The Best American Essays 2017

by Leslie Jamison

  Then, Lynwood smiled—his face seeming to gather where his eyes were narrowing—and seeing how frightened I looked, he became contrite: “Shit, I’m not going to kill you—you’ll piss yourself to death.” And so Lynwood, though sixteen, began to “father me,” a ritual where he would “adopt me,” which was his term, and make certain that I made something out of myself, go to college. Never mind that I had my own quite wonderful father and mother, this was immaterial. Lynwood had made his decision: I was going to get out of Harlem—I was his one good thing, his one good act. During May and in December, Lynwood would appear, ask to see my grade report, and I’d hand it over, trying to make it look as if this was the most natural act in the world. Luckily, I was a good student. In all honesty, in the early years, the school I attended rarely gave you grades—they provided long, written responses—two paragraphs for each class. Lynwood, as I recall, didn’t read them: he’d simply tell me that I was “doing well.” And so he didn’t need to give me an “ass whipping.” In retrospect, it is even possible that Lynwood had “consulted the stars,” he remained so ethereal.

  In my self-involvement, I really did not comprehend how much Lynwood’s gesture meant for him and for me. I did do well in school—my parents would not have otherwise—and I went on to graduate school and teaching at Cornell. And I didn’t see Lynwood until I learned that he had been sent to prison. Hearing that he was at Sing Sing, I decided to visit him, a drive of three hours from bucolic Ithaca. I hadn’t seen him in twenty years—he was thin, wiry, and unusually meditative—and he had that sharp-boned figure that one immediately wants to feed, to fatten up, that look that my aunt Josie used to call “sparrow needy.” For a moment, I couldn’t conceive that he would have frightened anyone—I saw, I guess, what my mother had gleaned in him, his unsullied sweetness.

  “Ken, good to see you,” Lynwood said. “But why did you come, did you miss your ass whipping?”

  Immediately, I recalled the old Lynwood: the body may change but the mind does not. His remembering the one thing that I too well connected with him surprised me, and his elation reminded me that he was mercurial—that things could easily move from good to bad, from commonplace to perilous.

  “I wanted to see you and thank you for helping me,” I told him.

  He looked at me rather quizzically. “I heard you’re teaching at college, that you’re married and doing good. That’s something,” he said.

  I wanted to say more, to explain how his investment in me suggested that there was something in him of great provender, something worthy, possibly even Augustinian in his bountiful complexity, but it was merely romantic, and it would have sounded hollow, paternalistic. Before I could even become more self-reproachably odious, he began to shuffle in his chair, looking as if he must have somewhere to go—this was not good for either of us.

  Then he stood up, and I saw how painfully thin he was. I had been there for merely five minutes. I hadn’t even had time to contemplate the banal surroundings or compare the walls to the other prisons I had visited, often giving poetry readings, where the inmates, if they didn’t like the poems, at least liked that I took the time to visit with them—in such places, the gift of the unusual, even a dubious college teacher, was often life itself. Sing Sing, of course, was famous for its closeness to New York City, thirty miles up the Hudson, and its illustrious prisoners, Willie Sutton and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and the fact that the same inmates who would later be housed within its walls constructed it. I found myself quickly looking about the table, seeing the gum tabs on the wall and the floor, the furious pencil markings on the desktop, a few ill-conceived numbers, possibly of a lawyer, or a friend, fitfully etched into the Formica, the listing of a wife or girlfriend who, more often than not, if not today or tomorrow, would refuse to return. I thought, too, of how many people I knew who had been sent “up the river,” a term first fashioned in Sing Sing. There were more black people in prison than in college, and the numbers kept growing. The prison, sadly, had become America’s true growth industry—today we make fast food and prisons: things that we can eat and things that eat us up, I recall a prisoner pundit stating.

  “This is too much good news,” Lynwood told me. “I didn’t think anyone from the neighborhood would look me up, especially one who escaped.” The word “escape” seemed to hover misshapen in the air, like a leaking helium balloon, bulbous, and addled. Suddenly, finding himself in a place where his language and experience had rarely taken him, I saw Lynwood begin to stammer. The world seemed as stolid and indecorous as if it were made of plasterboard. I wanted language, an entreaty; Lynwood, now, was simply a prisoner, waiting to die. “Have a good life,” he said.

