Rescuing the Wicked Queen: Review of Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird — Laura K. Warrell

May 022014
 

Helen Oyeyemi

With Boy, Snow, Bird, the author treads a well-worn path alongside novelists who give voice to the most notorious villains in the Western literary canon. But she distinguishes herself by weaving a tale that digs at the deeper, uglier roots of human behavior and culture so that we can see ourselves reflected in her story. The novel is as stunning, complicated and magical as the women it presents. —Laura K. Warrell

boy-snow-bird

Boy, Snow, Bird
Helen Oyeyemi
Riverhead Books
Hardcover, 320 pages, $27.95

 

Fairy tales may communicate the universal principals of life but a good story told from a villain’s perspective is often a more delectable read.  Certainly, there is much to learn about the human psyche through contemplating the souls of the wicked; thus we have a tradition of novels, like John Gardner’s Grendel, that retell time-honored tales from the points-of-view of monsters. British novelist Helen Oyeyemi adds her voice to this ever-expanding catalogue, offering her own series of fabulistic novels that weave yarns as bewitching as the classics.

For her fifth book, Oyeyemi wanted to write a wicked stepmother story.  In an interview with Canada’s National Post, she said, “I wanted to rescue the wicked queen from Snow White, because she seemed to find being a villain a bit of a hassle in a lot of ways.”  In Boy, Snow, Bird, Oyeyemi reimagines the tale of the girl “with skin as white as snow” and the jealous stepmother who banishes her. Oyeyemi artfully explores the same themes of beauty, vanity and motherhood as the Brothers Grimm did in the source material, but adds other enticing layers of meaning.  The story takes place in a small Massachusetts town in the 1950s when the American South was fully segregated and magazines predicted the “End of [the] Negro race by 1980.”  But even more intriguing is the secret the characters’ family has kept hidden away for generations: they are black people who have been passing for white. Thus, the novel becomes not only an exploration of the worship of beauty, but an elegantly twisted tale about race and identity.

A writer who has been compared to both Edgar Allen Poe and Emily Dickinson, and who bristles at the “magic realism” label often affixed to her work, Oyeyemi seems fascinated by the mystical and macabre. Whether the Bluebeard-inspired story of an author’s muse coming to life in Mr. Fox or the eerie tale of a troubled child’s relationship with a ghostly new friend in The Icarus Girl, Oyeyemi’s novels straddle the real and unreal. She published The Icarus Girl, her first novel, at the age of nineteen and since then has become one of the youngest writers to be added to Granta’s list of “Best Young British Novelists” and won the Somerset Maugham and Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards.

Born in Nigeria, Oyeyemi grew up in South London where she spent most of her childhood in libraries rewriting classic stories. “I had so many problems with [Little Women]” she said in a National Public Radio interview. “I was so upset with Beth dying, with Jo and Laurie not getting married.  So I just crossed out all those things and wrote new endings. Then I went from there to writing my own things and never really looked back.”

Boy, Snow, Bird begins in New York City where Boy Novak, a beautiful white girl with blonde hair, lives with an abusive father who catches rats for work.  Such a horrifying set of circumstances – “the rats that are blind and starving are the best at bringing death to all the other rats, that’s your father’s claim” – prompts a twenty-year-old Boy to run away to a sleepy New England town called Flax Hill. There, she meets Arturo Whitman, a jewelry maker and widower, and his mesmerizingly beautiful daughter Snow, “a medieval swan maiden, only with the darkest hair and the pinkest lips, every shade at its utmost.”

Arturo eventually proposes to Boy with a handmade bracelet instead of a ring; “a white-gold snake that curled its tail around my wrist and pressed its tongue against the veins in the crook of my elbow…All I could think was: I will fear no evil…That snake was what he’d made for me…was maybe even what he thought I was, deep down.”  Boy’s fate as a wicked stepmother is sealed.  When she gives birth to her daughter Bird, a nurse tells her, “‘That little girl is a Negro’” thus prompting Arturo to reveal his black family’s history of “passing.”

In his mind he was no more colored than I was…his parents were the only ones from their families who’d decided to move north from Louisiana and see if anyone called them out on their ancestry.  His father had stood in line behind a colored man at the front desk of the Flax Hill Country club and eavesdropped as the colored man tried and failed to gain membership…Gerald liked golf and didn’t see why he shouldn’t play it in those surroundings if he could get away with it.  Gerald had thought: Well, what if I just don’t say…what if I never say?  He’d passed that down to Arturo, the idea that there was no need to ever say, that if you knew who you were then that was enough, that not saying was not the same as lying.  

Arturo’s mother Olivia has also passed for white and so refuses to accept her black grandchild, suggesting Boy send Bird to live with Clara, the daughter Olivia sent away for being “dark.”  Instead, Boy sends Snow to Clara, thus alleviating her growing jealousy of the beautiful girl “everybody adored.”

The novel is divided into three parts and the second is told through Bird’s point of view.  It begins with the adolescent girl turning to writing as a way of coping with a family she embarrasses while also trying to connect with her mother who is unashamed of her but cold.  Snow is a regular topic of conversation among the Whitmans who recall the girl’s mythic beauty and grace.

“I have a letter to Snow that I have never sent,” Oyeyemi writes in Bird’s voice.  “Dear Snow, Have you really got to be everywhere?”

After Bird discovers a box of letters written to her from Snow, letters her mother has kept from her, the sisters develop a correspondence and more secrets are uncovered.  The third section of the novel returns the narrative to Boy’s point of view as the older, more reflective woman contemplates her choices.  One last secret is revealed in the book’s final chapters, a shocking turn that further underscores the novel’s exploration of the dualistic nature of identity.

Oyeyemi is faithful to much of the Snow White tale: the dead wife Boy replaces in the Whitman family is presented as saintly and “good,” Snow is described as a girl who “looks like a friend to woodland creatures,” and of course, the innocent young beauty is banished.

“Snow is not the fairest of them all,” Oyeyemi writes in Boy’s voice, echoing the Brothers Grimm’s tale.  “And the sooner she and Olivia and all the rest of them understand that, the better.”

But Oyeyemi is also faithful to the literary qualities of fairy tales as she infuses the narrative with supernatural elements.  When Boy arrives in Flat Hill, “insects dropped onto my shoulders, tentatively, as if wondering whether we’d met before.”  Later, she becomes aware of a ghostly presence “on the other side of the saplings” as she takes a walk.  Bird fears that trolls live in her bedroom and believes she can talk to the swarm of spiders she thinks are congregating in her room.

Such moments in the story suggest a curiosity on Oyeyemi’s part to explore what is “real,” but the author seems uninterested in drawing clear lines between these natural and supernatural planes.  The two co-exist in her work, creating an enchanting continuity between the spirit world, the real world and the characters’ imaginations.  There are as many allusions to the fabulistic – Alice in Wonderland, Red Riding Hood, genies and poisons in bottles – as there are to the painfully concrete – black boys teaching a parrot to say “Fuck Whitey,” references to the Black Panthers, Ebony magazine and Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old black boy beaten to death in 1955 after allegedly flirting with a white woman.

Within this context, the contemplation of beauty becomes profoundly more loaded.  In The Guardian, Oyeyemi stated that in Boy, Snow, Bird she wanted to explore the feminine gaze, the ways women seek approval and “who gets to be deemed the fairest of them all.”  Perhaps in no work of literature is the supremacy of white beauty made more explicit than in the tale of Snow White, in which a mother yearns for a child “with skin as white as snow.”  Boy’s white loveliness contrasted with what the Whitman family considers Bird’s unappealing blackness is only the first layer of the author’s exploration.  It is the Whitman family’s passing, in particular Snow’s apparently white beauty, that gives the novel its philosophical spine and its evil queen her dimension.

“Snow’s beauty is all the more precious…because it’s a trick,” says Boy.  “When whites look at her, they don’t get whatever fleeting, ugly impressions so many of us get when we see a colored girl – we don’t see a colored girl standing there.  The joke’s on us…From this I can only…begin to measure the difference between being seen as colored and being seen as Snow.  What can I do for my daughter?  One day soon a wall will come up between us, and I won’t be able to follow her behind it.”

One way to read Snow’s expulsion from the Whitman home is as an attempt by Boy to protect herself from the threat of the girl’s beauty, this from a woman who has been presented throughout the novel as obsessed with her appearance.  However, another way to read Boy’s decision is as an attempt to protect her black daughter from Snow, who otherwise would act as a constant reminder of the adoration and social inclusion Bird will undoubtedly be denied.

Oyeyemi includes a lengthy but beautifully written series of letters the sisters send to one another, which she uses to dig deeper into the notion of passing.  Snow lets Bird know that their family has been practicing “calculated breeding” for generations, monitoring the skin tone and hair texture of family members and lamenting the birth of dark children like Clara and Bird.  Living in a more racially diverse town, Snow has experienced racism in a way Bird has not, and describes how she avoids racist taunts yet feels unable to defend her black friends against them.  She also describes how her political awareness has evolved having spent most of her life with the exiled black members of the family.

“You can’t feel nauseated by the Whitmans and the Millers without feeling nauseated by the kind of world that’s rewarded them for adapting to it like this,” she writes to Bird.

Bird repeatedly asks Snow to describe how she experiences her immense beauty, a request Snow mostly denies until finally she admits, “I may or may not have hated my own face sometimes.  I may or may not have spent time thinking of ways to spoil it somehow.”

The sisters bond over many things but nothing connects them more than their shared inability to see themselves in mirrors.  Oyeyemi uses mirrors in the novel more than any other image or symbol, in fact, it is the backbone to the plot, much like her original source.  In “Reading Snow White: The Mother’s Story,” scholar Shuli Barzilai discusses Lacan’s analysis of the mirror stage in human development and suggests that the magic mirror in Snow White is central to the evil queen’s connection to and separation from herself, her daughter and the world around her.

“The queen’s confrontations with her magic mirror,” Barzilai writes, “set and keep the plot of ‘Snow White’ in motion.”

