hurt.

This is what I wrote in an editorial: “And if acts such as those committed in the last few days are needed to strike fear into the bodies of once fearless men and rid this campus once and for all of repressive and deadly ideas and institutions, then so be it.” It was the line “then so be it” that I regret writing now. I don’t really regret anything else in the editorial. I think saying that that kind of manifestation is inevitable is absolutely correct. And I think it was. It’s easy to say that it’s inevitable after it happens. But it was inevitable.

* * *

From the book WITNESS TO THE REVOLUTION by Clara Bingham.
Copyright © 2016 by Clara Bingham.
Reprinted by arrangement with Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

* * *

^{[1] In one of the most brazen examples of police violence and FBI dirty tricks, Fred Hampton, the twenty-one-year-old chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, was gunned down in his sleep at 4:30 a.m. on December 4, 1969, by the Chicago police. Mark Clark, another Panther leader, was also killed in the raid. Though the police claimed they acted in self-defense, they were proven wrong by evidence showing ninety gunshots going one way through the front door of Fred Hampton’s apartment, where he slept with his fiancée, who was eight months pregnant. Hampton was killed by two bullets fired to his head at point-blank range in a cold-blooded assassination. The FBI assisted the Chicago police by giving them a map of the floor plan of Hampton’s apartment that they obtained from William O’Neal, an FBI informant who was Hampton’s trusted bodyguard. O’Neal had slipped a sleeping pill into Hampton’s drink when they had dinner together that night, sedating him so that he could not defend himself. ↩}

^{[2] J. Edgar Hoover was particularly threatened by Hampton because he preached racial solidarity against an oppressive U.S. government. He appealed to white as well as black radicals and moderates and had a charisma and way with words that enabled him to unite a fractured movement. One of the FBI’s COINTELPRO objectives was to “prevent the rise of a ‘messiah’ who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement.” In 1967 the FBI opened a file on Fred Hampton that would eventually fill twelve volumes and more than four thousand pages. ↩}

^{[3] Ericka Huggins, along with Bobby Seale (cofounder of the Black Panther Party), was in jail awaiting trial on murder charges that were part of the New Haven Nine conspiracy trial. ↩}

^{[4] Five thousand people attended Fred Hampton’s funeral.↩}

^{[5] The police officers were found not guilty in a 1972 trial, but after thirteen years of litigating the civil rights case, which went all the way to the Supreme Court, the families of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were awarded $1.8 million—the largest settlement of its kind at the time. In 1990, FBI informant William O’Neal, who was Fred Hampton’s bodyguard, died in what some believe was a suicide. ↩}

^{[6] Huey Newton, who with Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party in 1966, wrote an autobiography titled Revolutionary Suicide, which was published in 1973. ↩}

^{[7] After Altamont, Sam Cutler left the Rolling Stones and began working as the Grateful Dead’s tour manager. ↩}

^{[8] Peter Berg, Peter Coyote, and Emmett Grogan cofounded the San Francisco improv and radical community action group called the Diggers. They were fixtures in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury hippie scene in the mid-to late sixties. ↩}

^{[9]  Albert and David Maysles made a documentary, Gimme Shelter, about the last weeks of the Rolling Stones’ 1969 tour, which ended with the Altamont Free Concert in Northern California. ↩}

^{[10] The Hells Angels were a motorcycle gang with a violent, outlaw history who rode Harley-Davidsons and were affiliated with parts of the counterculture, and were sometimes used to provide security. ↩}

^{[11] Charles Manson, a mentally disturbed musician who created a small cult called the Manson Family, was responsible for nine grisly murders committed in Los Angeles in July and early August of 1969, the most famous one being Sharon Tate, the pregnant wife of director Roman Polanski. Manson and his accomplices were indicted for the Tate and other murders in December 1969. The high-profile trial began in Los Angeles in June 1970. ↩}

^{[12] Sly and the Family Stone, who played at Woodstock, was a racially integrated soul/funk band that created an original blend of the black Motown and San Francisco white psychedelic sound. The band released the album Stand! in May 1969; it sold three million copies and is considered one of the most successful albums of the sixties. The single “Stand!” reached number three on the charts in 1969. “Sly was less interested in crossing racial musical lines than in tearing them up,” wrote Greil Marcus in Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975), p. 65. ↩}

^{[13] The Badger Army Ammunition Plant, or Badger Ordnance Works, in Baraboo, Wisconsin, made ammunition during World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars. During World War II it was the largest munitions factory in the world. ↩}

^{[14] Armstrong and the New Year’s Gang didn’t know the Weathermen and were acting independently, but according to FBI informant Larry Grathwohl, Bill Ayers sent a cell of Weathermen to Madison to try to make contact with the New Year’s Gang and scout out more locations in Madison to bomb in February 1970, but the plan was scrapped after events that occurred on March 6. See Larry Grathwohl, Bringing Down America (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1976), p. 159. ↩}

Colin Dickey | Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places | Viking | October 2016 | 10 minutes ( 4,181 words)

Below is an excerpt from Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places. In this excerpt, Dickey sleeps over in the purportedly haunted Lemp Mansion in St. Louis, Missouri, the historic home of a 19th-century beer brewer whose suicide sent a family into a tailspin of horrific tragedy. This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor A. N. Devers.

* * *

It is, quite literally, a dark and stormy night. A summer storm has settled over St. Louis: gray­-black clouds turning the air yellowish and electric, the rain pulsing down in waves. The sprint from the parking lot to the front door of the Lemp Mansion—no more than fifty feet—leaves you soaked. The thunder is following on the heels of the lightning; it is right above us. In the bar the stained ­glass portraits of William Lemp, Jr., and his first wife, Lillian Lemp—the Lavender Lady—flicker to life from the lightning outside with disturbing fre­quency, the accompanying thunder coming fast afterward. It is the perfect night for a ghost hunt: the air already electric, everyone already a bit on edge. In his portrait, William Lemp looks prematurely old; the glass art­ist has added shading to his face to give the appearance of three dimen­sions, but the result instead is that he appears haggard, black pits around his eyes, deep creases in his skin.

As if he knows he’s going to die.

The owners of the Lemp Mansion seem quite content to capitalize on the building’s repu­tation. Ghost hunters come here regularly to take tours, use KII meters and ghost boxes, and record for EVPs (electronic voice phenomenon) and orbs. I’m here for one such tour, led by a local ghost-­hunting group. I’m also here to spend the night, since the Lemp Mansion operates as a bed-­and-­breakfast—though I won’t be able to get into my room until 11 p.m. My room, the Elsa Lemp Suite, is itself part of the tour: the most haunted room in this most haunted house.

The haunted Lemp manison. Image via Matt Hunke

The Lemp family story should be remembered as your classic rags-­t0-­riches success story: Johann Adam Lemp emigrated to America from Germany in 1838 and within a short time had grown a prosperous business selling beer. At the time the only beers available in America were strong English ales, and Lemp, along with John Wagner in Philadelphia, is credited with introducing the lighter, German­-style lager beer that has since become ubiquitous in the United States. Lemp’s beer caught on quickly, particularly in the German immigrant community of St. Louis, and by 1850 he was shipping four thousand barrels of beer annually. Prior to electric refrigeration, Lemp had found that the natural caverns beneath St. Louis provided a stable and year­-round cool environment, which al­lowed him to ramp up production without fear of spoilage. His success was mirrored by constant rivals Eberhard Anheuser and Adolphus Busch, whose Budweiser beer would play second fiddle to Lemp’s Falstaff brand well into the early twentieth century. Johann died in 1862, but the company soldiered on under the direction of his son, William, who con­tinued to grow the brewing juggernaut, which, by the dawn of the twen­tieth century, seem destined to endure forever.

Your feet feel a bit unsteady, but that’s probably because, after more than a hundred years, the staircase and the floors have begun to slope slightly as the foundation of the house has become uneven.

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The first suicide in the Lemp Mansion happened in 1904. Three years earlier, William’s twenty-­eight­-year­old son, Frederick, who had been groomed to take over the family business, died suddenly from heart failure, leaving William distraught. When William’s closest friend, Freder­ick Pabst (of the blue-­ribboned Pabst Brewing Company), died a few years later, on January 1, 1904, it sent William over the edge: he shot himself in the head just over a month later in the mansion the family had occupied since 1876. William’s successor, William Jr. (Billy), lacked his father’s head for business; he spent lavishly, and the business floundered. His marriage to Lillian fell apart, and the couple’s messy divorce in 1906 made head­lines. But the real crippling blow to the Lemp brewing empire came in 1919, with the passage of Prohibition. Billy shuttered the company with­ out notice, and within two years both he and his sister Elsa had killed themselves. The family retired from the public eye, out of the beer busi­ness for good, almost forgotten, until another of William Sr.’s eight chil­dren, Charles, followed in the footsteps of his father, brother, and sister, killing himself with a revolver on May 10, 1949. (Tradition holds that Charles shot his dog before himself, though this is nowhere mentioned in the police reports of the incident.)

Charles Lemp was the only one to leave a note, which read simply, “In case I am found dead, blame it on no one but me.” But most have instead chosen to blame a curse of some kind, a curse under which the Lemp family suffered, unable to shake the fate that awaited each in turn. In the Haunted Lemp Mansion board game, players move through the mansion while collecting various strategy cards; if a player collects both a “revolver” card and a “bullet” card and then happens to land on a “suicide” space, he’s out of the game—an oddly tasteless reference to the gruesome series of tragedies that repeatedly befell the House of Lemp.

Unlike the Winchester Mystery House, with its sprawling, formless labyrinth of rooms; the George Stickney House, with its rounded corners; or the House of the Seven Gables, with its secret staircase, there is nothing particularly odd—architecturally speaking—about the Lemp Mansion. It is large, to be sure, and stately, but its outer construction is straightforward, and its rooms are laid out in a fairly sensible order. Its additions over the years increased its size, but its overall shape and appearance don’t suggest anything out of the ordinary.

And yet the mansion itself—far more than the neighboring brewery, the caves below the city where the fabled Falstaff beer was once stored, or the other homes the Lemps have owned through the years—remains in­ extricable from the family and its curse. This is how we tend to think of old, august families that have lasted through the generations: there should be one central, ancestral home, a single estate that embodies the bloodline.

As I hold my camera on the window, a strange light moves across it, a wave of light that holds, then passes by and disappears.

It’s an idea ingrained in the very word “house,” with its dual meaning as both building and family. And like Edgar Allan Poe’s House of Usher, the House of Lemp seems to have failed. In Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher,” house and House are conjoined so tightly that when Roderick Usher’s sister, Madeline, seems to rise from the grave to carry off her brother (the last surviving member of the Usher family) to his own death, the house itself collapses, supernaturally torn asunder, and crum­bles into the swamp just as the narrator escapes. But unlike the house of Usher—and despite the tragedies and calamities that have befallen its occupants—the Lemp Mansion still stands.

* * *

The rain is deluging the streets outside, and we gather in one of the din­ing rooms on the first floor, where there are light snacks and infrared camcorders. My friend Elizabeth has joined me for this tour, and we wait along with the other guests—there are maybe twelve of us total—who range from college age to mid­forties, and altogether we are a fair enough cross section of the general population. It’s hard to read the faces of the other people on the tour, or discern their interest in ghosts or this house. As we settle in and munch on our celery sticks and slightly stale cookies, the guide gives us a brief rundown on the history of the house. In our hands are ordinary camcorders to which infrared rigs have been attached, and we’re instructed how best to hold them so our arms won’t get tired, as well as other basic tips, such as don’t pan too fast through a room or the image will blur, and don’t look through the viewfinder while going up or down stairs or you’ll get vertigo.

After the guide finishes with the instructions, we gather our equip­ment and head toward the stairs. You feel a bit dizzy, but you tell yourself it’s probably because you’re looking through the infrared camera’s view­ finder too much. Your feet feel a bit unsteady, but that’s probably because, after more than a hundred years, the staircase and the floors have begun to slope slightly as the foundation of the house has become uneven. All your hairs are standing on end—probably, you tell yourself, from the storm outside. It’s time to go upstairs.

* * *

Ghost hunts without technological devices these days are almost unheard of; one could almost say that ghosts don’t exist without the technology that re­ cords them. But though the devices have gotten more complex, the spirit world has long been intertwined with technology. In 1884 Samuel F. B. Morse demonstrated the first use of the tele­graph; despite its very straightforward technical workings, here was a m­achine that could send and receive disembodied messages over great distances—as though they’d come from another world. The parallels between Spiritualism and telegraphy were immediately drawn, and early publications, such as the Spiritual Telegraph, attested to this very simple analogy: just as the telegraph could send and receive over great distances, the Spiritualist could send and receive across the divide of life and death. Four years after the telegraph’s invention, the table raps that famous Spiritualist Fox sisters claimed allowed them to talk to spirits, after all, were themselves a form of Morse code. Media and medium were two sides of the same coin.

The table rappin’ Fox sisters. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

It’s not that a belief in ghosts began in 1848, of course, but the Spiritualist revolution reformulated how we believed in ghosts. No longer were they purely emanations of terror; now a direct communication with the dead could be established through technology. This has largely continued through all subsequent technological advancements: nearly every major communication technology has sooner or later been appropriated by ghost seekers.

There is photography, of course: pioneered just prior to the telegraph, it came into its own in the second half of the nineteenth century and be­ came one of the prime means of documenting ghosts (though from the very beginning the veracity of spirit photos was questioned by skeptics). Radio and television, too, were seen as receptors for spirit messages from the beginning, with ghosts frequently discerned through static and failed connections. The introduction of consumer magnetic tape recordings in the 1940s and ’50s spurred yet another revolution in communicating with ghosts; with recording now significantly cheaper and more portable, ana­log tape (with its added bonus of tape hiss and other audio imperfections) put the voices of the dead in the hands of the masses.

In the late 1950s Swedish painter and documentary filmmaker Fried­rich Jürgenson decided to record birds singing in his garden; while playing back the recording, he unexpectedly heard on the tape the voice of his dead mother calling his name. He spent years making further recordings and researching the technique before publishing Radio Contact with the Dead in 1967. Jürgenson’s work was followed and greatly expanded by Latvian psychologist Konstantin Raudive, who published his extensive documentation of EVPs in his Unhörbares wird Hörbar (The Inaudible Made Audible), published in English in 1971 as Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication with the Dead. Raudive reported his lengthy experiments with EVP and transcribed some of the more disturb­ing communications he received. “Here is night brothers, here the birds burn,” one voice told him one night. Another came through the wire to tell him: “Secret reports . . . it is bad here.”

Raudive claimed that his work would lead “to empirically provable reality with a factual background,” but skeptics point to the degree of leeway he gave his spirit voices in their attempts to communicate. He explained that spirits talked in multiple languages, even in the same sentence; that they could speak in languages they hadn’t known in life; and that they sometimes spoke backward. Considering all these allowances, it’s not ter­ribly surprising that Raudive could discern so much chatty conversation from the dead. If you’re looking for spirit voices, you can find them in just about any string of gibberish or noise if you listen hard enough.

Perhaps it’s less important whether one believes than why he believes.

Jürgenson used EVP as many Spiritualists did: to contact lost loved ones, to be reassured that they were okay and in a better place. The search for ghosts often takes this form: of a kind of mourning, a working through of grief and loss. We look for the ghosts of those whose deaths we have not yet gotten over, as though we need their blessings to let them pass on.

* * *

There is no sense of grief or loss—at least nothing outwardly visible—in any of the people climbing the Lemp Mansion’s stairs with me. If any­ thing, the vibe is of veiled thrill seeking and vague curiosity. Near the top of the stairs is the Elsa Lemp Suite, where I’ll be staying the night in a few short hours. Elsa was the youngest of William Sr. and Julia Lemp’s eight children, born in 1883, when Julia was forty-­one years old. Elsa married the vice president of a metal company, Thomas Wright, in 1910, but by all accounts the marriage was troubled. After losing their only daugh­ter in childbirth, Elsa filed for divorce in 1919, citing mental anguish and abandonment. After their separation, Elsa, the wealthiest woman in St. Louis, changed her will to write Thomas out of it entirely. But just thirteen months later they were reunited and they remarried on March 8, 1920. Twelve days later Elsa killed herself with a single self-­inflicted gun­shot wound to the heart.

The unassuming suite that bears her name, hers when she was a child, looks out to the north, with St. Louis spilling out before it. But though Elsa succumbed to the same “curse” as did her brothers and father, you will not find her ghost here. She died in her own home, at 13 Hortense Place, some seven miles from the Lemp Mansion. The ghosts that haunt this room date from a period in the mid-­twentieth century when the house was used as overflow housing for a local pediatric hospital. The spirits of termi­nally ill children, they’ve been known to engage in mischievous behavior: pulling at the sheets while guests are trying to sleep or tugging at their legs as if they were by their feet.

Nearly every room in the house, it turns out, has a story. In Charles Lemp’s bedroom, sometimes small items will move about the room without warning. In another bedroom, a smell of raw sewage sometimes emanates from nowhere, indicating that the spirits of the house don’t like you. Through the hallways roams the spirit of a young child whose iden­tity has never been completely verified. A shadowy figure lurks in the basement, and an unknown man has been seen sitting down for a meal in the first­-floor dining room, only to vanish when approached. With this many stories, I half expect a scene out of Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion, with rooms of translucent figures cavorting and mischief making—but so far, even with the spooky weather outside, we’ve seen nothing.

Then at some point I find myself alone in the Elsa Lemp Suite while the other guests are investigating other rooms. All the lights on the floor have been shut off, and the only way to see anything is through the infrared camera. I run the camera over the room, pausing on a small window air conditioner that’s rumbling slightly under the stress of keeping the room cool. As I hold my camera on the window, a strange light moves across it, a wave of light that holds, then passes by and disappears.

It could have been car headlights passing by outside, except that I’m on the third floor and the light would have to have been coming from behind me, where there are no windows or other sources of light. No one is nearby that I can see, and no other explanation offers itself. I keep the camera focused on the air conditioner, seeing whether the phenomenon will repeat itself. For a minute I watch the machine soldier on stoically, but the light doesn’t reappear and nothing else happens.

Viewing a dark mansion through an infrared lens is undeniably eerie, no matter who you are. The realm of otherwise mundane objects takes on a pall. People’s irises turn ghostly white, so that the folks standing next to you—living, breathing, and very much alive—look like hollowed­out zombies. Things that are still in normal light pulse faintly in infrared; they seem like they could come alive at any moment.

It’s not just the infrared; walking around the mansion, I see how the viewfinder of a camera can change the landscape. The way a camera can single out a specific object for our attention makes us presume that something specific is going to happen. The more ordinary the object and the longer the wait, the more our expectations heighten. You tense up.

Horror movie premises so often involve a perfectly innocuous object turned malevolent—a house, a toy, a child. I discover that holding the camera for a long five seconds on an object is usually enough to make it unnerving, and I begin to question the light that I saw playing out over the air conditioner. Perhaps it was just my expectation of something, but stand­ing alone in a pitch ­black room of an old mansion, with nothing for illumi­nation but an infrared camera, thunder rolling through the distance—it becomes unnerving very quickly.

* * *

We’re now on the second floor, in one of the large middle bedrooms. Be­cause houses were taxed based on the number of bedrooms, the Lemp Mansion, as was the custom at the time, has overly large bedrooms separated in the middle by pocket doors (once the doors were fully closed, two bedrooms could be had for the price of one). Supposedly ghost hunters have gotten strong electromagnetic pulse (EMP) readings from the center of this room, supposedly this is significant, supposedly the distant sound of a dog can be heard on some recordings. The infrared cameras, we’re told, can pick up organic matter that’s otherwise invisible on carpets. And sure enough, panning a camera down to the floor reveals stains in blotches and clumps. This is the room where apparently Charles Lemp shot his dog, and it’s strange to look down and see beneath your feet what looks like the poor animal’s blood, as though it was killed only yesterday.

But it’s probably not blood: without the camera, the stains look more like ground ­in dirt than spectral blood. Despite the great legends of the Lemp Mansion, it becomes clear that the terrifying experience always happens on some other tour, some other time.

It’s at this point that my friend Elizabeth reveals a secret: if you toggle your infrared lights on and off while standing near someone else, the inter­ference will cause orbs and shadows to appear on the person’s video. You can, in other words, create your own ghosts. The light I saw moving across the air conditioner in the Elsa Lemp Suite may very well have been this. Perhaps someone passed by me in the hallway while I wasn’t looking, and some unintended interference on their part was enough to create a momen­tary play of light—one that I was all too ready to accept as paranormal.

No matter how hard we look, it seems, the ghosts won’t materialize on demand. Why should they? Moving through these rooms supposedly haunted by the Lemp family, the other people on the tour are eagerly hunting for orbs and shadows, evidence of the ghostly presence of the Lemps and their supernatural curse. But it seems equally plausible to read their story as a history of family mental illness, perhaps a clinical depres­sion or bipolar condition passed down through William Sr.’s genes to his doomed children, children who lacked the cultural or medical support to combat this neurological condition. The tragedies of the Lemp Mansion might have been entirely a matter of brain chemistry, attributable to noth­ing other than a lack of timely medical intervention.

* * *

The Lemp Brewery. Image by Moose Winans

In 1901 a man in a black suit entered a downtown jewelry store and identi­fied himself as William Lemp, Jr. He asked for the largest sunburst dia­mond in the store, then told the owner, “I will take it with me now, and you may send the bill to the brewery.” He pawned the diamond and was never heard from again. In 1915, according to historian Davidson Mull­gardt, a woman named Mrs. Fannie Zell had herself sent flowers from Billy, Charles, and their brother Edwin Lemp to convince others that she had admirers among the rich and powerful.

And then there’s the curious case of Andrew Paulsen, who appeared in St. Louis in 2010 claiming to be one of the last living descendants of the Lemp family. He had a key to the Lemp mausoleum, along with a painting by Louise Lemp (one of Billy’s nieces and an established artist) and other assorted memorabilia, including housewares he claimed were from the family, which he began selling on eBay. “Our desire and passion is to let the wonderful people of St. Louis and the world know there is a Lemp descendant who is willing to share never before told stories of the famous Lemp family of St. Louis,” his business partner, Cheryl Sochotsky, wrote on their Website, Lemp Treasures. He began giving tours of sites in St. Louis and attracted admirers among those obsessed with the Lemp family.

But in short order Paulsen’s story began to unravel. The woman he claimed was his mother—Anne­-Marie Konta, granddaughter of Annie Lemp (Elsa’s eldest sister)—died in 1973, thirteen years before Paulsen was born. As people began asking questions, he was unable to provide anything like proof that he actually descended from the Lemp family. When St. Louis Magazine reporter Jeannette Cooperman asked him for some kind of confirmation, he stonewalled, then threatened legal action. Why someone would concoct an elaborate fiction solely to hawk some meaningless housewares online for a few bucks is a mystery, but just one more example of someone trying to capitalize on the long, sad history of the Lemp family.

It does speak to the aura surrounding the family, which has not dimin­ ished along with their fortunes. In some ways, the dramatic ending of Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” seems overly optimistic and convenient: with Roderick’s death and the end of the family line, the house falls into the swamp and the name vanishes as well. In reality, decline is much messier, and even though the House of Lemp has lost its former glory, the house and the name still linger, drawing an odd breed of revenants along with the ghost seekers.

After the tour one of the dining room servers stops us in the hall. “Did you see anything?” she asks, excited. She has been working here for only three weeks and hasn’t experienced any haunted moments, though she’s hoping to. She has no doubt in her mind that the house is haunted; after all, she’s seen ghosts all her life. She was seven or eight, she says, when she first saw one, on her family’s land, which had once been a plantation: a young girl, pale, running, terrified, always returning near her birthday. The server didn’t ever try to figure out what the story was: “I figured it wasn’t my business. She wasn’t hurting anyone.” Her face now is full of excitement: how lucky we are to have had the chance to commune with the spirits in such a legendary place. How could we have failed to see at least one?

Spend enough time debunking the legends associated with haunted places, trying to see past it all—the marketing, the dubious electronic devices, and all the other trappings—and you sometimes forget how real, and how persistent, the belief in ghosts is for many of us. A belief that in various ways, and for various people, gives an explanation and a meaning to experiences that can’t be explained away easily. A belief that can help us mourn and give us hope.

The hunt finally over, I retrieve my bags from the foyer and head back up to the Elsa Lemp Suite, hoping for a good night’s sleep in the most haunted room of the most haunted mansion in the country. By now I’ve been awake for almost nineteen hours, having woken up at four thirty in the morning to make my flight to St. Louis. I am thoroughly exhausted, and though I toy with the idea of staying up to see what happens through the night, the truth is, I pass out in minutes. If ghosts swarmed about me that night, they did not trouble my sleep.

* * *

From the book Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places by Colin Dickey, to be published on October 4^th by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
Copyright © 2016 by Colin Dickey.

Chloe Caldwell | I’ll Tell You In Person | Coffee House Press | October 2016 | 19 minutes (4,768 words)

“Do you get in bed and cuddle with Chloe in the mornings?” It was an early evening in spring, and Bobbi and I were in the kitchen, standing across from each other at the counter. We’d just finished eating pizza and salad with ranch on the back porch. Bobbi’s mom, Cheryl, was on speakerphone, calling from her hotel to check in on us.

“She doesn’t!” I said, making eye contact with Bobbi, who looked at me skeptically in a way only an eight-year-old can.

“Yeah but that’s ’cause . . . well, do you sleep naked?” Bobbi asked, lowering her deafening voice for once like she was asking me in total confidence.

I burst out laughing.

“No!” I said.

I’ve had countless sleepovers with Bobbi in the past three years, and I never don’t pretend she’s my little sister, even though, at twenty-eight, I’m too old to be her sister. I feel too young and immature to be her mother. At twenty-eight, I’m more like an aunt or a cousin. I could easily be engaged or pregnant or have children of my own. But that is not my life. Instead, I babysit, still waiting for my real life to begin. In limbo. A friend sent me a birthday card that read, Happy Saturn Return, good luck with that, seriously.

“You could be in India having sex next year,” Cheryl told me once when I was down on myself about being such a loose end in the domestic department.

“Whereas I probably won’t!” she said.

When Cheryl called that night, Bobbi and I had been in the middle of an improvised séance, though I was unsure what dead person we were trying to contact. We held hands around an orange candle and chanted gibberish. It reminded me of the opening scene in Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.

In a mock new-age voice, Bobbi said, “o.k. now breeeeeeeaaathe in the baaaaaad energyyyyyy.”

“No way! Not doing that,” I said.

“Yeah but then you breathe it out.”

“Yeah but why do I have to breathe it in at all?”

“Just trust me and do it.”

“K.”

“Now look up at the sky and repeat after me: Iloveyoumommy-Iloveyoumommy.”

“IloveyoumommyIloveyoumommy.”

The phone rang. We screamed. 

***

When I was younger, my mom and I had a running joke about her having another baby. My mother—so youthful at heart— seemed fertile and healthy, in good physical shape, so the joke seemed plausible even when she was in her forties. Once on April Fool’s Day many years ago, my mom called up her siblings to lie that she was pregnant, while she and I stifled laughs in the living room. My mom grew up with seven siblings, four sisters and three brothers. I have zero sisters and one brother a couple years older than me. Trevor likes to say we were best friends when we were three and five, but then we didn’t talk for years. Then when I was twenty-one and he was twenty-three we became best friends again. 

But I couldn’t share clothes with a brother. I couldn’t ask a brother about my period or my breasts that were getting larger by the day. Sometimes when I was home alone, I would go into my brother’s room and try on his jeans. I was envious of him because he had skinny legs and olive skin. I had fair skin and ample legs. I was developing quickly; it seemed more curves appeared each night. I’d go into his room and take his jeans out of his drawers, admire their tininess. The waist four or five inches smaller than my own. The jeans wouldn’t fit me, and I’d leave the room defeated and feeling fat.

I begged for a sister. “Let’s adopt!” I said. My mom says that since I don’t have a sister, my fantasy is better than how it would be in reality. Obviously. In my fantasy we would braid each other’s hair and borrow shirts and share cigarettes. Like the scene in Tiny Furniture when Lena Dunham is showering and her real-life sister is reading her a poem on the toilet. That would be my life. A little sister. How she’d love me. How I’d love her. We’d speak in our own language and sleep in the same bed. But those are only the cliché things we would do. The real things we would do are too nuanced and special for me to know. I loved Summer Sisters by Judy Blume because the girls in it were not blood sisters, and I’ve spent my life looking for female friendships that would replicate the relationships in that book. I read it three times each summer as a teenager. Beezus and Ramona Quimby. Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield. Lena and Grace Dunham. Natasha and Malia Obama. Dot and Kit.

***

I like to say my father has a thousand daughters. He’s had so many teenage girls work at the music store he owns, taught countless girls guitar and ukulele lessons. He’s been in some of their lives from when they were seven into their early twenties. The girls still stop by when they’re home from college. They leave notes for him on fluorescent Post-its.

Rob, I stopped by but u r avoiding me

i really don’t like this distance between us so please be here next time 

♥ Sharece

Rob i thought u were my bae 

love ashley 

My father has a thousand daughters the way I have a thousand sisters.

***

When I was a child, my mother worked for an organization called the Fresh Air Fund. It was a program helping inner-city kids from low-income families to come upstate and stay with a family for a couple of weeks. The year I was six years old, my mother was the chairperson for the Fresh Air Fund. We took the train into Grand Central to pick up the kids and take them back upstate. I brought my blond Baby Alive doll that could eat and poop. My family wasn’t getting a “fresh-air kid” that year—we’d hosted one for years, and my dad wanted a summer off from having three children. But on the train home I sat next to a nine-year-old girl. She had a doll too, hers black, mine white. She asked me if she could brush my hair. She brushed and braided it and we played with our dolls. She was outspoken. When we arrived upstate, and the kids went with their corresponding families, Tiffany’s family didn’t show up. 

“I’m going home with you! I wanna go with you!” she declared to my mom.

I pleaded, already taken with Tiffany. How do you not love someone who brushes and plays with your hair? I didn’t have to twist my mom’s arm. We piled in the red Toyota, and Tiffany and I sat thigh to thigh. “cow!” she’d exclaim as we passed farms.

That’s how I met Tiffany, my summer sister. She came every summer for the next six years. Tiffany was the funniest person I’d ever met in my short life. Tiffany and I played with American Girl dolls—I had Addy and she had one she’d created that she named Tatiana. She did my hair for years, putting it in elaborate updos and French braids. We shared a bedroom. When we got older, we begged my mom for diaries at Fashion Bug, and we wrote in them at night, griping about each other. We were supposed to go the mall but my mom won’t take us until Tiffany eats something but she says she’s fasting. so annoying!!!! 

Every morning, early, my dad would turn on the coffeemaker, and Tiffany told me for the first few years at our house, she didn’t know what this sound was. She’d thought it was the sound of my dad farting.

My mother and I recently had a conversation about our summers with Tiffany.

“She brought a lot of laughter to our house when we needed it,” she said. My parents were still together then, but there were issues. Such as my dad coming home to find he had an extra child in the living room, one with a booming laugh, brushing his daughter’s hair.

We brought Tiffany to Cape Cod with us one summer. We jumped the waves. Tiffany borrowed my mom’s turquoise two-piece suit, and she got wrecked from a wave, laughing and crying, her bikini top falling off. Tiffany was vocal about hating mosquitos, sun, grass, swimming. When we were kids, my brother and I played outside in the sandbox. My mom told her to play with us.

“I’m not getting in that! That’s dirt!” she said.

***

I’ve always idolized older girls. Even now some of my best friends are in their forties. There’s a photo of Tiffany and me where she is crossing her legs, so I am too. Besides Tiffany, I also had my cousin Megan for a surrogate big sister. Megan was five years older than me, my cool cousin—skinnier, blonder, older. I got my belly button pierced because hers was. I got my cartilage pierced because hers was (she took me). I waitressed because she did, drove stick shift because she did. When I was a freshman in high school, she was a freshman in college, at suny. My parents had just separated, and Megan e-mailed me to invite me to stay with her for a weekend. I brought my two best friends along. I forever jokingly blame this experience for why I did not go to college. It was the first time I funneled beer, and my friends and I ended up throwing up all over the place. Megan lent me her expired id, and I bought beer with it from ages sixteen to nineteen, when my mom found it while snooping through my jeans. She mailed it back to Megan with a note saying, There are other ways to be a cool cousin. 

Megan warned me about getting older. Every year since I’ve turned twenty-five, on my birthday she reminds me, “It’s all downhill from here.” We went to the beach every summer, and we once saw a woman with tan legs, loose skin wobbling all around. “I’m scared my legs are gonna look like that,” she said. Another year we walked along the water and she said, “My thighs rub together while I walk now. They never used to do that.” It was one of the most morbid statements I’ve ever heard, and it still haunts me. I was twenty-three then and assumed my body would function perfectly my entire life. Now my thighs also rub together.

Megan and I spent this past New Year’s Eve together.

“Remember when you wanted a breast reduction?” I asked her over a glass of champagne.

“Yeah, now I want a lift,” she responded.

