Still from Mickey Mouse: The Haunted House (1929)

Mom played Hooked on Classics, three albums of disco-beat-backed classical music, for me and my brother Frank when we were young. The albums were ancestors to the modern-day mash-up,  one song morphing into the next. Hooked on Classics 3: Journey through the Classics’s track nine, “Journey through America,” was my favorite, especially when I’d spin it on my Fisher Price turntable at night. Jaunty. The track was composed of twelve songs conflated into one instrumental tune.

“When the Saints Go Marching In Jimmy Crack Corn.”

“When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again Deep in the Heart of Texas.”

The needle skipped despite the dust-free vinyl, and the whole record player, playing at max volume, wobbled on my nightstand. The nearby music box’s blonde ballerina spun herself, and everything, to reckless abandon.

My favorite part of “Journey through America” was “Shortnin’ Bread Star-Spangled Banner.” On cloud-stilled mornings when the distance between the bed and shag carpet seemed as wide as the Chesapeake Bay, Mom broke the silence by calling, “Three lil’ children lyin’ in bed.” And we’d get up.

Sometimes I still hum the song, alone and under my breath, while brushing my teeth or making coffee. I don’t have children. But I do think I carried my nephew, Frankie, before he was born, in my body. At least the idea of him. Anticipation in my stomach. A foot cramp where my toes spread out like they got to be free. Somedays he sat on the slope of my nose. His ultrasound profile looked a little like mine.

Mandy, my sister-in-law, gave birth on November 11, 2016. Frank Prescott Dawson V (yes, Prescott, and yes, the fifth), whom we call Baby Frankie to avoid confusing him with his father, Frank, and his grandfather Frank, and his deceased great- and great-great-grandfathers, Frank and Frank.

Legacy.

About ninety minutes after Baby Frankie’s early arrival, I bounded down the jet bridge onto the next flight to Baltimore. On the plane, to pass the time, I scrolled through photos of our new baby. We had an album’s worth of hours after the caesarean. Everyone wanted to capture it all. When I arrived and saw Baby Frankie in the crib for the first time, I took a pic of Mandy in her bed, druggy. Or maybe just that happy. I prefer that version.

My nephew’s newborn body looked comfy in its Blackness. His skin, still ruddy from birth but quickly browning, absorbed all the hospital room’s florescent light. He clenched both his fists, his eyes wide open, arms in the air like a celebration of his excellence. He looked like Usain Bolt. He looked like T-Pain just told him to put his hands up and stay there.

Everything seemed possible. He could be a doctor like his dad.

He could be anything.

He could be arrested for doing nothing on a West Baltimore street, like Freddie Gray before his death by police.

These are the realities of today’s Black boys. The extremes. Acknowledging the spectrum isn’t morbid, but elegiac—a lamentation not for the deceased but for those separated from the meaning of their bodies almost from birth. Feared as early as five, as if their small frames cage a rage no one can temper.

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I’m growing microgreens. Every couple of weeks they are sufficiently lush to be snipped and eaten. They sit on my nightstand, and there’s just enough light, coming from an adjacent window, to feed them. Outside that window, I can see a tree that is older than anyone I know. I photograph it frequently, watching it change with the seasons.

As much as I love plant life—trees and flowers—growing food is new for me. It comforts. It feels as though, in this uncertain time, I am connected to the ancestors, the way they’d often grow a little patch of something for sustenance. From the time when the Old South turned into the New South, which I suppose is now old again, most all Black folks spent a lifetime of scraping and scuffling. Land of one’s own was hard to come by. Despite how often the gospel of “get you some land” was preached, white supremacy wielded its power over the land. But even for the sharecropper, a little patch of something, a rectangle of dirt on which to grow greens, tomatoes, some cabbage, some berries, was protected and nurtured. Even when the dirt was hard and spent, black hands eked sprouts from it, tended them to fullness. And ate from the bounty.