Mirrors perform the same function in Boy, Snow, Bird.  All three of the main characters, and some of the minor characters, interact intimately with mirrors, which reveals the internal conflicts that push the story forward.

“Nobody ever warned me about mirrors,” says Boy in the first line of the novel.  “So for many years I was fond of them, and believed them to be trustworthy.”  To Boy, everything becomes a mirror; she ogles herself in picture frames, brass pitchers and dessert spoons.  Mirrors are a way for Boy to come to “familiar terms” with herself as she communicates with and understands her identity through viewing her own reflection, for instance, when she tells her reflection “look what I got you” after finding a husband in Arturo.

“Mirrors see so much,” she says, a concept that supports a Jungian interpretation of the Snow White myth put forth by Barzilai, which suggests that Snow White is not a separate person whose presence threatens the queen but the queen’s shadow side, i.e., the “Snow White in herself.”  Such an interpretation seems even more viable after Boy becomes pregnant and is unable to see her reflection clearly in the mirror.

“When I stood in front of the mirror,” Oyeyemi writes, “the icy blonde was there, but I couldn’t swear to the fact of her being me.  She was no clearer to me than my shadow was.  I came to prefer my shadow.”

Bird’s interactions with mirrors are the opposite of her mother’s.

“Sometimes mirrors can’t find me,” she says.  “I’ll go into a room with a mirror in it and look around, and I’m not there.  Not all the time, not even most of the time, but often enough.”  Bird decides that the reason she is unable to see herself is because she is either not human or “someone [was] wishing and willing me out of sight.”

Snow also fails to show up in mirrors but she has a different explanation than her sister’s.

“My reflection can’t be counted on, she’s not always there,” Oyeyemi writes.  “But I am, so maybe she’s not really me.”

Mirrors, which also feature in the surprise twist in the plot’s final chapters, are only one of the elements working within the stratums of meaning Oyeyemi layers into this piece.  With Boy, Snow, Bird, the author treads a well-worn path alongside novelists who give voice to the most notorious villains in the Western literary canon.  But she distinguishes herself by weaving a tale that digs at the deeper, uglier roots of human behavior and culture so that we can see ourselves reflected in her story.  The novel is as stunning, complicated and magical as the women it presents.

—Laura K. Warrell

.Laura K Warrell
Laura K. Warrell is a freelance writer living in Boston. She teaches writing at the University of Massachusetts Boston and Northeastern University and is a July, 2013, graduate of the MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has previously published both fiction and nonfiction in Numéro Cinq.

 

It Is Love, My Frightened Ones, Love: Review of Robin Oliveira’s I Always Loved You — Laura K. Warrell

Mar 012014
 

Robin Oliveira

Passion may be the very essence of romantic love, as it is of art, thus Berthe and Mary’s torment becomes as vital to their overall happiness as pleasure. The lyricism with which Oliveira conveys this fact – in particular, through dialogue and narration – illustrates the dual nature of love, for instance when Mary and Degas share an intimate moment and she notices that “he smelled of graphite and oil and turpentine; he smelled of work, of Paris, of all of art, everything she wanted.” —Laura K. Warrell

I Always Loved You

I Always Loved You
A Novel
Robin Oliveira
Penguin, $27.95

 

In a literary culture where explorations of romance are often relegated to lightweight, Hollywood–ready love stories with contrived happy endings, Robin Oliveira distinguishes herself.  Her latest novel, I Always Loved You, is romantic in the truest, most intellectually compelling sense of the word. The narrative travels elegantly across the topography of love while simultaneously exploring the agony and exultation of the human experience as it manifests in life and art.  The relationship between artists Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas sits at the center of this novel set amongst the salons and exhibition halls of Belle Époque Paris, which means Oliveira has given herself a challenge unique to writers of historical fiction: faithfully representing a time and cast of characters readers know well while also telling a story that is fresh and contemporary. Oliveira meets this challenge masterfully while also creating an air of romance too often missing in modern fiction.

This is Oliveira’s second novel. Her first, My Name is Mary Sutter, won the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, while she was writing it, and the Michael Shaara Prize for Excellence in Civil War Fiction after it was published. I Always Loved You is a story about another strong-willed Mary forced to find her way in male-dominated society. Oliveira considers women’s struggles among men as “one of the unifying conflicts across cultures,” one which she likes to showcase in her work.

Indeed, Mary Cassatt was a quintessential woman of courage.  Not only did the young American painter uproot her life in Philadelphia to relocate to Paris alone, but she also managed to become one of the only women to exhibit alongside the likes of Degas, Manet, Monet and Pissarro.  In I Always Loved You, Cassatt is presented as a headstrong female who bends to no man’s will and even overwhelms her male counterparts with her pluck. After Degas introduces her to the impressionists at a salon, Mary realizes “what it was to be a woman at a party in Paris.  One either fed the men or was consulted about the time, but was not expected to speak beyond pleasantries.” She asserts herself by openly disagreeing with Émile Zola’s views on literature versus art, suggesting the writer’s work is “less vivid” than Degas’ paintings, then watches as Zola’s “wine-flushed face blushed an even deeper shade of vermillion.”

But it is her friendship with Degas that constitutes the greatest conflict of Mary’s life. Though the true nature of the artists’ relationship remains a mystery to this day – Cassatt burned all of their correspondence – Oliveira places them in a will-they-or-won’t-they love affair in which Mary’s desire for Degas occasionally surpasses her desire to create art, while Degas’ obsession with his work drives the lovers together and apart for years.

The novel begins in 1926 after Degas has died and Mary is sorting through boxes of old letters made up of “so many pages, you would think they had been in love.”  The narrative then steps back to 1887 after Mary has returned to Paris to build a life having studied briefly in the city the year before.  She attends a salon with her friend Abigail Alcott, sister of Louisa May, where unbeknownst to her, she is ogled by Edgar Degas. Unbeknownst to Degas, this attractive woman is Mary Cassatt whose painting he admired weeks before at an exhibition.

Later, an introduction by a mutual friend seals their shared destiny. Mary asks Degas, whose work she also admires, whether he believes art is a gift, to which he replies, “Art does not arise from a well of imaginary skill, obtained by dint of native ability…Art is earned by hard work, by the study of form, by obsessive revision. Only then are you set free. Only then can you see.”

This is the first in a lifetime of conversations about craft, and most interestingly the notion of “seeing,” in which the lovers engage, grow intimate and fight.  Degas proves to be an unpredictable, argumentative cynic and wayward friend who nonetheless adores Mary and her work. He brings her into his circle of artist colleagues where Mary cuts through “the clannish nature of Parisians” with her challenge to Zola. Though her path to acceptance by the circle is bumpy, she eventually becomes an integral part of one of the most celebrated communities of artists and thinkers in Western history.

Through the course of the novel, Mary struggles with her muse and attempts to mold her art to the conventions of the time until Degas inspires her to stay true to her singular vision. In her creative life, she experiences great successes and humiliating failures, while in her personal life she struggles with her family, including a sick sister and disapproving father, who come to live with her in Paris. All the while, Degas flits in and out of her life, fawning over her one moment then maintaining his distance the next.

A subplot between Édouard Manet and painter Berthe Morisot, the wife of Manet’s brother Eugene, reinforces the novel’s overarching theme of elusive love. Manet and Morisot spend the novel stealing glances, sneaking away for trysts, smiting one another with jealous jabs and suffering the consequences of choosing fidelity to family over true love.

I Always Loved You is not romantic simply because it deals with matters of the heart, but because Oliveira adheres to many of the attitudes and aesthetic qualities of romanticism: an emphasis on the self and creative freedom, the elevation of the human soul and pursuit of wonder, the use of extravagant language to reflect the poetry of life and an acceptance, even glorification, of the agony of existence. The characters exemplify the romantic notion that pleasure, beauty, love, even artistic achievement requires pain to be meaningful and real.

Oliveira develops the romantic soul of the novel through the ideas and choices her characters make, and the lyricism with which she tells their stories. Degas acts as a champion for the self and the struggle for art over commerce. Several times during the course of the novel, he withdraws his work from exhibitions, even if it puts Mary and his friends in difficult positions, because he prioritizes the private experience of creation.

“Nothing public matters,” he tells Mary. “What matters is what happens inside the studio. Your work. That is where genius lies, where it is born…It is not born on the walls of an exhibition.”

Mary begins the novel striving for recognition outside of her studio but only discovers her individual style, and consequently finds success, once she heeds Degas’ wisdom, abandons the “academic values” set by the establishment and “renders a portrait she knew the Salon would undoubtedly reject.” Mary is blissful whenever inspiration strikes, but in true romantic fashion, also feels “a wash of sadness, for that sensation happened rarely for an artist, and was in turn fleeting.” Her work becomes as rewarding as it is “punishing,” just like her love for Degas.

Of course, love is at the heart of the novel, especially the love emotionally faithful women feel toward emotionally faithless men like Degas who is too egotistical to love. After a frustrated Mary asks him, “Do you love anyone, Edgar?  Anyone at all?” Degas ponders the question; “Why not love her? Why not say it? What had quickened when he had kissed her had at least been lust. But he was not a romantic man.”

Meanwhile, Manet is simply a cad, parading his lovers in front of not only his loyal wife but Berthe, the woman he loves. Berthe is torn between a tempestuous affair with Manet and a dependable marriage to a devoted husband, who just happens to be Manet’s brother; “I have found a good man who will forgive me anything, even the gossip of others. Even the truth.  What, then, was love? The incessant whisper of passion, or the tedious murmur of caring? The ragged tear at your heart, or the gentle caress that rendered you safe? Perhaps there was no one thing that was love.”