***

The first time I met Bobbi was in 2011, when she was five and I was twenty-five. She was always animated, but polite and somewhat shy. (Now that we are pseudo-sisters, now that she is ten, she is not polite and shy with me. Sometimes I have to tell her to give me ten minutes. Sometimes I have to take her into the other room. Sometimes we yell and I swear.) 

In 2013 I lived at Cheryl’s during the months of November and December while her family went to Australia. It was just me and her two cats in the house. The house was medium-sized but felt big for only one person. I was lonely. I knew I wasn’t a child anymore, but I didn’t know myself as an adult yet, either. Instead of sleeping in the main bedroom, I found myself over and over retiring to Bobbi’s small bed on the floor, with the red-and-blue Spider-Man fleece blanket. Last year I told Bobbi I slept in her bed instead of her mom’s so I could curl up next to the wall.

“That is the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard in my whole life,” she said.

***

Last summer I stayed with Bobbi and her older brother, Carver, in Portland for a week, and there was an E. coli scare. We had to boil and bottle the water before we drank it. The kids were excited because they got to drink Gatorade and Vitaminwater and sugary drinks they normally weren’t allowed to have. It was all anyone was talking about. E. coli. One morning at the dog park with Bobbi’s puppy, Janie, Bobbi asked me, “What would you do if there wasn’t any water to drink for a month?” 

I said I would go in grocery stores and suck water from different fruits and that I would go to parks in the early morning and lick the dew off the grass. Bobbi burst into hysterics, like this was the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard.

“I would just make smoothies!” she exclaimed. And then, “Do you think Janie knows what she looks like? Like, do you think she thinks she’s a really good-looking dog?”

***

Bobbi is passionate about horror. She gets a rush from scaring herself crapless. She loves true stories and ghost stories and the author April Henry. One afternoon we drove to Powell’s, where I promised to buy her one book. She had to make the excruciatingly difficult decision between April Henry’s novels The Body in the Woods and Girl, Stolen. She chose The Body in the Woods. She sleeps in her brother’s room the nights she binges on horror. She’ll follow me everywhere, saying things like, “What if we open the door and there’s a serial killer sitting at the table?” and “What if we come upon a dead clown?” She wants desperately not to be alone after reading these books and watching these movies. She even comes into the bathroom with me and stands under a bath towel while I pee. But she’s addicted. 

***

One day we were in her mom’s library looking at the books on the shelves. I pointed out my book of essays. 

“What’s it about?” Bobbi asked.

“My life.”

She grew uncharacteristically quiet.

“Was your life sad?”

“No . . .” I said.

She perked back up and matter-of-factly said, “Good!”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because when people write about their lives, they usually had bad or sad lives.”

“That’s a great observation,” I said.

***

I get irritated in the mornings packing Bobbi’s lunches when she didn’t eat the tomato soup she’d begged me to put into a Thermos and the hummus and pita and apple and orange I packed the day before. She only ate the two Thin Mints. I toss it all into the compost and ask Bobbi why she didn’t eat at lunchtime. 

“I was too busy talking and telling ghoooossssst stories!” she said.

“Well, try to eat what I pack you today, ’cause this is a waste of food and a waste of my time.”

“Yes, ma’am!” she shouted, dramatically straightening her posture and hand-saluting me.

“Can I try your coffee, pleeeeeeaaase? Can you give me your iPhone password, pleeeeeeeaaaaassse?”

“I’m so happy you’re seeing how hard my life is,” Cheryl said that day and gave me a gift certificate to Massage Envy.

In my own life, in my own apartment, all I have to take care of is a jade plant, which barely needs anything. Besides that I just make sure to get out of bed every day, shower, eat protein, get a little exercise. I answer to no one. So it’s a trip, walking into Cheryl’s and having responsibility for not only two small humans but also a dog and two cats and a fish. Usually I am my first priority, but now I am my last. When evening rolls around, I become completely overwhelmed with fixing dinner, loading the dishwasher, walking the dog, getting the kids to brush their teeth. I often pass out right after they do, not enough energy to finish a glass of wine or read one of Cheryl’s one million books and advance review copies.

I am asked if I have children only once or twice a year, and I try not to bristle. I’m not exactly sure why I do bristle—I think because these people are not really seeing me, seeing my incredibly non-mom life. I try not to scream, like in that episode of Broad City, i am not a mom! do i look like i have kids?

I’ve noticed for the past few years, I’ve been trying on families instead of boyfriends. Through writing I’ve made many special friendships with women in their forties. There is one decade between us, and I’m curious what that decade will make of me. I visit these women, stay at their homes with their husbands and children. I sleep in their guest rooms or their daughters’ beds. I observe. I note-take in my mind. I want open communication the way they have, but I don’t want a rescue dog because I won’t be able to juggle a kid and a dog. They have what I do not—stability, Legos, school lunches—and I have what they do not: endless time to read or masturbate or watch three movies in a row or stare at the ceiling wondering what is to become of them.

***

In her essay “Munro Country” about her infatuation with author Alice Munro, Cheryl writes, “I didn’t really think I was Alice Munro’s daughter. I’m not talking here about delusion.” 

I feel similarly about Bobbi. I don’t actually think she is my sister. I’m just joking around. But it would be untrue to say I don’t feel a connection. When we lie on the couch watching Bob’s Burgers, my feet in Bobbi’s lap, when we walk down the street and she puts her arm around my waist, when she wakes me up in the middle of the night to get her water, or when she animatedly tells me about her dreams over tea and eggs in the mornings, I feel safe. Something akin to love.

***

When I made friends with Fran, she was someone I recognized immediately as family. It was as though I’d known her forever. She was so familiar to me and I couldn’t fathom it. 

“I can’t believe how well we get along,” I said to her. “This is crazy.”

“Maybe we’re karmic sisters,” she responded. “That happens sometimes.”

***

Bobbi and I watched My Girl. “This is my new favorite movie,” she declared. We watched The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. We watched Anchorman 2. Mean Girls 2. The Sandlot 2. Zoolander 2. We ate at Red Robin. We ordered pizza and Caesar salad and went out for cheeseburgers. We went on the tire swing at the park. We did yoga on the front porch. We drew pictures. We went to the pet store for materials to clean her fish tank. We picked flowers. I practiced her lines with her when she got the part of Elsa in her acting class’s version of Frozen. Her best friend came over and they danced on top of the coffee table to “Call Me Maybe.” I drove Bobbi and Carver to school, piano class, acting class, soccer, and basketball practice. I sat on the bench while she participated in her parkour class. “Are you gonna stay and watch?” she’d asked me. 

One thing I love about kids is they don’t even know how much they are helping you. The summer I had a broken heart so bad I thought I was dying, Taylor Swift’s song “Trouble” had just been released. We were in the car all the time, as the children’s camps were opposite directions from one another. “Trouble” came on the radio often, and each time, Bobbi and I sang it at the top of our lungs. I call this sort of thing “active grieving.”

I knew you were trouble when you walked in 

So shame on you now 

Flew me to places I’ve never been 

Now I’m lying on the cold, hard floor 

Carver told us our singing was really annoying. He asked me to please change the station.

During the breakup, I showed up to babysit and told Cheryl I was in a bad headspace. That I was devastated. “Is it terrible or will you be o.k.?” she asked. I was about to tell her it was terrible, and I wouldn’t o.k., but she interrupted and said, “Listen— even if it is terrible, you will be o.k. And if it makes you feel any better—my twenties were full of crazy bitches.”

***

If you ask kids, “Wanna do something fun?” they yell, “Yeah!” Adults don’t do this. They often roll their eyes and groan, “Like what?” 

On my last day with Bobbi before I would fly back to New York, I picked her up at school. I loved picking her up in the afternoons, feeling like anything was possible. The sun shone on the windshield. Bobbi saw me from the distance and jumped in the car.

“Hi, friend,” I said.

“Hi, friend!”

“Let’s have fun!”

“Yeah! Let’s get frozen yooooooogurt!” she said.

“Good idea!”

“Guess what a boy gave me,” she said, pulling a large chocolate bar wrapped in gold foil out of her backpack.

I’d been craving chocolate all day.

“I love you so much right now,” I said, reaching my hand back for a piece.

“Yay,” she said, slapping a square in my hand.

We parked on Hawthorne Boulevard and skipped around town. We got frozen yogurt. While I was in the bathroom, Bobbi piled her yogurt with everything I said she couldn’t have, like gummy bears and chocolate chips. We went to the bookstore. We went to one of my favorite boutiques because I had babysitting money burning a hole in my pocket. She helped me pick out a jean jacket with sweatshirt sleeves. I rolled the sleeves up, and she said, “No, keep ’em down, that’s how the kids are wearing them.” I got a text from Cheryl, Coming home soon? We jumped back into the car, singing along to First Aid Kit on the Wild soundtrack.

“Are you thinking about mac and cheese?” Bobbi asked me as I drove, catching my eye in the rearview mirror.

“No . . .”

“Oh. You look like you are.”

***

Two summers ago, Cheryl was teaching a writing workshop at Omega Institute for a couple of weeks, and my mom and I drove there to have dinner with Cheryl’s family. We opened a bottle of red and a bottle of white and ate cheese and crackers. 

“You guys—do you know the story of how we know Chloe and her mom?” Cheryl asked her kids.

“Yep,” Bobbi said, coming to sit next to me on the couch and patting me twice on the knee.

“You do? What is it?” Cheryl asked, sipping her wine.

“Like—we’re actually all related or something,” Bobbi said dismissively, shoving crackers into her mouth, already bored by the story.

“What did she say?” my mom asked me from across the room.

“She said we’re all related.”

My mom and Cheryl and I laughed. We told the story, which is a complicated one with a few twists.

In spring of 2011, I’d just begun publishing my writing online, and I published an essay on the Rumpus. The anonymous writer Dear Sugar commented, Chloe Caldwell, I don’t know who you are, but I know you’re a sweet pea rock star. I loved this essay. Loved it. Keep on writing like a motherfucker, sister. I was touched but had no clue who this mysterious writer was. I thanked her on Twitter.

Meanwhile, I was sitting on my mom’s couch reading personal essays in the Sun magazine online. I stumbled upon “The Love of My Life” and was so moved I called my mom into the room and told her she had to read it. My mom looked over my shoulder and said, “I think I’ve read that. I think I even e-mailed the author.” This habit of e-mailing authors when they make you feel something is one of the best traits my mother has passed down to me.

I messaged Cheryl on Twitter telling her I loved her essay, and she told me she loved my Rumpus essays. We began e-mailing. I was e-mailing with both Dear Sugar and Cheryl Strayed at this point and had no idea they were the same person.

I told Cheryl my mom thought she’d e-mailed her many years ago. Cheryl responded four minutes later:

Is your mother Michele? She e-mailed me in 2002. We had an exchange about how much we both love Lucinda Williams. How old were you then? 

Sixteen. I was sixteen then, and here I was eleven years later, unknowingly e-mailing the same author about the same essay my mother had.

That same spring, I got a book deal for my first book. All of these magical things were happening. Did Cheryl do this? I wondered. I asked her.

“I didn’t say anything to anyone,” she said. “It was all you, babe. In some interesting way, it was your mother who brought us together, through my mother. They were the original contact. I wrote in The Sun about how much I loved my mother, and your mother wrote to me saying she loved it. Our friendship was in the stars.”

***

After dinner in the cafeteria at Omega—including a vegan cupcake we all found inedible—we took a walk on one of the trails to a pond. Bobbi was licking my arm. 

“Give me some space,” I said.

“Yeah, God, Bobbi, why do you get so hyper around Chloe? It’s annoying,” her brother said.

“Because she’s awesome,” Bobbi said.

On this fifteen-minute walk, Bobbi wanted me to give her dares.

“Run to that tree and do twenty jumping jacks.”

“o.k. now what?”

“Say, ‘Hi, how are you?’ to this group of boys walking toward us.”

“o.k. now what?”

“Count to one hundred.”

“o.k. now what?”

“Stop talking to me for one full minute.”

“Oh come on.”

***

When I stay with Bobbi consecutive nights, we become so used to each other we finish each other’s sentences. When I accidentally broke the family’s SodaStream bottle, she wrote an apology note to her parents, from me. When she got lice, I shampooed her hair. I sat on the toilet while she bathed, and we talked about the girls in her class. Her dog and kitten sat with us in the bathroom. She wears my t-shirts a few days in a row. She gets the shirt dirty and documents everything we did on it. “This is when we ate ice cream at Salt and Straw, this is when we painted pictures . . .” She wears my band shirt that says Girls In Trouble. “Next time you come,” she said, “can you bring me a shirt that says Tomboy on it?” After meeting my mom a couple of times, she once said, “Your mom’s, like, active.” 

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You know, like, she’s a ‘let’s have a dance party’ kind of person,” she explained impatiently. “And she photo bombs people.”

***

When Cheryl had to fly to Los Angeles to attend the Golden Globes, she flew me to Portland to stay with her kids for a week. The kids and I had a Golden Globes party. We ordered pizzas and I broke out the wine with my friends. Every time we saw Cheryl on the tv screen, we screamed. 

“Be quiet, everybody!” Bobbi said, jumping up and running to the tv to see her mother. “She might say something about us!”

When we picked Cheryl back up from the airport, the first thing Bobbi said was, “Chloe said ‘fuck’ seven times driving here.”

“Did you say ‘fuck’ seven times?” Cheryl turned her head to look at me.

***

Bobbi and I both eat avocados out of the shell with lots of salt. I know she likes her eggs scrambled hard, and she knows I get lost if she’s engaging me in a conversation while I drive. She taught me frozen blueberries are delicious in oatmeal, and I taught her what the word stealth means. Sometimes we buy candles and she runs and drops them on my friends’ doorsteps. We both have a love affair with macaroni and cheese. We love nonfiction books and don’t care for sports. When we walk to the store for butter at night because we don’t have any to make chocolate chip cookies, I am surprised to see she does what I do when I’m alone—when she sees a man walking toward us, she crosses the street to the other side. “He’s freaky,” she says, grabbing my hand. 

When I fly home after my weeklong babysitting stints, I always feel melancholy. I lament I was too hard on her—not fun enough, too strict, and I ache for her company. I miss the height of her standing next to me at all times, especially when we brush our teeth or cook meals, her head near my shoulders. I open my computer and find she’d been looking up the ten worst shark attacks on YouTube.

I miss you, I texted her from the airport. Hi I miss you too, she texted back, along with every single emoji that exists. It must have taken at least an hour. Cheryl texted me the next day, Sorry Bobbi sent you one thousand emojis! She only did it because she loves you.

I know she does, I said.

***

Chloe Caldwell is the author of the novella Women and essay collection I’ll Tell You in Person (Coffee House, Oct. 2016).

Franz Nicolay | The Humorless Ladies of Border Control: Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar | July 2016 | 25 minutes (6,916 words)

Below is an excerpt from The Humorless Ladies of Border Control, by Franz Nicolay, the keyboardist in The Hold Steady. This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. 

* * *

You don’t travel for comfort; you travel to justify the daily discomfort, … the nagging doubt, sadness, weariness, the sense of being a stranger in a world.

Our roommate on the sleeper train from L’viv to Kyiv was a stocky, ham-fisted forty-five-year-old veterinarian. A friend of his, he told us, had a visa to America in the 1980s, but he got caught stealing from the grain quota and now can’t go to America ever. He had conspiracy theories and opinions he was eager to share: they didn’t kill bin Laden, it could have been “any tall guy with a beard”—for that matter, I, Franz, look a little like bin Laden, don’t I? And we haven’t seen that much of Michelle Obama recently, have we? If there’s not a trumpet, it’s not jazz. Vitamin C doesn’t work, all you need is raspberry tea with lemon and the love of a good woman. Everyone’s been there— first beer, first guitar, first girl.

He stripped down to what would once have been called his BVDs, nearly obscured by his hairless belly, and snored all night. When we awoke, he was gone, replaced by an older man with a lined face and Clint Eastwood stolidity. “He has the saddest face I’ve ever seen,” Maria said. He slept first, facedown and fully clothed; then, when I returned from the bathroom, he was sitting upright, bag beside him, staring out the window. He never said a word.

I was a musician then, often traveling alone, sometimes with my new wife, Maria. I hadn’t always traveled alone: for years I had been a member of the kind of bands who traveled in marauding, roving packs, like “Kerouac and Genghis Khan,” as the songwriter Loudon Wainwright once put it. First there was the nine-piece circus-punk orchestra World / Inferno Friendship Society, a monument to pyrrhic, self-defeating romanticism and preemptive nostalgia that still haunts me like a family lost in a war. But I had ambitions, and World / Inferno had “underground phenomenon” baked into the concept. So I jumped to a rising neo–classic rock band called the Hold Steady, which became, for a few years, one of the biggest bands in what is, for lack of a term of representation rather than marketing, called “indie rock.” We opened for the Rolling Stones and played the big festivals and bigger television shows. Our victory-lap touring constituted an almost audible sigh of relief that we’d finally arrived— we’d never have to work a day job again.

But I couldn’t, it turned out, take “yes” for an answer, and it seemed to me that I was still too young to settle into that comfortable chair. Amid the usual dull stew of misaligned personalities and creative sensibilities, I shrugged off (or threw aside) this rare sinecure for a keyboardist in a rock band. Compare it to the gamble of the ambitious young lawyer or financier who knows he’ll never make partner at the firm. When you’re on the train, one friend said, and you realize it’s not going where you wanted to go, you have no choice but to jump off. You’ll get bumped and bruised, and you don’t know where you’ll stop rolling, but you do know the train’s not swerving from its track.

I enjoyed a brief palate cleanser in Against Me!, who shared the dual title of most influential punk band of their generation and most controversial soap opera of their scene. It was a brief interregnum. I wanted to test myself as an entertainer, without the crutch of volume. I wanted to see if I could walk into a room full of strangers, who might not even speak my language, and keep them, at bare minimum, from walking out of the room. I aspired to the tradesman’s charisma and practical craft of the old vaudevillian, the one who may not be the best dancer or singer but knows a few jokes, can do some soft-shoe, whatever it takes to get over that night.

There is a great deal of similarity between touring life and military life: small groups of men (and it is still, almost always, men) of disparate backgrounds, bonded by close quarters, foreign places, and meager rations, engaged in activities of dubious purpose but governed by vague and powerful ideals— patriotism, punk rock, machismo. The rules are the same: Do your job. Pack light. Defend your gang, don’t get off the boat, beware of strangers. Sleep stacked three-deep in bus bunks like submariners or curled in hard foxhole corners. Release your tensions in promiscuity, alcoholism, and violence. Keep your mouth shut. Keep your feet dry. Above all, don’t complain.

And, like army men, when we finish our tours of duty, even if we remain in the touring world, we lose our taste for adventure: we return, like World War II veterans creating the Eisenhower suburbs, and quickly domesticate. We pair off, leave the cities for places like the Hudson Valley, Northern California, or Oxford, Mississippi, places within driving distance of an airport and a music scene but far from chance encounters with tour acquaintances. We drink quietly and alone, avoid loud bars and rock shows as places of entertainment and possibility. We tell and retell, buff and hone, our debauched and criminal war stories with those who were there when we see them, in a mutual, fictionalizing reassurance that what we did had some meaning, that we fought for the right side and maybe even won a small skirmish here and there. To outsiders, we no longer brag: we’re no longer sure we were noble.

Now I lived like a pack mule, a dumb and anonymous brute whose only purpose was to carry weight from one place to another. Accordion in a backpack on my shoulders; a day bag slung from my neck over my chest; a banjo in my left hand, my right dragging a suitcase full of CDs, vinyl records, and T-shirts with my name on them. From Brooklyn by subway to Manhattan, by train to Newark, by air to Frankfurt or Kraków or London, by cab to some club or another, dragging bumping bags across cobblestones to a kebab-and-pizza storefront to wait out a winter downpour. Often it was cold—I should have brought my overcoat, I would think, but that would have meant too much excess weight and bulk. You don’t travel for comfort; you travel to justify the daily discomfort, what in the last century would have been called existential neurosis. It’s a kind of therapy: the nagging doubt, sadness, weariness, the sense of being a stranger in a world viewed at an oblique angle suddenly, miraculously, all has a reason— you’ve been traveling. It’s not your past, your guilt, your family. It’s just the road: you are tired and sore, you are a stranger.

* * *

Be inconspicuous all day, except for the thirty minutes onstage, when you must be the most conspicuous thing in the room.

I lived like a pack mule, but I had to exude the appearance of ease and confidence. I packed carefully. I traveled alone out of thrift. The shows were rarely large, but I never lost money. It was a point of pride but also a necessity and a justification. I lived like a wealthy man, though I spent as little as possible; I had little to spend. I sometimes traveled with musicians whom hundreds of people paid to see and who were provided with bread, cheese, beer, fruit, hot food, orange juice. I scavenged like a beggar or a half-forgotten houseguest. I nibbled trail mix by the handful, like a rodent. I crushed single-serving bottles of water in my fist, as if my thirst might expose me if it, itself, was exposed.

I chipped my front tooth on the rubber cork of a bottle of wine. I had pushed it in too deeply, and taken it in my teeth and twisted the bottle to squeak it loose. A true cork might have torn or bruised, but the stubborn rubber ripped the tip of the tooth before popping free. Just a flake, a grain of sand on a pristine bedsheet, but, like the princess, my tongue grew restless in its sleep, probing, rubbing, aware.

Be inconspicuous all day, I learned, except for the thirty minutes onstage, when you must be the most conspicuous thing in the room. Your livelihood depends on being unable to ignore. Artistry has nothing to do with it: anyone can ignore a good song, but few can ignore someone singing even a terrible one in their face. They want to be entertained, but they don’t want it actively; you must both convince them of their need and fulfill it. You are the bottle and the wine, the vessel and the salve; they are the stubborn cork to which you put your jaw, in a grin that is both welcome and a challenge, like strange dogs meeting in an alley. Whose will is stronger? Is your wheedle wilier than their indifference? Can you bully or seduce them or turn their curiosity into interest, and then to attention? And for what? The restless tongue probes the tooth.

Buy the book

I marked my aging by renunciations: first I traveled with a band of nine, then with five, then with none. I sloughed off concentric circles of friends: my college friends and then my band friends stopped noticing I was away and filled my empty chair with others. Then instead of friends I had passing acquaintances with fake names whom I saw once a year when I came back through their town, if I ever saw them again. Time passed, and my body began to set its own contracting boundaries: first I couldn’t sleep on floors anymore, then I couldn’t sleep on couches, finally I couldn’t sleep in shared rooms.

But that changed again, and I could too: I married Maria, and she joined me in this world of transience and assumed names. Two years later, we were three months into a six-month tour, playing together on our way from Poland to Ukraine. The previous months had included six weeks around the United States, followed by a counterclockwise spiral through Central and Eastern Europe. It was time, then, to abandon the car for the train and slim down for Russia and Asia, mailing or abandoning anything we couldn’t carry. We repacked our remaining things in the parking lot of a rest stop: one acoustic guitar in a hard case, one banjo in a soft case, one accordion in a backpack case. Six audio cables, one tuning pedal. One hiking backpack filled with day clothes— for me, one pair of pants, one shirt, three undershirts, six pairs of socks, six pairs of boxer briefs. I had learned the army style of folding one’s clothes, first in halves and then rolled into themselves, tight and elastic like hot dogs or police batons. One rolling suitcase, mostly merchandise: one dozen large white T-shirts, one dozen each black and white mediums, one dozen large black, one dozen small white; two ladies’ tank tops; two dozen LPs, fifteen vinyl EPs; some stray one-inch pins. Two boxes of CDs met us in Kraków; we had sold enough to fit more in the suitcase and hoped we could restock before we crossed into Russia. Only one stage suit—two would be better, but space and airline baggage charges didn’t permit the luxury. No room for regular shoes, so I wore my dress shoes onstage and off: the uniform comes first.

We returned our rental car without incident. We changed forints, crowns, and euros into złoty and back into euros, then tried to spend the change on gewgaws and water bottles. “Every traveler experiences,” says Gogol in Dead Souls, “when scraps of paper, pieces of string, and such rubbish is all that remains strewn on the floor, when he no longer belongs to a place and yet hasn’t regained the road either.” We had to downshift from libertarian car touring, in which we could control our route, stop for lunch, and air-dry our dirty laundry across the backseat, but also were responsible for our pace and parking and gas and the logistics of the journey, to the contained social-democratic leisure of train travel, for which you have to pack tight and efficient and mobile, but once you’re on board and give yourself over to a power greater than yourself, your time is your own. On travel days you’re in an Internet-free bubble with a window and a bed and nothing to do but read, nap, snack, and think.

From Poland into Ukraine we rode a new generation of sleeper trains, an upgrade from the clunky metal midcentury model: molded plastic and triple-decker bunks with private sinks and en-suite bathrooms that don’t stink of the filth of decades. Our roommate was an elderly and cranky Pole. Who could blame him for his mood as we clattered and tripped and, sweating, hoisted a camping backpack, a suitcase full of merch, a guitar, a banjo, and assorted day bags above our heads and onto the shelf? We finished a half-bottle of Italian frizzante and tried to get a few hours’ sleep before we had to reckon with Ukrainian customs agents. Time to get our story straight: we’re not playing any official gigs. We have some friends with whom maybe we’ll play a few songs. We’re giving away the CDs. We don’t have any concrete plans. Just a couple of slacker Americans.

* * *

Maybe you want to see something more . . . unconventional?

Three youngsters, two guys and a girl named Larisa, picked us up at the Kyiv station. They had moved from Kharkov and other more provincial centers to the big city and were sharing an apartment in one of the beige Soviet housing projects on the far side of the river. A couple of people had driven their cars down into the shallows and were bathing them with soap and soft sponges. Along the public beaches people sunned themselves. Russians and Ukrainians like to sunbathe vertically: stripped to their Speedos, they stand, hands on hips and arms akimbo, sans headphones or other distractions, dignified, bellies oiled, like little Easter Island statues lined up facing the water.

We showered and changed while our hosts watched rollerblading stunt videos scored to “Gonna Fly Now” and Lil Wayne. The blades had the middle two wheels removed and a reinforced bridge for sliding on railings. Larisa asked if we skated.

“No,” I said. “I used to ski, though— downhill racing.”

“Really? Respect.” She gave me a high five.

We offered them a hard-boiled egg. “We’re vegan,” she said. “But can I have it for the dog?”

I didn’t know dogs liked hard-boiled eggs, and anyway this seemed conceptually inconsistent for a vegan house— but never mind. The dog wolfed down the egg.

“The country is like it’s dying,” said a different Larissa, a rare American of Ukrainian heritage who had repatriated. “I come home tired and depressed and I realize it’s not me, it’s that I was walking all day among people who are tired and depressed and it just rubs off.”

“Why do you stay?” I asked.

“Well—it’s just, like, I live here now. I’ve built a place for myself. And I can’t just leave”—like a tourist can was the implication—“ because, well, I come from an easier country, and good luck to the rest of you.”

“It is not a civilized country” was the judgment of a Pole I’d met a few days before, eating with Maria’s aunt and her posse of aging hipster friends at a Brazilian steakhouse in Łódź. I struck up a conversation with an owl-eyed, mustachioed man who winced when he heard we were bound for Ukraine. He had tried to set up a renewable energy program there. “Everyone warned me that it was corrupt and impossible to do business there, and I never will again. I lost 50,000 euros.” He shook his head. “The people are wonderful— it is just the system is impossible.”

The show was in Malaya Opera, a pink-and-white neoclassical theater that had been a cultural center for transportation workers. It was now a dilapidated hulk with dance studios and old socialist realist murals of Ukrainian peasants along the staircase. We were in the musty basement, where a kid (whose beard almost covered the “24” tattooed on his neck) ran a studio and a rehearsal room, and, apparently, lived: he dragged a twin mattress and pillow out of the show room when we arrived for soundcheck. The show was with local heroes Maloi— who would be flat-capped, anthemic punk stars if they lived in the United States or England— and was packed and sweaty.

The rhythm of train touring is not unlike that of bus tours. You are delivered to the station after the show, at midnight or one, get in your bunk, and let yourself be rocked to sleep by the sway of the car and the white noise of strangers’ snores. You’ll be picked up in the morning by the next town’s promoter, drive to their— or, more often, their parents’ or grandparents’—flat, shower, eat breakfast, nap if necessary, and try to see some of the town.

That’s how it’s supposed to work. In this case, when we rolled into Dnipropetrovs’k around six a.m., there was no one to greet us but a few sad pigeons. We called Vlod, our contact, twice before he answered, obviously still asleep, grunted, and hung up. We settled in at the station cafeteria for what promised to be a wait.

When he arrived, Vlod proved to be tall, slouchy, hungover, and dour. Maria tried some small talk, gesturing around the station and saying, “These buildings are pretty.”

“There is nothing pretty in this town.”

Off to his grandmother’s apartment (his mother also lived there) on the sixth floor of a crumbling housing project, a gray skeletal torso with rotting balcony ribs. Vlod had been a journalism student and worked at a newspaper “singing songs of praise to the rich people and politicians.” Now he was a technical writer, making more money, he said, but without as much fun and travel.

We wanted to go downtown to see the museum, or maybe a fortress. Vlod was unenthused: “Maybe you want to see something more . . . unconventional? There is a huge abandoned building ten minutes’ walk from here. It is a monument to Soviet stupidity.”

We walked to another disintegrating apartment tower, this one beyond habitation. It had been built on the side of a hill and almost immediately started sliding down into the valley. It was about twenty yards from the elementary school Vlod had attended. When the floors and walls of the building started cracking, the students didn’t worry too much about a collapse: “We were just happy school was canceled.” After the tower was abandoned for good, the money to tear it down never materialized. Eventually the school, which had closed to keep the kids out of the way of the demolition, simply reopened in the shadow of the gap-toothed hulk.

We scrambled over the piles of rubble, clumps of weeds, and blooms of broken bottles, up the urine-scented remains of the stairs to the soggy roof. The whole city was ringed with identical “monuments to Soviet stupidity”—a miles-wide Stonehenge of graffiti-splashed white concrete, separated by the green blooms of trees. Dnipropetrovs’k is, according to the UN, the world’s fastest-shrinking city, forecast to shed 17 percent of its population in the next ten years. Vlod and his friends did “rope jumping” from the top of the ruin—a kind of amateur ziplining in which you just freefall and wind up hanging in the middle of the slack rope like abandoned laundry until your friends haul you back to the roof.

Graffiti in Kharkov, 2010. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Vlod had been to the United States twice on summer work / travel visas. It is common for Ukrainian and Russian teenagers to be given a temporary visa arranged through a U.S. business looking for cheap summer labor. Nearly universal is the complaint that this often means, in practice, working grueling hours at someplace like a Carvel in a rest stop in middle-of-nowhere New Jersey. The more resourceful quit and hit the road while the visa is still good.

Vlod was sent first to Connecticut, where he finished his job and then took a Greyhound across the country. “It was the trip of a lifetime,” he said. “I prefer traveling on bus. In Ukraine, on a train the view is always the same—station, factory, trees, station, factory, trees.” When he signed up for a second go-around, though, they sent him to Pennsylvania, where “they treated us like slaves. I said they couldn’t do that. They said I’d be fired, and the next day I was and they put me on a bus to New York and a plane home.”

There was an unusual culture clash at the show, and I wondered how Vlod came to organize it at this particular venue. We usually ended up in dank, graffiti-covered “youth centers,” but this was a spotless white gallery and cultural center, funded by a single rich benefactor. The theater’s director, Olya, was from Kazan’ in Russian Tatarstan but had just returned from a failed marriage in California. The staff were ironic, urban, cosmopolitan. They and Vlod—who usually booked punk and metal at a bar on the other side of town—regarded each other warily, if at all. Sophisticate or no, Olya was rubber-legged drunk at the end of the night. We bunked up in the attic and hit the train station in the morning bound for Kharkov.

* * *

What Proust called ‘peculiar places, railway stations, which do not . . . constitute a part of the surrounding town but contain the essence of its personality.’

Stations upon stations indeed, as Vlod had complained: some piled with rusted debris, some graffiti-splashed concrete, one home to a dark-green old train car emblazoned with a red star, as if from a Cold War newsreel— what Proust called “peculiar places, railway stations, which do not . . . constitute a part of the surrounding town but contain the essence of its personality.” Families parked their old Ladas next to the tracks and spread out picnics, the coming and goings of trains enough entertainment for the day. Young men in stonewashed jeans and ponytails, or with shaved heads and black Adidas track pants, watched an endless array of thin, busty blondes in vertiginous patent-leather heels. Next to the tracks wiggled a dual carriageway of bicycle-wheel ruts. A wall of trees shaded a shrubbery moat. Then miles of fields.

Nearly every ex-Hapsburg town in Eastern and Central Europe will tell you they have the biggest clock or bell tower and the biggest central square in Europe. In Ukraine, they will add that they have the biggest remaining statue of Lenin. Kharkov’s claim is the largest square in Europe, depending on whether you count Red Square or something (Kharkov native son Eduard Limonov says in his 1990 book Memoir of a Russian Punk, “ ‘Only Tiananmen Square in Beijing is bigger than our own Dzerzhinsky Square’—Eddie-baby knows that first commandment of Kharkov patriotism well”). Writer and musician Alina Simone wrote of the city, from which her parents had emigrated, “Invariably, the two words people used to describe Kharkov were either industrial or big. Occasionally big and industrial were helpfully combined to yield the illuminating phrase ‘a big industrial city.’ ” I saw many more Soviet remnants in Kharkov than anywhere else I’d been: hammer and sickle facades, shiny red Lenin medallions on sides of buildings, the odd “Glory to Work” mural over a gray housing project. The apartment towers were missing the pastel-wash veil they get in Eastern Europe.