  I watched as he walked through the gates and remembered how much he had frightened us, he, merely ten years our senior. People had often said that Lynwood would kill for kicks, that he acted for no worldly reason, that he had no feeling for anybody. My brother, Paul, years after seeing the killing, once tried to tell me that it wasn’t Lynwood who had done it—I don’t think Paul was willfully misremembering. He was simply older; he, too, had found his future torturous; things that had once made sense to him were oddly inchoate, disconsolate. And people in Harlem as elsewhere were full of contradictions. Yes, there were easy calls in my community. There was Larry, who, from age three, always wanted to play house and wore dresses and would later be seen adorned with Vera Wang. He’d now be called a cross-dresser, but from the moment we first knew Larry, he was simply Larry, and all of us accepted him. Surprisingly, whatever else we didn’t know about ourselves—and we were a veritable congress of commencements—Larry seemed oddly integrated, and he would often stand as a beacon of discernment for us when things grew choppy. If suffering rarely makes one generous, it can make one wise—and it may be wrong for me to say Larry suffered—he, in fact, seemed self-assured, the only person in my community, paradoxically, who knew who he was. The rest of us were simply struck by the hammer. Larry, for example, told my brother that it was OK for him to drop out of college. It was OK simply to be a musician. “Look at me,” he said to my brother. “Do you think I asked anyone for permission?”

  “Bro,” Paul said, “when I was younger, I once went to a bar on 138th Street—one of those funky places that scare people, the kind of place you writers like to imagine but would never be caught in—the kind of place that even frightened me.” He was silent for a moment, talking, I think here, for once truthfully to his brother. Speaking, that is, in the way my parents had hoped he would have talked when they were alive—when he was most vulnerable. “In the bar I bought a bag of grass, and this big dude took my money and then said it wasn’t enough, that I owed him for six bags. I wasn’t a saint—I had purchased from him before—but I didn’t owe him anything. That I knew.

  “The guy was getting more anxious, he had a gun, and he wasn’t interested in the money—he wanted to make a scene—he wanted to . . .” Paul found himself scavenging for the word, looking toward the sky, as if the answer were present there. The word Paul compromised on was “humiliate,” a word that seemed oddly grandiose, but he employed it. “He wanted to humiliate me.

  “I wasn’t into much, but I wasn’t going to let that happen,” my brother continued. “And so I began to think about how I would hurt him, what I could do—I was looking at the bar, going through scenarios, most of them useless.

  “Suddenly, Lynwood appeared, in that way he always did, seemingly coming from nowhere. ‘Let me handle this,’ he said. And he took the pusher and rushed him out the door and I never saw him again. I don’t know why I said it, but I told Lynwood, ‘Please don’t hurt him.’”

  Paul suddenly stopped talking, and I hoped he would continue, but for someone who had rarely offered the slightest intimacy in speech, I knew that this was merely the first tentative voicing. Paul might say more; he might, just as easily, return to his vaulted privacy.

  Paul and I never returned to that moment, so his short foray into speech seems like a sacrament. When
he died from septicemia after a very short stay in the intensive care unit of Roosevelt Hospital, where he never truly regained consciousness, my distraught parents asked me to gather up his few personal articles. Paul had placed the things that he would wear once he got well in a yellow plastic milk carton, everything neatly packed and folded, as if they were to be presented to someone of inestimable value. There were two pairs of jeans, three pairs of socks, five pairs of undershirts, two T-shirts, a pair of beaten-up Converse sneakers, none of which, of course, was ever used, so I had little to do. On the top of this haphazard congress, looming like an epiphany, was the only article that was not clothing, a copy of my book of poems, To Hear the River, which I had dedicated to Paul. The poems interestingly alluded to James Baldwin’s novel Another Country, which centers on the death of Rufus, a black jazz musician who would, in a fit of rage and self-hate, hurl himself off the George Washington Bridge, and how his death implicated us all. My title celebrated the twenty-four times the Hudson River called like a siren to Rufus, presaging his demise: how Rufus, death-tainted, could not elude his fate. The novel asks: Has any one of us ever been truly present at our lives?