Passion may be the very essence of romantic love, as it is of art, thus Berthe and Mary’s torment becomes as vital to their overall happiness as pleasure. The lyricism with which Oliveira conveys this fact – in particular, through dialogue and narration – illustrates the dual nature of love, for instance when Mary and Degas share an intimate moment and she notices that “he smelled of graphite and oil and turpentine; he smelled of work, of Paris, of all of art, everything she wanted.” The exalted feeling with which the romantic lover relates to her mate is exemplified by such hyperbolic language: Degas does not simply smell like a man she loves but he smells like the world and everything in it Mary cherishes. When he disappears in the weeks following their intimacy, she thinks, “all things she would abandon at the slightest encouragement if he would only grasp her wrist or whisper, I missed you.” Oliveira’s novel lays bare the inherently romantic nature of elusive love, which makes lovers experience the ecstasy of union and the torment of loss again and again.

Likewise, the tragedy of unfulfilled love has greater consequence in a well-lived life than love fulfilled as suffering makes life meaningful. Mary, still smarting from the cruelty Degas has inflicted upon her, asks Berthe whether her relationship with Manet has been worth the pain. “Live without having loved?” Berthe answers.  “I don’t know if I would have wanted that…I can’t help that I love him.  I wish that I could, but no amount of wishing has made it so.’”

This romantic spirit is further accentuated by the presence of light, and by extension vision, as a recurring image in the novel.  Light plays a major role in the evolution of the plot as these artists are inspired by, work by, covet and capture light, thus, it features heavily in their interactions with one another and their work.  “‘I’ve visited your country,’” Degas tells Mary when they first meet. “‘The light was horrid.’” Later, the lovers see the light hitting the Seine a certain way and “longed for a brush to record it before it slipped away.”

Oliveira uses light to symbolize the characters’ internal experiences and artistic impulses. When Berthe’s father dies she agrees to marry Eugene because “all the light had gone out of the world” while a character in the midst of dying feels “the light trickling away.” Light finds its way into the novel through other words: glimmer, shimmer, glare, flickering, brilliant, luminous, reflect, brighten, candle, sunlight.

But Oliveira’s most stunning handling of light is how she uses it to tell her story the way her characters use it to paint. She manipulates the light in the rooms and streets to give texture to the scenes, for instance when Manet confesses to Berthe that he has contracted syphilis and the “dull light” outside the window makes “pale marble of his hands.” Oliveira uses light to signal changes in mood as well, like when Degas breaks the news to Mary that he has called off the publication of a journal they created together and “a cloud passed over the sun, casting a cool shadow over the lake, dulling the reflection of the trees in the water.”

In yet another scene, Mary has been weakened once again by Degas’ cruelty as “the glimmer of the candle [in the room] fading now, and with it all her vague dreams of a life lived beside this man…The flame trembled in its puddle of molten wax and went out, rendering the studio a place of shadows and depth.”  These scenes are as provocative and beautifully rendered as the paintings the characters create.

Certainly, light enables one to see and when, in the beginning of the novel, Degas tells Mary she must learn to “see” in order to create great art, she becomes obsessed with clarifying her vision. Oliveira uses sight as powerfully as she uses light: Mary wonders if she “would she ever truly see” and later realizes in order to do so she must “unsee” everything she has known before, from her creative habits to her view of herself and the world.

“Paint what you see, paint what you love,” Degas tells her, suggesting that artistic vision and love are one in the same or are at least rooted in the same place in the human soul.  Perhaps then it is no coincidence when Mary finally finds her way that Degas tells her, “You’ve painted love…You must never paint anything else. You have found it. Your obsession is love.” How ironic that Mary is able to paint love and Degas is able to see it in her work, yet they are unable to experience it together.

Even more ironic is the fact that both artists are going blind. In the beginning of the novel, Degas is being fitted for special eyeglasses because there is a hole in his vision casting dark shadows. Blindness has stolen from him “the mass of things, their shape-ness, their roundness, their solidity. Edges wavered and blurred and doubled until forms became hallucinating shape-shifters, liquid impersonators of what had once been reliable, immutable matter.” Once again, the richness of Oliveira’s narration paints a vivid picture of the world seen through the eyes of an artist.

Certainly, there is no way to know whether Oliveira’s portrayal of her characters and their relationships are completely faithful to history but in the end it doesn’t matter. I Always Loved You is an engaging read because the author has recreated a world of romance and color populated by characters whose challenges mirror those of modern times. But for all the characters’ musings about artistic integrity and creative freedom, perhaps the words spoken by Manet best capture the novel’s enduring message: “It is love, my frightened ones.  Love.”

—Laura K. Warrell

 

Laura K. Warrell

Laura K. Warrell is a freelance writer living in Boston. She teaches writing at the Berklee College of Music and the University of Massachusetts Boston and is a July, 2013, graduate of the MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has previously published both fiction and nonfiction in Numéro Cinq.

 

The Sadder It Gets The Funnier It Gets: Interview with Steve Almond — Laura K. Warrell

Jan 022014
 
Steve Almond Photo by Sharona Jacobs

Steve Almond Photo by Sharona Jacobs

I first met Steve Almond in the late ‘90s when he participated in a panel discussion at the Boston Public Library about the state of publishing.  Unlike his more conciliatory co-panelists, Almond let loose with a spirited evisceration of an industry that pushes lackluster, commercially viable efforts over work created by hardworking craftspeople digging for literary truths.  Almond came off as cynical, even bitter, though by the end of the event, he was the guy we fledgling young writers in the audience wanted to be.  Almond was a renegade.  A true artist.

Nearly two decades later, Almond has become a household name (at least among literary circles) and a local celebrity in Boston where he makes his home.  He has been an adjunct professor of Fiction and Non-Fiction at Boston College and Emerson College, and a creative writing instructor whose classes consistently sell out at Grub Street, a non-profit organization for Boston-area writers.  He has also become an enviably content family man – as opposed to the self-loathing cad he admits to being in his youth – a state that makes his lingering cynicism even more poignant.

As a writer, Almond is intimidatingly prolific.  He has written ten books of fiction and non-fiction, including 2010’s Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life, an essay collection about his years spent as a “drooling” music fanatic, and God Bless America, his most recent collection of short stories. Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America, a memoir tracing his lifelong obsession with sweets, won a host of awards and was selected as a best book of 2004 by Amazon.com. His stories and essays have been featured in countless publications, including Tin House, Ploughshares, Salon.com and Playboy magazine, and have won him innumerable honors including the Pushcart Prize.

What’s most amazing about Almond is his versatility; the same writer who can write gut-busting predictions for 2014 (Pope Francis becomes a Unitarian, Miley Cyrus gets a tongue infection) can also break your heart, for instance, in his short story, “First Date Back,” about an emotionally damaged war veteran’s doomed love affair with a flight attendant.  Almond is known for his sharp wit and penchant for tugging at the seams of a complacent American culture. But beneath his deliciously witty, sometimes harsh tone lies an enduring faith in humanity. Almond loves us all though we occasionally piss him off with our tendency to ignore our better angels.

 — Laura K. Warrell

§

Laura K. Warrell (LW): One of the qualities that stands out in your work is how present you are as an author.  As readers, we know so much about you – what you consider to be your weaknesses and obsessions, the botched relationships you suffered in the past and the marriage and family you enjoy in the present. Like Vonnegut, one of your literary heroes, you’ve written yourself deeply into the work.  What does this do for you as a writer and what do you think it does for the reader?

Steve Almond (SA): Writers are always making themselves known; it’s just how overt they are about it. Any good art is coming from a writer’s deepest preoccupations, anxieties and concerns and sometimes directly from his or her memories and fantasy life.  For instance, there’s no way to separate J.D. Salinger from Holden Caulfield.  Caulfield wasn’t just out there in the cosmos waiting for Salinger to happen onto him. He was a figment of Salinger’s imagination, an expression of Salinger’s deepest anxieties and sorrows, a fictional disguise. Holden Caulfield is considered a beautifully imagined character, but really he came from the deepest precincts of Salinger’s psyche.  Any decent artist is revealing the deepest part of who he or she is.  In my recent nonfiction, I write overtly about my life and opinions.  It’s not sublimated into fictional characters.  But even if it was, it would still be me.

LW: Do you think it’s possible to write too much about the self, perhaps to the point of self-absorption?

SA: What lifts work away from solipsism and self-absorption is the author’s attempt to understand and endure feelings – sometimes difficult, even unbearable feelings, and sometimes feelings so ecstatic and wonderful they’re unbearable in a whole other way.  Focusing on the self doesn’t make a work self-absorbed. What makes a work solipsistic or self-absorbed is a superficial focus on the self in a way that is self-concerned without being self-interrogating or self-aware.

LW: So, if you’re engaging with a text as a writer or reader and the work isn’t compelling or engaging, is it possible the author just isn’t present enough?

SA: A writer’s career is marked by the work that made it out into the world, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. There are all the shitty drafts he or she wrote, the failed novels and projects that never got published. Those are places where the writer just didn’t dig deep enough.  In my case, it happens when I haven’t known or loved the characters deeply enough to successfully write about them, so I produce work that tends to settle for cleverness over real emotional engagement, there’s a certain show-offy quality. That’s the definition of sentimentalism: asserted emotion.  Emotion that’s not dramatized by the character and his or her experience but is asserted by the author.  That’s an attempt to make the self known but it’s a failed attempt.  I’m saying that as somebody who makes a lot of failed attempts.

LW: Part of what makes your work come alive is a kind of underlying obsession, which manifests in two ways.  You write with a wonderfully obsessive attention to detail and you also write about what seems to obsess you – music, sex, candy.  How important is obsessiveness and/or obsession to writing?

