June 17, 2020 First Person The Sound of Music So Far Away By Wayétu Moore Photo: Fred P. M. van der Kraaij. Via Wikimedia Commons. In the months after Mam left Liberia for New York, we talked to her every Sunday. She sounded the same to me then, though once or twice her voice disappeared while she spoke. I inhaled the heavy silence, hoping that some of her would seep through the phone so that I could lay my head against it. “I will soon be back, yeh?” she would say. After moving into the house with palm trees, I found that her smell had moved with us, followed me as I, on so many Saturday afternoons, had trailed her around the apartment in her red high heels that dragged underneath my feet. In her closet, in her room, in the kitchen, even Korkor smelled like her—the calming blend of seasoned greens and rose water. Every day our driver, a short, chubby man with a blunt line of gray hair an inch above each ear, picked us up from school. Torma met him at the end of the road to walk us home. From the main road we could see our house dancing in the heated rays of the sun, a drawing that grew bigger and more real with each step. We stumbled out of the car in uniform plaid skirts and small pink backpacks. Torma waved at our driver as his tires blew a whirl of dust into the air when he drove away. “Come,” Torma said, turning around to us. “Surprise for you all inside.” Read More
June 16, 2020 First Person The Origin of My Laugh By Danielle Geller When my mother died, her best friend Heidi called and told me, “What I’ll miss most is her laugh.” * When my mother called me on the phone before she died, she rarely laughed but often cried. * My mother had four daughters, and I am the oldest. My mother did not raise us. We had all been adopted: the first of us, by our paternal grandmother; the third, by my mother’s friend; the fourth, by a family in Virginia shortly after she was born. My youngest sister is almost twenty years younger than me—she was eight years old the first time we met. I found a card her family had sent my mother with a still-working cell phone number printed inside, and we set up a meeting while I was in town for a conference. As we walked across the parking lot toward their car, her adoptive mother made an off-hand comment that startled me into laughter. She tripped over nothing and gasped, “You have your mother’s laugh.” * When I was in middle school, I fell in love with a friend’s laugh. It sounded like cute, high-pitched hiccups. I practiced her laugh alone in my room—as if my laugh could be something smaller, something else. Grandma always said she could pick my laugh out of a crowd. * A bat biologist once described my laugh as the sound a crow makes when it sees something really shiny. * A few years ago, a friend I knew only through voice chat and video games visited me in Boston. More accurately, he visited Boston for a video game convention, but I had invited him and the rest of our guild to my apartment for a dinner of homemade pulled-pork sandwiches, corn bread, and macaroni and cheese. On the train ride down, his phone’s battery died, and he found himself wandering my street in the dark because he couldn’t remember the number of my building. He was about to head back to his hotel when he heard it, my laughter, erupting from the open living room window. “I knew that laugh!” he yelled when I opened the door. * My mother did not want her daughters to return to the Navajo reservation. She kept us from her family to protect us, she thought. But after she died, I reconnected with my aunt, and the first time we talked on the phone, I recognized it, my mother’s laugh, carried hundreds of miles from the land she once called home. Read More
June 8, 2020 First Person Let It Burn By Robert Jones, Jr. ©Ana Juan In 2017, I wrote an essay titled “I Don’t Give a Fuck about Justine Damond,” which outlined my perspective on Ms. Damond’s death at the hands of Mohamed Noor, a Minneapolis police officer who also happened to be Somali American and Muslim. My thesis was this: How can I be concerned about a white woman shot and killed by a police officer when there are countless Black people who suffered that fate to the stunning silence and antipathy of the vast majority of white American populace? The essay was met with the characteristic outrage from white people (but not only white people). They accused me of disrespecting Damond’s memory and being inconsiderate of her family’s feelings. I was also accused of being a hypocrite for not condemning the actions of the cop as I had in previous incidents involving Black victims. Even some of the people closest to me believed that I had crossed a line and thought that I had been too harsh in my assessment and should if not show reverence then certainly remain silent on the matter. But I could do neither, not with the blood of Black people flowing endlessly in the streets. I insisted that there was a purpose to my position. I had predicted that the outcome of Damond’s death would be unique and that, unlike in the numerous cases in which the murder of a Black person by state agents was considered “justified” and the agents themselves regarded as valiant, the officer who killed Damond wouldn’t have access to the protections or rationalizations that his white compatriots had always been given. And I was correct. Read More
June 8, 2020 First Person Performing Whiteness By Sarah Bellamy Original illustration © Otto Steininger When the weather warms up I feel two things: excitement and trepidation. My body longs for the warmth of sun on my skin and my heart remembers that summer is the season of death. It has been this way for a long time, but I think I started counting when I was a teenager. That’s when I learned of the “Red Summer”; in 1919, white supremacist terrorist attacks and riots resulted in mass murder of Black civilians in more than three dozen cities across the United States. Often in the summer I am in the presence of young people who, as teenagers, are just coming into their awareness of the brutality that is cyclically enacted against Black people. Often I need to hold space for their rage, their grief, their fear. I am tired of summers beginning this way. A short while ago, as I was nursing my son, I scrolled through the New York Times. Reporting about Ahmaud Arbery caught my eye. I clicked on a video link. Though I didn’t intend to, I saw the cell phone footage of his murder. I saw him running as pickup trucks bore down on him, I saw armed white men jump from their vehicles. I saw the buckshot disperse into and out of Ahmaud’s body. I saw him turn to run and fall. I thought of how we often see Black bodies running, bodies like his in particular—peak fitness and youth and promise. Sprinting, turning on a dime, twisting and perhaps catching a long pass to run a touchdown. Instead, Ahmaud turned, picked up his knee to run, and fell forward, succumbing to the wounds of shotgun blasts to his chest. I felt my spirit crumple as his body did. It