The Kharkov show was abruptly canceled, if in fact there ever was a show. The status reports went from TBA to “open-air picnic” to “I don’t know, it says rain” to “You must have known the show could get canceled.” We couldn’t find our hotel, which was supposed to be near the train station. It was pouring rain. We took shelter under a liquor store awning and asked for directions from a kiosk operator, then a cabdriver, then some young dudes on the sidewalk— no one seemed to be able to agree where the street our hotel was supposed to be on was. We mule-trained up a hill that seemed right only to find a dirt road. This couldn’t be it—the station hotel, within sight of the McDonald’s, on a dirt path? I ran up the hill and back. Sure enough, that was it, and in fact it was a perfectly nice little place with a banya (steam bath) in the basement. After a pilgrimage for Georgian food (it was getting on six, we still hadn’t eaten yet, and I was now sick as the proverbial dog), it was a circuitous walk home past the Constructivist gigantoliths overlooking that second-biggest-square-after-Red-Square and, for good measure, “the second-biggest Lenin.” Lenin gestured in approval of the tents that crowded the square, advertising the upcoming Euro 2012 soccer tournament. The rain had stopped.

We had a message from booking agent Dima: “You have a show tomorrow in Donetsk, no guarantee, but they’ll pay your ticket to Rostov-on-Don.” We stopped at the bus station to see how painful it would be to get to Donetsk by tomorrow. There was a bus at noon, but “they don’t sell that ticket in Ukraine.”

They don’t sell in Ukraine a ticket for a bus . . . in Ukraine?

No. “Six a.m. or eight a.m.”

Eight a.m. it would have to be, and we hit the banya to sweat out the bad news.

* * *

Dinner for my capitalist friends!

The morning’s cabdriver quoted us a price of fifty, Maria said forty, he hemmed for a minute, and, thinking she was my guide, said in Russian, “How about forty-five? Tell him fifty, and you can keep the rest for yourself.” When he dropped us at the station, a man was loading boxes of live chickens into the storage bins beneath the bus. The fact that there was a space under the bus was actually a pleasant surprise, since it meant we were in a modern bus, not an old Soviet Ikarus, an exhaust-stinking, shock-free diesel monster. We asked to put our bags in the bays. “Not now,” said the driver. “There are cameras on me. You will have to pay extra.” The bus swung around the corner of the building and parked a hundred yards away. We threw the bags underneath and boarded without incident or extra charge.

The bus stopped for a bathroom break in a village (Izyum, meaning “raisin”) about halfway between Kharkov and Donetsk. A statue of a woman in a flowing dress strode confidently into the future. A dog slept in the sun in front of an ice cream cart, whose attendant yelled at me for leaving the freezer door open while I counted my cash. A young boy fingered a Rubik’s Cube faster than I’d ever seen, first with both hands and then with just one. He was the “Tommy” of Rubik’s Cube. Two tall, bullet-headed Georgians with sleepy eyes made gentle fun of the etchings of Georgian tourist attractions printed in their passports. My health had started to crumple under the effects of the short, sleepless nights, and there’s not much worse than having a cold in the dusty summer heat. Primary-color Ladas scattered across the streets like M&M’s.

Halfway through the six-hour sauna of a bus ride, we got another text from Dima: “The Rostov venue”—this was the first show in Russia, supposedly two days hence—“ gave me the wrong date! It’s tomorrow. Oh, by the way, there are no trains to Russia either. Please buy a bus ticket at the station when you arrive.”

Andrey, who was supposed to pick us up in Donetsk, called Maria, who’d been sleeping, for a status report. “I think . . . the bus broke down, we’re still in Slovyansk.” That’s what she’d heard the guy behind us saying to his friend on his phone. The guy tapped her on the shoulder and explained that he’d been lying to his friends because he was late. “Oh, we’re in Donetsk!” she corrected. “Almost there.”

We pulled in. “Where’s our guy?” She scanned the parking lot. “Not the hippie!”

A gangly ostrich of a man strutted across the gravel, juggling, woven bag over his shoulder, a couple of halfhearted dreadlocks, zipper pull in one earlobe, a curl of bone in the other, apron tied over corduroy cutoff shorts. He grinned, gathered his juggling balls, waved.

“Yup, it’s the hippie,” I told Maria. “Are you Andrey?”

“Nope, they sent the waiter. I’m Anton!”

Anton was a cheery fellow, as are most hippies at first. He took Maria to the ticket counter to explore our options for crossing the Russian border.

“You got a ticket?” I asked when they returned.

“Yeah, but you’re not gonna like it!” Anton grinned. “Leaving tonight at midnight, arrive seven a.m.”

Graffiti in Donetsk. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Donetsk seemed less weighted by physical history than other eastern Ukrainian or Eastern European cities. It was founded only in 1869—by John Hughes, a Welsh mining magnate— and destroyed in World War II. It had, to me, the faint scent of Texas: new mineral wealth showing off, fresh construction, unstained pavement, a pink Hummer parked outside a coffee shop. Donetsk is home to Ukraine’s richest man, the steel and coal tycoon Rinat Akhmetov, who operates the region nearly as a personal fiefdom (when fighting broke out two years later and ground the local economy to a halt, thousands of workers stayed solvent because his factories stayed open and continued to pay their salaries). Anton came to our table in the club with plates of pasta.

“Dinner for my capitalist friends!” he announced.

“Did he just call us his capitalist friends?” I asked Maria.

“Is a joke!”

We asked promoter Andrey if he thought that the bottle of wine he had given us would be an issue at the border. “In this part of the country, it’s barely a border,” he said.

(Two years later, it barely was. In the wake of the annexation of Crimea by Russia, separatist provocateurs began referring to the southeastern provinces of Ukraine as Novorossiya—“ New Russia”—and declared a “Donetsk People’s Republic.” Unacknowledged Russian arms, tanks, and soldiers poured across the border from the Rostov region. Bombing destroyed the Donetsk airport and much of the city, including the hospital. The train station closed. Heat and water were scarce. Those who could leave the region fled: 1.5 million of the region’s prewar population of 4.5 million are said to have gone either to Russia or to western Ukraine, depending on their political sympathies. The Russian government both represented the separatists at peace negotiations and denied any control over them. The American government considered sending arms to the Ukrainians.)

“I don’t like U.S.A., but I like you!” said an audience member after the show. The cab we were supposed to take to the bus station sped away in a huff because his trunk was full and we had too many bags. We packed into the next one, and a drunk jumped in the front seat. I thought he was with the driver until he got out at an intersection, gave us a double thumbs-up to confirm that we had the money, and split.

We passed the new stadium, built to hold Euro 2012 matches. The old one had been tiny and on the outskirts of town. The new one was lit up in blue like Giants Stadium and was almost as big. A massive statue of Winged Victory, also lit, stood out front. The cabdriver gestured to the hotel across the way: “That, too, has been there forever. And now in the last month they’re calling it a four-star hotel.” (The stadium was damaged by artillery shelling in 2014, and the Donetsk team now plays on the other side of the country, in L’viv.)

The station was dark, but the security guard, smoking cigs and drinking beer, assured us that the bus to Rostov was coming. He told the driver that it was a four hryvnia charge to continue into the parking lot. We got out on the curb instead. The bus pulled up some time later.

It was an hour’s wait to board, and a two-year-old girl had the best idea of anyone for making use of her time: jump on the curb, jump off the curb, shake your ass, kick the aluminum wall, get daddy to swing you around like an airplane. Cabdrivers offered to take us the six hours straight to Rostov-on-Don. We all boarded, crammed into every seat. Truly, as Dr. Pangloss never said, this was the worst of all possible worlds.

It was three a.m. when we reached the border crossing. The horizon brightened even as the near-full moon was still in the sky. The Russian authorities filed on, tight-lipped and tight-haired, and I had an idea for a worst-selling pinup calendar: “The Humorless Ladies of Border Control.” A guard mumbled his way through some boilerplate. As he left, someone said, “Use your street voice!” The guy sitting next to us joked, “He was asking ‘Everyone all right? Need a drink? Not too cold?’ ”

We sat for three hours at the border, from three a.m. to six a.m. Legions of pigeons were nesting and hatching in the eaves under the tin roof of the Ukrainian exit station, and the cacophony of coos, chirps, and warbles was maddening. We were given two cigarette breaks. A dozen giggling women ran into the field and hoisted their skirts to pee.

* * *

Having passed through one formality does not secure the stranger from another.

Of nineteenth-century Russian customs and border agents, the Marquis de Custine wrote, “The sight of these voluntary automata inspires me with a kind of fear . . . every stranger is treated as culpable upon arriving on the Russian frontier.”

The paranoia and vindictively selective enforcement had begun thousands of miles to the west, at the Russian consulate on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. We’d expected some procedural difficulty getting an entry visa at the Chinese embassy, located in the shadow of the USS Intrepid on the desolate West Side, but had sailed through the lines, frictionless. We simply dropped off our passports, photos, and a check for two hundred bucks and a week later picked up the passports with our photos laminated onto a visa page.

The Russians, though, were a different story. Mark Twain, writing over a hundred years earlier, complained that Russians “are usually so suspicious of strangers that they worry them excessively with the delays and aggravations incident to a complicated passport system.” We were required to fill out the PDF application in advance and show up at the consulate building between nine thirty a.m. and twelve thirty p.m. to apply in person.

The first day, we arrived at ten thirty a.m. and joined the line on the sidewalk, about twenty people deep.

“Well, this shouldn’t take too long,” I thought.

Two hours later, only five people had entered the building.

“Come back tomorrow,” said the burly security guard in a thick Russian accent and slammed the iron cage around the door shut.

We looked at our linemates, none of whom seemed shocked. All of them, besides ourselves, were professional line-standers, paid by visa applicants with more money and less free time—or more sense— than we had. They brought books, lined up before the doors opened, and hoped for the best (or, if they were paid by the hour, the worst).

We returned the next day, at nine a.m. this time, and waited a mere hour and a half outside before being ushered through the glass doors into a waiting room, then to a Plexiglas window like a bank teller’s. A blonde stereotype of a sadistic Slavic bureaucrat didn’t look up from her desk.

“Papers!” she barked, of course. “Passports!”

She read unhurriedly through the applications, marking them with a red pen, first mine, then Maria’s.

“Twenty-six!” she said, circling that box forcefully. “It is wrong.” She shoved the papers back through the slot beneath the window.

Item number 11 took one’s passport number, issuing country, and dates of validity. Item 26 asked, “List all countries which have ever issued you a passport.” Since she had already entered her passport information, Maria had left it blank instead of entering “United States.”

“Obviously this was just an oversight,” she said to the lady. “Can’t I just write it in?”

“No! Reprint it and come back tomorrow.” If she’d had a shutter to slam shut, she would have.

“We’ve been here two days in a row!”

She muttered to herself, scribbled something in Russian on a Post-it note, slid it to us, and got up from her chair. The interview was over.

“What does the note say?” I asked Maria.

“It says, ‘Can skip line.’ ”

“We’re supposed to show armed guards a Post-it note?”

“Russia is the land of useless formalities,” complained Custine, who was himself detained in customs for twenty-four hours while trying to enter Saint Petersburg. “Much trouble is taken to attain unimportant ends, and those employed believe they can never show enough zeal . . . having passed through one formality does not secure the stranger from another.”

Yet societies that insist on procedure and red tape can be simultaneously riddled with informal, ad hoc loopholes. We arrived early on the third day, not a little dispirited. We knocked on the cage and showed the guard the note. He waved us in.

* * *

What we seek in traveling are proofs that we are not at home.

I should properly introduce my other traveling companion on the Russian leg of our journey: a Frenchman, the Marquis Astolphe de Custine, author of the 1839 book Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia. He served the same role for me in Russia that Rebecca West would in the Balkans: a perceptive, acid perspective from a different era against which to measure my own impressions. Born in 1790, Custine lost both his father and grandfather to the guillotine at an early age. He became an object of scandal when in 1824 he was found unconscious, stripped, and beaten, the result of a misplaced sexual advance toward another man. He became one of the most notorious homosexuals of his conservative day—“a problem for everyone,” as a contemporary put it—and he grew snide, bitter, and scandalous. He had literary ambitions, but his writing was ignored during his lifetime; Heine called him “a half-man of letters.” But his discomfort in his homeland, and seemingly in his own skin, made him an ideal traveler. “The real travelers,” said his countryman Baudelaire, “are those who leave for the sake of leaving.” Custine was a connoisseur of places, he said, that were “more singular than pretty or convenient; but singularity suffices to amuse a stranger: what we seek in traveling are proofs that we are not at home.” He first wrote a travel book about Spain, which garnered him a complimentary letter from Balzac, who suggested he write about another “semi-European country”—Italy, or perhaps Russia.

Emboldened by Balzac’s suggestion and envious of Tocqueville’s example, he traveled to Russia in 1839—a short trip, mostly confined to Russia’s northwest, but as George F. Kennan, the American Russia hand and Cold Warrior, wrote, Custine “read countries, he claimed, as other people read books.” Custine arrived in Russia a born elitist and returned (despite his personal respect for then Tsar Nicholas I) a confirmed democrat, sickened by what he saw as the debasing effect of authoritarianism on the population. “When [Russian nobles] arrive in Europe,” his German hotelier tells him on his way to Saint Petersburg, “They have a gay, easy, contented air, like horses set free, or birds let loose from their cages. . . . The same persons when they return have long faces and gloomy looks; their words are few and abrupt; their countenances full of care. I conclude from this, that a country which they quitted with so much joy, and to which they return with so much regret, is a bad country.” The Russian customs agents themselves questioned his motives:

“What is your object in Russia?”

“To see the country.”

“That is not here a motive for traveling!”

His ensuing judgment of the country was severe, perhaps unfair, certainly condescending, and somehow persistent: perhaps because his pessimism echoes the “curiosity, sarcasm, and carping criticism” he—and I, and many other observers— found among Russians themselves. It is in his role as critic, and as the personification of the opinion of a Europe toward which Russia has historically looked with a mixture of envy, self-deprecation, and defensiveness, that he served his most recent turn in the public eye. In Alexander Sokurov’s 2002 film Russian Ark, filmed in one ninety-six-minute shot, Custine and an unnamed narrator stroll through the Hermitage and thus through scenes from Russian history, from Peter the Great to World War II, still trying to identify the soul, or the narrative, or the fate, of the nation.

* * *

Copyright © 2016 by Franz Nicolay. This excerpt originally appeared in The Humorless Ladies of Border Control: Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar, published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission.

Charlotte McDonald-Gibson | Cast Away: True Stories of Survival from Europe’s Refugee Crisis | The New Press | September 2016 | 20 minutes (5,452 words)

Below is an excerpt from Cast Away, by Charlotte McDonald-Gibson. This story comes recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

* * *

This war is none of my business.

Majid Hussain didn’t know who would turn up on his doorstep first: Colonel Gaddafi’s foot soldiers following orders to purge Libya of its migrant workforce, or vengeful rebels wielding Kalashnikovs and the conviction that everyone with black skin deserved to be lynched.

For months the Nigerian teenager had watched on television in Tripoli as rebels not much older than himself stormed through the desert in their cheap sunglasses and mismatching camouflage, and it had seemed inconceivable that this shabby army of the disaffected could pose a threat to Muammar Gaddafi’s calm and ordered capital. He had heard rumours that all Africans from south of the Sahara were at risk of attack from rebels seeking mass punishment for the few who had colluded with the regime – but surely these were just rumours? Every day Majid still went to work and returned home every evening to his reliable air-conditioning and his satellite TV. The rebellion had remained remote from his life, and he wanted it to stay that way.

This war is none of my business, he thought. I have already seen my own country torn apart by old hatreds – I don’t need to see that again.

Majid and his housemate Ali had laughed off reports on CNN and the BBC about fighting on the outskirts of Tripoli, and they didn’t want to believe the news that Gaddafi was bombing civilians in Benghazi. It was all Western propaganda, the two Nigerians convinced each other. Even when a spokesman for Gaddafi warned on public radio that they would flood Europe with migrants if there was any Western military action, the young men remained unconcerned.

‘Come on,’ Majid had said to his friend, ‘of course they don’t want Europe to be full of immigrants, so NATO will leave us in peace.’

Finally, on the morning of 12 August, 2011 Majid could ignore the reality no longer. The air-conditioning unit was still spluttering along and Libyan state TV continued its delusional broadcasts, but outside the ground was shaking. The French Mirages and British Typhoons were cutting through the clouds above his head as NATO bombing raids thundered closer to Gaddafi’s compound, and closer to the two frightened Nigerians.

This is what an earthquake must feel like, Majid thought, as pure terror coupled with a sense of utter powerlessness overwhelmed him.

He was no longer safe in Libya. Clouds of dust and smoke rose above the minarets and cranes of the Tripoli skyline. Before the air had cleared, the order came from the top. The rebel army, supported by NATO, was closing in and Colonel Gaddafi finally made good on his threat. All migrant workers still living in Libya were to be rounded up, taken to the coast, and forced on board whatever vessels were available. There they would be sent out into the waves in the direction of Malta and Italy, a flotilla of human despair heading directly to Europe’s shores.

As the Arab Spring began its eastward creep from Tunisia and protests broke out in Libya in February 2011, a voluntary exodus of the country’s large migrant workforce had begun. During the first few months of fighting, the Egyptians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Filipinos, Vietnamese and sub-Saharan Africans beat a relatively calm path overland to neighbouring Egypt and Tunisia, patiently queueing under the fierce desert sun to submit their papers at the crowded border posts. But soon people were fleeing with nothing more than the clothes they were wearing. Gaddafi had bolstered his military with mercenaries from nearby states, relying on Tuareg tribesmen from Mali to put down any rebellions that threatened to erupt in the Libyan hinterlands. These men became targets for vengeful rebel groups looking to vent their anger at the regime. They didn’t wait to gather any evidence: anyone with black skin came under suspicion. Sub-Saharan migrants found on the street were beaten, robbed and locked up. Hundreds died in the wave of retribution. As the rebels advanced on Tripoli, thousands of foreign workers found themselves trapped and terrified in the city centre, awaiting their fate.

* * *

If I stay in Nigeria, having seen what I saw, will I be a good person?

This wasn’t the first time Majid had felt so helpless: he was only eighteen but already weary from what seemed like an eternity on the run from events beyond his control. And he was so tired of running. Life was not meant to be this way. Majid’s father had prepared him for business dinners and charitable endeavours, not for a flight across continents in search of peace and security.

Majid had been one of Nigeria’s luckier sons, born to an industrious family which had managed to navigate its way out of the poverty and corruption which infected so many lives there. His grandfather was one of the first police officers in independent Nigeria, and his father practised medicine before turning his hand to business and ascending the corporate ranks to become a management executive at the Nigerian National Petroleum Company.

During Majid’s childhood, there was not much family around – his mother fell ill and died when he was four years old. An old passport photograph was all he had to remember her by, and other relatives had drifted away. But he felt no great emptiness in his life. He had his father, a kind and generous man who paid the school fees for the poorer children in their neighbourhood and insisted on supporting the underdog teams whenever he and Majid watched football. Majid preferred the relatively sure bet of being a Manchester United fan and used to tease his father for his soft heart. But he was stricter when it came to his son’s education: first it was home schooling, then a private academy with extra English classes, before enrollment in a management studies course.

As an only child, Majid had the run of their mansion set in generous grounds in the city of Jos in Northern Nigeria. There was a housekeeper, a driver and a cook, and he had plenty of friends from the local football team. Although occasionally teased for his height – he bore the nickname ‘Smallie’ with equal measures of affection and annoyance – he played with a determination and agility that belied his short stature. And he was growing into a good-looking young man with a smile that quickly spread to his eyes and lit up his face, with just a glint of good-natured mischief. Most of all it exuded kindness, and only time would tell whether he was cut out for the ruthless world of Nigerian business towards which his father was steering him.

In the end Majid’s wiles and athleticism proved more useful than any education.

In 2009, his steady path towards a comfortable life and lucrative career came to an abrupt halt. Near the end of the previous year, sectarian violence had erupted in Plateau State. Since Nigeria had achieved independence, religious clashes had come and gone with the inevitability of the seasons, with Jos sitting uncomfortably on the divide between the Christian south and the Muslim north. But this conflict was particularly brutal, with hundreds of people killed in Jos as gangs went from house to house, Christians attacking Muslims and Muslims attacking Christians with equal ferocity. Mosques, churches and homes were razed, as politicians from both sides fanned the flames.

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At first Majid felt no fear. When you lived with your hero, what was there to be frightened of? He was fifteen and his father still towered over his life, although he was no longer the agile man who could match his son’s prowess on the football field. Majid’s father was 65 and had retired from the National Petroleum Company, deciding it was time to start a more low-key wholesale business and devote his dwindling energies to philanthropy.

When a Christian mob turned up at the family compound on 9 January 2009, there was little he could do to defend his son.

It was early morning when Majid’s father heard a noise in front of the house and went out just in time to see a man scale the fence and open the gate to a gang of young men high on hatred and violence. The spacious grounds gave him a little time to grab Majid and race him towards the rear of the house where he kept his chickens. He only had a few minutes to think, and hoisted Majid onto the chicken coop, from where he could climb up into the coil of razor wire that topped their perimeter fence.

When the men burst in behind him he realized he had no time to escape himself, but he had done everything he could to save his child.

‘Go!’ was his last word for his son.

But Majid couldn’t: he was frozen with fear on the top of the fence, his legs tangled and bleeding in the wire and his gaze fixated on his father as the axe hit the point where his arm met his shoulder. At first Majid was surprised by the lack of blood. Even as a second blow fell and his father crumpled, it all seemed so clean. Then the axe came down again and split his skull, finally opening up a torrent of red. Still Majid sat on the fence and watched, as if he were seeing it all through the filter of a dream. He watched silently as the life flowed out of the only family he had ever really known.

Finally the mob finished its frenzy and turned to the boy on the fence. One man picked up an iron weight and flung it high to try and dislodge him. Majid kicked his legs free and jumped down on the other side.

At that moment he started running, his life now suddenly set on a different course. First he ran away from the mob’s screams. Then he ran through the forests, finding himself alongside other men, women and children who had watched similar evils befall their homes and their family. He continued running through the region, seeing houses aflame and bodies in the road. He stayed on foot, eventually running out of the state entirely. He avoided large urban areas and trekked and hitched rides through the jungle, sleeping rough and eating whatever he could scavenge.

Nowhere felt safe any more, so he kept running.

Not once did he stop to ask himself where he was going or what he was doing. The only motive propelling him on was a deep survival instinct, a drive to make it alive from one day to the next, dimly aware that a hardness was forming within him as he ran from his country.

I am scared of no one. I have no fears, nothing, because of what I have seen.

An anger was also welling inside him. A cycle of revenge and old hatreds had robbed him of his father, and he was afraid that if he stayed in Nigeria he too would end up sucked into a life that would leech any remaining humanity out of him. So he ran to escape the desire to avenge his father and perpetuate the sectarian bloodshed.

If I stay in Nigeria, having seen what I saw, will I be a good person? he asked himself. I don’t think so. I will have this anger. I will just be waiting for the slightest opportunity to kill.

Finally he crossed the border north into Niger, a vast desert nation and smugglers’ paradise at the heart of the African continent. There, hanging out penniless in markets and bus stations among other itinerant souls, he heard about the life of plenty that could be his in oil-rich Libya. The streets may not exactly be paved with gold, but they said you could fill the tank of your car with petrol for less than ten dollars, and that was enough for Majid.

* * *

Twice he had trusted in people’s kindness, and twice he had been betrayed.

In the lawless border towns of southern Niger, you could get anything you wanted for the right price: guns, drugs, women. The thriving smuggling trades were run by nomadic Saharan tribes with a history of moving to wherever they could find the best resources. In the past those resources were water and arable land, but as nations in Europe and North Africa introduced more visa restrictions in the 1980s and 1990s, the most lucrative resource was the constant stream of human beings driven towards richer, safer nations. With their knowledge of the punishing desert climate and a history of navigating its farthest reaches, smuggling people across the Sahara was a natural vocation for the nomads.

When fifteen-year-old Majid turned up in sand-blasted Agadez – a caravan city carved from the desert by the ancient salt traders and now epicentre of the new business of hopes and dreams – he felt utterly lost and alone. He was grateful for the kindness when a local man approached and offered him food and assistance, not questioning his motives even when the man told him how to sneak aboard a smuggling truck which was heading to Libya.

‘Don’t worry – when other people are getting on the truck, just do it,’ the man said.

Majid followed his advice, and mingled in with those who had paid for their clandestine passage north. They clambered on board the light goods vehicle with their bundles of belongings, the men hanging over the sides as the women and children settled down on top for the long drive.

It was just one cold and cramped night on the desert tracks before the fugitive passenger was discovered. When the smugglers did their morning headcount, they headed straight for the skinny boy shivering in a T-shirt and filthy jeans. They didn’t even bother beating Majid or trying to extort money out of him. He clearly had nothing to give them. However, after threatening to leave him to die in the desert, they became oddly accommodating.

‘OK,’ the Chadian driver said with a sudden change of heart, ‘come on, get in – whenever we stop, if you need food, just let me know’.

For the rest of the winding two-week journey north, Majid happily took him up on his offer and thought how lucky he was for this small act of compassion. He failed to realize that he had become nothing more than a commodity to be traded and battered for the best deal. The smugglers had seen it all before, and had their own plans for the poorest of the poor who turned up in Agadez desperate to head north but unable to pay their way. Their agents prowled the bus stations for the most vulnerable, encouraging them to smuggle on board vessels and tipping off the driver about their illicit cargo. Everyone got a cut until they arrived at their final, dismal destination.

For Majid, that was a desert border post manned by a ragtag bunch of Libyan security forces and tribal militia. The mask of friendship fell from the Chadian driver’s face as he shoved the boy out and into the hands of a kidnapping gang, who bundled him onto the floor in the back of a pick-up.

Mural of the athletes of the refugee team at the 2016 Olympics, Rio de Janeiro. Via Wikimedia.

The drive seemed short compared with his journey over the desert. Majid spent a couple of hours crouched beneath the seats trying to make sense of his situation. Had the kind man in Agadez really been working with the smugglers? What fresh indignity lay in store for him when the truck stopped? As he climbed down from the pick-up, he looked around in despair. His new home was an old farmhouse crumbling to dirt, but the locks on the doors were sturdy and the dozens of people cowering on the floor had clearly been there for some time.

Majid was held in the acrid heat for days, visited once in the morning and once in the evening by a man bearing bread and water. Each time he would slap the sides of Majid’s head and demand that he call his relatives for money. Each time Majid would tell him the truth.

‘I have no family.’

Like the other hostages, he either had to find someone who would pay for his freedom, or work off his debt. It took a week for Majid’s captors to realize there was no one to extort, so they found a job for him: tending camels at a sprawling desert farm, where the landowner had few kind words for his new charge. Majid’s delicate hands and slight frame were unsuited to manual labour, and the exasperated farmer soon gave up.

‘You’re an idiot, you have no idea how to feed a camel!’ he shouted at him one morning before taking him back to the main house.

‘He’s just a child, he is so little,’ the farmer told his wife, asking her to put him to use as a houseboy.

And so Majid found himself trapped in a life of domestic servitude with nothing for his efforts beyond crumbs of bread and water. For a month he was forced to get up at dawn to scrub the floors, wash the dishes, clean the toilets and perform whatever task the mistress of the house dreamt up. She was not cruel exactly, but she treated Majid as worthy of nothing but a few orders barked in broken English.

With each day that passed, a little more of the humanity Majid had been desperately trying to preserve ebbed away. But his ingenuity was undiminished, and he dedicated his energy to forming a new plan to escape. One morning his captor jotted down a list of a few items and sent Majid to the market. He didn’t flee straight away, but formed a mental map of the town. The next time he was sent to the market, he vowed to make his escape. Desperate for help, he ran up to every black face he could see on the street and tried to explain his situation. But the words tumbled out in English, and most of the French- and Arabic-speaking men shrugged their shoulders and turned away.

Then Majid caught sight of an older man watching from the shade of a street café. To Majid’s surprise the stranger started addressing him in the local language of Plateau State.

‘Calm down,’ he told Majid. ‘You can’t be on the streets – the Libyans know each other and it will be easy for them to locate you.’

The man told him he would be safer at his house. Majid wanted to resist, wary of the older man’s intentions. Twice he had trusted in people’s kindness, and twice he had been betrayed. Perhaps the apparent Good Samaritan knew of Majid’s father and was aware that the family once had money. But Majid had little choice: all he had in his pocket was a handful of notes for the weekly shop.

His trust in the stranger paid off: for six months the man kept him hidden at home, providing him with clothes and food and trying to engineer a way to get his new young charge to Tripoli, where he had a brother who could help him settle and find work. Eventually he heard that a friend was stopping by en route to the capital and asked him to take Majid with him. That final leg of his journey to Tripoli was a comfortable one. Majid didn’t have to hide among a crowd or crouch on the floor of a car: the friend was a Libyan police officer who didn’t think twice about ferrying an illegal migrant across the country to fill one of the many jobs going in the capital.

* * *

As the revolution gathered pace, Majid was working as a stock-taker in a supermarket.

Since the 1970s Libya had been something of a promised land for people from the poorer African nations. In many countries south of the Sahara, a young man might expect to earn around a hundred dollars a month during his lifetime before dying in his fifties with nothing to hand down to his children except unrealized dreams of a better life. Libya, by contrast, was booming. The oil finds and Gaddafi’s ambitious social development projects meant there was more work than the nation’s six million citizens could handle, and cheap labour flooded in.

Exactly how Gaddafi dealt with this labour deficit over the years depended on which geographical pole he was gravitating towards.

At first the workers came from North Africa and the Middle East, as Gaddafi tried to position himself as a strongman of Arab nationalism. But when fellow Arab leaders refused to back him in the face of a UN arms embargo in 1992, a wounded Gaddafi had to look elsewhere to realize his geopolitical ambitions. That marked the start of his pan-Africanism policy, with the Libyan ruler touting himself as a saviour for an entire continent. While his visions of a single African currency, one army for the continent and a pan-Africa passport failed to make any headway, he did open up his borders to sub-Saharan Africans who wanted to live and work in Libya. Hundreds of thousands took up this opportunity, and even when he tilted back towards Europe in the 2000s and agreed to requests for more border controls, the workers kept coming – they just were not all there legally. By 2011, there were estimated to be 600,000 legal migrants in the country and between 750,000 and 1.2 million people working there without official paperwork.

Syrian refugees striking at the platform of Budapest Keleti railway station. September 2015. Via Wikimedia.

At first, Majid was one of the latter. But now, finally settled in Tripoli, he was beginning to feel at home. By mid-2011, as the revolution gathered pace in the east of Libya, Majid was working as a stock-taker in a supermarket, earning decent money and living almost rent free. His landlord was an army major, and often they would share a meal, and maybe a joint, and talk politics into the small hours of the morning.

The major had a very one-sided view of Libyan history, but Majid listened intently.

Libya used to be an impoverished desert backwater where people lived in mud huts, his landlord told him, and then Colonel Gaddafi staged a coup in 1969 and built a nation which shared the oil wealth and brought prosperity to all. The major and Majid did not talk about the purges of hundreds of students, academics, journalists and other ‘enemies of the revolution’ that happened as Gaddafi had set about building his paradise in the desert in the 1970s. Nor about the dozens who were hanged and mutilated on public television, a lesson to anyone unconvinced by his power grab. These disappearances and deaths carried on well into the 1980s and 1990s, with the Libyan regime also sponsoring terror abroad as Gaddafi fashioned himself as an anti-colonial pariah of the Western world. Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister, may eventually have been able to bring Gaddafi in from the cold during their rapprochement in a Bedouin tent in 2003, but new business and trade ties did not mean that Gaddafi was a reformed man. Old habits die hard, and when unrest started simmering again in the eastern provinces during the Arab Spring, the Libyan strongman didn’t think too long before ordering his troops to open fire on unarmed protesters.

He was also quick to remind his former Western partners that the proximity of Libya to Europe may not bode well for the future.

‘If you threaten [Libya], if you seek to destabilize us, there will be chaos, Bin Laden, armed factions,’ he warned as the support grew for a military campaign against him. ‘You will have immigration, thousands of people will invade Europe from Libya. And there will no longer be anyone to stop them.’

With a thousand miles of Mediterranean coastline and around two million migrants living in Libya at the start of the war, Gaddafi had plenty of human capital to bargain with.