By any measure of politics and civil order, Black people in the antebellum and Jim Crow South existed in a cruel relationship to land and the agricultural economy. Exploitation happened from birth to death, from the fields all the way to the commissary where people overpaid landowners for minimal goods. Black people gave birth in the cane, died in the cotton, bled into the corn. But out of little patches of something, carefully tended to because beyond survival is love, came reward. The earth gave moments of pleasure: Latching onto a juicy peach—your teeth moving from yellow to red flesh. Digging up a yam, dusting off its dirt, roasting it so long the caramelized sweetness explodes under your tongue. Running your hands across the collard leaves coming up from the ground rippled flowerlike. That green is as pretty as pink. Read More

In this American dark age we must all take a moment to travel through time. Dark ages are marked with violence, disease, economic and cultural erosion, scientific perversions as well as, surprisingly, technological advancements. Technology for violence and the science of war thrives in these periods while libraries shrink. Arts investments dwindle and our knowledge of history, both distant and immediate, fades. Some believe we are just now on the brink of a dark age, and yet those not invited to benefit from certain privileges of whiteness have been in one for centuries. The black American and the white American live in two bodies during the same hour with eyes that see vastly different shadows. Racism is an integral part of the American experiment. There is no more time or energy left to waste arguing that truth. Genocide of the indigenous peoples, enslavement of the African, abduction and incarceration of the Japanese American, exploitation of the modern undocumented immigrant and the current carceral state that grinds black and brown bodies into profit for private corporations is racial in design, an obvious and grotesque reality. That is the strategy of institutionalized national racism. Oppressed citizens of that nation possess no country. The land below them is controlled by the state, so they become nomadic and vulnerable to exploitation and abuse by delusional agents of the state. Black Americans have been citizens of a nation without a country for a very long time.

I tell my students of fiction that every character must exist in three temporal realms: past, present, and future. Without that consideration, characters will feel inauthentic. This is a lie. We all know people who seem either cursed or just stupid, who flounder between the same bad choices again and again. It is as if they have no memory of their last bad relationship, no ability to recollect and learn and strategize differently. That kind of person has a past, of course, but refuses to see it. When we deny our past we erase our experiences, our knowledge of what is possible. The only people that have no past and no experiences are children. Denial of the past means you have to think as a child thinks, act as a child acts, relegating one’s daily existence to the surprise of a child. The infantilization of the American psyche is essential to perpetuating grotesque institutional structures that require the suffering of many to pay the debt of power to very few. Yet, it is human nature to fantasize about the past. To live in history with judgment, whether it is reverie or regret, is dangerous.

I will not evoke any adages of wisdom or recount the overwhelming narratives of police violence because the hour calls for imagination, not nostalgia. Nostalgia is a paralytic curse as productive and healthy as consuming the meat and wine of a dream. We don’t need to dine with ghosts. That brings us to the present. When people live only to judge the past, the present body is neglected, left to rot. And yet, when they turn fully away from the past, ignoring it entirely, they are subject to incarnations of old traumas. When we carry the past objectively into the present with honesty, our memories become assets. A nation must remember its whole history fully without judgment to guard against reliving previous horrors. This kind of relationship with the past also prevents mistaking history for destiny.

I’m a very spiritual person. I know that we are all the same spiritually, yada yada, but the physical body has rules. The body must be protected and honored as sacred. The nomadic black American body is in jeopardy. She has been bound and hunted for centuries, her pain has become commodified into an operatic spectacle for the world to despair and consume. Those witnessing the protests across this nation are splitting in various factions. Some support the protesters but not the looters. Some support the police but not the president. There are those who want to be neutral, nonparticipatory, refusing to believe the truth that their own bodies are intrinsically knitted to the fate of us all. The rest say let the thing burn and drown the ashes. Just maybe they are all right? What if we must try everything?

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Paint brushes and watercolor paints on the table in a workshop, selective focus, close up

“In the Universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between them, there are doors.” —William Blake

Psychiatrist Daniel Siegel explains how the brain is like a folded hand. A fist. The thumb against the palm represents the limbic regions, brain zones dealing with emotions, stress. The folded fingers are the cerebral cortex, which help with rational thought and regulating moods. The fingernails are the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain used for decision making, ethics, and morality. All these zones work together as a team. Faced with panic, the fingers spring up, we lose rationality, ethics, and are left with our emotions. We often rely on our basic instincts: fight, flight, or freeze. We may feel disorganized, unable to concentrate or make decisions, suffer from mood swings, frustration, and bouts of adrenaline. The trick is to find a way to bring those fingers down. Keep everything connected.