stole my breath and ignited a raging panic in my flesh. My heart pounded with a drumming that goes back generations. My body remembered nursing my firstborn son while protesters marched past my house to demand justice for Philando Castile. My body remembers. But then something else caught my eye. It was the white man who shot him. It was how he looked down at the human being he’d just mortally wounded. It was the conviction on his face. The posture eerily reminiscent of so many white men who have walked away from the violence they’ve enacted against, in particular, Black men. Black men who, in a fair fight, would’ve wiped the floor with them. But this fight, since the beginning, has never been fair. The deck has always been stacked against us. This fight goes looking for our young, proud, strong men. It hunts them. It runs them down in pickup trucks. It demands their attention, even when it has no authority to do so. It is staggered by the grace and beauty and freedom it sees in what it chases. It wants it and extinguishes it instead. As a stage director I am trained to watch how people move and to interpret meaning—to read their bodies. As an American I am also trained to read bodies and see race. And, like looking through a pair of binoculars, these two lenses perfectly aligned in the moment after Ahmaud fell, magnifying the embodiment of white supremacy in his murderer. The way that man bore up. The way he turned and walked back to his truck, to his father, a shotgun slung low in his hand. It was in his shoulders, his jaw, his waist, his hips. I saw it come over him and I saw him stand up in it and move with it and, though he didn’t say the words, they were all over him: Take that, nigger. I realized I was watching thousands of white men throughout American history standing over a broken Black body, their breath ragged, adrenaline cresting, spent, feeling legitimated by the proof of their violence. It is more than a rash decision; their bodies betray an assumptive birthright. Their bodies firm up and swagger into a ritualistic circle of savagery. It is a possession. Read More
May 27, 2020 First Person The Unreality of Pregnancy By Gabriela Wiener Egon Schiele, Schwangere. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Over these past months, nine, to be exact, I’ve come to think that pleasure and pain always have something to do with things either entering or exiting your body. Nine months ago I didn’t know that a series of events related to those entrances and exits would converge that November, the same month I turned thirty. My father was diagnosed with colon cancer, Adriana committed suicide by throwing herself from a hotel window, and I was lying in a Spanish National Health Service hospital bed, recovering from major surgery. I returned home, devastated by the news, and physically very weak. I can scarcely remember the days following my operation, two weeks during a particularly cold winter, during which I’d needed J’s help for almost everything. To cut my meat, to brush my teeth, and to clean my incisions. I’d had some excess mammary glands removed from beneath my armpits and I could barely move my arms. I had two enormous scars from which catheters emerged, draining dark blood. I’d decided to have the glands removed because, aside from being unattractive and annoying, the doctors had assured me that, one day in the remote future when I decided to have children, they would fill with milk and cause me terrible problems. And so I decided that I should amputate what I saw as a deformity, even though my mother, with her magical worldview, insisted on reminding me that in other times, women with supernumerary breasts were burned as witches: for her, my two extra breasts could have held supernatural powers. The surgery went off without complications but the recovery was turning out to be very difficult. On top of that, the antibiotics they had prescribed to prevent infection seemed to be burning a hole in my stomach. Read More
May 19, 2020 First Person Palimpsests By Nancy Wayson Dinan In 1990, Jacob Mason stopped playing video games. I was in middle school, and I knew something had happened to him, but I was still more than a decade away from real empathy. I was more interested in myself, as middle schoolers are. Jacob lived down the street; his mother was a friend of my mother’s, but he and I didn’t know each other well yet. Something had happened and he no longer wanted to play. I took his Nintendo console and his games, including the original Mario and the original Zelda, and I was happy to have them. That same spring in Leisurewoods in Buda, TX—my neighborhood—there was a murder-suicide. A man had killed his wife and children and then turned the gun on himself. No suicide note was found, though the murder weapon, a .38 caliber revolver, was found next to the father, Peter Joost. The lack of a suicide note was suspicious, as was the fact that none of the victims had been shot in the head, as would normally be the case. People live in that house now, a nice-ish ranch-style home on Killdeer Drive, and I think about how strange it would be to live in a house where four people died one night. But, again, at the time, this crime was nothing more than a story to me. I was busy with my own life, fairly new to the area and having a hard time adjusting. To say my home life was hard would be an understatement, but that’s a story for a different time. Let’s just say that my life revolved around Seventeen magazine, as I tried to figure out how and what and who to be, and fantasy novels with larger-than-life heroines, and hiding whenever I heard my stepfather’s car pull into the driveway. I played Mario first, starting at the beginning and continuing all the way through, and didn’t touch Zelda for a couple of months. But the rumors started, and they eventually reached me, even in my exile from the rest of the small town, because everybody whispered them. Peter Joost, who worked for the Texas Gambling Commission, had uncovered something, had been investigating something big. He never would have killed his family. And then 20/20 came to film, and they did a whole story about how this was not a triple murder-suicide but instead a quadruple murder. Joost had been investigating the Houston Turf Club, which at the time had a $1 billion lawsuit against the Texas Gambling Commission. The Hays County sheriff at the time, Paul Hastings, said the questions raised by the Joost family and their representatives were “beating the same dead horse.” He said he was convinced that the murder-suicide ruling would stand for one thousand years. Later, at an interview in July of that year, Hastings said that the day the shootings were thought to have occurred, Peter Joost suddenly canceled plans for one of his son Eric’s friends to spend the night. Hastings did not identify the boy or his family. “I don’t remember where we got that information,” Hastings said, and that was that. The world moved on. Read More