SA: Everybody comes into life as an obsessive.  Obsession is the default setting of how human beings think and feel.  When babies are hungry, they are obsessively hungry.  Obsession is the arrest of attention in the midst of distraction, and it’s the defining quality that allows us to produce and consume art. But our obsessions are socialized, cajoled or shamed out of us.  You’re not supposed to admit to having all these overweening, out-of-control, sometimes self-destructive feelings. But obsession isn’t there to fill your mind and spirit with junk; it’s a mode of consciousness. Artists are people who, by and large, are able to access that obsession and go straight at it, surrender to it, in the interest of trying to figure out why they can’t move past a particular experience or relationship dynamic or even a kind of food.  For me, writing Candyfreak was about getting to a place of such desperation as a writer, such unhappiness and self-loathing, that the only thing that could get me to the keyboard was writing about something I was naturally urgent about and felt all sorts of obsessive, wondrous feelings towards.  But what makes the book interesting, if it is interesting, is that it’s really a book about depression.  I thought about the role candy had played in my life and realized every incident from my childhood and adulthood was not just about pursuing happiness but also finding a path away from despair.  If I had just tried to write a fun, carefree book about candy it might have been clever but I don’t think it would’ve resonated as deeply with readers.  Good autobiographical writing proceeds from the question ‘am I going to be okay,’ and the sense of that being in some doubt.  That’s what inspirational memoir is all about: reassuring the reader everything is going to be okay.

LW: Sex also features heavily in your work; even when you’re talking about issues entirely unrelated to sex, you manage to sneak in a reference.  In your essay, “How to Write Sex Scenes: The Twelve-Step Program,” you suggest that these sexual moments are less about eroticism than “desire and heartbreak.” Is this what allows you to write so frankly about sex while maintaining a sense of depth and purpose?

SA: The question is whether as a writer you’re settling for self-regard over self-awareness.  Are you navel-gazing, or in this case, genital-gazing rather than peering into your own dark corners?  When I write about sex, I’m basing it on what it’s like as a real person to be in sexual situations.  Sometimes it’s wonderful, happy, physically ecstatic and intimate.  But every time there’s doubt: about the relationship, about yourself, body shame, all the stuff that’s fucking real.  There’s a certain kind of writing, including some of my more cheeky writing, that tries to portray sex like a sitcom and only glances in the direction of the deeper moments of self-loathing, doubt, or anxiety about our own pleasure or our capacity to give pleasure or whether we’re going to be lonely all our lives.  That’s fucking scary shit.  All I’m doing is saying, ‘yes, it’s scary,’ and when my characters go through it I try to draw from the parts of myself that are still kind of haunted by that.  Other authors make other decisions.  But if you slow down in the parts that are sad, awkward, shameful or painful – and yes, it’s hard to do but that’s where the equity is as an artist – you’re building these psychologically and emotionally reliable onramps to the moments that really matter.  And that’s the point.  My argument is that the sadder it gets, the funnier it gets.  The comic impulse arises from tragic feelings, it’s the way we contend with tragic stuff.  It’s a little moment of self-forgiveness.

rock and roll save

LW:  One of the essays I especially love from Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life is “(I Bless the Rains Down in) Africa” in which you deconstruct the lyrics of the ‘80s hit “Africa” by Toto.  On one hand, it’s a funny look at a somewhat silly piece of music.  On the other hand, it’s a political piece about American culture.  What was your process writing it?

SA: Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life is about worshipful fans, people who idolize musicians and get really attached to the soundtrack by which years of our lives are defined.  I put lots of things in the book to counterbalance my visits to obscure musicians who I think are awesome with the more esoteric stuff I wanted to talk about.  “Africa” is a good example of how the music of particular songs is so great we don’t even listen to the words.  A good backbeat and melody conquer everything.  I loved “Africa” and listened to it, I had a Toto album, I’m not disavowing that the song is an ecstasy tablet for your limbic system.  But when you really listen to the words, they seem to encapsulate so much of what’s completely fucked up about American culture.  If you want to understand the level of pathology, delusion and American colonial privilege as we lurch toward the end of our imperial death spiral, listen to that song.  It’s a great instance of how completely privileged, self-ennobling and insulated from real suffering we are. That’s all I was trying to say, though it’s really not fair.  The songwriter wasn’t writing a political manifesto, he was writing a pop song.  But I think the reason it gets a lot of credit, why the CBS Morning show plays it in their tribute to Nelson Mandela is because it’s exactly what America is built on.  The song doesn’t offer real depth, but an appearance of depth by name checking an impoverished continent with lots of starving people.  It’s a deeply cynical way of being in the world and typically American.  My radar aims toward those kinds of white-hot, pulsing quasars of hypocrisy.

god bless

LW: Your short story collection, God Bless America, begins with an epigraph from Max Lerner, which says, “America is a passionate idea or it is nothing.”  There are many ways to interpret the work and themes this book explores, but what stood out for me was the characters’ loneliness.  There were a lot of lonely people in this book and, moreover, people with small dreams they couldn’t seem to attain.  How do those ideas and Lerner’s quote fit into your view of America?

SA: Maybe this sounds depressing but that is America.  One of my favorite books is John Williams’ Stoner, which is this quiet book about an academic who, we find out in the first paragraph, never made any great marks, never made any great impression on his students or colleagues, is utterly forgotten by history.  And you sort of think, ‘God, what a loser’ but then you realize that’s 99.9% of us.  We might dream big but in our lives, we’re mostly known only by the people around us and most of our big dreams don’t happen.  America’s a sort of factory producing these dreams of big fame and unconditional, universal love but that’s not really how most people experience life. Instead, they struggle in day-to-day ways with small petty grievances.  Our fourth estate is in such a mess now because we have a bunch of people who are really good at exploiting those grievances, anxieties, fears and sources of rage.  We have such prosperity but we’re so pathologically greedy about it.  Despite our good intentions on a personal basis, we have social policies that are ridiculous, inhumane and just cruel and heedless.  So we end up with an unhappy civic culture.  How does that happen?  Well, it’s a bunch of lonely, unhappy people not listening to their conscience.  There are moments in which individually people are beautiful and do wonderful things, but as a collective, we’re profoundly unhappy.  Just turn on the TV and you’ll see it.  It’s impossible to live in this country and not be distressed thinking, ‘goddamn, we’ve got all this shit and we’re less happy per person than precincts of the world where people are struggling to get enough nutrition and where there’s a significant risk of violence, and those people live more happily than we do.’  That’s a big mystery and this collection is my effort to understand it.

LW: One of the stories, “The Darkness Together,” about a mother and son whose peculiar relationship is exposed when they meet a stranger on a train, is such a satisfying read though, unlike your funnier work, it’s sad and emotionally heavy.  So are there stories which you can’t “write funny,” not so much because of the subject matter but because the stories themselves don’t trigger the comic impulse?

SA:  You could write a story like “The Darkness Together,” with humorous elements: the sexual anxiety of the kid, the mother’s blindness to her weird, seductive mojo.  It’s not so much the material as it is the posture you have toward it, the attitude you take, the emotional space you’re writing out of.  Sometimes it’s looser and more relaxed, and humor becomes part of it.  And sometimes the emotional space is more sober.  I wrote this collection during a dark time in American history, the Bush years, and maybe a dark time in my personal history.  So a lot of the stories are more serious.  At readings, I find myself saying, ‘sorry, these are not going to be rip roaring funny.’  What I admire are writers – Vonnegut, Lorrie Moore, Sam Lipsyte – who are able to be funny/sad, who recognize those two travel together.  I like to write in that mode, that’s my natural terrain.  It’s how I deal with my own unhappiness.  But sometimes you write them straight.  But yes, it’s a collection where readers shouldn’t expect to snort milk out of their noses.

LW: Do you know when a piece should be written with a more serious tone or does it just come to you that way?

SA: I have an idea for a story and as it takes shape, I just say, what if, what if and what next.  Sometimes it arises with a serious question or I’m taking it seriously, looking at it straight without comic forgiving.  I’m just going to go to the dark shit, no joking around.  For instance in “First Date Back,” I’m writing about a soldier who’s just come back from a political conflict.  He’s guarding a secret and thinks he’s fallen in love with a stewardess on his flight home.  They have a brief relationship in which the combination of his craziness and her sensible attempt to hold him at bay collide.  Anything can be written in a way that has comic aspects to it, I could’ve done it with this story.  But the attitude I had imagining this guy and his deluded love affair, how the affair collides with or provokes this destructive secret he’s trying to keep inside, that was a sobering series of thoughts.  There was no Steve Almond humorous tap dancing going on.  I was getting closer to the truth, looking directly at it and trying to imagine the few hours those characters had together.  Of course, marketing people don’t like how I won’t write the one funny book or the one sad/serious book.  But I like that I have serious stories like “The Darkness Together” and “First Date Back” along with funnier stories like “A Jew Berserk on Christmas Eve” that clearly gets at serious stuff while giving the comic impulse free reign.

LW: You teach a class called “Funny is the New Deep” and also wrote an essay under the same title.  You say “prophecy” arises from distress and suggest that “the (literary) prophet is an idealist unable to silence his disappointments.”  How do you help writers, who might not have such easy access to those places of distress, pain and longing, get to those depths so they can write about life, sex or anything else in ways that are funny and deep?

SA: All you can do as a teacher is give permission and make it okay for students to go there, even to reward them for doing it.  It’s trickier when you’re talking about stuff people are conflicted about letting out of the bag, like their sense of humor.  A student may say, ‘I’m a serious person, I built my identity around being a serious person.’  But that doesn’t mean he or she has no sense of humor.  It’s just a quieter, more concealed sense of humor.  A sense of humor is just a bio-evolutionary adaptation, something human beings require in order to live with all the bad data rolling around their brains and hearts.  It takes different forms.  All I’m doing as a teacher is giving people permission and inspiring them.  I say, ‘actually, this classroom is the place where I want to know how fucked up things are, and I want you to tell the truth about the things that matter to you the most deeply.  In whatever form, in whatever tone.’  You can’t force people but you can make the decision desirable by making it clear that it’s a safe space to get into the shit and show examples of people doing it successfully: here’s what I mean by creating a strong narrator or what I mean by the comic impulse and how it operates in people’s work, this is what I mean when I say the sadder the work is and the more bruising its truths, the funnier it becomes.  What I admire in other writers is their effort to tell the truth and pay attention to the world around and inside them, around and inside their characters.  That’s what makes the language beautiful.  So I tell students not to worry about being a beautiful writer and just tell the truth about what’s rattling around inside them.  I’m always pleasantly shocked by how able people are to do that when you give them permission.