  When I had given my book to Paul, he simply nodded. In the two years he had it, Paul had never said a word. I thought he hadn’t read the book or liked it. Like so much between us, it seemed simply to have fallen through the universe, like something useless or inconsequential. But there it stood on the top of that hodgepodge, like the earth’s irrepressible language. What if I had never seen it? What if I had never looked at that haphazard totem of Paul’s things? What if neither one of us had been born or had the other, if we, however fitfully and messily, had not loved one another? My parents now are dead, both of them taken by Alzheimer’s disease. I’m happily married and loved by a woman far better than I could ever imagine or deserve. I’ve taught a number of very fine students and helped a few of them to go far farther than they or I ever thought possible. I’ve had wonderfully supportive friends and colleagues. It’s been a good life.

  You’re my brother, Paul often said. You’re my brother. And both of us—in good and bad—whatever can be said about us, tried desperately to understand what that implied, to take on the risk of presence, as Baldwin would term it, to bear witness to what we did or did not do. Life is a chain of unalterable dalliances and failings, and it is also, just as powerfully, the tale of drives to Providence and Ithaca, forays into dangerous clubs by ones who truly ventured there and by ones who could only venture there as an act of the imagination; and it is, just as ineluctably, a tale of grace, of happenstance. What is, is.

  The last poem I published was about Paul; it was written twenty-six years ago. I haven’t composed a poem since, and even there, no matter how much I wished it otherwise, he seemed to vanish.

  CATHERINE VENABLE MOORE

  The Book of the Dead

  FROM Oxford American

  These are roads to take when you think of your country / and interested bring down the maps again

  I was three years old when the Killer Floods hit West Virginia. We were spared, my family and I. My parents had recently bought a stone cottage in a hilly Charleston neighborhood with great schools. Dad had just graduated from law school. We lost nothing, while thousands of our neighbors were ejected from their homes into the icy November waters that claimed sixty-two lives; the 1985 storms still sit on the short list of the most costly in U.S. history. In the aftermath, newspapers accumulated the miracles and spectacles. An organ caked with mud, drying before a church. The body of a drowned deer woven into the under-girders of a bridge. Two nineteenth-century mummies that had floated away from a museum of curiosities in Philippi, recovered from the river.

  None of this suffering was ours. “Ours.” My mom—a ginger from the low country whose freckles I was born to—packed me up for a week of relief work in a hangar at the National Guard armory. Her task was to deal with the hills of black trash bags, sent to Appalachia from abroad, stuffed with clothing that recalled dank basements and dead people’s closets. For endless hours she sorted it into piles by age, size, sex, and degree of suitability. Meanwhile, I dressed up in the gifts of the well-meaning and the careless. Stiletto heels. Crumbling antique hats. Tuxedos, gowns, belts, and bikinis. “Nobody wants to wear your sweaty old bra, lady,” my mom muttered to one of these imagined do-gooders, tossing it aside. On the contrary—I did, very much! I modeled the torn, the stained, and the unusable, cracking up the other volunteers. Mom saw how little of the clothing was functional, how much time was being wasted in the sorting, but she was desperate to be of use.

  Disaster binds our people to this place and each other, or so the story goes. Think of the 118 mine disasters our state has suffered since 1894, the fires, explosions, and roof falls. Or the floods, whether “natural”—like the one this June that killed at least twenty-three people (as I write this, my friends come home from recovery work, stinking of contaminated mud)—or those induced by humans, like the coal waste dam that burst at Buffalo Creek in 1972, when 125 people drowned in a tsunami of slurry. (Pittston Coal called it an “act of God.”) Other disasters are less visible, inside our bodies even: the rolling crisis that is black lung disease claims a thousand lives every year, while an addiction epidemic seems to be robbing entire generations of our children. West Virginia’s drug overdose death rate is the highest in the nation. Then there is the toxic discharge: from the 2014 Elk River chemical spill that poisoned the water of 300,000 residents to the microreleases leaking daily from the sediment ponds that serve mountaintop removal sites.