* * *

He made the EU an offer that sounded more like a threat: give him $5 billion a year or he would flood the continent with foreigners

For decades, Gaddafi’s regime had been profiting from people’s desire to reach Europe. With the Italian island of Lampedusa less than 200 miles away, a steady trickle of people had launched off Libya’s beaches on dilapidated vessels, willing to risk their lives on the gamble of reaching richer, safer lands. Most were young men heading to Europe to work; others were seeking sanctuary from conflicts, droughts and famines. Gaddafi saw only opportunity in their desperation. No criminal enterprise could operate in Libya without the dictator sharing in the loot, and people smuggling was no different. The boats left for Europe with the security forces either turning a blind eye in exchange for bribes, or actively facilitating the voyages.

Migration was just another political tool for the dictator, and the extent to which Gaddafi could exploit this bargaining chip became clear when the economic crisis took hold in Europe. Rising unemployment and stretched government budgets meant that the few thousand people arriving on EU shores in boats from North Africa became easy targets for politicians looking for someone else to blame. In 2009, Italy’s President Silvio Berlusconi came up with a solution: they would intercept boats in Italian territorial waters and force them back to Libya, where his old friend Gaddafi could take care of them.

Italy had retained strong economic ties with its former colony. Libya was its largest supplier of oil, while the Libyan government also held stakes in everything from Unicredit, Italy’s largest bank, to the Juventus football club. Berlusconi and Gaddafi had a close personal friendship. A persistent rumour in Italy credits Gaddafi with coming up with the phrase ‘bunga bunga’ to describe a harem of women – a phrase now universal shorthand for the sex parties which led to Berlusconi’s downfall. So when Italy offered to invest another €5 billion in Libya, Gaddafi was happy to take the boat people off Berlusconi’s hands. People had spent days at sea with no food and water making the crossing from Libya to Lampedusa, only to be beaten with clubs and cattle prods as Italian sailors forced them back onto Libyan vessels and turned them round. The Italians sent at least 1,000 people back to Libya – an effective police state with little regard for human rights – with no effort made to assess who was on board the boats or whether anyone was a legitimate asylum seeker in need of protection from war or persecution. No one really knew what happened when the men, women and children returned. Libya is not party to the United Nations’ 1951 Refugee Convention which guarantees the rights of people needing international protection, and conditions in Libyan detention centres were appalling. Many people never even ended up in detention, but were transported to Libya’s inhospitable southern borders and dumped in the desert.

Whatever the morality of the deal, it proved effective for Rome. Clandestine arrivals by sea fell from 10,236 in 2009 to 1,662 a year later. But while the Italian policy may have stuck a finger in the dam, it did nothing to address the underlying causes or halt the overall flow of people entering Europe illicitly. They just found another route, with an increase in arrivals along the Greek border in that period. The Italian policy was also in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits returning people to a country where they may face degrading and inhuman treatment. Berlusconi was eventually forced to abandon his push-backs policy in 2010 when the European Court of Human Rights started legal proceedings. Gaddafi then came back to the EU with a new plan: for the right sum, he could stop the people ever leaving Libyan soil in the first place. In summer 2010 he made the EU an offer that sounded more like a threat: give him $5 billion a year or he would flood the continent with foreigners.

Refugee boat approached by Spanish coast guard vessel. Via Wikimedia.

‘Europe might no longer be European, and even black, as there are millions who want to come in,’ he warned during a visit to Rome, where he did not shy away from playing on old European racial and religious prejudice. ‘We don’t know what will be the reaction of the white and Christian Europeans faced with this influx of starving and ignorant Africans. We don’t know if Europe will remain an advanced and united continent or if it will be destroyed, as happened with the barbarian invasions.’

European leaders were sufficiently spooked to come up with a deal. While publicly there was shock at the audacity of the offer, the European Commissioner for Home Affairs Cecilia Malmström and the European Commissioner for Enlargement and European Neighbourhood Policy Štefan Füle visited Tripoli in early October 2010. What emerged was a pledge to pay Gaddafi €60 million over three years for ‘economic development’. During the same trip they came up with a deal to ‘develop our co-operation on migration-related issues’. This was despite Libya’s dismal human rights records and evidence compiled by human rights groups that Gaddafi’s preferred method for dealing with unwanted migrants and refugees was to truck them out to the remote Saharan border outposts and leave them to die.

The migration problem was not solved. People would still flee war, famine, poverty and persecution. They were now just dying somewhere else, out of Europe’s sight.

* * *

You just keep running until you find a safe place, but a safe place does not exist.

For Majid, Libya had always been a place to settle and make a life for himself, rather than a staging post on the way to Europe. He had no interest in risking his life packed in a decommissioned fishing vessel like a battery hen simply to reach a continent which didn’t want him anyway. He had inherited an interest in international politics from his father, and read enough news to know that Europe was not the golden land of opportunity many people seemed to think it was.

Life in Libya was not perfect. Majid felt a wall growing around him, isolating him from everyone else. He told the few friends he had that he wasn’t scared of anything, but in reality he was scared of the night. When darkness fell visions of his father’s death would haunt him as he tried to sleep, the anger would return, and he felt like he was losing himself again. How could he ever be happy when he had lost the most important person in his life? But he had a job, some friends, a comfortable home – at least that was something.

Living a good life, peacefully, maybe I can be free.

The Nigerian teenager had clung on to the belief that Libya offered him the best chance of a bright future right up until the morning of 12 August, when six soldiers knocked on his door.

In the end it was Gaddafi’s forces who got to Majid first. He should have known better than to stay at home. While the major who owned their house may have been amiable over a few spliffs during the good times, his allegiances were to his colonel and he didn’t hesitate to act on Gaddafi’s order to round up the foreign workers. The soldiers knew exactly where to find Majid and Ali. When the knock on the door came, the two young Nigerians didn’t even have time to exchange words of surprise, let alone gather their belongings or their savings before they were marched at gunpoint into a waiting truck. When Majid tried to resist, he was told he had one other choice.

‘You can stay and fight for Gaddafi.’

So he reluctantly climbed aboard the truck bound for the coast.

Gaddafi’s spiteful expulsion of thousands of foreign workers marked the start of the mass exodus from the Libyan coastline which would over the coming years test the very principles at the heart of the European Union. Within a few months, Colonel Gaddafi would be dead. Rival rebel groups would start battling for power as Libya sank into a prolonged and chaotic civil war. The people smugglers would thrive like never before, with no functioning law enforcement to stop them. The countries which had helped oust Gaddafi would shrink from view. Scarred by military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, they would decide that the messy task of nation-building was best left to the victors, no matter that it wasn’t even clear yet who they were.

Majid was not thinking about any of that yet. As the truck rumbled towards the Mediterranean, a sad sense of resignation washed over him as he considered his short, troubled life.

From the day of my father’s death, I have been running and searching for some kind of peace, but this is so hard to find, he thought. You just keep running until you find a safe place, but a safe place does not exist.

* * *

Copyright © 2016 by Charlotte McDonald-Gibson. This excerpt originally appeared in Cast Away: True Stories of Survival from Europe’s Refugee Crisis, published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission.

Michael Walsh & Don Jordan | The King’s Revenge: Charles II and the Greatest Manhunt in British History | Pegasus Books | August 2016 | 26 minutes (6,559 words)

The excerpt below is adapted from The King’s Revenge, by Michael Walsh and Don Jordan. The story takes place in the wake of the English Civil War, fought between the Parliamentarians (“Roundheads”), who favored limitations on the king’s power and had the support of radical Protestant religious minorities (such as Puritans), and the Royalists (“Cavaliers”), who were loyal to the throne and were mostly members of the Church of England.  In 1649, the victorious Roundheads tried and executed the king, Charles I. After the coronation of his son Charles II in 1661, known as the Great Restoration, Charles launched a global manhunt for the 59 judges who signed his father’s death warrant, as well as the court officials who tried the case, collectively known as the “regicides.”

Many of the regicides fled to other countries, and below we found out what happened to those who fled to America, as well as to those were pursued by an American in Europe. This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

* * *

If what he had done against the King were to be done again, he would do it again.

The spring of 1661 was significant not only for the crowning of the king. Hitherto Charles had paid little attention to the capture of regicides abroad, but that was about to change. As carpenters sweated over the erection of those magnificent coronation arches with their dual themes of royal triumph and revenge, Charles unleashed his bloodhounds in America and Europe. Two royalists set out from Boston to lead a hunt across New England for Whalley and Goffe, and the most ruthless operator in the king’s service was drafted in to spearhead a search across Europe for Ludlow and the other nineteen regicides who had escaped in 1660.

The American manhunt was launched on May 6 by John Endecott, governor of Massachusetts. Endecott had received an arrest order from the king which, dispensing with flowery courtesies, had been brutally curt:

Trusty and well-beloved,

We greet you well. We being given to understand that Colonel Whalley and Colonel Goffe, who stand here convicted for the execrable murder of our Royal Father, of glorious memory, are lately arrived at New England, where they hope to shroud themselves securely from the justice of our laws; our will and pleasure is, and we do hereby expressly require and command you forthwith upon the receipt of these our letters, to cause both the said persons to be apprehended, and with the first opportunity sent over hither under a strict care, to receive according to their demerits. We are confident of your readiness and diligence to perform your duty; and so bid you farewell.

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The abrupt tone reflected Charles’s fury at the welcoming reception accorded the regicides in America. Their unchallenged presence was not only an insult but a danger that threatened to undermine still further Britain’s fragile hold on the colony. The two men were openly enjoying their freedom, sometimes challenged by the odd royalist, but admired and welcomed by the majority Puritans. In London the Council of Foreign Plantations was told that the two were holding public meetings, praying and preaching that the two were holding public meetings, praying and preaching and justifying the killing of the king. Whalley was quoted as saying that “if what he had done against the King were to be done again, he would do it again.”

All changed after May 1661. Having received the menacing royal command, John Endecott had to be seen to respond decisively. He commissioned two ardent royalists to conduct a manhunt right across the territory. The two men—a young Boston merchant called Thomas Kirk and Thomas Kelland, an English sea captain—were furnished with the governor’s authority to impress all the men and horse they needed and with letters requesting help to the governors of other English colonies. There was also one for Peter Stuyvesant, the governor of the neighboring Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, a bolt-hole for people fleeing the English colonies. The search party set off on May 25, launching a hue and cry that would fade then sound again for years.

The hunters had the outward support of the most senior colonial officials like Endecott. But it was reluctant backing, and they could scarcely have known when they set out the depth of the opposition they would encounter.

* * *

Hide the outcasts, betray not him that wandereth.

They had a good idea of their quarry’s whereabouts when they left Boston. On receipt of Endecott’s commission, they secured warrants from the governor of Connecticut and made directly for New Haven. Their target was the house of the millennialist pastor John Davenport, founder of the New Haven colony. Since their arrival on the Prudent Mary the previous summer, Davenport had become perhaps the fugitives’ greatest ally. A man with a mesmerizing personality, Davenport had been followed by five hundred Puritans when he left London in the 1630s to establish his ministry in the New World. He built there a fiercely independent bastion of Calvinist zealotry. In New Haven, Mosaic law held sway—only church members judged the predestined to be saved by God could vote, own land or hold office. Quakers and other outsiders were turned away by the colony’s borders (even at the beginning of the nineteenth century Jews and Catholics were barred from setting foot New Haven green). There was no argument when Whalley and Goffe came knocking in the early months of 1661. They were greeted as “Godly” people and allowed in.

Whalley was put up in Davenport’s house while a neighbor, Thomas Jones, offered his home to Goffe. Jones had more reason than most to sympathize with the two men, for he was the son of regicide John Jones. Young Thomas had been a fellow passenger with the two fugitives on the Prudent Mary the previous summer. Three months after they disembarked on the Boston quayside, the older Jones had been hanged, drawn and quartered in the Strand. Of course, anyone aiding Whalley and Goffe in New England faced the same. A proclamation outlawing the regicides warned that none “should presume to harbour or conceal any [of] the person aforesaid under pain of misprision of high treason.”

The death warrant of Charles I with the signatures of the 59 judges. Via Wikimedia.

Kirk and Kelland pushed south through New England’s rugged highlands and reached Guildford, the capital of New Haven colony, in three days. This put them a mere eighteen miles from the town of New Haven and their target. There was time enough that day to reach their men, but they needed warrants from William Leete, the colony’s governor. It was here that their problems began, for Leete smoothly sabotaged their mission.

An account of what transpired was later sent to Endecott by the two royalists. They arrived in Guildford on a Saturday and Leete received them courteously enough. Then things began to go wrong. To their great discomfort, the governor insisted on reading the king’s proclamation aloud while the locals clustered around, so ruining the royalists’ hopes of surprising the fugitives. Leete then asserted that the two colonels had left New Haven nine weeks before. This was untrue, as Kirk suspected after questioning locals. Several claimed the regicides were still in New Haven and named the Reverend Davenport as their protector. Probing further, Kirk heard that Leete was well aware of this.

The royalists went back to the governor, demanding warrants to search and arrest and fresh horses to get them to Davenport’s home. Much delay and evasion ensued. The horses were provided but Leete apologetically refused any search and arrest warrant. Before he could issue the document, he would have to consult the New Haven magistrates. This, unfortunately, couldn’t be done quickly because the next day was Sunday, and nothing was allowed to move in New Haven on the Sabbath. On Monday, the magistrates did convene, but they came to no decision. After agonizing for much of the day, they announced that the freemen of the colony would have to be summoned. That would take another four days, the increasingly angry royalists learned.

Needless to say, the birds had long flown. On the day that Kirk and Kelland led the search party into Guildford, a Native American rode through the night to warn Davenport, Jones and their guests. The two colonels were quietly shifted to a secure, if uncomfortable, hiding place not far away, though well hidden from inquisitive eyes. This was a cave halfway up a rocky escarpment a few miles beyond New Haven. It is said that on the Sunday the Reverend Davenport’s sermon drew from the book of Isaiah and his favorite proverb: “Hide the outcasts, betray not him that wandereth. Let mine outcasts dwell with thee.”

The royalists heard about the night ride of the Native American and demanded to interview him or that Leete question him. The governor refused, insisting there were no grounds to do so. They then asked him to authorize raids on the homes of Davenport and Jones. In the absence of a decision by the freemen, this was also refused.

Searches were at last conducted and Davenport was reported to have been “very ill used” when they got to his house. The searches were of course fruitless. However, all kinds of stories have been handed down through generations suggesting prolonged searching during which the royalists came very near to their prey. One story has a search party coming through the front door while Whalley and Goffe ran out of the back. Another has them almost cornered and hiding under a bridge as their pursuers thundered over it. Yet another has them deciding to surrender in order to save Davenport from arrest but being dissuaded by their friends. According to one tale, Governor Leete hid them in his own cellar, which invites one to wonder whether they were there, listening even as their whereabouts were being discussed upstairs by their host and the two frustrated royalists.

Engraving from “Nalson’s Record of the Trial of Charles I,” 1684. Via Wikimedia.

After weeks of frustration, Kirk and Kelland switched their attention to the south, disappearing across the border into New Amsterdam, presumably after another tip-off. There they secured the co-operation of the Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant, but to no avail. They returned some weeks later bitter and vengeful. Their report to Massachusetts’ Governor Endecott called the New Haven authorities “obstinate and pertinacious in their contempt of his Majesty.”

To buy off the two royalists, the Massachusetts authorities presented each with a juicy land grant. At the same time Edward Rawson, secretary of the colony’s council, warned Governor Leete that his own future and that of New England was imperiled:

I am required to signify to you…that the non-attendance with diligence to execute the King’s warrant, for the apprehending of Colonels Goffe and Whalley, will much hazard the present state of these colonies, and your own particularly, if not some of your persons…there remains no way to expiate the offence, and preserve yourselves from the danger and hazard, but by apprehending the said persons, who, as we are informed, are yet remaining in the colony, and not above a fortnight since were seen there: all which will be against you.

In the event, Leete survived unscathed, and so did John Davenport. Having preached so bravely from Isaiah, he sent Secretary of State Sir William Morrice a groveling denial that he or his colony had ever aided the two fugitives. The colonists had “wanted neither will nor industry to have served His Majesty in apprehending them, but were prevented and hindered by God’s overruling providence… The two Colonels, who only stayed two days in the Colony, went away before they could be apprehended, no man knowing how or whither.”

Judging from the archive there was a feeling in London that the two men were no longer on the other side of the Atlantic. There were reports of them being seen with Ludlow in the Netherlands. Apparently they were amused to see other reports that they’d been killed.

Whalley and Goffe stayed in the cave during the summer of 1661. When the hullabaloo died down, they were quietly moved to Milford, another Puritan settlement eight miles away. This time their hiding place was a cellar they would spend the next two years “in utter seclusion without so much as going into the orchard.” Not until 1664 was there another threat to them.

* * *

Andrew Marvell likened him to a Judas; his former clerk, Samuel Pepys, labeled Downing a ‘perfidious rogue,’ and, in his native New England, ‘an arrant George Downing’ became an epithet for anyone betraying a trust.

On the other side of the Atlantic, things would not prove so easy for the regicides in 1661. As Kelland and his partner were being thrown off the scent in New England, a man of far more menacing and astute caliber was being appointed to lead the European hunt. This was a former Roundhead, Sir George Downing, who had been posted as envoy extraordinary to the Netherlands in 1661. Over the next year this burly, quick-witted man would serve the ends of his royal master Charles II so well that he would be granted a baronetcy, huge monetary reward and the plot of land next to Whitehall Palace that forever commemorates him—Downing Street. He would also gain a reputation as an odious, treacherous turncoat: Andrew Marvell likened him to a Judas; his former clerk, Samuel Pepys, labeled Downing a “perfidious rogue,” and, in his native New England, “an arrant George Downing” became an epithet for anyone betraying a trust.

Anonymous illustration comparing the execution of Charles I with that of the regicides. Via Wikimedia.

Until a year earlier, Downing could have been counted as a convinced republican. He was born to a God-fearing family of Puritans in Dublin who settled in New England in the 1630s. Like the Puritans of New Haven, the Downings had opted for the New World to escape the Anglican straitjacket which Charles I wanted to impose. Their son George, it seems, flourished there. He became one of the first students to gain a degree at Harvard, the recently established college in Boston, and after that began to make his mark as a preacher. Then came news of the Civil War in England. Like many other young Puritans, Downing was drawn to it, taking ship to England and joining a parliamentary regiment of dragoons as chaplain. Downing’s commanding officer was the dour, radical Puritan Colonel John Okey; he became the chaplain’s mentor, enthusiastically pushing his career. That career was meteoric, but not as a preacher. Downing gave up his chaplaincy during the first Civil War and became an expert in intelligence gathering for the parliamentary armies. So good at this was he that at the age of twenty-six he was appointed “scoutmaster general”—the chief field intelligence officer—of Oliver Cromwell’s all-conquering army in Scotland. It was the equivalent to being a major-general. Come peacetime, Downing breathlessly maintained his success, accumulating sinecures from Cromwell’s government, marrying a beautiful moneyed aristocrat from the Howard family and being elected to Parliament. The clever young parvenu from Massachusetts personified the confident, new, and supposedly godly world of republican England. Yet it could be argued that deep down he believed in monarchy—Downing, always a sycophant to the right people, led the clamor in Parliament for Cromwell to take the crown.

In 1656, Downing was appointed special emissary to the Netherlands, where one of England’s principal concerns was the threat from the royalist exiles. Large numbers of them were clustered there, mostly around the great ports of Amsterdam and Rotterdam, existing in various states of desperation and hope, dreaming and plotting Cromwell’s downfall. The Netherlands was “the nursery of Cavalierism,” declared Secretary of State John Thurloe, who directed Downing to set up a spy network there. The former chaplain was a huge success in the dark arts of espionage and his network eventually spread beyond Europe and into England. A study intelligence in this period paints a picture of Downing’s blithe ruthlessness: “He was engaged in entrapment, hiring spies, harassing exiles as well as the bribery and chicanery to which he appears to have been well suited.” The study judges that most of Downing’s “talents as a spymaster” emerged in this earlier period, but that “one or two refinements were to be added after 1660 such as more scope for assassination attempts, kidnappings and even suggestions of grave robbery.”

The royalists were terrified of Downing—“that fearful gentleman,” one called him—and he himself claimed that he was a target for royalist assassins. A Major Whitford, one of the royalists suspected of killing the regicide Isaac Dorislaus, was seen with others lurking around Downing’s house. The emissary called on the Dutch to provide him with protection.

All in all, this feared spy chief and dyed-in-the-wool Cromwellian would seem to have much to fear from a return of the Stuarts. Yet, at the restoration, far from being thrown into prison or worse, George Downing was knighted by Charles II in the very month that the king returned. What was behind this astonishing turn of fortune? One story, possibly apocryphal, might explain it. During his frustrating years in exile in France, Charles had several times slipped over the border into Dutch territory, either on a secret visit to his sister, the wife of William of Orange, or to rendezvous with exiled supporters. The story goes that, very shortly before the restoration, Charles made one of these visits and an “old reverend like man in a long grey beard and ordinary grey clothes” succeeded in forcing his way into his presence. The old man then pulled off his beard to reveal himself as the feared George Downing, come to warn the king that the Dutch planned to arrest him and hand him over to the English. Charles promptly terminated his visit. Downing had saved his life.

Whatever the truth, we do know that on the eve of the restoration Downing set out to worm his way into royal favor. He used an intermediary, Thomas Howard, a brother of the Earl of Suffolk and a close intimate of Charles and his sister, the Princess of Orange. Howard had been one of Downing’s informants since 1658, after making the mistake of entrusting potentially damaging private papers to the keeping of a mistress and then falling out with her. Downing somehow acquired the papers and blackmailed the young aristocrat—or, as he put it, “gained” him. “I think I can hardly pitch for one better instrument than Tom Howard, he being the master of the horse to the Princess Royal,” Downing boasted in a report to London. From then on, Howard was his creature, passing on every tidbit about the Stuarts.

Dutch pamphlet criticizing the beheading of Charles I, 1649. Via Wikimedia.

Two years on, in April 1660, when General Monck’s army was in London and astute men were changing allegiances, Downing summoned Tom Howard and instructed him to tell the still exiled king that he now desired “to promote His Majesty’s service.” To prove his new allegiance Downing showed Howard intelligence material that he wanted communicated to the king. This included a letter in cipher from Secretary Thurloe reporting feeling in the army and among the general populace. Downing begged for a royal pardon and promised that if he got it, he would “work secretly on the army in which he has considerable influence.” As for his own past as a Roundhead, Downing told Howard to relay his repentance that he had been misled as a youth in New England, where he had “sucked in principles that since his reason had made him see were erroneous.”

As Downing awaited the king’s reply, his good friend John Milton was publishing two anti-monarchist tracts which three months later would be ritually burned by the common executioner, and would see the poet jailed and in danger of joining the regicides on the scaffold. A kinder future was in store for George Downing. In the second week of June the reply came back from the king that he was forgiven. Howard conveyed that Charles would forget past “deviations” and would accept “the overtures he [Downing] makes of returning to his duty.” Three weeks afterwards, the new monarch knighted Downing and paid him £1000.

On his reappointment to The Hague, the man who had wished Oliver Cromwell king now oozed loyalty to Charles. He vowed to the king’s chief minister, Lord Clarendon, that on pursuing the regicides he would do “as much as if my life lay at stake.” Indeed, “if my father were in the way I would not avoid him for my loyalty.”

* * *

Tell them of a King and they cut your throat in earnest.

Downing’s first task was to locate the regicides’ bolt-holes, “that I may know where they are and what they do”—far from easy in a country flooded with English fugitives. “It is not to be credited what numbers of disaffected persons come daily out of England into this new country,” he reported in his first dispatch, describing the new arrivals from across the Channel as “well funded and confident… [they] do hire the best houses and have great bills of exchange come over from England for them.”

In prising out the regicides from among these exiles, Sir George knew he could expect little co-operation from the Dutch. During his previous incarnation in the Netherlands he had been the agent of a fellow republic and, to an extent, approved of. As the agent of a king, particularly one engage in the execution of republicans, he was now in hostile country. Decades of bloody war with the Spanish monarchy for control of the Low Countries had left the Dutch more wholeheartedly republican than any people in Europe except perhaps the Swiss. A guide to the Netherlands published in England in 1662 warned: “The country is a democracy…Tell them of a King and they cut your throat in earnest. The very name carries servitude in it and they hate it more than a Jew doth images, a woman old age and a nonconformist a surplice.”

At this early stage we do not know who Downing used as agents to discover the regicides, but presumably many old informants were still present in Holland and Germany and there were potentially many more among new refugees. By no means were all of these as well funded as Downing suggested. Some exiles were in dire financial straits and a few guilders bought their loyalty. Others were suborned and blackmailed into spying while still in England, then sent abroad to mix in exile circles.

Scenes representing the Restoration , 1660. Via Wikimedia.

Downing would ultimately accumulate a rich mix of informants. Along with the unpredictable adventurer Joseph Bampfield, who had once rescued Charles’s younger brother James from the Roundheads dressed as a girl before switching sides to spy for the same Roundheads, and then switching sides again, they included an Irish cutthroat called James Cotter who gloried in his reputation as an assassin. And there was also the bewitching Mata Hari figure of Aphra Behn.

A memorable picture of the efficiency of Downing’s agents was later made by his former clerk, Samuel Pepys. Downing had boasted to Pepys of his intelligence coups in the mid-1660s, during the second Anglo-Dutch war. Pepys’ diary for December 27, 1668 records:

Met with Sir G. Downing, and walked with him an hour talking of business, and how the late war was managed, there being nobody to take care of it; and he telling, when he was in Holland . . . that he had so good spies, that he hath had the keys taken out of de Witte’s pocket when he was abed, and his closet opened and papers brought to him and left in his hands for an hour, and carried back and laid in the place again, and the keys put into his pocket again. He says he hath always had their most private debates, that have been but between two or three of the chief of them, brought to him in an hour after, and an hour after that hath sent word thereof to the king.

*

Reviewing the difficulties involved in kidnapping the regicides, Downing casually suggested murdering them. In a dispatch to the Earl of Clarendon in the autumn of 1661, he wrote: “What if the king should authorize some trusty persons to kill them . . . let me have the king’s serious thoughts about this business.” If Charles did give the idea some thought, nothing was put down on paper, and the secretary of state moved quickly to disassociate himself and the king from the idea. Charles would never countenance murder, he insisted.

The breakthrough Downing needed came in September when he found the weak link in the chain of friends protecting the exiles in Germany. An English merchant living in the city of Delft was revealed as the front man for some of the exiles. His name was Abraham Kicke and he acted as the regicides’ post box. Much of their correspondence with wives back in England appears to have gone through him, as did the odd bundle of money sent to keep them going. Little is known about Kicke except that he had the regicides’ trust. John Barkstead—one of the king’s judges who had become a fugitive by 1661—called him “my real friend.” That would prove a fatal misjudgment.

An acute judge of human weakness, George Downing took the measure of Kicke after a single meeting, divining that money and threats would overcome whatever loyalty the merchant felt for the regicides, and quickly proved it. Kicke was given a choice by Downing: a reward of £200 per head for every regicide he helped to snare or the ruin of his business if he didn’t co-operate. From that point on, the merchant was in the control of George Downing.

*

Timing was everything. Downing needed to get the warrant issued and verified as late in the day as possible to lessen the chances of his targets being warned, but early enough so the three fugitive regicides—John Okey, John Barkstead, and Miles Corbet—could be seized before their supper party broke up and Corbet went home. He also wanted the trio in irons and safely en route to England before Holland woke up to what was afoot. A vessel called the Blackamoor had been provided, probably laid on by the Royal Africa Company. The Blackamoor lay moored and waiting in Rotterdam.

There is no record of the talk that evening but there must have been much to catch up on. It was at least eighteen months since Corbet had seen his two fellow fugitives and in that time the world had turned upside down. Perhaps the three men mulled over the betrayal of General Monck, or Okey’s attempts to stop him. Perhaps they read together some of the last speeches of their friends, the fellow regicides who had been executed and whom they regarded as martyrs. No doubt they speculated on the vulnerability of the Stuart regime and the chances now for the success of the Good Old Cause. Presumably there was also talk of hearth and home and some excitement at the arrival next day of two of their wives. Perhaps, too, they talked of Okey’s old comrade Sir George Downing, and praised God that he and not some vengeful royalist was the ambassador here.

Accompanied by three English officers serving as mercenaries in Holland, along with some sailors, presumably from the Blackamoor, Downing was hidden in a house nearby. He had set the wheels in motion early that afternoon, arriving at Johan de Witt’s home with a request for a warrant and informing the Dutch leader that was representing him with an opportunity to do the King of England a “most acceptable kindness.” There was, as Downing expected, long delays. Not till early evening was the warrant ready and then it had to be rushed to Delft.

As the minutes went by, Kicke became worried. He told Downing later that Miles Corbet (“the hunchback,” he called him) was showing signs of leaving, which might mean only two regicides in the net—and £200 less for himself. One imagines the old man getting up from the fireside table and beginning to make his farewells when there was a knock at the door. In his report to Clarendon, Downing gloated over what happened next:

Knocking at the door one of the house came to see who it was and the door being open, the under Scout and the whole company rushed immediately into the house, and into the room where they were sitting by a fireside with a pipe of tobacco and a cup of beer. Immediately they started up to have got out a back door but it was too late, the room was in a moment full. They made many excuses, the one to have got liberty to fetch his coat and another to go to the privy but all in vain.

No doubt the king was thrilled as Clarendon passed him Downing’s dispatch.

* * *

Every body here admireth the constancy and resolution of those men who were lately executed in England for having judged the late King.

Londoners turned out in their thousands to watch the condemned trio dragged on separate sledges from the Tower of London to Tyburn and the scaffold. Extra troops had been drafted in to control the crowds, with Mercurious Publicus reporting the mood as being so hostile to the condemned men that the guards barely prevented the people “anticipating the executioners.”

A very different crowd—perhaps equally big, certainly too big for Charles’s comfort—turned up at Okey’s funeral. Previously none of the executed regicides had been allowed a Christian burial. After the ritual butchery their heads had been boiled and stuck on spikes in Westminster Hall or London Bridge, their quarters carted away. Okey’s internment was to be different. Charles agreed that his body should be treated with respect and interred in the family vault in the East End parish of Stepney. No such concession was offered the families of his two comrades. On the appointed day, the remains were taken to Christ’s Church, Stepney. There had been no publicity but the Puritan grapevine sufficed. People began to stream towards Stepney. The news quickly filtered through to Charles that hordes of “fanatics” were on their way to pay tribute to this murderer of his father. The king—outraged, horrified or both—ordered it stopped. The Sheriff of London was dispatched to Stepney to end the ceremony. By the time he and his constables arrived, however, as many as twenty thousand people were assembled round the church. They were dispersed “with much harshness and many bitter words,” but appear to have gone home peacefully. To prevent another demonstration of solidarity with the “Godly martyrs,” Okey was buried where no crowds could gather—in an unmarked plot, somewhere in the grounds of the Tower of London.

The coronation of Charles II. Via Wikimedia.

The unexpected beneficiaries of this spectacle were the other regicides awaiting their own deaths. The Bills authorizing more executions had reached their final reading but were dropped and up to twenty regicides were saved. Instead of Tyburn they were kept in the Tower or dispersed to strongholds in the furthest reaches of the realm. Why were no more of them executed? Charles’s own dwindling blood lust was undoubtedly part of it. As early as the first batch of deaths he had written to Clarendon that he was “weary” of the hangings. The new butchery can only have increased his distaste. Another factor was the propaganda bonus the “fanatics” secured from the executions. The victims’ heroic performances on the scaffold were retold in pamphlets and books like Prayers and Speeches of the Regicides which were constantly reprinted and turned men who were supposed to be damned for martyring their king into martyrs themselves.

Admiration for the executed men spread beyond London, indeed beyond England. “Every body here admireth the constancy and resolution of those men who were lately executed in England for having judged the late King,” wrote a Paris-based correspondent. Naturally the authorities came down hard on the printers and booksellers. Four men involved in the trade were put on trial for publishing and selling seditious literature. Three were fined, pilloried and imprisoned. The crime of the fourth, a John Twyn, made the king overcome any distaste for spilling more blood. Having published a book entitled A Treatise on the Execution of Justice, calling for an end to the royal family, Twyn was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered.

Another display of punishment had been ordered a few months earlier, to mark the anniversary of the day when the death sentence was passed on the king. Three of his judges were roped to sledges, each with a halter around his neck, and dragged through the streets from the Tower to Tyburn—then back again. None of the three—Sir Henry Mildmay, Viscount Monson and Robert Wollop—had signed the death warrant or been present when sentence was pronounced, so they didn’t qualify as regicides. Indeed all three insisted that they agreed to act as judges in order to help the king. That cut no ice. The trio had all been ardent republicans and they were all sentenced to life and, on top of that, the humiliating trip to Tyburn. According to Pepys it was to be an annual excursion.

* * *

The white-haired stranger who in September 1675 appeared brandishing a sword, rallied the settlers, beat off an Algonquin attack and prevented a massacre, before disappearing as miraculously as he had come.

While the captive regicides might now be spared death, that did not hold for the dozen or more fugitives abroad. In 1664, the search for Edward Whalley and William Goffe was revived on the other side of the Atlantic. Following previous frustrations and failures, the hunt had been largely abandoned since 1661. The fugitives continued to live in their cellar in Milford. Thomas Temple’s promise to “hazard his life” in pursuit of them had helped him become governor of Nova Scotia but it left the fugitives untroubled. The old cave on Providence Hill lay abandoned to the bears and snakes.