LW: Is it ever hard for you to be funny and deep?

SA: I struggle all the time getting at the darkest stuff in my own self and life, maybe because I’m still feeling guilty or confused or just frightened of it.  But that’s what a career in writing is about: expanding the number of things you can be brutally honest about.

LW: In your homage to Vonnegut, you talk about the writer you “wished to become” back when you were a younger man.  How close are you to becoming that writer?

SA: I still struggle everyday with making time, paying attention, figuring out the big mystery of how to write on a bigger scale.  Maybe stuff inside me is blocked but it might also have to do with having a family and wanting to give love and attention to them.  That’s going to take precedence over my art.  The people I admire – Dave Eggers, Jess Walter, Anthony Doerr, Cheryl Strayed, Aimee Bender – they’re able to give to their art and, it seems, to their families’ lives and even to their social conscience.  Those people are heroes to me.  I hope I’ll start to follow their example and live up to what I can do as an artist.

—Laura K. Warrell & Steve Almond

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Laura K WarrellLaura K. Warrell is a freelance writer living in Boston. She teaches writing at the Berklee College of Music and University of Massachusetts Boston and is a July, 2013, graduate of the MFA program at Vermont College. She has previously published both fiction and nonfiction in Numéro Cinq.

Shopping While Black: Thoughts after Trayvon Martin — Laura K. Warrell

Aug 012013
 

Laura K Warrell

Shopping while black — I had never heard the phrase before Laura Warrell mentioned it in a phone conversation and then went on to relate the anecdote that begins this essay. The Trayvon Martin shooting was in both our minds, in the foreground, not the background. I was astonished because I know Laura, who is a bright, intelligent, sophisticated, graceful human being, astonished that in a cosmopolitan city like Boston, the stigma of skin colour, the taint of slavery, could still attach to her. And I was thinking of words like profiling, stereotyping, paternalism, racism — words that describe the ongoing effort to single out, repress, infantilize and criminalize African-Americans. The Stand Your Ground laws and recent voter suppression laws coming on the heels of the Supreme Court decision against the Voting Rights Act are reminiscent of the vagrancy and contract laws the Southern states used to try to reconstitute slavery-in-all-but-name after the Civil War. You are guilty if you are black, and you should be afraid.

This is Laura K. Warrell’s third contribution to Numéro Cinq. She has an edgy, contemporary take on social issues from the ugly manipulation of race in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained to the Boston Bomber.

dg

—

There’s been no mistake. After all, our department, as far as I know, and I only know the lowest level, doesn’t seek out guilt among the general population, but, as the Law states, is attracted by guilt and has to send us guards out. That’s the Law. What mistake could there be? – The Trial, Franz Kafka

It was half past three on a bone-crackling winter afternoon in Boston and I needed a watch. Standing between me and the nearest subway station home was a skywalk leading from a chichi shopping mall to a Lord & Taylor department store. Until then, the upscale chain had not been tops on my list of shopping destinations considering I had been scrounging around on a teacher’s salary for years. But I was freezing and loathe to spend another second outside. And who knew, maybe I would luck out and find a watch I could afford.

I should admit to feeling some apprehension before going into the store. As a black woman, I have suffered my adopted hometown’s notoriously prickly racial climate long enough to know there are some places my movements might be “observed” and deemed worthy of confrontation. Moreover, I have lived in the United States long enough to know that the minor stresses of retail shopping – crowded aisles, greedy customers, ill-mannered counter help – pale in comparison to the traumas black shoppers endure everyday, an experience often referred to as Shopping While Black.

Being followed while shopping has happened so much now I don’t even remember specifics anymore. Every time you turn around there’s the clerk pretending to be folding or rearranging things near you. Sometimes they ask if they can help you. Sometimes they don’t. It’s reached a point that whenever I go shopping I get tense about dealing with the clerks. – Duane, 37, sexual violence educator, email to the author July 24, 2013

Shortly after I entered the store and started poring over a display table of watches, a saleswoman came over and asked, “Can I help you?”

So jazzed was I to have found a watch I both liked and could afford that I hardly noticed my surroundings. But then I looked up and quickly registered two things: first, the clerk, a white woman in her early fifties, was ringing her hands and staring back at me with a panicked expression, and second, there were three other white women looking at the watches yet the clerk was only talking to me.

“No thanks,” I told her. “Just looking.”

Usually when shoppers say, “just looking,” salespeople go off to bother other customers or linger perkily in order to lend a hand. The Lord & Taylor clerk did neither. Instead, she folded her arms and kept an eye on me, hovering by a display case a few steps away from where I was shopping. The woman seemed nervous, afraid, even though I was doing nothing more than browsing the watches. Whenever I glanced up, she would flinch as if her spying had been discovered then feign interest in the items in the display case, shuffling the watches around the shelves and wiping at phantom lines of dust. For several minutes, I tried to ignore her but she kept standing there. She didn’t ask if I was looking for something special, didn’t compliment the watches I held against my wrist, neither smiled nor spoke. She just hovered and watched.

I had no intention of stealing. I do not steal. So, if I’m not a criminal and had no inclination whatsoever of committing a crime, it would seem scientifically impossible that my body language, facial expressions or any other type of behavior could have given off any signal that might suggest I was planning on taking something from the store. True, in my worn winter boots and knock-off designer coat I was clearly not a typical Lord & Taylor customer. But if memory serves, the powers-that-be in this country have yet to pass a bill forbidding shoppers from frequenting retailers whose price tags stretch beyond their salary range. Regardless, the clerk was drawn to me, a near middle-aged woman whose only criminal offense over a lifetime was a speeding ticket in high school.

I had arrived at the second stage of the Shopping While Black experience: responding. Should I confront the woman, speak to her manager or stomp out in a huff? Did I have the energy for a battle or would I let this one go?

Rather than decide, I stalled. I just couldn’t believe this was happening. Almost forty, I thought I had long surpassed the age when I could be seen as a threat. Besides, I was on staff at two universities, was completing work on a Master’s degree and had managed to build a decent life in one of the priciest and most elite cities in the country. Hadn’t I transcended this bullshit?

Just to be sure I wasn’t imagining things, I casually strolled over to a nearby display of sunglasses. Two aisles away, the clerk followed. I went to a case of necklaces. She wasn’t far behind.

Finally, I walked up to her. “You’re not watching me, are you?”

“No,” she answered like a question.

I waited, imagining this would be the moment for her to apologize for the confusion or express outrage for my having accused her of such an offense. But she didn’t say or do anything except glare anxiously at the watch in my hands.

“Good,” I said and went back to shopping. And, surprise, she went back to trailing me.

Later, when I would tell people what happened, white friends and family would say what they often say after such events occur; “maybe you were imagining things, maybe the woman was only trying to help, maybe there was someone who looked like you who’d stolen something earlier in the day.” Black friends and family would only sigh wearily.

Being followed around in retail stores is a common occurrence. It happens so often I don’t often take note of it as much as I should nor am I as enraged as I should be. Not long ago, I was perusing the shoes and clothing at a store. While I shopped, one salesperson followed me to every section of the store. She would pretend to fix something, and when she finished, she would stand in the same section and watch me awkwardly. After about fifteen minutes of this, I left, leaving the dress and two pairs of shoes I wanted on a table in the middle of the store. The same thing happened another time and after following me, the clerk just looked at me and said, ‘the dresses in here are very expensive’ then paused like that would make me leave. – Leandra, 33, journalist, email to the author, July 23, 2013

Which raises the question: what was the Lord & Taylor clerk’s goal? To avoid a robbery she had no sensible reason to believe would occur? Or to just keep people like me out of her store? And by “people like me” I mean people who buy watches and clothes.

Unable to stand it any longer, I walked over and placed the watch on the counter in front of her. “I was going to buy this. But now I’m not going to.”

“Oh,” she said, with an infuriating mix of docility and snottiness.

“You shouldn’t follow people.”

“I know,” she whined like a child.

“I don’t know why you’re watching me but I can assume the reason,” my voice quaked. “And I want you to know it’s offensive…”

I went on with the kind of speech we curse ourselves for having come up with only after we’ve abandoned a situation, but I got lucky and thought of it on the spot. I told the woman how anyone has the right to shop wherever they want and how inexcusable it was for her make assumptions about people. The woman didn’t deny watching me or apologize for any misunderstanding but only kept insisting, “I’m the only one here,” although she clearly wasn’t. As if the defense was relevant anyway.

I left the store soaring with pride having stood up for myself. But it didn’t take long until I sank into a funk. The rest of my day and several days after were ruined, as if in an instant, everything I had ever accomplished had been reduced to nothing. I cringed thinking of the people who fit the “profile” even more than I do, especially young black men, and how taxing their daily lives must be if a fortysomething university instructor can’t even fly under some fool’s radar.

You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me thirty-five years ago. And when you think about why, in the African-American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away. There are very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me. There are very few African-American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me — at least before I was a senator. There are very few African Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often. – President Barack Obama, address to the nation, July 19, 2013

The list of reasons the Trayvon Martin case gives us to be horrified by modern American society is endless: the purpose of a Neighborhood Watch shifting from folks keeping an eye on things to arming themselves; an adult man deciding for no reason other than race that a seventeen-year-old boy is up to no good; the same adult man, or any human being, feeling surprise when the boy defends himself after being confronted (what else does a person walking alone at night do when a stranger in a goddamn van is following him for several blocks?) Then there’s the law that exists to protect the adult man and the apparent effectiveness of his defense, i.e., to portray the boy as a “thug,” the beloved term of narrow-minded people who seem to want to group all black, inner-city youth – whether or not they’ve ever gotten into any real trouble – into an easily discarded population of violent, parasitic monsters.

“That is exactly what George Zimmerman saw: a trope,” writes UC-Riverside English professor Vorris L. Nunley in the Los Angeles Review of Books. “Not Trayvon Martin. Not a person. Not an American or even a human being, just a Black trope – a disruptive figure occupying the anxiety-ridden terrain of his White imagination.”