  Appalachian fatalism wasn’t invented out of thin air. If your list of tragedies gets long enough, you start to think you’re fated for disaster. And maybe the rest of the country starts to see you that way, too. I watched a documentary last year about the outsized influence of extractive industries here. It was a well-rehearsed narrative, this litany of disaster—land grab, labor war, boom, bang, roar—on and on in the dark theater. I admired the film in some ways—the bravery of naming each and every pain, the courage of its makers to pass into the tunnel of it, to point fingers along the way. But as I sat through this latest iteration of Appalachian grief writ large, I began to seethe—not at some alleged oppressors, but at the narrative itself. I cannot live inside the story of this film, I remember repeating to myself, like a chant. That can’t be my story because nothing lives there.

  Admittedly, there’s a spellbinding allure to disaster, close cousin of the sublime. Hypnotic and wordless, the disaster repulses even as it propels one’s attention toward it. I know, because I’m victim to its seduction, too. I live five miles from where the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel tragedy unfolded, along the New River Gorge in Fayette County. Hawk’s Nest is an extreme in a class of extremes—the disaster where truly nothing seemed to survive, even in memory—and I have made a home in its catacombs. The historical record is disgracefully neglectful of the event, and only a handful of the workers’ names were ever made known. What’s more, any understanding of Hawk’s Nest involves the discomfort of the acute race divide in West Virginia, seldom acknowledged or discussed. Indeed, race is still downplayed in official accounts. Disaster binds our people, maybe. But what if you’re one of those deemed unworthy of memory?

  Here’s what we know: Beginning in June of 1930, three thousand men dug a three-mile hole through a sandstone mountain near the town of Gauley Bridge for the Union Carbide and Carbon Corporation. The company was building an electrometallurgical plant nearby, which needed an unlimited supply of power and silica, and the tunnel was determined to be the cheapest and most efficient source of both. A dam would be built to divert a powerful column of the New River underground and down a gradually sloping tunnel to four electrical generators; the ground-up silica rock harvested during excavation would be fed into the furnace in Alloy.

  Three-quarters of the workers were migratory blacks from the South who lived in temporary work camps, with no local connections or advocates. Turnover on the job was rapid. B
y some reports, conditions were so dusty that the workers’ drinking water turned white as milk, and the glassy air sliced at their eyes. Some of the men’s lungs filled with silica in a matter of weeks, forming scar tissue that would eventually cut off their oxygen supply; others wheezed with silicosis for decades. When stricken, the migrant workers either fled West Virginia for wherever home was, or they were buried as paupers in mass graves in the fields and woods around Fayette County. The death toll was an estimated, though impossible to confirm, 764 persons, making it the worst industrial disaster in U.S. history.

  If the company had wet the sandstone while drilling, or if the workers had been given respirators, most deaths would likely have been avoided. Yet through two major trials, a congressional labor subcommittee hearing in Washington, and eighty-six years of silence, neither Union Carbide nor its contractor—Rinehart & Dennis Company out of Charlottesville, Virginia—has ever admitted wrongdoing. Calling the whole affair a “racket,” in 1933 the company issued settlements between $30 and $1,600 to only a fraction of the affected workers and their families. The black workers received substantially less than their white counterparts.

  Soon after the project wrapped, the workers’ shacks were torn down and a country club built to serve Union Carbide’s employees. A state park was established at the site in the mid-1930s, and the Civilian Conservation Corps built a charming stone overlook at what has become one of the most misunderstood and most photographed vistas in the state: the New River, dammed and pooling above the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel. Historical memory of the event has since then constituted nothing short of amnesia. Despite its status as the country’s “greatest” industrial disaster, it remains relatively unknown outside of West Virginia, and even here the incident is barely understood and seldom examined. It took fifty years for the state to mark the deaths at the site. The governor who presided over the disaster’s aftermath, Homer Adams Holt, who went on to serve as Union Carbide’s general counsel, excised the story from the WPA’s narrative West Virginia: A Guide to the Mountain State. Many also believe that when a novel based on Hawk’s Nest was published in 1941, Union Carbide convinced Doubleday to pull and destroy all copies.