That all changed in the summer of 1664. The king gave the order for an expeditionary force to be sent to New England. Its prime target was the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam on Long Island, which Charles wished to take over in order to create an unbroken wedge of British rule on the north-east seaboard. The force was led by four commissioners and commanded by Colonel Richard Nicholas. They had further orders to “apprehend all persons who stand attained of high treason, and to discover those who have entertained them since the restoration.” It was unnecessary to identify the traitors by name.

Four men-o’-war arrived, carrying four hundred troops and enough firearms and ammunition to equip several hundred more. Whalley and Goffe retired once more to their cave but remained there only for a week or two. One night, a panther screamed outside the entrance. More worryingly, a group of Native Americans chanced upon their hiding place and discovered their bedding, though they did not spot either of the men. Word spread around Milford about their presence. Their benefactors decided to move them to one of the most remote settlements in Massachusetts, an outpost called Hadley, some eighty miles to north-west on the boundary of Indian territory and ninety miles from the coast.

Hadley in 1664 was a stockade village of some fifty Puritan families. The settlers who built it in 1659 chose a site in the tranquil valley of the Connecticut river. It must have seemed to them that they had found the Promised Land. Their little satellite settlement was on an oxbow bend under the shadow of a richly forested mountain. They would discover that they were surrounded by the most fertile soils in New England. The great nineteenth-century landscape artists Thomas Cole would call it “Arcadia” and immortalize the landscape in The Oxbow, an 1833 painting that became as famous in America as Constable’s Haywain in England. After Niagara Falls, Hadley would develop into the most visited holiday site in America.

By pre-arrangement, the fugitives were received by the town’s Puritan minister, John Russell. The Reverend Russell concealed them in an upstairs room. Since the Russells lived right in the middle of the settlement, this seemed an unnecessary risk; however, their luck held. Many decades later, a historian picked up folk memories of searchers from Boston and Redcoats from England arriving in Hadley around 1664, but there is no record that the Russell house ever came under suspicion.

The Angel of Hadley, Frederic Chapman, 1850. Via Wikimedia.

Colonel Nicholas and his troops succeeded in their primary task of ejecting the Dutch, but they found it impossible to persuade colonists of New England to aid the search for the regicides. Nicholas reported later that when he tried to set up a hearing of complaints in Boston and issued a summons for witnesses, a small mob-cum-delegation appeared and stopped him: “The Government sent a herald and trumpeter and 100 people accompanying them to proclaim that the Commissioners should not act in the government nor any persons give obedience,” he reported, adding “the meeting was dissolved and nothing farther done.”

The commission had secret instructions from Charles to tread gently with the Massachusetts Puritans. The colonial government had been slow to recognize Charles as king and the British strategy—unusually subtle—was to woo the colony gently back to full allegiance, prior to imposing a new charter. This might explain the failure to take tough action against people suspected of harboring Whalley and Goffe.

Much of what we know about the fugitives’ lives at this point comes from the researches nearly a century later of Thomas Harrison, then governor of Massachusetts. He acquired Goffe’s papers –letters and a diary –while compiling a history of the colony published in 1764. The material revealed that the two were sometimes living “in terror.” In letters between Goffe and his wife Frances the two tell each other to be careful of betrayal.

Whalley and Goffe were not completely hamstrung by their hermitic existence in Hadley. These two clever and energetic men may have lived in fear and have been constantly under cover, but through a front man they went very successfully into business. Their partner was the influential Daniel Gookin, a friend of the two since they had sailed to New England together on the Prudent Mary in May 1660. Copies of the Goffe letters show that he and his father-in-law eventually became sufficiently prosperous to send a message home to England asking their families not to send them any further remittances until they asked for more money. The pair went into stock raising and “a little trade with the Indians.” By 1672, they “had a stock in New England money of over one hundred pounds, all debts paid.”

Edward Whalley and William Goffe remained hidden with the Reverend Russell for another ten years, until Whalley’s death around 1674 or ’75. Goffe was to live on to become the center of a hugely dramatic story—the legend of the Angel of Hadley, the white-haired stranger who in September 1675 appeared brandishing a sword, rallied the settlers, beat off an Algonquin attack and prevented a massacre, before disappearing as miraculously as he had come. The superstitious people of Hadley decided their savior must have been a supernatural being. Ninety years after the incident, the president of Harvard, Ezra Stiles, wrote: “The inhabitants could not account for the phenomenon, but by considering that person as an Angel sent of God on that special occasion for their deliverance.”

By the nineteenth century the angel incident was presented as fact and so too was William Goffe’s role as the angel. The story inspired many writers. The first to make use of the tale was Walter Scott, who based his novel Peveril of the Peak upon the legend of the Angel. He was followed by James Fenimore Cooper and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The cave that sheltered Goffe and Whalley is now a tourist attraction and bears a bronze plaque stating, “Opposition to Tyrants is Obedience to God.”

* * *

Excerpted with permission from The King’s Revenge: Charles II and the Greatest Manhunt in the British History, by Don Jordan and Michael Walsh. Reprinted by arrangement with Pegasus Books. All rights reserved.

Marcy Dermansky | Excerpt | October 2016 | 12 minutes (2,933 words)

In The Red Car, Marcy Dermansky’s newly released third novel, 33-year-old Leah Kaplan is lured away from an ill-considered marriage and taken on a surprise hero’s journey.

With deadpan humor, in dreamlike, Murakami-inspired unvarnished prose, Dermansky tells the story of Leah’s adventures after a former boss dies and bequeaths to her the red sports car Leah never liked in the first place.

This curious inheritance, and her boss’s funeral, leads the Queens-dweller back to San Francisco, where she’d worked and lived just after college. There, Leah gets to back up in reverse to relive a bit of her youth, and to reconsider her life choices from a better informed perspective before moving forward into a more intentionally designed adulthood.

Can a novel about a 33-year-old woman qualify as a coming-of-age story? When she was interviewed by Steph Opitz at Kirkus Reviews, Dermansky argued in favor of that possibility.

“Maybe coming of age is happening a bit later,” she said. “Maybe people find themselves a bit later. It’s funny because you’re not supposed to come of age in your 30s, but maybe people are allowed to keep reinventing themselves. Maybe it doesn’t stop.”

As a 51-year-old late bloomer I’m encouraged by that idea. And it supports a hunch of mine: that the older women are—the more entrenched patriarchy was when they were growing up—the longer they might need to be allowed to arrive at true self-actualization. Here is Dermansky’s excerpt.

* * *

Judy shook her head when she saw me the next day, dressed in the same clothes I had worn to work the day before. “We used to call that the walk of shame,” she said.

“I don’t even know where to begin,” I said.

If only I had rolled out of my boyfriend’s bed.

I always felt pleased by the fact that Judy liked me. Before getting this job, I had only temped at a couple of places. I had, in fact, started out temping for her. Even before the interview, I had that going for me. I had showed her a shortcut in Microsoft Excel that she thought was clever. “You can make spreadsheets!” she said, surprised and delighted.

It was true. I had skills. I also told her about an Italian movie I had seen at an art house theater that I thought she would like. She went to see it and she liked it, too. It turned out she created the position for me. Until then, she had never had a full-time assistant because everyone bugged her too much. Judy had also tried teaching me how to knit, but it turned out that I did not have the patience for it.

I would not know until later, years later, when I didn’t work for her, when I had left San Francisco, that I loved her. She looked like Liza Minnelli. She was divorced. She liked to paint. Almost everyone at the office was scared of her. She said what she thought. She had the power to hire people and also fire them. And she did fire people, frequently. Drunken custodians, incompetent receptionists, high-paid managers who went over budget. Rarely did anyone get a second chance.

I told Judy about my night, leaving out the part about sleeping on the floor of the hallway. I knew about Judy’s ex-husband, an alcoholic who used to beat her before she got the hell out. She knew about my anorexic roommate and my boyfriend who was not actually my boyfriend. Still, I had to keep some things to myself. She had some clothes back from the dry cleaner, which she told me to wear.

“Really?” I said.

“You can’t work looking like that,” she said.

I was not only creased. My clothes were dirty. I put on Judy’s black skirt, the white silk shirt, and then, the blazer.
“You look like a different person,” she said. “Bad?” I asked.

I felt uncomfortable in Judy’s clothes. Like an impostor. She was six inches shorter than I was and so the skirt showed off way too much leg. Otherwise, her clothes fit.

“No,” Judy said. “You look incredibly put together. I am surprised.”

What this told me, of course, was that normally I did not look put together. I supposed I knew that already.

“You need a new boyfriend,” Judy said.

The observation made me wince. “I know that.” “And a new place to live.”

“I know that, too,” I said.

Judy sighed. Sometimes she knew when to back off. Sometimes, she reminded me too much of my mother. Other times, just as irritating, she reminded me that she was boss. Now, she handed me a folder.

“Work,” she said. “We have a job opening for a new admin, level three, who is going to work for Harry over in contracts. Here are some job descriptions for similar jobs for you to go on. Can you write this up for me? I need a classified ad and the job description itself.”

“Okay,” I said.

I reluctantly took the folder.

There were days at this job I didn’t have any work to do at all. Judy liked that I worked on my fiction at the office, advised me to lie to anyone who asked me, to always say that I was working, even when I wasn’t. Judy had high expectations for me. She quizzed me about my life. She always wanted me to write more, do more, be more. There were moments when I wanted to tell her to shove it. It was not like her paintings were showing in galleries, that she had a boyfriend. But I never did. At all costs, as a rule, I avoided confrontation.

“Why don’t you get this done by lunch?” she said. She saw the surprise on my face. “And then we’ll go out. I have something special to show you. There’s a new tapas place I want to try. Does that sound good?”

“It sounds good,” I said.

I could not tell her that I had hoped for a different morning. To play video games on my computer and drink coffee. She hired me to be her friend, but she also needed an assistant. The work was real. I wondered what it was that Judy wanted to show me.

I walked back to my cubicle. I noticed so many people looking me up and down and I wondered why. In general, I was not liked at my workplace. It was known that I was Judy’s pet. The other administrative assistants knew I did not value my job. I understood this and had respect for their contempt. Many of the other employees were in their thirties and forties and even fifties. They had kids and mortgages and I did not know what else. Credit card debt.

“You look nice,” Beverly called out from her cubicle as I passed by. Beverly was one of the admins in her fifties. She had long gray hair and wore oversized linen clothes to work. “What’s going on? Big meeting? Job interview?”

And then, it clicked.

I was wearing Judy’s clothes. “A date after work?”

I shook my head. “I generally don’t go out on dates,” I said, admitting to too much.

“And that is one of the problems of your generation. All sex. No romance. No love.”

I could not disagree with that.

“I spilled coffee on my shirt,” I said. “Judy lent me this outfit.”

Beverly nodded her head. “That explains it. The skirt is a little bit too short for an interview.”

I nodded. I stood at the edge of her cubicle. It was not that I did not like Beverly. She made me nervous. She told me once that she only had fifteen more years until her pension. So she was going to keep on doing the job that she had for fifteen more years, even though she hated it. I felt like it was necessary to stay away from Beverly; I did not want her resignation to rub off on me. That was how I felt about pretty much everybody in my office. That they were all resigned to mediocrity. And who was I, after all, to want so much more? Even Judy, so high and mighty. She seemed hopelessly stuck to me.

I held up my folder. “Work to do,” I said.

Beverly gave a wry laugh. She and Judy used to be friends. They had had a falling-out. This was years ago, long before I had started working there. That was another reason I avoided Beverly, not wanting to get in the middle. But really, it was because Beverly was preparing herself for death, and while I was not entirely satisfied with the circumstances of my existence, I felt like the possibility of improvement still existed. That I could make happiness happen. That night, for instance, I was determined not to sleep on the hallway floor.

To get to my cubicle, I passed four more cubicles, and then Diego’s office. Diego, he was different from the rest. He was also young, only a couple of years older than me. He wore slick suits, crisp shirts, silver and navy blue ties. He had a degree in architecture from a good school. He was from Costa Rica. I had an enormous crush on Diego. We were friends. He was clearly not interested in me and so it helped when we out for lunch or hung out by the water cooler that he knew that I had a boyfriend.
“Leah,” he called out. “You look so nice today.”

It was an invitation. I came into his office, sat on his desk. It was a flirtatious move on my part. That was what we did. Besides lunch with Judy, flirting with Diego was my favorite part of the job.

“You should dress like that more often,” he said.

“They are Judy’s clothes.”

“Let’s go out for lunch today,” he said.

I shook my head. “Can’t,” I said. “I am having lunch with Judy.”

“That’s cool.”

“We are going out for tapas.”

“Totally cool.”

It was revelatory, really. If I dressed differently, the hot guy in the office would ask me out, even if it was only for lunch. Who knows? I might even get ahead, succeed, earn more money. That, of course, wasn’t what I wanted. My position at the office wasn’t temporary, but I continued to think of it that way. I wondered if I could cancel on Judy and then go out for tapas with Diego instead.

“Work to do,” Diego said.

I slid off his desk, brandishing my folder. “Me, too,” I said, and I did.

The funny thing about doing work at my job was that I was good at it. I was able to blend three old job descriptions from other positions into a new one for Judy. I knocked off the ad to post on the HR website, another one for the newspaper, and coded all of the entries properly with ID numbers, the proper codes and HTML tags. I knew that Judy would be pleased with my work. She would review, approve, make one unnecessary change just to prove her superior position, and then the job would be posted.

Judy was smart and Judy had hired me. She had seen something in me. Even if I didn’t want to get ahead in the field of human resources. The job actually paid well. I had enough money to rent my own apartment, buy my own furniture. No more crazy roommates. But I was afraid to do it, afraid that renting an apartment meant that I was forever compromised. Whereas Judy said what it would mean was I had a nice apartment and nothing more. Judy often had smart things to say to me. Most of the time, I didn’t listen to her.

She was not surprised when I showed up at her office at noon and handed her the completed work.

“Thanks, doll,” she said, giving it a cursory glance. “I knew you would get this done.”

Going out to lunch with Judy was usually expensive, but Judy was my boss, and most of the time, if it was just the two of us, she paid, putting the tab on the office account. We walked to the parking lot together. I felt myself growing excited. A new restaurant. A long lunch.

“Look,” Judy said, squeezing my hand.

“What?” I said, surprised but also pleased by the physical display of affection, not usual for Judy.

I looked and what I saw was the parking lot. I saw parked cars. I looked for Judy’s car and I did not see it. I followed Judy’s extended arm, not sure what I was looking for. My gaze traveled from her arm down to her red nail polish to a blindingly red car, gleaming in the sunlight. A sports car. I blinked. I felt as if I had gotten something in my eye.

“It that yours?” I asked.

“I have always wanted a car just like this,” she said. “Come see. Can you believe it? It’s a dream come true.”

I wasn’t convinced. It was a car. Who dreamed about owning a red car?

Judy had once told me she wanted to go to Hawaii. She told me she wanted to paint large canvasses. A mural. This, this was just a car. I wasn’t sure why, but I knew that I didn’t like it. It was a feeling I had. I shivered.

“It drives like a dream, too,” Judy said. There was that word, again. Dream.

A bad dream, I thought.

I thought about spending the night on the floor in front of my apartment. I hadn’t had any dreams. Strangely, I had slept well. I followed Judy to her new car. She unlocked the car with a loud beep from her key chain and I got in.

“I didn’t know you wanted a red car,” I said. I felt almost betrayed, that she hadn’t told me.

“All my life,” Judy said.

I touched the smooth leather of the upholstery. I put on my seat belt. I checked to see if the seat belt was secure. The car was too low to the ground. It had new car smell, something chemical and cloying, and I opened the window even though it was cold outside.

“I feel like something sinister has happened in this car,” I said. “Or could happen. I don’t know. Something bad.”

“I don’t know what you are going on about,” Judy said, her voice sharp. I hated it when Judy was displeased with me. “But save it for one of your short stories. This car is all good. It’s brand-new. It is perfection.”

I looked away, stung, not sure if Judy was putting down my short stories. But that wasn’t it. I had responded wrong. A gesture had been required and I had let her down. It was Judy who was disappointed.

I hated that I had disappointed her.

I had disappointed my mother, moving so far away after college. By not calling home. By keeping secrets. I did not want to be a disappointment.

“Congratulations,” I said. “Don’t listen to me. What do I know? I take the bus. This car. It’s beautiful. Look at this leather interior. It’s so soft, Judy.”

The leather, it was soft. I did like it. I looked at Judy, her short dark hair, her red lipstick. I saw how pleased she was, with her car and even with me, once again, pleased with the compliment I had paid her new car.

“You are beautiful,” I said, meaning it.

I had never thought that before, about Judy. Because she was small and she looked like Liza Minnelli. But she was, beautiful.
Judy smiled at me, placated.

“This is the nicest thing I have ever bought for myself,” she said.

“That’s nice,” I said.

Judy started the engine. It was loud. Too loud. My feelings for the car, despite what I had said, had not changed.

“This is it for me,” she said. “This car.” “That’s not true.”

“You’re just a baby,” Judy said. She put the car into reverse. “I forget that sometimes.”

“No,” I said, offended. “I am not.”

But I had never had tapas before. She drove us to the restaurant she had picked out. I was distracted. I realized I was not sure what I would do, after work, what I could expect. If I had a home to go back to. I let Judy order. The car had upset me. Judy had found a parking space right in front of the restaurant and I could see the red car from our table. Taunting me. There was something about the way she talked, too, that reminded me of Beverly. Of fifteen more years at the office. A life sentence. I wanted Judy to return the car. To quit her powerful job. But she would never do these things. This, as she had said, was it for her. I was not a baby. Somehow, I felt older. Like I had aged in a day. Judy ordered a carafe of sangria. The waiter asked to see my ID. The sangria was delicious.

“I have high hopes for you,” Judy said, refilling our glasses. “You know that. You are going to do incredible things.”

“No,” I said, though I wanted to. “I am not.”

“I am going to make sure of it,” she said.

“No,” I said.

“Let’s celebrate.”

“Celebrate what?” I asked.

“The day,” Judy said. “This lunch. My red car. To our future good fortune.”

The waiter came to our table with a tray full of small plates of food. Judy had ordered well. Fried potatoes, roasted artichoke hearts, sautéed mushrooms, calamari.

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“This is the best calamari I have ever had,” Judy said.

I smiled at Judy. It was also the best calamari I had ever had, though I couldn’t say how many times I had had calamari. Three, maybe. Perhaps four. I was not a baby, but I had more to do. I felt content again in the moment, with the food, with her company. I didn’t even mind the red car if it made Judy happy. It was not my car, after all. It was not my life. We were both a little bit drunk by the end of the meal.

“I can’t drive like this,” she said, laughing.

We drank one espresso and then another.

We sat at our table in the window, unable or unwilling to leave. “Screw the office,” she said.

I laughed, delighted to hear these words come out of my boss’s mouth. I think I knew even then, that afternoon, when we never ended up going back to the office, that this day was something special. The waiter brought us an order of caramel flan, on the house. We shared the dessert, taking small bites with small silver spoons.

“Delicious,” Judy said, smiling at me.

* * *

Excerpted from The Red Car by Marcy Dermansky. Copyright © 2016 by Marcy Dermansky. With permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.

Patrick Phillips | Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America| W. W. Norton & Company | September 2016 | 17 minutes (4,588 words)

Below is an excerpt from Blood at the Root, by the poet Patrick Phillips.  The story begins in September of 1912, in the days after two assaults on white women. Ellen Grice claimed she was attacked by two black men who left before she was hurt. The next day Mae Crow, a 19-year-old white woman, was discovered  injured and unconscious in the woods. She allegedly regained consciousness for long enough to accuse a 16-year-old black youth, Ernest Knox. This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

* * *

Journalists only started writing about the expulsions once the wagon trains of refugees grew too large and too numerous to ignore.

Though it would take weeks before reports reached Atlanta, in the days after the attack on Crow a nighttime ritual began to unfold, as each evening at dusk groups of white men gathered at the crossroads of the county. They came with satchels of brass bullets, shotgun shells, and stoppered glass bottles of kerosene, and sticks of “Red Cross” dynamite poked out through the tops of their saddlebags. When darkness fell, the night riders set out with one goal: to stoke the terror created by the lynching of Edwards and use it to drive black people out of Forsyth County for good.

In 1907, W. E. B. Du Bois had put into words what every “colored” person in Georgia knew from experience, which was that “the police system of the South was primarily designed to control slaves. . . . And tacitly assumed that every white man was ipso facto a member of that police.” In the first decade of the twentieth century, the days when all white men had been legally empowered to pursue and arrest fugitive slaves were only fifty years in the past, and the fathers and grandfathers of many locals would have been part of such posses in the days of slavery.

So it must have seemed natural to many whites when, each night around sundown, a knock came at the door and the adult men of the family were summoned to join a group heading out toward the clusters of black cabins scattered around Forsyth—along the Chattahoochee out in Oscarville, in the shadow of Sawnee Mountain north of Cumming, and south, toward Shakerag and Big Creek. It would take months—and, in a handful of cases, years—before the in-town blacks of Cumming were finally forced out, since many lived under the protection of rich white men, in whose kitchens and dining rooms they served. Instead, it was to the homes of cotton pickers, sharecroppers, and small landowners that the night riders went first, and it was these most vulnerable families who fled in the first waves of the exodus.

Written traces of the raids are few and far between and consist mostly of vague reports of “lawlessness” after dark. Since journalists only started writing about the expulsions once the wagon trains of refugees grew too large and too numerous to ignore, it is hard to say precisely what took place on those first nights of the terror. Some of the attacks later made headlines in Atlanta (“Negroes Flee from Forsyth,” “Enraged White People Are Driving Blacks from County”), and it’s likely that similar raids had been happening since the discovery of Mae Crow’s body in early September. The night riders fired shots into front doors, threw rocks through windows, and hollered warnings that it was time for black families to “get.” But of all their methods, torches and kerosene worked best, since a fire created a blazing sign for all to see and left the victims no place to ever come back to. In mid-October, the Augusta Chronicle reported that “a score or more of homes have been burned during the past few weeks . . . and five negro churches.”

The arsonists must have been terrifying wherever they struck, but for Forsyth’s poor black farmers, the burning of churches was a true catastrophe, striking not just at the community’s spiritual home but at what Du Bois called “the social centre of Negro life.” In 1903, sitting in his Atlanta University office, just forty miles south, he had described Georgia’s rural black congregations as “the most characteristic expression of African character” in the entire community. “Take a typical church,” Du Bois wrote.

[It is] finished in Georgia pine, with a carpet, a small organ, and benches. This building is the central club-house of a community of Negroes. Various organizations meet here—the church proper, the Sunday-school, two or three insurance societies, women’s societies, secret societies, and mass meetings of various kinds. Entertainments, suppers, and lectures are held. . . . Considerable sums of money are collected and expended here, employment is found for the idle, strangers are introduced, news is disseminated and charity distributed. At the same time this social, intellectual, and economic centre is a religious centre of great power. Depravity, Sin, Redemption, Heaven, Hell, and Damnation are preached twice a Sunday after the crops are laid by.

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Faint traces of other black churches are tucked away in handwritten ledgers at the state archives at Morrow; in the collections at the University of Georgia in Athens; even in the basement of the Forsyth courthouse, where a cardboard box atop a metal filing cabinet still holds deeds for the land on which black residents once founded Mt. Fair, Shakerag, and Stoney Point—about which nothing is known but names and approximate locations. All that can be said for certain is that, again and again in the fall of 1912, white men sloshed gasoline and kerosene onto the benches and wooden floors of such rooms, then backed out into the dark, tossing lit matches as they went. All over the county, beneath the ground on which black churches stood, the soil is rich with ashes.

* * *

Mae became an object of fascination during her sickness.

In their race to outdo one another, and to further sensationalize the story, journalists had been reporting Mae Crow’s death almost from the moment she was discovered in the woods. “GIRL MURDERED BY NEGRO AT CUMMING” the front page of the Augusta Chronicle had blared on September 9th, in an article that informed readers that “the negro’s victim died at her home near Cumming tonight.” The Macon Telegraph went further, claiming that when Ernest Knox attacked Crow, he “beat her into unconsciousness and then threw her over [a] cliff.” Once a single false report of Crow’s death appeared in print, other editors felt compelled to follow suit, and a typical article in the Constitution closed by informing readers of the sad fact that “although every effort was made to save her life, [Crow] died late Monday afternoon.” By the beginning of October, interest in the story had grown so intense that the Georgian upped the ante, writing that Cumming was in an uproar over “the death of two white women at the hands of negroes.”

Meanwhile, Ellen Grice was alive and well out in Big Creek, no doubt busy with the work of running a household and a small farm with her husband, John, and keeping a low profile after all the trouble her allegations had stirred up. Mae Crow lay in her bed in Oscarville, watched and prayed over by her parents, Bud and Azzie, but still very much alive. In the first few days after she was found, Dr. John Hockenhull even told reporters “she will likely recover.”

For many locals, Mae became an object of fascination during her sickness, and at least two men were so desperate to get a glimpse of the beautiful, bedridden girl that they made a drunken pilgrimage. According to Azzie Crow, “when our darling daughter was living here at the point of death . . . one Sunday Wheeler Hill and another man came up to our house intoxicated.” Hill and his friend, Crow said,

wanted to see what the negroes had done . . . They hung around awhile, and before we knew it, they had gone to the back of the house . . . then pushed open the door and climbed up and were in the room where our precious daughter lay.

As much as they were offended by Hill’s intrusion, Bud and Azzie made it clear in a letter to the North Georgian that they were not opposed to the raids being waged in their daughter’s name and were as anxious as everyone else to be rid of “those fiends of hell, negroes.”

As September waned and as the first cold breezes rippled across the Chattahoochee, Mae grew weaker from her injuries, despite everything the doctors of the county had tried, and despite her mother’s prayers. At some point during the second week of her coma, Dr. George Brice told Bud and Azzie that their daughter had contracted pneumonia. On September 23rd, 1912—two weeks to the day from when she was first found in the woods—Mae Crow died.

* * *

All the legs on the tables, chairs, and bed had been shot off.

Mae’s funeral was held at Pleasant Grove Church, a short walk from the house where she grew up, and in the center of a whole community of Crows. According to her schoolmate Ruth Jordan, the sight of Mae’s coffin being lowered into the ground was almost more than the white people of Oscarville could bear. “After she was buried it seemed like all hell broke loose,” Jordan recalled. Soon “the night was filled with gunfire [and] burning cabins and churches,” and the Jordans could hear whites “shooting at any black they could find.”

George Jordan and his wife, Mattie, were poor sharecroppers, like most other whites in Oscarville, but all her life Ruth had heard the story of how, when her mother’s mother died at a young age, “a black woman that lived nearby . . . became a mother-figure [to Mattie], teaching her to cook, keep house, and care for the younger children.” And so, as they listened to the crack of gunshots and smelled the smoke of distant fires, George and Mattie Jordan feared for their black neighbors.

“The Union As It Was,” Harper’s Weekly, October 10, 1874. Via Wikimedia Commons.

At first light, George Jordan walked toward Garrett Cook’s place. “Pa went to check on them,” Ruth Jordan said, and he found that their house “had been shot so full of holes that all the legs on the tables, chairs, and bed had been shot off.” When George called out, Garrett and Josie Cook finally emerged, having spent the night hiding in the woods:At one point, Ruth’s father went out to check on an African American couple named Garrett and Josie Cook, who owned twenty-seven acres not far from the land George Jordan was working as a sharecropper. George told his wife that he was going out “to get news of the goings on,” but with gangs of night riders on the move, Forsyth had become dangerous even for a forty-four-year-old white farmer like Jordan. As he “walked down the road that night,” Ruth remembered, “he was drawn on by a group of armed white men [and] it scared him so bad he came home.”

Pa told this man to go back to his farm so the two of them could defend it against anyone that tried to take it from him. . . . The man replied, “George, that would just get us both killed,” and he left Forsyth County forever.

For days afterward, the Jordans could hear the sounds of the night riders each evening at dusk, and this went on “every night,” Ruth Jordan said, “until no colored was left.” Asked whether her father was ever challenged by locals for having tried to help his black neighbors, Jordan answered that to her knowledge “the subject was never again brought up by any of the whites involved.”

* * *

Certain men would go to a black person’s home with sticks tied up in a little bundle [and] leave ’em at the door.

Isabella Harris , the eight-year-old daughter of Cumming mayor Charlie Harris, also remembered that September as a terrifying time, particularly once she learned that the night riders were not “mountaineers” from outside the county but gangs of ordinary white men, well known to all.

Such mobs may have been on the other side of Du Bois’s “color line,” but they were far from strangers to the black people they terrorized in the weeks after Mae Crow’s death. When black residents like Garrett and Josie Cook woke to the sound of a rock smashing through a window or the jangle of bridles outside their door, the order to leave was usually delivered by men whose voices they had heard many times before: employers and landowners for whom they had plowed and picked cotton; merchants with whom they had traded; and white neighbors they had lived and worked with for years.

And whereas in early September, men from the church picnic had been bold enough to try to stand up to the white men pursuing Grant Smith, after the lynching, and in the wake of Mae Crow’s death, it didn’t take much to “run off” the few black residents still in the county. Joel Whitt, a local white man who was twenty-three in 1912, said that in the beginning, the night riders used gunfire and torches, just as Ruth Jordan remembered. But later, Whitt recalled, “Certain men would go to a black person’s home with sticks tied up in a little bundle [and] leave ’em at the door.” By late October, if you made such a thing and placed it outside the cabin of some last, proud black farmer, by sunup he and his whole family would be gone.

Even as refugees flooded into neighboring counties, many residents bristled at criticism of Forsyth and offered a simple explanation for the “lawlessness” that was making headlines all over the state. A “violent element” had come from outside, they told reporters, and “but very few residents . . . participate in the demonstrations.” Asked about the makeup of the lynch party that had dragged Rob Edwards out of the county jail, one Cumming man claimed that “the members of the mob live in the hill country” north of Forsyth and came “from adjoining counties and the mountains.”

During the century that followed, generations of whites have continued to blame Forsyth’s recurring episodes of racial violence on “outsiders,” like when, in 1987, County Commissioner David Gilbert claimed that the men who’d attacked African American peace marchers were all from outside the county—despite the fact that seven of the eight men arrested had Forsyth addresses. “The real thing that upsets me,” Gilbert told reporters, “is that this whole thing was sprung by outsiders. It’s just a bunch of outsiders trying to start trouble in Forsyth County.”

The further one gets from 1912, the more frequently whites have tried to deflect attention away from the county’s long history of bigotry by pointing to a specific group: the Ku Klux Klan. It’s easy to understand the appeal of such an argument, since it exonerates the ordinary “people of the county” from wrongdoing during the expulsions and implies that they themselves were the victims of an invasion by hooded, cross-burning white supremacists. The only trouble is that in the America of 1912, there was no such thing as the KKK.

* * *

The ‘modern’ version of the Klan came to life not in the woods and fields of the rural South but in Hollywood.

When people hear of that group today, the organization that comes to mind is actually the second incarnation of the Klan—the first having been stamped out in 1871 after the passage of the “Ku Klux Klan Act,” which enabled victims of racial violence to sue in federal court and gave President Ulysses S. Grant the right to suspend habeas corpus in pursuit of racial terrorists. Empowered by Congress to suppress Klan activity during Reconstruction, the U.S. Justice Department arrested and convicted many of the group’s earliest, most violent members. As a result, the Klan’s first grand wizard, former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, was already calling for the organization to disband in the early 1870s, and by 1872 federal prosecutions had rendered the original KKK all but defunct.

For more than forty years after those original prosecutions, there was no Ku Klux Klan as we now know it. And when it was reborn, the “modern” version of the Klan came to life not in the woods and fields of the rural South but in Hollywood, where in 1915 D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation portrayed costumed “white knights” as the defenders of white womanhood and the saviors of an idealized antebellum world. Griffith found inspiration for his night riders not only in the Reconstruction-era “Ku Kluxers,” but also in the romances of Sir Walter Scott, whose heroic highlanders burned crosses to summon their fellow clansmen to battle.

Via Wikimedia Commons.

Griffith’s groundbreaking motion picture, based on Thomas Dixon Jr.’s play The Clansman, was pure fantasy, but millions of white moviegoers saw it as “history written with lighting,” as President Woodrow Wilson was famously—and apocryphally—said to have remarked when the film was screened at the White House. As Birth of a Nation took the country by storm, life began to imitate art, and when it opened at the Fox Theater in Atlanta in 1915, the streets around the movie house filled with men dressed up in sheets and pointy hoods, many riding horses draped in white cloth, like the heroes of the film. Once inside, moviegoers were mesmerized by a story of chaste white women being stalked by savage black rapists. The Birth of a Nation lit up movie houses with the most vivid fantasy of southern whites: a black rebellion, which in Griffith’s telling was both political and sexual. As the film’s mulatto villain Silas Lynch tells one of his white victims, gesturing out the window at rampaging black soldiers, “See! My people fill the streets. With them I will build a Black Empire and you as a Queen will sit by my side!”