While the nation prides itself, justifiably, for the phenomenal social strides that have been made, Trayvon Martin stands as a reminder that black citizens continue to suffer the lingering legacy of racism. Black bodies still signify guilt in the eyes of too many Americans: in department stores, on city streets, even in shared community spaces.

As soon as I got in the library the security guard decided I was the only one in the place that needed help. What was that the president was saying about every black man in America knowing what it feels like to be followed? BUT THIS IS A LIBRARY!!! [I guess] everyone knows black people don’t read. – Christopher, 42, poet/educator, Facebook status update, July 22, 2013

Shopping, driving and walking while black happens to young black people.

“My son and his friends were coming from work when they were accosted by the police. They were thrown on the ground, put in the cruiser and made to wait without really knowing what they were being stopped for. They discovered that the police thought they were a group of black males who robbed a store. When the officers realized they were wrong, they dismissed it by saying to my son and his friends, ‘we have the wrong f—g car.’ – Al, 63, teacher, Facebook status update, July 14, 2013

Shopping, driving and walking while black happens to older black people.

I was visiting Salem, Massachusetts with my two teenage daughters. We’d had a nice lunch and I was taking pictures of my girls as they toured an old cemetery. A police officer walked up and asked to see my ID. He said the police were looking for someone who was passing off counterfeit bills and the suspect fit my description. He asked to see my wallet and to look in my backpack. I said not before I know what all this is about. Meanwhile, a large crowd was gathering; to my surprise, many of them stepped up to challenge the officer, saying I was being harassed. My daughters were nervous. After radioing his sergeant, the office was told to take me around to the merchants who had been scammed and see if they could ID me. As my daughters were left to fend for themselves, I was put into a police car and driven to the local mall. Two shop owners claimed to recognize me as the thief. I was put back in the police car and the cop said, ‘For the record, I don’t think you fit the description but I have orders.’ Fortunately, the last shop owner said I wasn’t the guy and I was taken back to my girls. An elderly white couple had brought them ice cream and was keeping an eye on them. The cop dropped me off, apologized for the ‘inconvenience’ and went on his way. I remember thinking, ‘does this ever end? Does being black in America, no matter where you live, always make you a prime suspect to whatever has gone down somewhere? – Rick, 61, public relations professional, email to the author, July 24, 2013

Even leaving the country doesn’t make one immune.

[Since moving to Europe], I hadn’t been back to the States for two years. At U.S. customs, the guy asked if it was true I’d been out of the country for twenty-four consecutive months and I said yes. He asked where is my military I.D. I told him I wasn’t in the military. He then asked which teams I played for in Europe. I had a smirk on my face by this point and said I was too short to be playing basketball. He asked what it was I did in Europe and I told him I teach English. His answer was, ‘They don’t speak English in Europe.’ Then I was in an interview room. They wanted to know how I really made money in Europe and I had to explain in detail. The guy who interviewed me said it’s not often they get black guys who travel that long out of the States without being in the military. Even the ball players come back more than once every two years. He joked I needed to come back more often so as not to arouse suspicion ‘cause only hippie white boys traveled the world for years. Of course, every time I enter the U.S. now, I am stressed. – Carl, 37, English teacher, email to the author, July 24, 2013

That fateful winter day, the Lord & Taylor clerk most certainly was not looking for guilty shoppers in her store but instead was attracted like a magnet to what she identified as guilt: my brown skin. Her unapologetic attitude and apparent conviction that there was nothing wrong with what she was doing suggests that in her mind, she had made no mistake. If I hadn’t yet committed a crime, I imagine her thinking went, inevitably as a black woman I would. I was guilty before I even walked in the door.

After the incident, I contemplated what all this meant for my day-to-day life. Do I assume there are places in my community to which I don’t truly have access and stop going to them to avoid harassment? Or do I continue frequenting those establishments and risk fucking up my week?

Managing people’s fears and assumptions about my race has been a lifelong task; overcompensating in professional situations, being overly polite in social situations, grinning harmlessly to clerks when entering shops. By now, this oppressive style of self-defense is instinctive though I sometimes catch myself doing it and feel shame.

I mean, that is a crazy way to live. Seriously, imagine a life in which you think of other people’s safety and comfort first, before your own. You’re programmed and taught that from the gate. It’s like the opposite of entitlement…My friends know that I hate parking lots and elevators, not because they are places that danger could occur, but it’s a prime place in which someone of my physical size can be seen as a dangerous element. I wait and wait in cars until I feel it’s safe for me to make people feel safe. I know most of y’all are eye-rolling, but if you spent a good three months in these size fourteens, you’d understand why I take that position. – Questlove, 42, musician, writer, record producer, bandleader of The Roots and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, in a New York Magazine essay entitled “Questlove: Trayvon Martin and I Ain’t Shit,” July 16, 2013

In truth, incidents like the one at Lord & Taylor are a rare occurrence in my world. But when something does happen – to me, to a friend, to someone somewhere in the country who looks like me, I’ll remember that I am on trial in perpetuity. American life can feel like a prolonged, Kafka-esque court appearance, as if I’m always being watched and judged, and at the drop of a hat may have to prove my innocence, my worthiness, my normalness. Every confrontation and insult feels like a hearing in which I’m forced to defend myself and then rebuild, to regain a sense of dignity and find comfort again in my own skin. I always recover but move on feeling a bit less trusting, more guarded and cynical.

The emotional aftermath of my confrontation with the Lord & Taylor clerk is negligible compared to the threats young black men in this country face on a daily, hourly, moment-to-moment basis. My now permanent anxiety when I pass the store pales in comparison to the harassment, the sitting in police cars, the prison sentences and murders too many young black men experience. Still, my own run-ins with self-appointed vigilantes and protectors of the common good are reminders that despite my own successes and the progress the country has made, I may always be considered a nuisance to some people. A threat. An eye sore.

How do we alter the nation’s consciousness so that black Americans don’t have to live with this permanent, unshakeable guilt for crimes they have never and will never commit? I wish I knew the answer. But one thing I know for certain is that we can no longer pretend it’s not necessary.

 —Laura K. Warrell

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Laura K. Warrell is a freelance writer living in Boston. She teaches writing at the University of Massachusetts Boston and Northeastern University and is a July, 2013, graduate of the MFA program at Vermont College. She has previously published both fiction and nonfiction in Numéro Cinq.

Birthday Girl: A Story of the Boston Marathon Bombing | Fiction — Laura K. Warrell

Jul 052013
 

Laura K. WarrellLaura K.  Warrell

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THE DAY AFTER KOKO’S FIFTEENTH birthday, two bombs went off during the marathon in downtown Boston, eight miles from where Koko lived with her mother.  She was at the mall buying a bottle of perfume called “Reckless” with the fifty-dollar bill her grandmother had slid into a Hello Kitty birthday card when her mother phoned to see if Koko had heard from her father and to tell her to come home. Koko bicycled through the streets, her legs – made clumsy by their pubescent lengthening out – now worked effortlessly, spurred on by fear.  The television was on when she got home, her mother, Pia, chewing at the palm of her fist and watching the footage play on loop.  The crack of the blasts at the finish line made Koko jump, the gush of smoke swelling in the air reminded her of a dream she had had once of ghosts.  The shattered glass and wrecked sidewalks, the scramble of people and rupture of screams already began to haunt her until she grabbed hold and pushed the scene firmly away, like so many other awful things.  Still, the eeriness of it all made her forget for the moment that her father had forgotten her special day.

[SPACE]

Friday morning, four days after the blasts, Koko untangled herself from her bed sheets and went to the living room to watch the news.  A hunt for the suspects – two men, one in a black baseball cap, the other in a white cap – had lasted through the night.  The first suspect, the older man, had died in a shootout with police who were still searching for the second suspect.  School was cancelled and the city was on lockdown.  A manhunt, the news called it.  Koko watched the footage of the two suspects crossing the sidewalk near the marathon finish line, backpacks strapped to their shoulders.  A photo of the younger man flashed onto the screen as Koko nibbled at her thumbnail, suddenly exhilarated, as if she’d woken up on a movie set.  A warm tickle moved through her.

“Have you seen him?”  Koko sent a text message to her best friend Bree.  “The younger one.  He’s beautiful.”

“Just thinking the same thing,” Bree replied.

“No one so beautiful would do this.  He must be innocent.”

“He better hope so.”

Koko’s mother blustered into the room, a gust of breathy sobs and wet tissues tumbling from quaking hands.  Her tatty silk robe flapped behind her as she sipped an orange juice with a splash of vodka Koko could smell.  She hadn’t left the house or changed clothes since the bombings.

“I can’t get hold of your father.”  Her bird-ish trill always sounded sharper, more brittle when she was frightened or needed something, which was often.  “I keep leaving messages.  You try him.”

“He doesn’t answer me either.”

Hovering above the television, her mother pulled the phone from the pocket of her robe and dialed.  “Circus,” she whimpered.  “We need you here.  Goddamn it, look what’s happened.  Those guys are out there somewhere.  What if they come here, what would we do?  Your family needs you.”

Through the screen of her mother’s nightgown, Koko watched the footage of the blast play again on television, the crack of the bomb, the plume of smoke, the bodies rushing.  Her mother tossed the phone onto the sofa, let out a raw cry then slunk back through the hall toward her bedroom.  Koko tried to take the scene in as something real, as an actual event that had occurred a mere bicycle ride away from where she watched on television.  But a bombing couldn’t happen, not in real life.  She couldn’t sense it like her mother seemed to.

Only the face of the younger man seemed fathomable, the smooth, pale skin, the slinky mouth and crumble of beard on his chin, the mess of dark hair, shadowy eyes lit with danger.  Koko imagined he was looking back at her and blushed, hot inside and skin reddening, as if she had a fever, though this was good.  Other boys had made her feel like this – pop singers, movie stars, a boy once or twice at school.  But he was different.  Something inside of her reached out and grabbed this boy.