We’ve been in confinement in France for over two months. Here in Brittany, under lockdown, when I’m not writing or online lecturing, I’ve been working as a clinical arts therapist. Three days a week, I leave the cherry tree blossoming in our garden and head along empty roads to a psychiatric hospital. On the car seat to my right is the file I dutifully compiled the first day of confinement. It contains my regulatory paperwork, proving my right to leave my house, forms ticked and completed: name, date of birth, address, hour of departure, arrival. A photocopy of my passport. A stamped document from my employer. Everything is signed.

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John Opie, Mary Wollstonecraft, ca. 1797, oil on canvas, 30 1/4 x 25 1/4″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

A young Englishwoman named Mary Wollstonecraft lived by her wits and her pen. At thirty-four, Mary did not expect to marry, but she soon met an American adventurer named Gilbert Imlay and believed she’d found her soul mate. In love, they moved to Paris where they had a daughter, named Fanny.

But Gilbert began to travel more and more, and soon it became apparent he had a wandering eye as well. Heartbroken over this desertion, Mary drank laudanum. She survived, but within a matter of months was despondent again and jumped from a bridge into the Thames.

Miraculously she was rescued and nursed back to health by William Godwin, like Mary a political radical, to whom she quickly developed a strong attachment. Later married and happy, they read Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther aloud together the night before she went into labor. Tragically, Mary died a few days after giving birth to a second daughter, also named Mary, who would be raised, along with Fanny, by William Godwin, who would remarry.

His new wife had a young child of her own, Claire, and the three girls grew up as sisters; they became known as Les Goddesses. When Mary was seventeen, a famous poet named Percy Bysshe Shelley came courting: he first paid favors to Fanny but quickly fell for Mary and the two eloped to the Continent, taking Claire with them.

Fanny, crestfallen, stayed behind and, like her mother, drank laudanum. The real story concerning the lives of these extraordinary women is filled with many paradoxes, and without a doubt it is more fantastic than any fiction. Read More

In the following excerpt from Jean Giono’s Occupation Journal, the prolific and fiercely imaginative novelist documents his life in Provence during the Nazi occupation of France. He writes of the weather, his family, the desire to flee, the rumors he hears from the surrounding villages, and his struggles to create “incontestably beautiful work” in the midst of crisis.

Paul Cézanne, Landscape in Provence, 1895–1900, pencil and watercolor on paper, 12″ x 19″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Sunday, June 4, 1944

Ten o’clock in the morning, the alert sounds. Immediately followed by violent rumbling at the far end of town, then silence. We’re listening. The most beautiful possible weather. Sun, powder blue sky, a little cool, light wind. Since the other day when ten bombs fell a hundred meters from Margotte, the hens have laid only small eggs, hardly bigger than quail eggs; they have no yolks. Imagine the panic there must be in Marseille now. All is quiet for the moment.

*

Tuesday, June 6, 1944

Charles returns from town with news. First, the Germans are said to have arrived. He didn’t see a single one, but someone told him that they had commandeered a villa on Boulevard Saint-Lazare. Then, the landing has supposedly begun. Where, when, how, no one knows. There’s no trace of it, no indication, but it has begun, no doubt about it. A collective hallucination? Anyone declaring in the empty city today that the Germans haven’t arrived and the landing hasn’t taken place would be torn to pieces.

Cool weather, clouds, overcast sky, crosswinds, still no rain.

Yesterday Mme. X. arrived. For at least three months she’s left me in perfect peace. “If I don’t come anymore,” she said, “it’s because I’m afraid of becoming attached to you.” She makes stupid faces. I answer dryly, “There’s no danger of that.” She protests. I move on and consider how to drive her away.

Began working on Deux cavaliers again.

Serious money worries. Still nothing from Paris, no letters. Wrote to Dambournet, L’Argus du Livre, to propose selling three manuscripts to him, Batailles dans la montagne, Le Poids du ciel, Les Vraies richesses.

A difficult period to get through morally. What I would need is to succeed at some incontestably beautiful work. What I’m writing doesn’t satisfy me. Not enough real work even though I stay shut up in my office the whole day. Irritated by difficulties that I can’t seem to overcome. I’ve hardly written more than a few pages for weeks. And even those aren’t as good as the ones I was writing three months ago. Read More