But given that in 1912 Griffith’s film, and the birth of the second-wave Klan, still lay three years in the future, it is simply impossible that the black people of Forsyth were “run out” by gangs of white-sheeted Ku Kluxers. Groups of mounted men did appear out of the darkness and terrorize black families in 1912, but they were not robed “white knights,” and they did not wear pointy white hoods. Instead, Forsyth’s gangs of night riders were farmers and field hands, blacksmiths and store clerks, and, in all likelihood, even a few elected officials like Bill Reid. The whites of Forsyth didn’t need klaverns, kleagles, and fiery crosses to organize a lynching in the fall of 1912. All it took back then, as Ruth Jordan said, was “people of the county.”

If the mobs were not made up of masked Klansmen, just well-known local men “with their horrible faces,” it is natural to wonder how those ordinary people first coalesced into gangs of night riders. How, that is, did a bunch of farmers decide to set fire to churches led by respected men like Levi Greenlee Jr. and Byrd Oliver, and to train the beads of their shotguns on the houses of peaceful landowners like Joseph and Eliza Kellogg? How did they summon the nerve to threaten the cooks and maids of even the wealthiest, most powerful whites in Cumming? Given that it required an organized effort, kept up not just over months but years, and given just how much will it took to sustain the racial ban for generations—from what source did all that energy come, and in what epic drama did these people think they were at last taking part?

* * *

The white people of Forsyth knew in their bones that such a thing was possible.

The land now known as Forsyth County, Georgia, was once home to Cherokee people, who had lived there for centuries when James Oglethorpe and the first Georgia colonists arrived from England in 1733. As whites settlers pushed farther and farther west during the late eighteenth century, the line separating native land from United States territory was redrawn again and again, as one treaty after another was broken. By the early nineteenth century, the native people of Georgia were confined to an area in the northwest corner of the state known as the Cherokee Territory, which included present-day Forsyth.

The federal government had long sought to “civilize” the Cherokee, and in the first decades of the 1800s the native people of north Georgia were still hoping to live in peace with their new white neighbors. Around 1809, a Cherokee man named Sequoyah began developing the first written alphabet for his people’s language, and by the 1820s the Cherokee settlements in northwestern Georgia included Cherokee-built schoolhouses, Cherokee-owned sawmills and blacksmith shops, and vibrant cultural institutions like a tribal newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix. Hollywood may have filled white imaginations with visions of Indians living in tepees and hunting with bows and arrows, but by the late 1820s many Cherokee people in the Georgia foothills had lived alongside their white neighbors for years and were part of a racially diverse and increasingly integrated frontier community.

When gold was discovered at Dahlonega in 1828, however, it created a renewed push into the Cherokee Territory. Benjamin Parks, said to have found the very first gold nugget while out deer hunting, told the Atlanta Constitution that “once news got abroad” that there was gold in the Georgia hills,

there was such excitement as you never saw. It seemed within a few days as if the whole world must have heard of it, for men came from every state. . . . They came afoot, on horseback and in wagons, acting more like crazy men than anything else.

Even as they tried to tolerate all these encroachments into the Territory, the Cherokee were disenfranchised in the courts, and they had no legal recourse even when whites stole from them in broad daylight. As the editor of the Cherokee Phoenix put it in 1829,

Our [white] neighbors who regard no law, or pay no respect to the laws of humanity, are now reaping a plentiful harvest by the law of Georgia, which declares that no Indian shall be a party in any court created by the laws or constitution of that state. These neighbors come over the line [between Georgia and the Territory], and take the cattle belonging to the Cherokees. The Cherokees go in pursuit of their property, but all that they can effect is, to see their cattle snugly kept in the lots of these robbers. We are an abused people. [Even] if we can receive no redress, we can feel deeply the injustice done to our rights.

White prospectors soon moved from rustling cattle to stealing whole Cherokee farms—emboldened by the fact that bogus claims could receive an official stamp of approval from state land agents. After the U.S. Congress passed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, Georgia officials began planning for the future of the Cherokee Territory, anticipating a day when government troops would force all native people west of the Mississippi. In 1832, two land lotteries were held to redistribute former Cherokee lands to Georgia’s white settlers.

“These Cherokee Indians accompanied Sir Alexander Coming to England,” 1730. Via Wikimedia Commons.

In theory, those who drew land lots were allowed to take possession only if the property was unoccupied, but in reality, countless whites interpreted their winning tickets as a license to drive off Cherokee residents, including many who owned prosperous farms. In May of 1833, the editors of the Phoenix told how

an industrious Indian had by his steady habits improved his premises to be of considerable value, when it was drawn by one of the lottery gamblers in Georgia. The fortunate holder of the ticket applied to the governor for a [land] grant, which was given him on his assurance that there was no Indian occupant on it. The fortunate drawer . . . loaded his pistols, entered the possession of Ootawlunsta, pointing one [pistol] at him, and drove the innocent Cherokee from his well-cultivated field. . . . The Cherokee are doomed to suffer.

With such white “pioneers” growing more and more bold, and with Georgia officials unwilling to comply with two separate Supreme Court decisions upholding the Cherokee people’s rights as a sovereign nation, the stage was set for the Treaty of New Echota. Signed in 1835 by a small faction of the Cherokee—and against the wishes of Chief John Ross—the treaty ceded the entire Cherokee Territory to the United States, in exchange for reservation land in Oklahoma. In the wake of New Echota, starting in the spring of 1838, the Cherokee people of north Georgia were rounded up by state militiamen and confined in makeshift pens, where they waited to start the forced march west. One of the largest Cherokee removal forts, Fort Campbell, was located in present-day Forsyth.

It was at Fort Campbell that Cumming mayor Charlie Harris’s grandfather Aaron Smith served under General Winfield Scott, commander of the Cherokee removals, in a unit known as the Georgia Guard. The guardsmen were notoriously cruel. Among them were many men who had come to north Georgia in search of gold and many who expected to personally profit from the removal of the Cherokee.

Charlie Harris grew up hearing tales of how his grandfather had once driven Cherokee families from their homes at gunpoint. According to Harris’s son David, Aaron Smith and other state militiamen spent the fall of 1838 deep in the pine forests of Forsyth, hunting down the last of the Cherokee holdouts. Smith was ordered to “search out . . . the pitiful and old Indians hiding and starving in the woods . . . who would not go willingly to the concentration camps for removal.” John G. Burnett, an army private who also served during the Cherokee removals, said that in 1838 he witnessed “the execution of the most brutal order in the History of American Warfare. . . . I saw them loaded like cattle or sheep into six hundred and forty-five wagons and started toward the West. The trail of the exiles was a trail of death.”

In 1839, when the last of north Georgia’s Cherokee people set out on the eight-hundred-mile march to Oklahoma, the newly depopulated area of the Cherokee Territory was overrun by white land speculators, gold prospectors, lawyers, and farmers, who had either won their forty-acre lots in the 1832 land lottery or bought winning tickets from others.

This is the real origin story of Forsyth. While descendants of the county’s oldest families have long celebrated their “pioneer” ancestors, the truth is that early white settlers pushed relentlessly into the Cherokee Territory over the objections of tribal leaders and the U.S. Supreme Court—and found the land “empty” only after military troops rounded up sixteen thousand native people, imprisoned them in removal forts, and then drove the Cherokee out of Georgia like a herd of livestock.

When a new kind of “race trouble” broke out in 1912, Forsyth was a place that had already witnessed the rapid expulsion of an entire people, and many residents, like Charlie Harris, had heard firsthand accounts from relatives who’d taken part in the Cherokee removals. So whenever someone first suggested that blacks in the county should not only be punished for the murder of Mae Crow but driven out of the county forever, the white people of Forsyth knew in their bones that such a thing was possible. After all, many families owed their land and their livelihoods to exactly such a racial cleansing in the 1830s.

* * *

Reprinted from Blood at the Root by Patrick Phillips. Copyright © 2016 by Patrick Phillips. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Keith Houston | The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time | W. W. Norton & Company | August 2016 | 18 minutes (4,720 words)

Below is an excerpt from The Book, by Keith Houston. This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

* * *

Never get involved in a land war in Asia.

To an ancient Egyptian of the third century BCE, the rolls of papyrus on which the country recorded its history, art, and daily business would have been of all-consuming importance. Scrolls made from papyrus were the medium for hundreds of thousands of books lodged at Alexandria’s wondrous library, and blank papyrus sheets were one of the chief exports to Egypt’s friends, allies, and trading partners across the Mediterranean. But papyrus’s 3,000-year monopoly was about to come under threat. Invented by Egypt’s upstart Hellenic neighbors and made from animal hides at great cost in sweat and blood, parchment was smooth, springy, and resilient where papyrus was rough, brittle, and prone to fraying. Its rise at papyrus’s expense, however, had little to do with the ergonomics of its use or the economics of its manufacture and everything to do with ambitious pharaohs who ignored the cardinal rule of military leadership: never get involved in a land war in Asia.

*

The Pergamenes’ book-collecting mania was so notorious that citizens of the nearby town of Scepsis, having inherited Aristotle’s library…, took the extraordinary step of burying it.

The invention of parchment is traditionally ascribed to King Eumenes II of Pergamon, ruler from 197 to 159 BCE of a Greek city-state located in what is now northwestern Turkey. Pergamon comprised only the city itself and a few local towns when Eumenes was crowned as king, but at his death thirty-eight years later it had been transformed into a political, martial, and cultural powerhouse. Chief among his achievements was the founding of a great library to rival that of Alexandria, and Eumenes’s institution boasted some 200,000 volumes at its peak. The Pergamenes’ book-collecting mania was so notorious that citizens of the nearby town of Scepsis, having inherited Aristotle’s library from one of the late philosopher’s students, took the extraordinary step of burying its literary treasure to stop it falling into the hands of their acquisitive neighbors. Nor did Eumenes stop at books: in a bid to assemble a staff worthy of his new library he approached Aristophanes, the chief librarian at Alexandria, to offer him a job. The Egyptian king Ptolemy clapped the librarian in irons to ensure his continued loyalty.

The contemporary story of the invention of parchment in Pergamon, as related by Pliny in his compendious but erratic Natural History, is a simple one. Writing in the first century CE, Pliny says that King Ptolemy of Egypt—the same Ptolemy, presumably, whom Eumenes had goaded with his importunate headhunting—was so incensed by the rise of Pergamon’s library that he banned exports of the papyrus on which it depended. Eumenes responded to the embargo by directing his subjects to find an alternative writing surface; thus, parchment was invented, and Eumenes got the credit.

Pliny’s geopolitical parable is not exactly bursting with detail. Dating his story is difficult: exactly which Ptolemy it was (and there were many) who forbade the export of papyrus is not clear, nor was it specified whether it was Eumenes II or his namesake who had invented parchment. And if Pliny’s knowledge of royal family trees was shaky, his grasp of history was worse. Writing some five centuries earlier, the Greek writer Herodotus, dubbed the “Father of History” and who would have been required reading for any later scholar, had described how Greeks of the Ionian tribe wrote their books on animal skins when papyrus was scarce. But to hear Pliny tell it, parchment was the spontaneous product of a bibliographic spat—Eumenes’s retort to Ptolemy’s library envy—that had taken place in more recent, civilized times. Parchment’s origins were a good deal more ancient, and its road to prominence much bloodier, than Pliny knew.

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As Herodotus had noted back in the fifth century BCE, people of the ancient world had been writing on animal skins long before the tussle between Eumenes and Ptolemy, but the practice was older still. Egyptian texts dated to between 2550 and 2450 BCE mention the use of leather as a writing surface, and the Cairo Museum possesses a fragment of a leather document written shortly after that. A millennium later, the Egyptian “Book of the Dead,” a collection of incantations entombed with the dead to help them navigate the afterlife, was commonly written on durable animal skins instead of papyrus. The Sumerians were no strangers to the use of animal skins either; a cuneiform tablet dated to 800 BCE describes how pelts were steeped in baths of flour, beer, and “first quality” wine before being pressed with alum (a mineral salt that causes animal tissues to contract), oak galls (nutlike tree growths caused by burrowing wasp larvae), and “the best fat of a pure ox.” A later account of the preparation of goatskin, found in Carchemish in the kingdom of the Hittites (now on the border between Turkey and Syria), is less insistent on fine ingredients. In this recipe, skins were to be soaked in goat’s milk and flour, rubbed with oil and cow fat, and finally treated with alum soaked in grape juice and oak galls.

Both recipes describe more or less the same process. First, soaking a pelt in a frothing, enzyme-rich bath of fermenting liquor softens it up, loosens its hairs, and, by means of rising bubbles of carbon dioxide, cleans it. Once the hair has been pushed off by hand or scraped off with a knife, the skin is treated with astringent tannic acids (such as those in alum and oak galls) to “tan” the skin, tightening it up and increasing its durability. The skins of a huge variety of animals were processed according to this basic recipe, and exotic beasts such as lions, leopards, hippos, and hyenas posthumously rubbed shoulders in the tannery with domesticated species such as cattle, sheep, pigs, and donkeys.

The result of all this soaking, scraping, and tanning, however, was not parchment but leather. Tough, flexible, and water resistant, leather was a surprisingly accommodating writing surface, capable of being worked to any desired smoothness and absorbing ink well, but it lacked the rigidity, delicacy, and portability that made papyrus an ideal vehicle for writing. And though the Pergamenes were not the first people to write on leather, they may have discovered the one thing that transforms soft, pliable hide into taut, smooth parchment.

* * *

The name of this conflict, the so-called Sixth Syrian War, hardly resounds through history.

Pergamon’s invention might never have left the land of its birth were it not for the war that convulsed Egypt at the midpoint of Eumenes’s reign. In 173 BCE, Rome was growing apprehensive about a “cloud in the east”—the predatory Greek king Antiochus IV, head of the Seleucid dynasty, uncle of Egypt’s Ptolemy VI Philometor, and ruler of a swath of the ancient world that stretched from the Aegean Sea in the west to the Gulf of Oman in the east. Worried that Antiochus planned to annex his nephew’s kingdom, Rome sent a delegation to Philometor at Alexandria under cover of paying tribute to the young king. The envoys’ real mission was to monitor the increasingly febrile atmosphere in the region.

It was not long before the situation deteriorated. Philometor, who had ruled with his mother until her death in 176 BCE (his name meant “he who loves his mother”), had fallen under the influence of ambitious advisers and in 170 BCE, still only a teenager, he was persuaded to invade a disputed part of the Seleucid Empire known as Coele-Syria.

The invasion was a disaster.

Forewarned, Antiochus defeated the invading Egyptian army and promptly counterattacked. Within a year he had occupied Egypt and coerced Ptolemy into declaring Antiochus as his “protector,” reducing the pharaoh to little more than a puppet king. Only Alexandria eluded Antiochus’s grasp: besieged and running out of food, its citizens nevertheless proclaimed Philometor’s younger brother—Ptolemy VIII Euergetes,^* or “benefactor”—to be Egypt’s rightful ruler. With control of Egypt’s monarch snatched away, the frustrated Antiochus released Philometor and withdrew, calculating that an Egypt divided between two feuding kings would be easier to subdue.

The inscription ends “Fritz Pyrmetter” (“Fritz Parchment Maker”). Via Wikimedia Commons.

The Ptolemies did not oblige. Philometor and Euergetes reconciled to face their uncle together. Exasperated, in 168 BCE Antiochus invaded a second time, sweeping aside the remnants of Egyptian opposition as he marched directly to Alexandria. He was drawn up short four miles from the city by a group of men led by a Roman senator: this was Gaius Popilius Laenas, a notoriously short-tempered troubleshooter dispatched by the Senate in response to the Ptolemies’ pleas for help. As the invading general approached the Roman deputation with his arm outstretched in greeting, Popilius pressed into Antiochus’s hand a tablet bearing the Senate’s ultimatum: leave Egypt or suffer the consequences. Before the stunned Antiochus could reply, Popilius drew a circle in the sand around him with his staff and, essentially, dared the conqueror to cross the line. “Before you step out of that circle,” Popilius said, “give me a reply to lay before the senate.”

Mulling Popilius’s demand, and aware of the might of the state on whose behalf it had been issued, Antiochus eventually offered the meek reply, “I will do what the senate thinks right.” Popilius accepted his hand in friendship. The Seleucid king withdrew his forces from Egypt, the Ptolemies were restored to power, and the crisis was averted.

The name of this conflict, the so-called Sixth Syrian War, hardly resounds through history. The Ptolemies and Seleucids had been quarreling over Coele-Syria for a hundred years, and after five earlier conflicts fought by the same dynasties over the same parcel of land, a sixth must have paled into irrelevance. If Antiochus’s invasion is mentioned at all outside of academic circles, it is usually because of Popilius’s brazen treatment of the invader: according to the author William Safire, the circle that Popilius drew in the desert outside Alexandria has a decent claim to being the origin of the phrase “a line in the sand.” (Its main competitor is the story of William B. Travis, lieutenant colonel at the Alamo, who drew a line in the sand with his sabre and said to his men, “Those prepared to die for freedom’s cause, come across to me.”)

For ancient scribes and scholars, however, the Sixth Syrian War was a watershed. Egypt’s economy was wrecked, with papyrus exports driven down and eventually halted altogether, and the literate societies of the ancient world suffered accordingly. Unexpectedly, though, Pergamon’s Eumenes II, he of the renowned library, seemed to have the papyrus shortage solved almost before it arose.

In 168 and 167 BCE, as the war in Egypt came to a close, Eumenes’s brother Attalus was in Rome on diplomatic business. Among the Pergamene delegation was Crates of Mallus, chief scholar at Pergamon’s library, who craved the same approval that the Romans accorded to Aristarchus, his rival at the Library of Alexandria. (Aristarchus had succeeded Aristophanes, the jailbird librarian.) Unfortunately, Crates’s visit did not begin well: he fell into an open sewer on the city’s Palatine Hill and broke his leg in the process. The librarian made the most of his forced convalescence by delivering lectures to rapt Roman audiences, sparking a renewed interest in grammar and literary criticism as he did so. Though the content of his talks has been lost, the medium on which they were written has not: Crates’s books were made of parchment, in the Pergamene fashion, and a Rome starved of papyrus was eager to learn more about this promising replacement. Ever ready to curry favor with his hosts, Crates ordered a shipment to be brought to Rome, and so parchment began its relentless spread across the ancient world.

* * *

A skin split into two layers yields kelaf (flesh side) and duxustus (hair side) parchment, which are suitable for tefillin and mezuzah respectively.

What, then, elevated the membrana, or “skin,” with which Crates dazzled Rome above the leather used in centuries past? Today, parchment is often described as untanned leather, but this manages to be an oversimplification and an oxymoron at the same time. An untanned skin is rawhide, not leather; not to mention early parchment often was tanned to some degree by the vegetable acids in its preparation baths. But to quibble over this definition misses the point. The innovation that distinguished parchment from leather was not chemical, but mechanical.

Having soaked and unhaired a skin, the Pergamenes discovered that by stretching it on a frame and allowing it to dry before cutting it down, the skin could be made to maintain its tautness and resilience. In mammals the dermis, the middle layer of skin from which leather and parchment are made, is composed of a network of minute collagen fibers. As an unhaired skin soaks in its preparation vat, these fibers absorb and become saturated with the bath’s liquid, and this, in turn, mingles with the skin’s own secretions to suffuse it with a sticky, adhesive fluid. Stretching the skin causes some of its fibers to break while others are pulled tight, aligning with the plane of the skin, and as the realigned fibers dry out they cause the skin to set in place. (Tanning, by contrast, chemically bonds the collagen fibers together, actively preventing the skin from stretching. The Pergamenes are thought to have modified the ingredients of their preparation baths to minimize this effect.)

The result of this combined stretching and drying process is a taut, flexible material. Whereas leather is soft and limp, a sheet of parchment flexed gently across its surface readily springs back to its original shape and will hold a crease if folded more firmly. More opaque than papyrus, and without the fibrous ridges that made it difficult to write on both sides of a sheet, parchment’s physical qualities, the Pergamenes found, made it an almost perfect substrate for writing. Moreover, parchment was stronger than papyrus: a skin gashed by a careless tanner’s knife could be safely sewn up, while loose leafs of parchment could be pierced with an awl and tied together without danger of tearing—a property that would be instrumental in shaping the book as we know it.

Tough as it is, parchment is not indestructible. Unlike leather, parchment “breathes,” absorbing or releasing moisture to match its environment, and overly damp or dry conditions can eventually damage parchment or its contents. Ink and illustrations may flake off a damp sheet of parchment; it may “cockle,” or wrinkle, and lose its stiffness; and it becomes prey to bacteria and mold that can discolor and eventually eat through the parchment entirely. A dry sheet of parchment, on the other hand, will wrinkle, grow brittle, and eventually crack. Fortunately, the temperate climate of Europe, where parchment found greatest use, is relatively benign. Long periods of excessive humidity are rare enough to prevent parchment from becoming too damp, and though parchment can dry out, it requires years in an arid environment—again, a rarity in continental Europe—for it to do so. Parchment is so resistant to dryness, in fact, that it can be heated to 480 degrees Fahrenheit (approximately 250 degrees Celsius) before it begins to shrink and brown. If heated while wet, however, a temperature of only 100 degrees (around 40 Celsius) will shrink a sheet of parchment like a sock left in a hot wash.

Pergamentmacher (Parchment Maker). Via Wikimedia Commons.

In spite of these shortcomings, parchment was an undeniably superior writing material—smooth under a pen’s nib, long-lived, and resistant to rough handling. It was perfectly equipped to replace papyrus, in other words, and that is precisely what it did as it was assimilated in turn by each new culture that took it up. The Jewish people of what became modern-day ancient Israel, for instance, were among the earliest and most enthusiastic adopters of parchment, as the Dead Sea Scrolls attest. Of the hundreds of documents and fragments found in 1946 in caves near the Dead Sea, more than 90 percent are written on parchment; dated to between 200 BCE and 50–70 CE, the scrolls show how rapidly parchment overtook its Egyptian rival. Even so, ancient Jewish law was strict in its treatment of this new writing material. The tanneries that processed skins, and which often used noisome horse dung to unhair pelts, had to be sited out of town and downwind of prevailing northwesterlies, with one rabbi of special olfactory sensitivity declaring a minimum safe distance of fifty cubits, or seventy-five feet, from the town wall. For ritual documents, only the skins of “clean” animals would do: oxen, sheep, goats, and deer were acceptable, but camels, hares, pigs, and “rock badgers,” or hyrax, were not.

Parchment became integral to Jewish tradition. The Mishneh Torah, a fourteen-volume companion to the Torah composed in the twelfth century by Rabbi Moses Maimonides, demands specific forms of parchment for different texts. The Torah, Maimonides wrote, is to be written only upon gewil, or whole parchment, and then only on its hair side. A skin split into two layers yields kelaf (flesh side) and duxustus (hair side) parchment, which are suitable for tefillin (scrolls contained in small boxes worn on the head and left arm) and mezuzah (scrolls placed on doorposts) respectively. In the cases of kelaf and duxustus, only the inner surfaces exposed when the parchment is split are suitable for writing. Skins prepared by non-Israelites or Samaritans were prohibited.

Having listed in exhaustive detail the minutiae that governed the ritual use of parchment, Maimonides was considerably more vague as to its manufacture. The few lines the Mishneh Torah devotes to the subject are puzzling, and describe a process that would produce a material more akin to leather than parchment. The crucial stretching process is omitted (though parchment found among the Dead Sea Scrolls does show signs of stretching, rolling, or pressing), and skins are to be finished with “gall-wood or similar materials which contract the pores of the hide,” which sounds suspiciously like tanning.

* * *

Any pontiff would surely have recalled the words of Revelations 2 in which Pergamon is branded a ‘seat of Satan.’

Christianity embraced parchment as eagerly as had its elder sibling, and the spread of the new religion throughout the Western world mirrored the ongoing shift in writing materials. By the fifth century CE, more Christian books were written on parchment than papyrus, and there were more Christian books than any other kind. Oddly enough, the Vatican continued to issue papal edicts, or “bulls,” on papyrus until 1022, during the papacy of Benedict VIII. Catholic conservatism may be to blame, but then any pontiff would surely have recalled the words of Revelations 2 in which Pergamon is branded a “seat of Satan.” Perhaps Benedict VIII was the first pope who could suppress a reflexive shiver when setting quill to the pergamena charta, or “Pergamene paper,” that had long been used for more mundane Christian manuscripts.

Like Rabbi Maimonides, medieval Christian writers recorded little interest in how one of the most basic components of their craft was made, and barely a word was written about parchment’s manufacture as it took its place as Europe’s most important writing material. This indifferent silence was finally broken by a single page tucked away at the back of a fourteenth-century reference book. Following the fashion of its time, this untitled volume was made up of choice extracts from many different works, bound together at its owner’s instruction. Now owned by the British Library, today the book goes by its catalogue number (Harley MS 3915, to be precise) and is most often cited for containing a sizeable chunk of a reference work called De diversis artibus (The Various Arts), a twelfth-century arts-and-crafts manual attributed to a monk who called himself Theophilus. But though Theophilus holds forth on sundry subjects such as paint mixing, glass blowing, and bookbinding, parchment making is not among them: the page that begins ad faciendas cartas de pellibus caprinis more bononiense (on the Bolognese art of making paper from goatskins) is an unattributed orphan. It is worth quoting in its entirety:

Take goatskins and stand them in water for a day and a night. Take them and wash them until the water runs clear. Take an entirely new bath and place therein old lime and water, mixing well together to form a thick cloudy liquor. Place the skins in this, folding them on the flesh side. Move them with a pole two or three times each day, leaving them for eight days (and twice as long in winter). Next you must withdraw the skins and unhair them. Pour off the contents of the bath and repeat the process using the same quantities, placing the skins in the lime liquor and moving them once each day over eight days as before. Then take them out and wash them well until the water runs quite clean. Place them in another bath with clean water and leave them for two days. Then take them out, attach the cords and tie them to the circular frame. Dry, then shave them with a sharp knife after which leave for two days out of the sun. Moisten with water and rub the flesh side with powdered pumice. After two days wet it again by sprinkling with a little water and fully clean the flesh side with pumice so as to make it quite wet again. Then tighten up the cords, equalise the tension so that the sheet will become permanent. Once the sheets are dry, nothing further remains to be done.

This is a craft transformed. Gone are the ambiguities of ancient soak-scrape-and-stretch methods, now refined into a rigorous multistep program with detail aplenty. Goatskin is explicitly mentioned, hinting at the fact that goats and sheep were more plentiful than cattle, and easier to raise. The fermenting vegetable and animal matter once used to unhair skins has given way to lime, a potent alkaline mineral that burns unprotected skin, and an additional soaking step has been added so that unhaired skins are thoroughly softened. And lastly, an extra-smooth writing surface is achieved by means of an elaborate series of wetting, drying, shaving, and polishing operations.

The driving force behind these advances was the emergence of parchment making as an industry in its own right. Where once a monastery would have raised its own cattle and made parchment from their skins, by the thirteenth century the needs of bookmaking monks were being met by a new breed of professional parchmenters. As the parchment-making industry matured it acquired the inevitable trade jargon: pelts were tied to drying frames, or “herses,” by wrapping cords around small pebbles called “pippins” pressed into the skin; shaving of the skin was carried out with a curved, moon-shaped knife, or lunellarium, without sharp junctions that might tear the skin; and finished parchment was often “pounced”—polished with powdered pumice, or porous volcanic rock—to improve its color and texture.

Der Pergamenter. (The Parchment Maker.) Via Wikimedia Commons.

Having mastered production of the basic artifact, a skilled parchmenter could branch out into niche varieties and treatments. Parchment was sometimes whitened with liquid chalk in lieu of pouncing, while concoctions made from such things as lime, egg whites, flour, and metal salts were applied to regulate the parchment’s moisture content and so stave off environmental damage. Transparent parchment, which was variously used for tracing, windowpanes, and even magnifying glasses, was made by treating the skin with substances such as rotten egg whites, gum arabic (an adhesive made from the sap of the acacia tree), or animal glue, and by deliberately under-tightening the skin on its herse. Richly colored purple parchment, so dark that it demanded the use of reflective gold or silver ink, could be made with dye derived from sea snails called murex.

Parchment’s name evolved along with advancements in its manufacture. For hundreds of years the Romans called it membrana, or “skin,” but by the third century a new term had come into vogue, and parchment was referred to as pergamena charta, or “Pergamene paper.” In time, this led to the Old French pergamin, parcemin, and perchemin, and later a whole host of Middle English variants such as parchemeyn, perchmene, parchemynt, and pairchment. The French connection also gave rise to a related term: whereas “parchment” carried connotations of the sheep and goats most commonly farmed in the land of its origin, “vellum,” from the Old French vel, or “calf,” suggested calfskin instead. Calfskin parchment was slightly rougher in texture, making it well suited for painting, and leaves of it were sometimes inserted into sheepskin parchment books where illustrations were required. The distinction between parchment and vellum, however, has always been an uncertain one, and today “vellum” is used to mean any especially fine parchment regardless of the animal from which it was made.

* * *

With its donor animal unsullied by life outside the womb… uterine vellum was prized by the writers of magical charms.

Confronted with an ivory sheet of taut, smooth vellum, it is easy to forget its origins in the flesh. Pens old and new glide effortlessly across it, and parchment invests even a humble rollerball pen with luxury and authority. Whereas an absorbent sheet of paper wicks away ink and blurs lines, the water-based ink found in most modern pens huddles into discrete lines and dots under its own surface tension and dries to a glossy shine atop parchment’s impermeable surface. As a writing material—and in stark contrast to papyrus, at least in its modern form—parchment is hard to beat.

For all its preternatural smoothness and seductive appearance, though, parchment cannot escape its provenance. Whether it was made yesterday or a thousand years ago, a sheet of parchment is the end product of a bloody, protracted, and very physical process that begins with the death of a calf, lamb, or kid, and proceeds thereafter through a series of grimly anatomical steps until parchment emerges at the other end. Like laws and sausages, if you love parchment it is perhaps best not to see it being made.

For the morbidly curious, hints of parchment’s provenance are not difficult to see. Tiny hairs still cling to the surface of many a sheet of parchment, and holding it up to the light reveals the delicate tracery of veins—which, if the animal was not properly bled upon its slaughter, are darker and more obvious. Even the best vellum, meticulously scraped and polished so that hair and flesh sides are nigh indistinguishable, cannot obscure its source material: in an ironic reversal of the shape a skin takes while attached to its erstwhile inhabitant, a sheet of parchment left to its own devices will curl toward its less elastic hair side. More unsettling still than these visible reminders, however, is the means by which a very specific form of parchment, called “virgin” vellum, is produced.

Virgin vellum was parchment of the very highest quality, and parchmenters were willing to go to some lengths to make it. It has long been known that the best parchment comes from the skins of the youngest animals, and there is archaeological evidence—specifically, animal bones excavated in the “heel” of Italy—that the proportion of cattle slaughtered at less than twelve months of age grew steadily in line with parchment production. Not only was the skin less likely to be blemished by insect bites, scars, and the like, but the thinner skins of younger animals were easier to work. It follows that if the best parchment is made from the youngest animals, then vellum made from aborted or stillborn calves and lambs must be best of all. Known less euphemistically as “uterine” or “abortive” vellum, this miraculous material was sought after not only for its qualities as a writing surface but also for its unimpeachable purity, with its donor animal unsullied by life outside the womb. For this reason uterine vellum was prized by the writers of magical charms and grimoires (written with the left, or sinister, hand); ultimately, this association with the occult was so strong that the production of uterine vellum was outlawed in some medieval Italian cities.

*

This, then, is parchment: the pale, virginal product of a bloody manufacturing process; a delicate writing surface that can withstand desert heat and European chill for centuries or even millennia; the medium upon which ancient and medieval writers set down the most important religious, literary, and scientific tracts of their times. Write with a good pen on a piece of parchment and you may wish you never had to go back to paper again.

* * *

^{*Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed a Ptolemy VII–shaped hole in proceedings. This unhappy scion of the Ptolemaic dynasty is thought to have been Ptolemy Philometor’s son, born long after the war with Antiochus. Ptolemy VII succeeded his father for less than two months before his uncle, Ptolemy Euergetes, had him put to death.↩}

* * *

Reprinted from The Book by Keith Houston. Copyright © 2016 by Keith Houston. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

We asked our contributors to tell us about a few books they felt deserved more recognition in 2016. Here they are.

* * *

Christine Hyung-Oak Lee
A writer whose memoir, Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember, is due from Ecco/Harper Collins in February.

Him, Me, Muhammad Ali (Randa Jarrar, Sarabande Books)

These are stories that don’t compromise—that stand their ground and say come here, because I won’t come to you. And that’s the most valuable thing to read—to go somewhere other than where you are. The characters are dark and twisty; she’s an Arab American Roald Dahl—the world they inhabit likewise whimsical yet treacherous. Her lively staccato use of language is the perfect foil to this darkness, keeping the reader suspended and engaged throughout. It never plods. Never holds your hand to the fire for longer than a few seconds at a time. The title story, “Him, Me, Muhammad Ali,” is one of the strongest in the collection, interweaving ancestry and tradition with contemporary conflict. There’s not a minaret in sight. Not even on the cover.