Impatient, she texted Bree.  “I want to find him.”

“Nuts.”

“I need to meet him.”

“As if.”

“We’re smart, we know people.  Someone we know must know him.”

“True dat.”

“Whoever finds him first wins.”

[SPACE]

The suspects were identified hours later – two brothers, nineteen and twenty-six from a town near Russia.  Soldiers searched door-to-door for the nineteen-year-old in the town where Koko lived while she looked for him online.  There were photos from the boy’s prom and wrestling matches, a picture of his family cat.  She found the high school he went to then sent messages to everyone she knew with connections there.  No one knew anything.  A post on Facebook came up with nothing and a search of the boy’s Twitter feed revealed little more than a fondness for parties, hip hop and weed.  The month before the bombing, he had posted a quote that read, “If you have the knowledge and the inspiration all that’s left is to take action.”  Koko wrote the words in permanent marker on her forearm then quickly covered them with her sleeve just as her mother called from her bedroom.

Koko grumbled and went to her.  Lying in bed with her knees at her chest like a sick child, her mother asked, “Sweetheart, will you bring me an aspirin?”

“They know their names,” Koko called on her way to the bathroom where she grabbed the aspirin bottle and a glass of water.

“Monsters.”

“I think he’s beautiful,” she said when she got back to the bedroom.

Her mother lifted her head from the pillow.  “Who?”

“The younger one.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“We don’t know if he did anything.  And if he did, I’m sure there was a reason.”

“What possible reason could there be?”

“I don’t know.  Someone must have hurt him.”

Her mother downed the aspirin with a swig of the vodka orange juice then fell back onto the pillow.  “I haven’t slept.  I’m starving.  I haven’t eaten since yesterday.  Where’s your father?  Why isn’t he thinking of us?  I’m so, so hungry.”  She reached out and Koko loosely took her hand.  “We’re so alone, you and me, aren’t we?  I’m sorry, sweet girl, I didn’t want us to be so alone.  This wasn’t how anything was supposed to turn out.”

Koko slid her hand from her mother’s sticky fingers and folded her arms over her chest.  Even sick and drunk she was still so pretty, her mother, delicate, her long blonde hair flowing over the silk pillowcase, gold-colored and shimmering like some holy light.  “Do you want me to make you something to eat?”

Her mother sniffled.

“Tomato soup from the other night?”

“Would you do that for me?  That would be so nice.”

Koko went to the kitchen and took the pot of soup from the fridge as her mother’s phone rang.  Hoping it was her father, she ran to the living room to answer.

“Darling!”  Her grandmother’s voice always reminded Koko of clucking chickens.  “How are you?”

“Okay, I guess.”

“How absolutely terrible.”  Koko could hear her grandmother’s exhale of the expensive cigarettes she smoked that smelled like cinnamon.  “Darling, there are terrible, terrible people in the world but we mustn’t allow them to frighten us.  That’s what they want and we mustn’t give those brutes anything they want.”

“I’m not scared,” she said.  “I know one of them.”

“My God, Koko, call the police.”

“Well, I don’t really know him.  I just feel like I do.  And I don’t think he’s terrible.”

Silence on the other end of the line, an exhalation of smoke.  “Put your mother on.”

Koko brought the phone to her mother then went back to the kitchen.  “I’ve already called and he’s not answering,” she heard her mother say.  “Why do you ask when you know I have no idea where he is, mother, you just want to torture me…he missed Koko’s birthday, you know…no, she’s fine about it, but me, oh, I’m not feeling well about all of this…A woman answered when I called yesterday.  She said, ‘Pia, are you okay?’…She’s not concerned about my well-being, Mother, why do you never take my side?”

Koko slid on her headphones and listened to her favorite song of the week, the Foster the People one about kids shooting kids, the one with the easy beat, the one her dad liked to whistle.  As she stirred a dollop of cream into the tomato soup, she imagined the younger suspect at the front door.  A chill went through her as she thought of him standing there, trembling and afraid.  He would look down at her ready to defend himself then see she wasn’t afraid of him.  He would sense how she could see he was gentle deep down, that she understood him.  She would sneak him into her room and make him something to eat, watch him take a bath, wash his back.  If her mother came in, she would hide him under the bed.  At night, she would crawl under to sleep beside him.

“Did you see the latest photo?”  Bree texted.  “Oh my god, wicked hot.”

Koko turned off the burner and ran back to the living room to the television.  In the photo, the boy wore a black graduation gown with a red carnation in the lapel, handsome with a smirk on his pout of a mouth.  She was slightly sick, slightly thrilled.

“I would so do him,” Bree texted.

“Shut up,” Koko typed.  “I love him.”

“Uh-oh,” Bree wrote back.

 The next image on the screen was a photo of the blast, so Koko changed the channel.  Her mother came down the hallway, went to the front closet and put on a down winter coat.

 “Are you cold?”

“No.”  Her mother lied on the sofa, shoving her bare feet beneath a cushion.  “We should stop watching.”

“Did you hear from dad?”

“Guess.”  She used the remote to turn down the volume on the television and groaned watching the footage of the suspects crossing the sidewalk with their bomb-packed backpacks.

“Mom?”  Koko started nervously.  “Can I tell you something?  It’s kinda private but I want to tell someone.”

“Of course, honey,” her mother said with a yawn.  “You can tell me anything.”

“You won’t be mad?”

“Tell me, sweet girl.”

“Well,” there was a lump in her throat.  “I know I don’t know him but I feel like I miss him.  Is that weird?  I just miss him.”

“Miss who?”

Koko nodded toward the photo on television.

Her mother tsked.  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t you feel bad for him?  Just a little bit?  I mean, he’s only nineteen.”

“He can go to hell for all I care,” her mother said.  “He’s evil.  You don’t know evil yet, but I can tell you, that’s the face of it.”

Koko’s throat thickened with tears but she swallowed them, covering her wet eyes with her fingers to stop their flow.  She’d learned early on, her mother was the crier in the family.

“Sweet girl,” her mother said.  “Come sit with me.  We can keep each other safe.”

“You don’t know how to protect anyone.”

Tears bloomed in her mother’s eyes.  “Why won’t any of you care for me?  I try so hard.”

“You don’t understand anything.”  Koko was on her feet, yelling instead of crying.  “He doesn’t have a voice.  He needs people behind him.  He needs someone to stand up for him, to believe in him.  To fucking love him.”

“Koko, the language.”

“No one’s got his back.”

“Dear God, I hope they get those boys soon.”  Her mother pinched the bridge of her nose.  “I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”

Koko’s phone buzzed.  She prayed it was her father.  He would understand.  He knew how complex life could be.  But it wasn’t a message from her father.  It was Bree.

“I found him.”

[SPACE]

Bree’s message said Jenny Parker lived near the suspects’ uncle in North Cambridge and the rumor was the boy was hiding there.  Bree sent the address.

“I’m going.”  Koko texted back.  “I want to be with him before they catch him.  Maybe they won’t catch him.”

“They’ll catch him.”

“I want him to be my first.”

“That would be so rad.  You’d be famous.”

“That’s not why I would do it.  You don’t know anything about love.”

“Drama queen.”

“It happened around my birthday, it’s a sign.”  She stared at the photo of the boy in his graduation grown.  “I want to fall asleep in his hair.  I want to hold him, to tell him everything will be okay.”

“Well, it won’t,” Bree texted.  “He’ll be in jail soon.  Or dead.”

Koko switched off her phone.

[SPACE]

She slid into a leather mini skirt and cowboy boots.  Bree called it her Fuck Me Gear, a look she cultivated in contrast to her saintly looking mother, who didn’t seem the kind of woman to be since her father barely came around.  Her mother’s faint, pretty, harmless looks had eluded her anyway.  Koko looked like her father.  Brown, thick-bodied, with messy eyebrows and unkempt black hair she let fall over her eye, looking out as if ready to pounce.  Boys liked her.  She had a quiet, explosive energy they poked at like poachers to a cornered wildcat.  She knew she scared them a little with the purple polish on her fingernails bitten to the quick, the witchy black eyeliner around her brown eyes.  She smoked cigarettes and drank bourbon in corners at parties, wouldn’t let boys kiss her on the mouth but teased them as they watched her walk through the halls at school in her skirts and cowboy boots.

The word ‘freak’ was scrawled on the front of Koko’s T-shirt, a touch she thought the boy would appreciate.  She checked herself in the mirror then went to the kitchen to make him a turkey sandwich, put the sandwich into a paper bag with a serving of tomato soup, a bag of chips and thermos of ice water.  She snuck a bottle of bourbon and a box of chocolates her mother gave her as a birthday gift, and put everything into her Hello Kitty backpack along with a map, a sweater and a box of bandages in case the boy was hurt.  She saw her mother was asleep on the sofa then went to her room to steal a twenty-dollar bill and credit card from her wallet.

Her mother’s phone rang.  Koko stood still in the other room.  If it was her father, she would consider it a sign and stay.  If not, she would go.

“Hello?”  Her mother answered sleepily.  “Yes, Mother, I’ve locked all the windows.”

Koko slipped out the back door.

[SPACE]

Koko pedaled her bicycle through the deserted streets, the brilliance of the spring day hollowed out by the stark absence of life.  Everyone was inside, she could sense the jangling of nerves behind bolted doors and windows.  The silence, punctured every few minutes with the scream of sirens in the distance, rattled her.  She focused on the smooth, peaceful grip of her bicycle tires on the road.

Koko stopped to check her map, sipping the bourbon to keep calm.  The address was in the next town over.  She continued on her bicycle, passing beside a cemetery then through a playground where she was spooked by children’s toys left in mid-play – a pair of badminton rackets, a tricycle, a basketball under a hoop.  Further on, an old woman on a cell phone watched her from the window of an apartment, mouth hanging open.  Koko’s palms were sweating on the handlebars, her pulse ticking in her neck.  But she kept going.

A fleet of police cars rushed toward her on the main road into Watertown, sirens crying. Koko steered her bicycle into an empty lot behind a gas station to wait for them to pass, fearing the boy must have heard the sirens, too.  She imagined him trembling in an alleyway praying to God.  Imagined him in the tool shed of a stranger’s house.  Maybe he was halfway to Canada.  Koko climbed onto her bicycle and raced to the address.

[SPACE]

The house was unremarkable, decayed brick and green awnings, a pale yellow door.  The porch was teeming with potted trees and plants, strands of green leaves and tangled stems crawled over the rails and banisters like the earth had opened up and sprung through the slatted floor.  On the front stoop, a dirty white cat twitched its tail then slinked away.  The windows of the house were dark, except for a light in a tiny window on the attic floor.  The boy must have been hiding there.

In a schoolyard across the street, Koko lay her bicycle in the shadows of a tree.  Her pulse pounded and made her ill as she picked at her lip and drummed up the courage to walk to the door.  She took a generous sip of the bourbon, pulled at the hem of her skirt, wishing she could cover her bare knees, then went up the steps and knocked.  When no one answered, she knocked again then backed up to see if there was movement in the attic window.  The light had been switched off.  She knocked one last time, then pulled a pen from her backpack when no one answered and scribbled onto an envelope she found in the mailbox.

‘I’m here,’ she wrote.  ‘I believe in you.  Flash the light to give me a sign and I’ll come.  Love from Koko.’

She opened the screen door and dropped the note inside then went back to her bicycle to wait.  The house remained still.  Lying in the grass, Koko watched whipped cream colored clouds slowly somersault over the roof of the house and imagined the boy with her.  She thought of him in his graduation gown, thought of him pinning his red carnation to her prom dress in a few years, imagined dancing with her head against his shoulder, his arms strung round her waist.  What was he thinking?  She wondered.  Was he thinking of his mother far away in Russia?  Was he wishing his friends were around him, wishing he was lying peacefully in his own bed?

Koko closed her eyes, giddy and slowed by the bourbon.  She peeked up at the house one last time before drifting, unwillingly, to sleep.

[SPACE]

Hours later, her stomach turned with the taste of bourbon and woke her.  Koko rolled over and threw up in the grass, reached for the thermos in her backpack and drank half of the water.  The sky was starting to find its pre-dusk blue, dreamy and cold above her.  She looked over at the house then down the streets.  Everything everywhere was still silent.  When she switched on her phone, it read half past six and chimed with messages from her mother and a text sent ninety minutes before from Bree.

“Where are you?”  The message asked.

“At the house.”

Several moments later, Bree wrote, “What house?”

“His uncle’s house.”

“Shit, Ko, didn’t you get my text?  News says the kid isn’t anywhere near there.”

“Then where is he?”

“Just go home and be safe.”

Koko tossed the phone back into her backpack, her throat swelling with tears.  She swallowed them with a sip of water then got back onto her bicycle, slowly making her way through the streets farther away from home.  Turning onto a main road, she looked through the windows of a laundromat, a convenience store, an Italian restaurant and pet shop, all of them empty.  Even the gas station at the corner was lifeless.

She saw a flickering light ahead and pedaled toward it.  A tattoo shop with curtains drawn, a neon sign out front sputtering.  A man was sitting in front of a television, she could see him through the glass door.  Koko banged on it and the man jumped before clomping over to answer.

“What are you doing out here?”  He sounded like a parent even with his hulkish body covered in tattoos and his septum pierced like a bull’s.  He pulled her inside, locking the door behind her.

Koko tugged at her earring, glancing past him instead of into his eyes.  “I want a tattoo.”

“You shouldn’t be out here.  Do your folks know where you are?”

“Yeah.”  She caught sight of the television where footage of the bombings played.  “So can I get a tattoo?”

“What the hell kinda tattoo do you want so bad to come out in this?”

Koko lifted her sleeve to show him the quotation.

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen.”

“I’ll ask you again.”

Koko blushed when she saw the boy’s photograph on the screen.  “Fifteen.”

“Well, I can’t give you a tattoo without your parents’ permission.”

“They’re alright with it.  Please,” her voice cracked.  “I need to get it.”

The man followed her stare toward the boy’s photo on the screen, the graduation gown, the carnation.  He looked back at Koko, a vein in his temple throbbing.  “Tell you what, kid.  We don’t need to tell your parents so long as you give me some basic info.  Protects me, see.  Just your name, your mother’s name, a phone number.  That’ll do.  Cool?”

He handed her a slip of paper and she wrote down her mother’s name and number.  “I’m Koko.”

“Lemme go get the equipment ready.”  On his way out of the room, the man took the television remote and flipped to a music station.  “You don’t need to see any of that.”

Koko nestled into the waiting room sofa and flipped through a magazine past photos of an Asian women with tigers and flowers inked down the length of their legs and tattooed college girls in fishnet stockings.

“Just gotta give the equipment a chance to heat up.”  The man said when he came back several minutes later.  With his elbows on his chubby knees, he looked like a bullfrog sitting in the folding chair.  “This channel cool with you?”

She nodded and took the sweater from her backpack, draping it across her knees.  Absently, she watched the music on the screen, struggling again to keep her eyes open.

“How long will it take ‘til you’re ready?”

“Haven’t used the machinery all day,” he replied.  “May be a while.”

The man didn’t say much, only chuckled every so often at text messages on his cell phone and checked a clock that looked like a compass on the wall.  Koko pulled up her sleeve and traced her fingers across the quote, picturing red roses laced through the words.

Thirty minutes later, there was a knock at the door and she turned.  The shape behind the glass seemed to cast a beam of sunshine into the room and Koko saw the towering body.  She saw the mess of dark hair and immense shoulders.  She saw a warrior, a titan, saw him as she always had.  A king.

The tattooed man unlocked the door and her father stepped into the room.

[SPACE]

The ride in the car started in silence, her father’s jaw pulsing as he kept his gaze fixed firmly, angrily to the road.  Koko toyed with the zipper of her sweater, wanting him to speak first.

“Are you mad?”  she asked.

“We’re not supposed to be on the roads,” he answered, his voice measured.  “We’re breaking the law being out here right now.  You know that, don’t you?  You’re lucky you weren’t in Watertown where the feds are looking.”

“What’d Mom tell you?”

“Who knows?  I couldn’t hear anything through the sobbing.  Barely got the address to the tattoo parlor.”

Koko gazed at the houses on the street as they passed, each of them lit with the glare of televisions beaming through windows.  “You forgot my birthday, Circus.”

“Huh?”

“My birthday was Sunday.”

“Is that why you did this?”  He tsked then cursed himself, guilt washing over his face.  “I’m sorry, baby.  I’ll make it up to you.”

“Were you worried about me?”

“Shit, of course.”

“Then why didn’t you call?  Mom tried to reach you.”

He wrapped his knuckles against the steering wheel.  Being around her always seemed to make him nervous, like she had him on a leash he wanted to chew through.  “I got a lot going on, Koko.  I think about you all the time, baby, but there’s, you know, so much going on.”  He glanced over at her.  “You’re shaken up, huh?”

“A little.”

“This kinda thing messes with grownups, too.”  He put a hand on her knee, squeezed.  “I just needed to be some place I could wrap my mind around it, you know.  Feel all right.”

“How come that place isn’t home?”

He took a toothpick from his pocket and started gnawing at it.  Let several moments of silence pass again between them.  “So, what are you, fifteen now?”

“Yeah.”

“How’s it feel?”

“Okay, I guess.”

“Fifteen.”  He let out a low, crackling chuckle.  “I remember fifteen.  Wasn’t one of my best years, but I can tell you, it gets easier.”

Koko looked up at him.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he said, his voice melodious, warm.  “There’s still lots that’s hard, but you just start to realize you’re getting closer to when you’re in control of things, you know, you’re gonna be free one day.”

As they drove in silence a bit further, Koko kept her gaze outside the window, realizing she didn’t recognize the streets.  “Where are we going?”

“I got a friend in Waltham,” he said.  “He’s got a place we can rest ‘til the streets open again.  He’s a good guy, you’ll dig him.  There’s a pool, you can dip your feet.”

“Cool,” Koko mumbled, looking around inside the old Buick.  As always, the car was cluttered with her father’s life – sheet music strewn on the floor, amplifiers and wires crammed into the deck beneath the rear window, suits in a garment bag hanging from a hook, boxes filled with copies of his demo CDs.  Only the trumpet case was set apart from the rest of the clutter.  Koko always loved to watch her father play his trumpet – she liked the sight more than the sound – imagining the horn made from elephant tusk and her father an ancient hero blowing into it to announce the hunt.  The trumpet case, strapped safely behind a seatbelt in the backseat, was like another source of life in the car.  She could sense it.

“Does your mother know you were gonna get a tattoo?”

“Not really.”

He shook his head back and forth, a slight smile on his lips.  “What were you gonna get?”

Koko pulled up her sleeve.

He stopped at a red light and read the quote.  “Where’d you hear that?”

“The second bomber.”  She was blushing again.  “The younger one.  It was on Twitter.”

The smile on her father’s face faded.  He cracked the toothpick in half with his teeth and tossed it into the ashtray.  Koko got a strange pleasure having shocked him.

“I’m in love with him,” she said, pushing harder.

 “The bomber?”

 “The younger one,” Koko said.  “I love him.”

 Her father turned away so that she stared at his face in profile, the crown of tousled black hair, the majestic shoulders and mighty jaw.  He was like a character in a comic book, a warrior draped in animal skins and wielding a sword.  She imagined crawling over the seat into his lap.

 “Well,” her father said quietly.  “I’m sure he’d love you, too.”

Koko turned away to look through the window into the dark houses on the street, settling back into her seat as the tears gently and finally came.

—Laura K. Warrell

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Laura K. Warrell is a freelance writer living in Boston. She teaches writing at the University of Massachusetts Boston and Northeastern University and is a July, 2013, graduate of the MFA program at Vermont College. She has previously published nonfiction in Numéro Cinq.