The story, “A Sailor,” dissects a marriage. A husband refuses to become angry with his wife for having had an affair. The following excerpt shows you what Jarrar’s writing is like. If you don’t like curse words, this isn’t for you. I like curse words done well. Jarrar does them well:

“She fucks a Sailor, a Turkish sailor, the summer she spends in Istanbul. When she comes home to Wisconsin, it takes her three days to come clean about it to her husband.

“He says this doesn’t bother him, and she tells him that it bothers her that it doesn’t bother him. He asks if she prefers him to be the kind of man who is bothered by fleeting moments, and she tells him that yes, she prefers that he be that kind of man. He tells her he thinks she married him because he is precisely the kind of man who doesn’t dwell on fleeting moments, because he is the kind of man who does not hold a grudge. She tells him that holding a grudge and working up some anger about one’s wife fucking a sailor is not the same thing. He agrees that holding a grudge isn’t the same as working up some anger about one’s wife fucking a sailor, but he adds, one’s wife, specifically his own, would never leave him for a sailor, and not a Turkish sailor. In fact, he says, she did not leave him for the Turkish sailor. She is here. So why should he be angry?”

Night Sky With Exit Wounds (Ocean Vuong, Copper Canyon Press)

Poetry is often under-recognized—and while Ocean Vuong’s has been recognized by Whiting, poetry needs every opportunity to be read. So I’m laying it down here. This is the one to read. Every poem beats with exigency and passion, and his work is complicated—spanning history and time and blood and heartbreak and hope. And yet there is meaningful silence in the words, too—gaps and pauses in the line breaks and spaces filled with guesses and anticipation and questioning. Vuong is a fan of Li-Young Lee and like Lee, Vuong investigates fathers, mothers, country, and historical pain. But it very well could be that he will make a mark bigger than Lee’s.

From Daily Bread:

“He’ll imagine the softness of bread
as he peels back the wool blanket, raises
her phantom limb to his lips as each kiss
dissolves down her air-light ankles.

& he will never see the pleasure

this brings to her face. Never

her face. Because in my hurry

to make her real, make her

here, I will forget to write

a bit of light into the room.

Because my hands were always brief

& dim as my father’s.

& it will start to rain. I won’t

even think to put a roof over the house—

her prosthetic leg on the nightstand,

the clack clack as it fills to the brim. Listen,

the year is gone. I know

nothing of my country. I write things

down. I build a life & tear it apart

& the sun keeps shining. Crescent

wave. Salt-spray. Tsunami. I have

enough ink to give you the sea

but not the ships, but it’s my book

& I’ll say anything just to stay inside

this skin. Sassafras. Douglas fir.

Sextant & compass…”

Ruth Curry
Co-publisher of Emily Books; writer, whose work has appeared in Buzzfeed, the Paris Review Daily, Nylon, Bookforum, and n+1; and author of the newsletter Coffee & TV.

Surveys (Natasha Stagg, Semiotexte)

If Marshall McLuhan rewrote “Cinderella,” the result might come out looking something like this novel, Stagg’s first. Colleen, an aimless 23 year old who works administering marketing surveys in an anodyne Arizona mall, lives a bleak and listless life, online when she’s not drinking or avoiding the advances of the peeping Tom in her shabby apartment complex. Then she meets Jim, a minor celebrity, “online, it doesn’t matter how…Describing it would be pointless and anyway, you can look it up.” Colleen and Jim fall in love and quickly, as a unit, become rich and very famous. The specifics aren’t clear, and they never need to be: Stagg lays out the truths and the falsehoods of the attention economy brilliantly without them. At the height of her fame, Colleen becomes obsessed with Lucinda, Jim’s ex, her obsession growing more desperate as Colleen’s notoriety inevitably wanes. “I curled around my computer, searching for all the things I’d seen a million times. The views were not growing as steadily, but they were growing, and would always grow, never diminish… I grabbed my phone and muscle memory led me to look up Lucinda’s Twitter. It looked as if all of it had been deleted. How stupid is she? I thought. You can’t really delete any of it.” Stagg’s dark wit, her accurate-to-the-millimeter rendering of the physical and psychological experience of consuming and being consumed by social media, and the emergence of Lucinda as someone whose power comes from her ability to be completely sustained by her own inner life — or at least, appear that way — makes Surveys really special.

The Black Wave (Michelle Tea, Feminist Press)

The DMV is no longer issuing driver’s licenses and the names of the fish that have gone extinct are crossed out on the walls of sushi restaurants: this is how we know the apocalypse is coming to San Francisco in 1999. There’s the thick perma-smog and a vegetable shortage too, but it is the driver’s license issue that grabs our narrator Michelle’s attention in Black Wave, the latest book from Michelle Tea. She needs a driver’s license to drive her getaway van to Los Angeles and escape the codependent relationships, drugs, and squalor (captured in all their pre-gentrified post-nostalgized charm) of the Mission in the late 90s. When Michelle gets to Los Angeles Black Wave bifurcates: LA Michelle, now sober, is attempting to adapt her unruly, unpublished 500-pg memoir called Black Wave into a screenplay. She is struggling, with sobriety, with the ethics of writing about her life and her loved ones, haunted by her past and by people she has yet to meet (in memoir-land, at the computer where she works every day — yes, there’s an element of metafiction at work). But then the apocalypse comes to contemporary Los Angeles too, the actual irreversible accelerationist climate one we’ve all been in denial about since 1999, in a series of tsunamis that will take out the entire West Coast. The mass suicides begin in New York. Michelle’s brother calls in a panic, begging an incredulous Michelle to turn on the TV and see for herself: “Michelle knew once she turned on her television it would remain on for a very long time.”

While telling a literal apocalypse story, Tea also interrogates other life-ending moments with the warmth and humor she’s known for: sobriety, the loss of a love, the practice (metaphorical suicide, if not real relationship-cide) of narrating one’s life for an audience. But it is the ‘real’ apocalypse that allows ‘real’ Michelle to finally finish her memoir, on the last day of the world: “She could, after all, write only the stories she was meant to write. She could write nothing more than that, nothing more or less perfect. As it turned out, time could not be wasted.” Perhaps it’s too on-the-nose to recommend an apocalypse story right now, but not this one.

Maris Kreizman
Author of Slaughterhouse 90210 and Editorial Director of Book of the Month Club.

Vow of Celibacy (Erin Judge, Rare Bird Books)

In addition to her budding career as a novelist, Erin Judge is an incredibly talented comedian, and her debut novel manages to be very funny without ever devolving into simply a string of humorous bits. That’s partly because her heroine, Natalie–an aspiring fashion designer who takes a vow of celibacy after a string of toxic relationships starting way back in adolescence–has so much heart. That Natalie is plus-sized and bisexual is an important part of the narrative, but it isn’t the whole story. Natalie is sex positive and body positive and she happens to be the star of a fun, smart, sexy romp of a novel in which she errs and learns and grows just like traditional protagonists do. I hate the idea that in this day and age Vow of Celibacy can still feel revolutionary in its treatment of both sexuality and size, but it’s true.

Nine Island (Jane Alison, Catapult)

I never expected an experimental novel that makes extensive allusions to classical Roman poetry to feel so vital and immediate, but Nine Island proved me wrong again and again. It’s the story of J, a translator of Ovid, who lives in relative solitude in one of those big, sprawling condos on an island in Miami. She’s not young, but she’s not yet old enough to retire in “paradise”, as so many of her neighbors have. The best comedy and poetry in Nine Island is in J’s depiction of her life in the present–the trips to Publix and the sunbathing and the existential angst–as well as her remembrances of the past.

Martha Frankel
Host of Woodstock Booktalk Radio and the executive director of The Woodstock Book Fest.

I read for a living, and am lucky enough to pick and choose only those books I enjoy. But three books this year grabbed me and wouldn’t let go; judging from the reactions of the dozens of people I’ve bought them for, they’ve grabbed others in the same way

Harmony (Carolyn Parkhurst, Pamela Dorman Books)

Carolyn Parkhurst’s novel about how far one family will go to help their autistic daughter, is that rare book that lets you feel you’re smarter than the narrator, until they do exactly what you would have.

Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget (Sarah Hepola, Grand Central Publishing)

This is the story of a seemingly normal woman, until she picks up a drink. Hepola’s blackouts lead her to some very dark places, but with such humor and bravery that you’re too busy cheering to be embarrassed.

The Next: A Novel of Love, Revenge and a Ghost Who Can’t Let Go (Stephanie Gangi, St. Martin’s Press)

Ghost stories? Not a fan. Which is why I didn’t think I’d like Stephanie Gangi’s The Next: A Novel of Love, Revenge and a Ghost Who Can’t Let Go. Revenge might be a dish best served cold, but Gangi makes us see how delicious it is served piping hot.

Michele Filgate
Literary critic and Vice President of Awards for the National Book Critics Circle

The Story of a Brief Marriage: A Novel (Anuk Arudpragasam , Flatiron Books)

I knew I had to read Anuk Arudpragasam’s debut novel when Garth Greenwell took time out from his own book party to introduce me to the author. Whenever someone I admire is that enthusiastic about something, I pay attention. And I’m glad I did. The Story of a Brief Marriage is set over a single day in a Sri Lankan refugee camp toward the end of a civil war that spans decades. The story centers around Dinesh, a young man who has lost everything and everyone he cares about. This haunting, devastating book is an intricate look at a man becoming reacquainted with his own body after living through some horrific experiences. He marries a woman he barely knows, and every moment is magnified by the dangerous situation they live in. The Story of a Brief Marriage is a story of grace and humanity despite catastrophic circumstances.

The Penny Poet of Portsmouth: A Memoir Of Place, Solitude, and Friendship (Katherine Towler, Counterpoint)

Yes, I’m friends with the author. But I would choose this book even if I didn’t know Katherine. I’m a sucker for memoirs about writers and the writing life—and this is one of the best books I’ve ever read in that category. Years ago, Katherine Towler moved to Portsmouth, NH and met Robert Dunn—a fiercely stubborn, eccentric poet who was beloved in the literary community, but content with being a “minor poet.” She became a caretaker for him in the final years of his life, and recounts what she learned from her friendship with Robert. It’s easy to focus on validation when you’re a writer, but this beautifully written book is a reminder that none of that really matters in the end. What counts in being an artist is the work itself, and the solitude and friendships we count on to fuel our creativity.

Stephen Sparks
Book buyer at Green Apple Books in San Francisco.

The Ghosts of Birds (Eliot Weinberg, New Directions)

The closest thing to a major review Eliot Weinberger has received for his latest collection of essays, published in October by New Directions, came in an episode of the “Inside the NY Times Book Review” podcast, where the book was mentioned in passing. I don’t understand the critical silence surrounding his work, which ranges in The Ghosts of Birds from ancient China through medieval Ireland onto George W. Bush. Perhaps he is too much a modernist for our post-modern tastes, though one would think that his keen sense of irony, deadly effective use of pastiche, unrepentant liberalism, and broad sense of humanity would appeal to readers–especially in 2016–looking for an antidote to what is starting to feel like the closing act of an abbreviated global era.

The Ghosts of Birds continues the serial essay begun in Weinberger’s masterful An Elemental Thing, a project that does much to reinvent the essay and the essay collection. Thematically linked, these essays demonstrate the weirdness, wonder, and often the alarming short-sightedness of the human imagination, all with an apparent effortlessness that belies the work that must have gone into them. Each essay proves an education in itself, making the book a veritable Harvard Classics set–but more fun.

Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey (Frances Wilson, Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Before I read Frances Wilson’s extraordinary biography, I knew De Quincey only as the Opium Eater, a minor character skirting the fringes of the Romantic era. After finishing Guilty Thing, I have a newfound admiration for the man who essentially founded the true crime genre, the addiction memoir, pioneered literary autobiography, and influenced writers like Jorge Luis Borges.

Wilson’s portrait of De Quincey and his era is astonishingly fresh and free of the tedious, soul-sucking character analysis that bogs down much biography. De Quincey in these pages comes across as a perpetually hounded man who lived by and through his writing, constantly on the run from creditors (perhaps most remarkable among his talents was his ability to waste his fortune), and who even for a time feared for his life after writing for two competing journals. (The worry was not unfounded: the editor of the upstart London Magazine was shot and killed in a duel with the editor of Blackwood’s, just one sordid episode Wilson recounts with gusto.) It’s debatable whether Guilty Thing is a reclamation job, but it is certainly the most vibrant and energetic literary biography I’ve read in ages.

Sari Botton
Writer, contributing editor to Longreads, editorial director of the non-profit TMI Project, and owner of Kingston Writers’ Studio.

Poor Your Soul (Mira Ptacin, Soho Books)

Balancing poignancy with subtle humor, Mira Ptacin weaves together the stories of her own tragic loss and her mother’s. When an accidental pregnancy progresses into an unviable one, Ptacin and her husband must decide whether to terminate it, or wait for it to terminate itself. Their grief echoes that of Ptacin’s immigrant mother’s, after her only son was killed by a drunk driver.

The Telling (Zoe Zolbrod, Curbside Splendor Publishing)

Zoe Zolbrod courageously, artfully, and compassionately examines herself–as a woman, mother, and sexual being–through the lens of her experience being molested as a child. The book is as intelligent and enlightening as it is beautifully written. I particularly admire how remarkably generous Zolbrod is toward the cousin who violated her.

See more from our Best of 2016 series

Shirley Jackson celebrated her 100th birthday this month. We are publishing this post from A.N. Devers in her honor.

* * *

Like so many readers, I loved and was gutted by Shirley Jackson’s famous New Yorker short story “The Lottery” from the first time I read it, and I have read it so many times since then that I don’t remember when I was first introduced to it. I was young. I have a couple of prime suspect English teachers who might have been the gift-givers. But until about nine years ago, I hadn’t read any of Shirley Jackson’s novels. I was only vaguely aware of one of them, her famous ghost story, The Haunting of Hill House.

Then I wrote a short story my MFA professor was enthusiastic about; it was full of domestic disturbance and the strange, and he assigned me to read all the Shirley Jackson I could get my hands on, which was difficult at the time, since not much was in print. So I read her collected stories, and two novels We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Hill House. I inhaled them and their contents, the cobwebs and fairy tales, the ghosts and talismans, the anxieties and fears. They are books written by a self-described witch who was also a tremendously gifted writer, and that makes them laced with a kind of special magic. I still can’t believe they aren’t better known or accepted as great American novels.

Since then, I’ve read nearly the lot of it, and done everything possible to get to know Shirley Jackson and her work, including staring up at her white columned house that was illustrated on the cover of Life Among the Savages, her bestselling memoir about raising four children. I wandered the backroads of Bennington, Vermont in my car looking for the inspiration of her haunted Hill House, before I learned it was inspired by a home far away from Vermont’s hills in California.

I’ve also been Jackson’s book pusher. Not too long ago, I dined with a table of smart, friendly, and incredibly well-read British book dealers and explained to them who Shirley Jackson was. They hadn’t read “The Lottery,” but it rung a faint bell. It’s worrisome, but I’m happy to report that they furiously wrote her name down. I once gave my copy of Castle to a stranger at a bar. And as a cherry on top, last year, I proposed and lead the first Shirley Jackson reading group at The Center for Fiction. We pored over her work, and read some of it out loud, and that is when I realized her fiction hasn’t aged. Her storytelling is incredibly modern. She is a writer to read right now.

Shirely Jackson. Photo credit: June Mirken Mintz

I thought I’d mention one story in particular that demonstrates her spookily contemporary style, and her prescient insight. “The Pillar of Salt” was published in Mademoiselle in 1948, yet as I returned to it last year, I was overcome with the feeling that it was a story about post-9/11 anxiety. In it, a married couple named Margaret and Brad take a train into New York City from New Hampshire—a special annual trip. Margaret ticks through a mental checklist of everything she needs to do or see in the city and then expresses satisfaction that everything is in order except for making a few dinner reservations. But after a few pleasant days in the city, things go off track. There’s a dinner party in an apartment of a friend, “who had found a place to live by a miracle and warned them consequently not to quarrel with the appearance of the building, or the stairs, or the neighborhood.” Jackson then humorously describes the interior design challenge of New York City apartment dwelling that is as present as ever today—the tenant having “easily caught the mania for slim tables and low bookcases which made his rooms look too large for the furniture in some places, too cramped and uncomfortable in others.”

Margaret feels claustrophobic in the small, crowded apartment and she goes to the window to catch some air. The noise on the street is loud, and she finds people calling up from the sidewalk that a house is on fire. She panics, believing they are speaking to her, and tries to alert the strangers at the party, but they ignore her, so she leaves them and her husband, who she can’t find, and goes down the staircase and outside by herself. On the street people ask for information about others who might be trapped, and she mentions only her husband. She soon realizes her mistake—the house fire was two doors down. She goes back into the party shaken and embarrassed.

What’s so brilliant about the story is that the rest of Margaret’s stay transforms into something pre-apocalyptic. Where the city was once bright and perfect to her, it is now splitting at the seams, and she can see that the “corners of the buildings seemed to be crumbling away into fine dust that drifted downward, the granite was eroding unnoticed.” She begins to unravel as her view of the city begins to decay around her, its people are a mob, its frenetic energy is a future disaster in the making. There is something so true in Margaret’s anxiety, that a city like New York is a kind of organized chaos that walks close to the edge of something else entirely. Jackson harnesses the unspoken secret knowledge of city dwellers—that it is likely inevitable that something horrible, potentially cataclysmic will happen at some point.

That is the crux of Jackson’s work: to suss out the secrets we share silently. She walks close to the edge, gathering ingredients for her strong witches brew of satire and strangeness and in doing so exposes truths about American societal structure and the often troubled roles we all play in holding the seams together.

A little known anthology of essays for new mothers, featuring twelve pieces by Shirley Jackson.

And yes, of course, Jackson is our American mother-writer foremother, and for all reader’s sake (not just writer-mothers), her work deserves to be broken out of the housewifery world she worked from and was pigeon-holed and abandoned in, and then appreciated for the very same role as housewife she explored in her work. It’s high time that domestic fiction be removed from the bottom bookshelves and be acknowledged as deserving of an equal place in American literature. Jackson’s work is particularly crucial because she seeks to expose just how complicated women’s lives are in a culture that hasn’t fully counted women as whole. She prods at notions of wifery with her witch stick and considers the complexities not only of marriage, but of being alone, being single, or simply being different than what we’re supposed to be.

Jackson should be known as more than just the writer of one perfect story, particularly beyond hip literary circles, where she has cult status. If we don’t find a way to wedge her other work into the bigger conversation, we’re setting ourselves up to exclude extraordinary writers who are taking up her mantle, like Kelly Link, whose work is possessed by a similar intelligence, skill, and magic—and who has even named one of her incredible stories after one of Jackson’s.

But there are signs the wedge is being wedged. In the years since I first swooned over “We Have Always Lived in the Castle” there has been a flurry and then a flood of Jackson’s books reissued, novels like the psychological thriller The Bird’s Nest, her haunting novel based on a real-life disappearance of a college student called Hangsaman, and the creepy and biting satire of class, The Sundial, which I first learned about in one of Tin House’s Lost & Found essays, written by Susan Merrell, who also recently published a smart and eerie novel called Shirley, and which the Jackson estate has been vocally upset about. And now there is a new brilliant biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, by writer and critic Ruth Franklin.

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Franklin does an excellent job showing us all that Shirley was, what her writing was about, and importantly, how and why she was and has been continually brushed off to the outskirts by the literary world at large, both while she was alive and in her afterlife. In an excerpt at New York magazine, Franklin writes:

Any doubts about exactly how difficult it was to do what Jackson did — producing classic works of fiction while managing what we now call “work-life balance” with virtually no support from her husband or anyone else — should be put to rest by the fan mail she received constantly from admiring readers, many of them mothers who were aspiring writers in search of advice. Over and over, the letter writers wonder at Jackson’s ability to do her writing while also caring for four children — a phenomenon that also mystified some of her friends. She occasionally wrote back to her readers, suggesting practical strategies such as planning out a piece before sitting down at the typewriter and, not surprisingly, ignoring housework to carve out more writing time. In private, she confessed her impatience with such comments. “This is a remark I have never been able to answer,” she mused after a weekend guest wondered aloud how she could be so productive.

She did it, of course, because there was no other way. She needed the children as much as they needed her. Their imaginations energized her; their routines stabilized her. More important, their heedless savagery was crucial to her worldview. Jackson could not come into her own as a writer before she had children. She would not have been the writer she became without them.

Some might say that Shirley Jackson created a lot of impediments for herself in becoming a writer: She married a rising academic and critic, she embraced the role of house runner while he worked, she took care of four children, and also had to find ways of supplementing her husband’s meager income with paid women’s magazine work that was not considered literary in any way, and as Franklin points out, brought criticism from other female writers who were trying to break out of long-defined roles. But the way I see it, Jackson only created one problem for herself—she took her life as a wife and mother as seriously as she took her writing, and she considered these roles worthy of making art. How dare she.

L. A. Kauffman | Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism | Verso Books | February 2017 | 33 minutes (8,883 words)

Below is an excerpt from Direct Action, by L. A. Kauffman. This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

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If the government won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government.

The largest and most audacious direct action in US history is also among the least remembered, a protest that has slipped into deep historical obscurity. It was a protest against the Vietnam War, but it wasn’t part of the storied sixties, having taken place in 1971, a year of nationwide but largely unchronicled ferment. To many, infighting, violence, and police repression had effectively destroyed “the movement” two years earlier in 1969.

That year, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the totemic organization of the white New Left, had disintegrated into dogmatic and squabbling factions; the Black Panther Party, meanwhile, had been so thoroughly infiltrated and targeted by law enforcement that factionalism and paranoia had come to eclipse its expansive program of revolutionary nationalism. But the war had certainly not ended, and neither had the underlying economic and racial injustices that organizers had sought to address across a long decade of protest politics. If anything, the recent flourishing of heterodox new radicalisms—from the women’s and gay liberation movements to radical ecology to militant Native American, Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Asian-American movements—had given those who dreamed of a world free of war and oppression a sobering new awareness of the range and scale of the challenges they faced.

On May 3, 1971, after nearly two weeks of intense antiwar protest in Washington, DC, ranging from a half-million-person march to large-scale sit-ins outside the Selective Service, Justice Department, and other government agencies, some 25,000 young people set out to do something brash and extraordinary: disrupt the basic functioning of the federal government through nonviolent action. They called themselves the Mayday Tribe, and their slogan was as succinct as it was ambitious: “If the government won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government.” The slogan was of course hyperbolic— even if Washington, DC were completely paralyzed by protest for a day or week or a month, that would not halt the collection of taxes, the delivery of mail, the dropping of bombs, or countless other government functions—but that made it no less electrifying as a rallying cry, and no less alarming to the Nixon administration (Nixon’s White House chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, called it “potentially a real threat”). An elaborate tactical manual distributed in advance detailed twenty-one key bridges and traffic circles for protesters to block nonviolently, with stalled vehicles, improvised barricades, or their bodies. The immediate goal was to snarl traffic so completely that government employees could not get to their jobs. The larger objective was “to create the spectre of social chaos while maintaining the support or at least toleration of the broad masses of American people.”

The protest certainly interfered with business as usual in Washington: traffic was snarled, and many government employees stayed home. Others commuted to their offices before dawn, and three members of Congress even resorted to canoeing across the Potomac to get themselves to Capitol Hill. But most of the planned blockades held only briefly, if at all, because most of the protesters were arrested before they even got into position. Thanks to the detailed tactical manual, the authorities knew exactly where protesters would be deployed. To stop them from paralyzing the city, the Nixon Administration had made the unprecedented decision to sweep them all up, using not just police but actual military forces.

Under direct presidential orders, Attorney General John Mitchell mobilized the National Guard and thousands of troops from the Army and the Marines to join the Washington, DC police in rounding up everyone suspected of participating in the protest. As one protester noted, “Anyone and everyone who looked at all freaky was scooped up off the street.” A staggering number of people— more than 7,000—were locked up before the day was over, in what remain the largest mass arrests in US history.

Many observers, including sympathetic ones, called it a rout for the protesters. “It was universally panned as the worst planned, worst executed, most slovenly, strident and obnoxious peace action ever committed,” wrote esteemed antiwar journalist Mary McGrory in the Boston Globe afterwards. In the New York Times, reporter Richard Halloran flatly declared, “The Tribe members failed to achieve their goal. And they appear to have had no discernible impact on President Nixon’s policy in Vietnam.” Even Rennie Davis, the Chicago 7 defendant and New Left leader who had originally conceived of the Mayday action, announced at a press conference that the protest had failed.

But the government’s victory, if you can call it that, came only as a result of measures that turned the workaday bustle of the district’s streets into what William H. Rehnquist, the assistant attorney general who would later become chief justice of the Supreme Court, called “qualified martial law.” While the government hadn’t been stopped, there was a very real sense that it had been placed under siege by its own citizens, with the nation’s capital city transformed into “a simulated Saigon,” as reporter Nicholas von Hoffman put it in the Washington Post. Nixon felt compelled to announce in a press conference, “The Congress is not intimidated, the President is not intimidated, this government is going to go forward,” statements that only belied his profound unease. White House aide Jeb Magruder later noted that the protest had “shaken” Nixon and his staff, while CIA director Richard Helms called Mayday “a very damaging kind of event,” noting that it was “one of the things that was putting increasing pressure on the administration to try and find some way to get out of the war.”

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Mayday, the scruffy and forgotten protest that helped speed US withdrawal from Vietnam, changed the course of activist history as well. It came at a time of crisis for the left—indeed, the distress call embedded in the mobilization’s name could apply equally well to the state of American radical movements in 1971 as to the conduct of the war they opposed. The last major national protest against the Vietnam War, Mayday was also a crucial first experiment with a new kind of radicalism, one rooted as much in its practices as in its ideas or demands. This quixotic attempt to “stop the government”—so flawed in its execution, yet so unnerving in its effects—was organized in a different manner than any protest before it, in ways that have influenced most American protest movements since.

The history of American radicalism since the sixties, when it’s been considered at all, has typically been misunderstood as a succession of disconnected issue- and identity-based movements, erupting into public view and then disappearing, perhaps making headlines and winning fights along the way but adding up to little more. Mayday 1971 provides the perfect starting point for a very different tale, a story about deep political continuities, hidden connections, and lasting influences. It’s a story rooted less in radicals’ ideas about how the world ought to change than the evolving forms of action they’ve used to actually change it—whether hastening the end of an unpopular war, blocking the construction of nuclear power plants, revolutionizing the treatment of AIDS, stalling toxic trade deals, or reforming brutally racist police practices. Many movements contributed to this long process of political reinvention, but feminism and queer radicalism played special, central roles, profoundly redefining the practice of activism in ways that have too rarely been acknowledged. And because this is an American story, it’s shaped at every level by questions and divisions of race. The story begins with a major racial shift in the practice of disruptive activism, as the direct-action tradition refined by the black civil rights movement in the fifties and sixties to such powerful effect was taken up and transformed by mostly white organizers in the seventies and eighties.

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Merging radical politics, Gandhian nonviolence, serious rock and roll, [and] lots of drugs.

The Mayday direct action took place a year after the Nixon Administration invaded Cambodia, an escalation of the Vietnam War that had provoked angry walk-outs on more than a hundred college and university campuses. At one of these, Ohio’s Kent State University, National Guardsmen fired into a crowd of protesters, killing four and wounding nine; ten days later, police killed two students and wounded twelve more at Jackson State University in Mississippi. The deaths sparked strikes at hundreds more campuses and inspired thousands who had never protested before to take to the streets. By the end of May 1970, it’s estimated that half the country’s student population—perhaps several million youth—took part in antiwar activities, which, in the words of former University of California president Clark Kerr, “seemed to exhaust the entire known repertoire of forms of dissent,” including the bombing or burning of nearly one hundred campus buildings with military ties. So many people were radicalized during the spring 1970 uprising that the antiwar movement suddenly swelled with a new wave of organizers spread all throughout the country, many in places that had seen relatively little activism before then.

The tumult of spring 1970 faded by the fall, however, and an air of futility hung over the established antiwar movement. Many of the longtime organizers who had persevered beyond the movement’s crisis year of 1969 were now burning out. As one antiwar publication put it in an unsigned piece, for the previous seven years “we have met, discussed, analyzed, lectured, published, lobbied, paraded, sat-in, burned draft cards, stopped troop trains, refused induction, marched, trashed, burned and bombed buildings, destroyed induction centers. Yet the war has gotten steadily worse—for the Vietnamese, and, in a very different way, for us.” It seemed that everything had been tried, and nothing had worked. “Most everyone I know is tired of demonstrations,” wrote New Left leader David Dellinger. “No wonder. If you’ve seen one or two, you’ve seen them all … Good, bad, or in between, they have not stopped the war, or put an end to poverty and racism, or freed all political prisoners.” In this climate of grim frustration, the national antiwar movement split, as long-standing tensions about the political value of civil disobedience divided activists who were planning the antiwar mobilization for spring 1971. A new formation named the National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC) called for a massive legal march and rally on April 24. This coalition boasted a long and impressive list of endorsers, but was centrally controlled by a Trotskyist organization, the Socialist Workers Party, and its offshoots.

NPAC aimed to build a mass mobilization against the war—organizer Fred Halstead called it “an authentic united front of the masses”—bringing together the widest possible array of forces. Toward that end, NPAC put forth just one lowest-common-denominator demand: “Out of Vietnam now!” NPAC also vehemently opposed the use of any tactics that went beyond legally permitted protest. Civil disobedience, the coalition’s leadership believed, accomplished little while alienating many from the cause. “In our opinion, small civil disobedience actions—whether in the Gandhi-King tradition or in the vein of violent confrontation—are not effective forms of action,” declared the SWP’s newspaper, The Militant. “While we do not question the commitment and courage of those who deploy such tactics, we feel that they are not oriented toward winning and mobilizing a mass movement.” The Mayday action came in for special criticism: “When people state that they are purposely and illegally attempting to disrupt the government, as the Mayday Tribe has done, they isolate themselves from the masses of American people.”

The other major wing of the antiwar movement ultimately renamed itself the Peoples Coalition for Peace and Justice (PCPJ), and was anchored by pacifist organizations ranging from the Fellowship of Reconciliation to the War Resisters League. PCPJ favored a multi-issue approach to antiwar organizing and worked to build alliances with non-pacifist organizations like the National Welfare Rights Organization, drawing connections between the foreign and domestic policies of the US government. The coalition also felt that stronger tactics than mere marching were called for, and emphatically endorsed civil disobedience. “Massive One-Day Demonstrations Aren’t Enough,” read the headline of a PCPJ broadsheet issued that spring, “More’s Needed to End the War.” PCPJ didn’t openly discourage people from attending the April 24 NPAC march, but focused its efforts on a multi-day “People’s Lobby,” which consisted of planned, coordinated sit-ins outside major government buildings.

Via Flickr.

Into this fractured political landscape came the Mayday Tribe, a new player with a very different approach. The group was launched by Rennie Davis, a white New Left leader who had become nationally famous after the melees outside the Democratic National Convention in 1968, when the federal government prosecuted him and other prominent organizers—the Chicago 7—for conspiracy. In Davis’ conception, the Mayday Tribe would bring the most politicized hippies of the time together with the hippest of the hardcore radicals. The word “tribe” itself was a countercultural code word, having been appropriated by whites to signal groovy distance from the dominant culture (the 1967 San Francisco “Be-In” that propelled hippiedom to the national stage, for instance, was known as “A Gathering of the Tribes” despite a notable lack of Native American participation), and Mayday had a long-haired freaky flavor that was decidedly missing from either the Trotskyist or pacifist wings of the antiwar movement. Jerry Coffin, an organizer with the War Resisters League who teamed up with Davis when Mayday was only an idea, recalled it as an attempt “to create a responsible hip alternative” to the Weather Underground: “merging radical politics, Gandhian nonviolence, serious rock and roll, [and] lots of drugs.” Many—perhaps most—of the people who took part in the action were relative newcomers to the movement, from the generation that had been radicalized by Cambodia and Kent State.

Davis took the idea of nonviolently blockading the federal government from a bold but ultimately unsuccessful attempt by the Brooklyn chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to paralyze New York City traffic on the opening day of the 1964 World’s Fair. CORE was an important interracial civil rights group founded in the 1940s, with pacifist roots and a strong commitment to nonviolent direct action. The organization is best known for the daring Freedom Rides it organized in 1961 to challenge racial segregation on interstate buses in the Deep South. These rides, with small groups of black and white activists defying Jim Crow through the simple act of traveling and sitting together, were met with extreme violence, with one bus firebombed and many Freedom Riders brutally beaten by white mobs. CORE was most active in the North, however, particularly in Chicago where it was founded; there, and in other northern cities, the group used sit-ins and other direct-action tactics as part of a major campaign in the early 1960s against school segregation.

By 1964, many in the civil rights movement were growing impatient at the slow pace of change. The Brooklyn chapter of CORE, younger and more radical than the organization as a whole, decided to use the occasion of the World’s Fair to draw attention to the deep racial inequalities in the event’s host city. CORE proposed disrupting the fair’s opening day through a “stall-in” at strategic points on the city’s highways, with protesters deliberately allowing their cars to run out of fuel so that the vehicles would block the roadways.

“Drive a while for freedom,” read a leaflet that organizers distributed throughout Bedford-Stuyvesant and other black neighborhoods. “Take only enough gas to get your car on exhibit on one of these highways.” The goal of the planned disruptions was to pressure the city’s government to take action on housing, education, police brutality, and other issues of urgent concern to New York City’s black and Latino population. But the outcry over this obstructive plan was enormous, with everyone from New York City officials to moderate civil rights leaders to President Lyndon Johnson denouncing the protest as one that would, in Johnson’s words, “do the civil rights cause no good.” CORE’s national director, James Farmer, was so appalled that he suspended the Brooklyn chapter. In the end, very few people went through with the highway action. They almost didn’t need to: the controversy had already garnered massive publicity, Fair attendance was a fraction of what had been projected, and civil disobedience protests inside the event led to 300 arrests.

* * *

Joy and life against bureaucracy and grim death.

The Mayday protest, with its goal of blockading the nation’s capital, echoed the CORE plan in mischievous tone and disorderly intent. The Mayday protest was to entail “action rather than congregation, disruption rather than display.” As one Mayday leaflet circulated in advance of the 1971 protests declared, in a clear allusion to the April 24 NPAC event, “Nobody gives a damn how many dumb sheep can flock to Washington demonstrations, which are dull ceremonies of dissent that won’t stop the war.” Mayday wouldn’t be a standard protest rally, where a series of speakers (usually chosen through an acrimonious behind-the-scenes struggle) would lecture to a passive crowd. It wouldn’t be a conventional protest march, where demonstrators would trudge along a route that had been pre-arranged with the police, shepherded by movement marshals controlled by the protest leadership. With much antiwar protest having become dreary and routinized (“Should I take pictures, I kept questioning myself, or would photographs from past identical rallies suffice?” asked one radical after April 24), Mayday promised to be novel and unpredictable.

Mayday would also diverge from the traditional form of civil disobedience that PCPJ supported. That type of action, the tactical manual explained, usually “involved a very small group of people engaging in ‘moral witness’ or action that involved them breaking a specific law, almost always with advance notice to authorities.” In a typical civil disobedience protest, participants would sit down at the entrance to a building or inside some official’s office and wait until police—who knew ahead of time what the protesters would do—carried them off to jail. If they were attacked or beaten, they would neither fight back nor run away. “Nonviolence in its dynamic condition means conscious suffering,” Mohandas Gandhi, the great Indian practitioner of nonviolent resistance, had declared. The philosophy of civil disobedience that he and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. propounded, and most pacifists embraced, entailed a willingness to accept violence and a refusal to engage in it, even in self-defense.

In the activist climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s, this kind of civil disobedience had acquired an aura of piety and passivity distasteful to many radicals; as Jerry Coffin observed, “very few of [the Mayday protesters] would have identified themselves as being members of a nonviolent movement.” The organizers of Mayday had a somewhat difficult sell to make, and the tactical manual emphatically distinguished their disruptive direct-action scenario from conventional nonviolence: “We need to be clear that we are not talking about an exercise in martyrdom; we are not talking about negotiated arrests; we are talking about using a tactic to attain an objective.” Explained S.J. Avery, who was working with the Quaker Project on Community Conflict at the time and ran some of the training sessions in nonviolence for Mayday protest, “The kind of nonviolent direct action that we had always been talking about was the very classic, traditional Gandhian sort, where you did your action and then you stayed there and you took your consequences. That was not part of the Mayday rhetoric. People wanted to keep it nonviolent, but I think a lot of people went down there thinking it was going to be pretty much guerrilla action. And that some people would get arrested, and some figured if they could get away, that was great.”

Via Flickr.

The Mayday organizers hoped to tap into the revulsion many felt toward the tactics of the Weather Underground and other violent groups, while steering clear of the submissiveness and sanctimony radicals associated with nonviolence. Explained Maris Cakars, editor of the influential pacifist magazine WIN, “The idea of ‘we’ve tried everything, now there’s nothing left but violence’ was pretty much replaced with the notion that now that violence—trashing, bombing, off the pigging—had failed it was time for a really radical approach: nonviolent civil disobedience.” The tactical manual explained that Mayday would be militant in a way “that conforms more with our new life style” and deploys “joy and life against bureaucracy and grim death.” An organizing leaflet elaborated: “The overall discipline will be non violent, the tactic disruptive, and the spirit joyous and creative.” To underscore their gently irreverent take on the sometime pious tradition of nonviolence, Mayday’s planners used witty remixed versions of social-justice artist Ben Shahn’s line drawing of Gandhi in their mobilizing materials, sometimes showing a crowd of Gandhis, sometimes rendering him with a raised fist.

The most novel aspect of Mayday, though, was its organizing plan. Unlike any national demonstration before it, this action was to be created through a decentralized structure based on geographic regions. “This means no ‘National Organizers,’” the tactical manual explained, in contrast to all the big DC marches and rallies that had come before. “You do the organizing. This means no ‘movement generals’ making tactical decisions you have to carry out. Your region makes the tactical decisions within the discipline of nonviolent civil disobedience.”

This approach reflected a major shift in activist temper over the previous two years or so: a growing disdain for national organizations, movement celebrities, and structured leadership, all of which were felt to stifle creativity and action. “Following the disintegration of SDS,” the radical magazine Liberation explained, “there were many in the movement who were thoroughly disillusioned with the whole idea of a national political structure. They came to feel that authentic radicalism must grow out of involvement in local or small-group activity, that it cannot flourish within a national organization.” The now-defunct SDS certainly came in for special scorn, along with the “movement heavies”—influential or hardline radical men—who so often represented the group to the media. But the criticism also extended to the national antiwar movement in its various organizational guises, which had “really well known people who were on the letterhead and [acted as] spokespeople for the movement,” as Ed Hedemann of the War Resisters League put it.

A pamphlet published by an anonymous group of West Coast activists not long before Mayday (and circulated among anarchists ever since) outlined an underlying critique of the very idea of a national or mass movement. Anti-Mass: Methods of Organization for Collectives defined “the mass” as an intrinsically alienating and repressive structure of capitalist society, designed purely to facilitate consumption. Radicals who aspired to create a mass movement—like the Socialist Workers Party with its April 24 NPAC march and rally—were reproducing the very structure they should be challenging. “We don’t fight the mass (market) with a mass (movement),” the essay argued. “This form of struggle, no matter how radical its demands, never threatens the basic structure—the mass itself.” The antidote to mass society, the pamphlet declared, was a decentralized movement based on small, self-organized collectives.

A related impulse toward decentralization characterized the radical identity-based movements that had emerged between 1966 and 1969—the multi-hued array of “power” movements (Black Power, Puerto Rican Power, Chicano Power, Yellow Power, Red Power), and the women’s and gay liberation movements. A central theme of each was the question of representation: who speaks for whom; who makes decisions, and in whose name. As Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton wrote in their influential 1967 manifesto Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, “Black people must redefine themselves, and only they can do that. Throughout this country, vast segments of the black communities are beginning to recognize the need to assert their own definitions, to reclaim their history, their culture; to create their own sense of community and togetherness.” By 1971, identity-based movements were fixtures of the radical landscape, whose very existence challenged the idea of an overarching ‘capital-m’ Movement that could speak with one voice. A mass movement—or, to put it another way, a movement of masses—seemed to drown out difference in the name of unity, something that many activists could no longer accept. The radical women’s liberation movement made this challenge to mass or national organizing explicit. Its signature contribution to radical activism was the assertion that the personal is political, a proposition that was electrifying in its day. Building upon the New Left project of countering personal alienation by uncovering “the political, social, and economic sources of [one’s] private troubles” (to quote from the 1962 Port Huron Statement, the founding document of SDS), the mostly white radical feminists of the late 1960s and early 1970s made consciousness-raising a centerpiece of their politics. This process of self-examination and collective discussion was best suited for small groups, which facilitated greater intimacy and internal democracy than large organizations. By the early 1970s, the small group was the predominant radical feminist form, characterized by “a conscious lack of formal structure, [and] an emphasis on participation by everyone,” in the words of organizer and theorist Jo Freeman. Though Mayday could hardly be termed a feminist initiative—there was a women’s tent and a women’s contingent, but the mobilization was planned and shaped by New Left men—the decentralized and radically democratic organizing principles of the women’s liberation movement helped shape the larger political climate that gave rise to the Mayday Tribe.

* * *

Rather than one conspiracy, it was thousands of
conspiracies.

The Mayday organizers proposed that everyone who wanted to help shut down the federal government organize themselves into “affinity groups.” Affinity groups are small assemblages of roughly five to fifteen people who take part in an action jointly, planning their participation collectively. Mayday was the first time they were used in a large-scale national demonstration in the United States, as well as the first time they were used in an explicitly nonviolent context. Affinity groups have been a recurring feature of many large protests since and a defining structure of a great deal of direct action organizing. Movements with such wide-ranging concerns as nuclear power, US military intervention in Central America, environmental destruction, AIDS, and global trade agreements have organized their actions on the basis of affinity groups; they have been especially important to movements that have explicitly defined themselves as nonviolent. There’s an irony there, for these groups began as underground guerrilla cells, and entered US radical circles through the most violent segment of the white New Left.

The term dates back to Spain in the late 1920s and 1930s, when small bands of militants from the Iberian Anarchist Federation (F.A.I.) undertook a series of guerrilla actions: first against the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera; next against real or suspected fascists during the Spanish Republic; and finally, against the fascist regime of Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War. They called their underground cells “grupos de afinidad,” explained Murray Bookchin, the writer and social ecologist who first introduced the term to the United States, “because people were drawn together not by residence, not even by occupation, but on the basis of affinity: friendship, individual trust, background, history.” The groups reflected both anarchist ideals of free association and military needs for security. The stakes were tremendous: a small slip-up could lead to torture and death. Because affinity groups were small and formed only by people who knew each other well, they were difficult to infiltrate or uncover. Because the groups acted autonomously, with no central command, the discovery or destruction of one would not obliterate the underground altogether.

The phrase and structure entered the New Left in the United States around 1967, when some in the movement were beginning to reject the philosophy of strict nonviolence and shifting, as the saying of the time went, “from protest to resistance.” Initially, that meant employing “mobile tactics” during demonstrations, notably the fall 1967 Stop the Draft Weeks in Oakland and New York. Sitting down and awaiting arrest increasingly seemed only to invite beatings from the police—and to accomplish little or nothing in the process; nonviolence had come to seem like passivity. Young militants began to experiment with more chaotic and aggressive measures: dragging mailboxes or automobiles into the streets to serve as temporary blockades; blocking traffic; remaining always in motion in order to create “disruptive confrontation.”

Via Flickr.

To pull that off well, you needed some kind of agile, streetwise organization—something, perhaps, like “a street gang with an analysis.” That’s how Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, the SDS chapter from Manhattan’s Lower East Side, defined the affinity group in a broadside published around 1968. The Motherfuckers, in their own words, were “flower children with thorns,” a fierce and disruptive group devoted to creating a “total break [from the present]: cultural, political, social, everything.” Ben Morea, the founder of the Motherfuckers, had learned about affinity groups from conversations and debates with Bookchin, who had done extensive research during the 1960s on the Spanish Civil War. “Murray really understood the history of Spain, and he was telling me about the grupos de afinidad. And I immediately saw the possibility,” remembered Morea. He was intrigued by the idea of “groups of like-minded people that weren’t public,” the sort of group that was “totally unknown to anyone else.” Embracing this clandestine structure, the Motherfuckers engaged in outrageous actions, which ranged from dumping garbage at New York’s Lincoln Center on its opening night (its construction having displaced a Puerto Rican neighborhood) to pelting then–Secretary of State Dean Rusk with bags of cow’s blood.

The Motherfuckers’ conception of affinity groups partly mirrored their Spanish antecedents: “Relying on each other,” explained one leaflet, “the individuals in an affinity group increase their potential for action and decrease the dangers of isolation and/or infiltration. The necessity for these relationships should be obvious at this stage of our struggle.” But security was not their only purpose. The Motherfuckers viewed affinity groups in grander terms as well. “In the pre-revolutionary period,” they wrote, “affinity groups must assemble to project a revolutionary consciousness and to develop forms for particular struggles. In the revolutionary period itself they will emerge as armed cadres at the centers of conflict, and in the post-revolutionary period suggest forms for the new everyday life.” Morea and the Motherfuckers soon introduced the idea of affinity groups as teams for street combat to Weatherman, the faction of SDS that aspired to be a revolutionary fighting force and to “bring the war home” to the United States. It was during the October 1969 Days of Rage, perhaps Weatherman’s most notorious action, that affinity groups made their true US debut. Some three hundred of the group’s followers converged on Chicago, where they went on what might best be termed a rampage: battling cops, smashing windshields, running through the streets, and creating mayhem. Jeff Jones, one of the founders of Weatherman, explained that as early as 1967, militant members of SDS began debating whether to adopt more violent tactics during street protests. “We had that discussion over and over again,” he recalled in a 2000 interview, “and each demonstration that we went to became a little bit more militant, until it was in our heads to organize a demonstration that was entirely street fighting, which we did, in which affinity groups played a very important role.”

All the participants in the Days of Rage were organized into the small groups, which Weatherman treated less like egalitarian collectives and more like military platoons. “There was a pretense made of contributions from everyone, but there was really a final yes or no from the top leadership. There would be a representative of the leadership in each affinity group,” recalled Judith Karpova of her time in Weatherman. As Shin’ya Ono described the group’s preparations on a Weatherman bus heading to Chicago for the Days of Rage, “In order to get to know each other and learn to move as a group, we divided ourselves into several affinity groups of six or seven persons each and did a couple of tasks together,” he wrote. “We discussed the functions of the affinity group, what running and fighting together meant, what leadership meant, and why leadership was absolutely necessary in a military situation.” Another account of Weather-style affinity-group organizing during that period by Motor City SDS similarly emphasized a paramilitary command structure: “The tactical leadership explains the plans using maps which they have drawn up, and our forces are divided into affinity groups. Each group sticks together, protects each of its members, acts as a fighting unit in case of confrontation, and functions as a work team.”

The Days of Rage were widely viewed as a disaster. The tiny turnout was a fraction of what the Weather organizers had expected; the street fighting left most participants injured or jailed or both, with little or nothing to show for their bravado. When mainstream figures like former Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Goldberg denounced the actions as “vandalism and hooliganism without a program,” many on the left agreed. The tactics used, Dave Dellinger of the Chicago 7 later wrote, “proved counterproductive in terms of their results—injuries, military defeat, an unsatisfactory choice at the end of the action between long prison sentences or enforced [time] underground, and unnecessary alienation of a potentially sympathetic public.” Some months later, one anonymous Weather sympathizer calling herself “a daughter of the Amerikan Revolution” published an essay on affinity groups in a spring 1970 issue of the radical Berkeley Tribe, endorsing their use for armed struggle. “The term ‘affinity group’ means different things to different people,” she explained, “anything from a group of people that run together in a riot to a basic armed unit for the revolution, which is my conception of it.” But already by 1970, even some of those who had flirted with street violence were concluding that rioting and armed struggle were dead ends for the movement, relegating activists to a terrain in which they could always be overpowered by the police or the military, while undermining their moral authority in the process. Affinity groups had proven too useful in practical terms to be abandoned—“they are to many people’s minds both safer and more politically acceptable than the marshal system for organizing participants at a demonstration,” an organizing manual of the period explained—but their significance and function began to change.

“The reason it changed, and went from a violent to more of a nonviolent kind of thing,” said Jeff Jones, “is because violent street fighting played itself out kind of quickly. We took it to the max at the Days of Rage, and the price was too high, and everybody knew it.” By the time the Mayday Tribe put out its call to protest, the concept of affinity groups had begun to blend with the other small-group forms that were rapidly growing in countercultural popularity: collectives, communes, cooperatives, consciousness-raising groups. Perhaps there was still a slight frisson of clandestinity attached to the use of affinity groups, given the sense among many that “Mayday was sort of the above-ground Weatherpeople,” in the words of the John Scagliotti, who worked as a full-time staffer in the DC office for the action. And certainly the impulse toward direct physical confrontation with authority would remain a recurring (and constantly debated) element of disruptive protest for decades to come. But on the whole, affinity groups were coming to be seen as more expedient and sociable than paramilitary or insurrectionary. “Affinity groups at Mayday,” remembered John Froines, another Chicago 7 defendant centrally involved in the action, “were both a tactical approach in terms of the street and also something more, connected to people’s linkages to one another.”

Via Flickr.

That said, there was a haphazard quality to the Mayday organizing; a lot of the action was put together on the fly. “We had no organization, so we made a virtue out of our weakness, which was what guerrillas had always done,” Jerry Coffin explained. “If you’ve got no organization, what do you do? You create something where no organization is a virtue, and that was the whole affinity group thing we’d been promoting.” Much of the initial outreach was done in conjunction with the speaking tours of Rennie Davis and John Froines to campuses throughout the United States. Much of the rest was done by mail, thanks to a resourceful activist who had figured out a do-it-yourself way to reset postage meters. “There was the notion,” Froines recalled, “that people from University of Wisconsin or Florida State or Smith College or wherever would come, and they would have encampments of their own, and they would develop tactical approaches to what they were doing.”

This decentralized structure, organizers hoped, would also help them avoid the legal entanglements they had faced after the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention protests. At first glance, Mayday might look “like an engraved invitation to a conspiracy trial,” as one activist told Time, but it would be virtually impossible for the government to pin responsibility on one or more individual organizers. Everyone was responsible. As one participant from Richmond College in Staten Island explained afterwards, “As affinity groups you have to make your own decisions and be fully responsible. You’re not simply following a leadership up at the head of a march … Rather than one conspiracy, it was thousands of conspiracies.”

The lack of formal organization, however, tended to undermine the ideal of egalitarian participation as a result of what radical feminist Jo Freeman famously called “the tyranny of structurelessness,” in one of the most influential essays of the time. Drawing on her experiences in the women’s liberation movement, where collectives and consciousness-raising groups had flourished, Freeman described how the lack of formal structures and decision-making procedures—so democratic in intent and appearance—in fact allowed informal and unaccountable power dynamics to flourish. Structurelessness, she wrote, “becomes a way of masking power,” for decisions were always being made in a group: “As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few.”

That was exactly the character of the Mayday organizing. Local affinity groups might choose their own targets and tactics, but a small group of men around Rennie Davis wrote the organizing materials, controlled the finances, called the press conferences, did the big-picture planning, and spoke for the action as a whole. Scagliotti remarked, “While Rennie and all these guys were the leaders, most of the people in the affinity groups didn’t know that, they didn’t know who the leaders were. They were just being organized in their local whatever to come to this thing.” The looseness of the overall structure gave considerable autonomy to local groups, but it also meant there was no transparency or accountability, no way for affinity groups to have input into the overall decision-making or to dispute what the informal leadership was doing.

* * *

More appropriate to Saigon in wartime than Washington in the spring.

Early on Monday morning, 25,000 or so members of the Mayday Tribe began moving into Washington to block their designated targets. The government was ready, having mobilized a combined force of 10,000 police, National Guard, and federal troops, with at least 4,000 more troops available on reserve. Their orders were to arrest every demonstrator on sight. (Attorney General John Mitchell explained to Nixon during a White House meeting to plan the government’s response to the protests, “I know they want to be arrested but, Mr. President, I don’t think that’s any reason for not arresting them.”)

“Small battles raged all over the city as demonstrators would build crude barricades, disperse when the police came and then regroup to rebuild the dismantled obstructions,” one underground paper reported. The protesters’ nonviolence pledge did not preclude building barricades; nobody felt “that because we will be nonviolent that we could not also be militant and creative.” The barricades were indeed inventive: “We threw everything available into the streets,” one participant wrote afterwards in the Berkeley Tribe, “garbage cans, parked cars, broken glass, nails, large rocks, and ourselves. To add to the confusion, we lifted hoods of cars stopped for lights and let air out of tires.” Some of these obstacles—like the one in Georgetown that was constructed by overturning a tractor trailer—were even effective in stopping traffic for relatively long periods of time.

But ultimately, the government had the upper hand on the streets, thanks to a military operation that, in Newsweek’s words, “seemed more appropriate to Saigon in wartime than Washington in the spring.” Waves of helicopters landed alongside the Washington Monument, ferrying Marines into the city, and federal troops lined the Key Bridge. A Marine battalion was stationed at Dupont Circle; Ann Northrop, who was working as a journalist at the time and went on to play a major role in ACT UP, recalled “tanks around the rim pointing out toward the street with their big guns.” The city was effectively under military occupation. “The scene was midway between that of a sham battle and a war of death,” one protester wrote afterwards. “Police vans careened around corners, frantic to discharge their human load and return for another. Helicopters chopping overhead made us aware that the ground troops had surveillance of all of our movements.”

Remembered Perry Brass, “There were people just running through the streets, there were cops running after them. Any time you stood still you’d be arrested, so you had to keep moving.” There was more order to the protest chaos than there seemed to be, thanks to the affinity groups and a sophisticated communications system. “We had all these very expensive radios,” explained Jerry Coffin, “thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of radios. And every major group that had a target had a radio and was in communication with our base.”

But all the planning and organization counted for little in the face of the government’s sweep arrests: there’s not a whole lot that nonviolent protesters can do when the government decides to send thousands of troops to round them up. Many of the 7,000 arrestees caught in the dragnet that first day were people with no connection to the protest, who just happened to be where sweeps were taking having not yet committed illegal acts. To transport the mass of prisoners, the police had to commandeer city buses; when even that wasn’t enough, they hired Hertz and Avis rent-a-trucks. Another 6,000 were arrested over three more days, most of them for blockading the Justice Department and the US Capitol. The city jail quickly filled, even though the police crammed as many as twenty people into two-person cells. Another 1,500 were packed into the jail’s recreation yard. That still left thousands of prisoners, whom the police herded into an outdoor practice field next to RFK Stadium. Conditions were awful, with next to no sanitary facilities, blankets, or food. One anarchist wag made a sign proclaiming the football field “Smash the State Concentration Camp #1.” People who had strongly disapproved of the Mayday Tribe’s shutdown plan were appalled by the flagrant violation of civil liberties, and upset to see the nation’s capital under military occupation.

But the government was clearly more concerned with maintaining control than with maintaining public sympathy, as would prove to be the case time and again—during the Seattle WTO blockades; at an array of Occupy encampments across the country; in Ferguson, Missouri—when direct-action protests threatened public order. Local residents, especially African Americans, almost immediately began supporting the imprisoned Mayday protesters by bringing food, blankets, and notes of encouragement to the football field and throwing them over the fence. Within a day, leaders of the district’s black community, predominantly from the civil rights generation of the 1950s and early 1960s and representing more than fifty organizations, organized a large-scale food drive for the crowd of arrestees, delivering the supplies in a twelve-car caravan. “We’ve been through all the head beatings and open compounds and we’re not going to do it again. But we did want to help them,” veteran civil rights activist Mary Treadwell said to the press. “We gave them food so they could put their bodies on the line and disrupt the government,” she explained, noting that anything that “can upset the oppressive machinery of the government will help black people.”

In retrospect, the moment seems rich in symbolism, like a passing of the direct-action torch. The black civil rights movement of Treadwell’s generation had made extraordinary use of nonviolent direct action in the United States to challenge segregation and racial inequality, from the pioneering Montgomery bus boycott to the legendary Southern lunch counter sit-ins to the daring Freedom Rides and even the abortive “stall-in” plan. But white resistance to change, and the unrelenting violence directed toward the movement, had propelled many organizers toward very different approaches. Over the course of the 1960s, black radicals increasingly rejected even militant nonviolence to advocate in favor of self-defense and, if necessary, armed revolution. As Black Power pioneer Stokely Carmichael put it in a 1966 essay, “We cannot be expected any longer to march and have our heads broken in order to say to whites: come on, you’re nice guys. For you are not nice guys. We have found you out.” Malcolm X had made the point even more forcefully in his famous 1963 “Message to the Grassroots”: “There’s no such thing as a nonviolent revolution,” he said. “Whoever heard of a revolution where they lock arms … singing ‘We Shall Overcome’? Just tell me. You don’t do that in a revolution. You don’t do any singing; you’re too busy swinging.”

Via Flickr.

But taking up the gun, literally or metaphorically, had only provided the white power structure with new justification for violently targeting black movements. As longstanding organizer Kai Lumumba Barrow recalled, “There was a major shift in the political expression of the black liberation movement in the mid sixties.” Barrow was raised in a radical black nationalist family and played a key role in the revival of direct action in movements of color at the turn of the millennium. The Black Panther Party and other black nationalist groups, she explained, “took the position that nonviolent direct action placed us in a very passive position,” and came to view it as a tactic for the privileged. “But what we did,” she continued, “was we went to the extreme and started engaging in armed struggle or at least self-defense, and we didn’t have enough experience with that perhaps, or we didn’t have enough support for that, and we were beat. We were beat pretty badly.” Terry Marshall, an activist who was deeply involved in a range of direct-action projects in the 1990s and onward, beginning with the Student Liberation Action Movement and continuing into Black Lives Matter, recalled, “I remember being little, I remember I thought everyone must be dead—Malcolm X was killed, Martin Luther King was killed, I was like, Angela Davis must be dead, all the Black Panthers must be dead.” He continued, “The movement was defeated because of internal weaknesses, but it was also militarily defeated.”

In the wake of all the repression, recalled Rev. Osagyefo Sekou, an organizer and radical theologian who led direct-action trainings in Ferguson after the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown, “There was a shudder. They say a wounded lion won’t fight. It makes sense, it was a shudder,” a pulling back from confrontational tactics more generally and from direct action specifically. Black-led movements in particular would not pursue direct action as a strategy to any significant degree until the anti-apartheid upsurge of the mid 1980s, and even then they would employ it in very different ways than their white counterparts; it would not be until the mid-to-late 1990s that movements of color would really begin to embrace and adapt direct action again on a significant scale. The movements that built on the innovations of Mayday to create a new direct-action tradition in the 1970s and 1980s were overwhelmingly white in composition and generally unsuccessful—sometimes spectacularly so—in addressing race.

* * *

It was nationwide mayhem, neither coordinated nor led by anyone.

Mayday wasn’t the last antiwar protest by a long shot, but it was the last big national one, and the last major one with ties to the fading New Left. “The white ‘New Left’ movement of the 1960s is dead and gone,” one radical wrote in Space City!, a Houston underground paper, soon after the action. “Although government repression had something to do with its demise, the main cause of its death was its failure to confront honestly [the] problems of sexism, racism and ego-tripping in general.” For all the efforts to create a decentralized action without “movement generals,” Mayday was criticized as too centralized and dominated by Davis and his circle. It was, one activist observed, “hate-the-heavies time,” and the complaints about Mayday revealed how dramatically the radical landscape was shifting. Another participant declared, “There were a lot of things about Mayday that were totally wrong. It was a mass mobilization, a national mobilization. It was elitistly organized, mostly by males. It was going to Washington.” As Scagliotti put it, “[Mayday was] the end of that sort of male radical leadership, the Rennie Davises, the Chicago 7, all those guys, the whole world of the counterculture mixed with radical street politics.”

An acrimonious follow-up conference in Atlanta that August revealed the fissures within the Mayday Tribe. There were separate gay and women’s gatherings beforehand, which set a consciousness-raising and identity-focused tone for the conference as a whole. Activists from these groups challenged the rest of the Tribe to examine and overcome their own internal chauvinisms; many participants were left feeling defensive and attacked. “No one seemed to think the conference was functioning to resolve any political problems or effectively to plan any future actions,” one attendee reported. “Yet most stayed to engage in the personal struggle with the questions of sexism and elitism in the Movement in general, in Mayday, and in themselves.” The heavies didn’t show, infuriating everyone else and underscoring in many people’s minds the problem of “macho tripping within the movement.” Straight white men, including more traditional leftists, just found the whole situation mystifying and uncomfortable. “Gays Dominate Mayday Meeting in Atlanta,” the left-wing paper The Guardian disapprovingly headlined its post-conference report. A number of the women and gay participants, however, were energized by the gathering. Or rather—in a sign of the separatism, personalism, and inward focus that would characterize identity politics for much of the seventies—they were energized by the time they spent among themselves. “For a number of us, gay and straight, the women’s part of the conference was getting to know one another through dancing, swimming, making music together, singing, rapping in small groups, in twos and threes, digging on each other,” one woman wrote in Atlanta’s underground paper.

“We blew each other’s minds by our beauty, our strength. We grew by loving each other.” A gay man similarly described the gay caucuses as “really a high for me … I’d forgotten about the atmosphere of total personal openness, openness about one’s deepest confusions, that is so lacking in straight-dominated meetings.” The Mayday Tribe ceased to exist soon afterwards. But in May 1972, when Nixon announced the mining of seven Vietnamese harbors, the underlying political shifts that had shaped Mayday were dramatically on display. Demonstrators all around the country quickly organized themselves and blocked highways, key intersections, and railroad tracks. The sites were mainly not notorious hotbeds of radicalism: they included Minneapolis, Albuquerque, Boulder, and Gainesville; Evanston, Illinois; East Lansing, Michigan; Oxford, Ohio. Protesters blocked the New York State Thruway and Chicago’s Eisenhower Expressway; others shut down Santa Barbara’s airport by occupying its runways. In Davis, California, demonstrators sat down on Southern Pacific tracks; still more did the same on the Penn Central commuter line in New Brunswick, New Jersey. In St. Louis, the local chapter of Vietnam Veterans Against the War occupied the top of the Gateway Arch, while another group of radicals took over the decommissioned mine sweeper USS Inaugural, saying they wanted to repair it and take it to Vietnam to clear the harbor of Nixon’s mines. It was nationwide mayhem, neither coordinated nor led by anyone. Longtime activist Leslie Cagan, one of the participants in the mine sweeper action, who would later go on to coordinate many of the largest protests of subsequent decades, from the million-person 1982 anti-nuclear protest in Central Park to the enormous 2003 protests against the Iraq War, recalled that there wasn’t “any kind of national organization or network that put out a call for these kinds of bolder actions. It was just one of those moments where a lot of people were on the same wavelength.”

The Mayday Tribe hadn’t succeeded in its stated goal—“If the government won’t stop the war, the people will stop the government”— and its singular experiment in nonviolent obstruction was soon forgotten, too messy or perhaps too unsettling to be part of popular understandings of the Vietnam War and the movements that opposed it. But the daring action had in fact achieved its most important aim: pressuring the Nixon Administration to hasten the end of the hated war. While neither activists nor anyone else would remember this unpopular protest for the outsized impact that it had, the political innovations of Mayday would quietly and steadily influence grassroots activism for decades to come, laying the groundwork for a new kind of radicalism: decentralized, multivocal, ideologically diverse, and propelled by direct action. As one participant observed in the protest’s immediate aftermath, “Twenty thousand freaks carry the seeds now, and they’ve been blown to every corner of the land.”

Seeds, of course, are small, and only sprout and grow after a period of dormancy. A new era of political retrenchment was beginning, and many of those who dreamed of fundamentally reshaping American society and politics were trying to put down new roots, as the first act in a long process of radical reinvention.

* * *

From Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism, by L. A. Kauffman.

Actress Mary Tyler Moore has died at the age of 80. Although she was best known for her iconic role on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” Moore was also a trained dancer and dreamed of making it into a career. In her 2009 memoir, Growing Up Again: Life, Loves, and Oh Yeah, Diabetes, Moore wrote about how dance gave her strength and stability:

Dance, especially the training for it, is a big part of me. It shapes the discipline I’ve brought to my work as an actress, initiated my belief in the adage “No pain, no gain,” and generally provided a home that’s never changed. No matter what fears assaulted me, as person, actress, or dancer, dance was constantly giving me the familiar steps I needed to grow.

Dance has been my constant best friend.

During the seven years of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” I arranged to have three portable ballet barres brought to the soundstage along with a huge mirror on wheels for class. It was a daily lunchtime event, presided over by a woman who’d been my teacher for some twenty years, Sallie Whalen. Music was provided by a classical pianist hired to accompany us on an upright that rolled to our spot in front of the newsroom.

There were usually eight to ten of us—Georgia Engel, Valerie Harper, Beverly Sanders, who played Rayette the waitress on the series, me, and several others who’d once worked as dancers and were now spending their days driving car pools or working as actresses. There were a few young dancers who’d join us from time to time, and when it was over they loved to sit at our dinosaur feet and listen.

It was a touchstone for all of us—sharing the class with its all-too-familiar panting and groaning or sitting on the floor afterward applying bandages to our new blisters.

It was a sisterhood of sorts, not about feminism, but about the nearly religious connection that is ballet class.

I’m often asked where my strength comes from to accept diabetes and its impingement on my life. I do believe ballet gave me that ability. But it’s sad to note that within the successful actress writing this book beats the heart of a failed dancer.

So as I gave up the dream of being a world-famous dancer and became, much to my surprise, a world-famous actress, I clung to dance for pleasure, for structure, and for adventure. Dance took me to places I would never have been privileged to enter without it, and to meet people I revered—and do to this day.

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