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 AUGUST 31, 2020

4 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

11 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Amy Davidson Sorkin on a remote Convention;
renegade ice-cream man; lawyer turned troll;
quarantined movie star; Gore Vidal’s grave.
Commemorative
ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS Cover Reprints
Alex Ross 18 Wagner in Hollywood
A composer’s fractured legacy in film. Search our extensive
SHOUTS & MURMURS
archive of weekly
Alexis Wilkinson 25 Mrs. Nice Guy covers dating back to
ANNALS OF SCIENCE
1925 and commemorate
David Quammen 26 The Sobbing Pangolin a milestone with a
The brutal history of an elusive creature. New Yorker cover reprint.
PROFILES newyorkerstore.com/covers
Evan Osnos 32 Man in the Middle
Will Joe Biden’s balancing act succeed?
OUR LOCAL CORRESPONDENTS
Jennifer Gonnerman 48 Survival Story
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Driving buses through a pandemic.

FICTION
David Wright Faladé 56 “The Sand Banks, 1861”
THE CRITICS
THE ART WORLD
Peter Schjeldahl 64 Made and unmade at Storm King.
A CRITIC AT LARGE
Judith Thurman 67 Family ties in Elena Ferrante.
BOOKS
71 Briefly Noted
Ruth Franklin 72 “Beowulf ” meets feminism.
ON TELEVISION
Doreen St. Félix 76 The “Black Journal” archive.
THE CURRENT CINEMA
Anthony Lane 78 “Tesla,” “Coup 53.”
POEMS
Phillis Levin 41 “September First Again”
Valzhyna Mort 60 “To Antigone, a Dispatch”
COVER
Gayle Kabaker “Out of the Blue”

DRAWINGS Liza Donnelly, Maddie Dai, Kendra Allenby,

Jason Adam Katzenstein, Julia Leigh and Phillip Day,
Charlie Hankin, Matthew Diffee, Drew Panckeri, Benjamin Schwartz,
Roz Chast, Sophie Lucido Johnson and Sammi Skolmoski,
Akeem Roberts, Evan Lian, Sofia Warren, Mick Stevens, Edward Steed,
Lillie Harris, Navied Mahdavian SPOTS Tom Bachtell
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 1
 CONTRIBUTORS
Evan Osnos (“Man in the Middle,” Jennifer Gonnerman (“Survival Story,”
p. 32) writes about politics and foreign p. 48) became a staff writer in 2015. She
affairs for the magazine. He is at work is the author of “Life on the Outside.”
on a book about the United States, to
Help feed be published in 2021. David Quammen (“The Sobbing Pan-
golin,” p. 26) has written numerous
NYC’s children Gayle Kabaker (Cover) is a visual art-
ist and a writer. “Vital Voices,” a book
books, including “The Song of the
Dodo,” “Spillover,” and, most recently,
and families featuring her portraits, will come out
in September.
“The Tangled Tree.”

now. Valzhyna Mort (Poem, p. 60) was born

Alex Ross (“Wagner in Hollywood,” in Minsk, Belarus. Her new poetry
p. 18), the magazine’s music critic since collection, “Music for the Dead and
1996, will publish his third book, Resurrected,” will be out in the fall.
The devastating “Wagnerism,” next month.
Charles Bethea (The Talk of the Town,
economic fallout of Phillis Levin (Poem, p. 41) is the author p. 15), a staff writer, has contributed
COVID-19 has put a of, most recently, “Mr. Memory & to The New Yorker since 2008. He lives
strain on NYC’s children Other Poems.” She teaches at Hofstra in Atlanta.
and their families, University.
and more New Yorkers Ruth Franklin (Books, p. 72) received
David Wright Faladé (Fiction, p. 56) the 2016 National Book Critics Circle
are depending on us teaches at the University of Illinois. Award for Biography for “Shirley
now to help put meals His novel “Nigh On a Brother” will be Jackson.”
on their tables than published in January, 2022.
ever before. You can Peter Schjeldahl (The Art World, p. 64)
help keep City Harvest’s Doreen St. Félix (On Television, p. 76), has been the magazine’s art critic since
a staff writer since 2017, is The New 1998. His latest book is “Hot, Cold,
trucks on the road and Yorker’s television critic. Heavy, Light.”
full of food for our city’s
youngest New Yorkers
and their families.
THIS WEEK ON NEWYORKER.COM

LEFT: SAUL LOEB / GETTY; RIGHT: GEOFF MCFETRIDGE

CAMPAIGN CHRONICLES ANNALS OF INQUIRY

What happens if Donald Trump Margaret Talbot on the history
fights the election results? Eric Lach of boredom—what the sensation
investigates possible scenarios. does to us, and for us.

Download the New Yorker app for the latest news, commentary, criticism,
and humor, plus this week’s magazine and all issues back to 2008.
 THE MAIL PUZZLES & GAMES DEPT.

THE PRICE OF JUSTICE and literature, was established in about

the third century B.C.E. The University
Although Jeffrey Toobin makes a well-rea- of al-Qarawiyyin, in Fez, Morocco, was
soned argument against Attorney Gen- founded in 859 C.E., though it was not
eral William Barr’s overreach in federal officially designated a university until
prosecutions, the details of the case that modern times. According to Guinness
he uses to demonstrate the problem are World Records, al-Qarawiyyin remains
The New Yorker
less convincing (Comment, July 20th).
Toobin notes that Colinford Mattis and
the “oldest existing and continually op-
erating educational institution in the
Crossword:
Urooj Rahman, who have been charged
with perpetrating a Molotov-cocktail at-
world.”The term “university” has several
limitations, not least that it has long been
Introducing
tack on a police car in Brooklyn, are both
“well-regarded lawyers.” He then lists
applied only to educational institutions
with distinctive structural and legal fea-
Partner Mode
their credentials, including their degrees tures that first developed in Europe. It
from the law schools of Fordham Uni- is imperative to remember that institu-
versity and New York University. But tions of higher learning outside Europe
these facts do little to support Toobin’s served as preëminent intellectual centers
opinion that their prospective legal pun- and contributed much to our under-
ishment is “the most egregious example” standing of the world.

1
of Barr’s brand of “federal excess.” Con- Thurston Hamlette
sider the now widely held view that vi- Brooklyn, N.Y.
olence is a tool of last resort for those
who don’t have a voice in society. Even AN ENVIABLE LIFE
so, the powerless realize that this coun-
try’s legal system expects people to pay a I read the reprint of Judith Thurman’s
price for violence, however justified it piece on the life of Margaret Fuller, the
may be. Given Mattis’s and Rahman’s pro- first female public intellectual, with ex-
fession, it is impossible to see them as citement (Books, July 27th). What a won-
incapable of effecting change from within derfully affirming role model for academ- You can now solve
the justice system. Instead of using their ically minded single women—and to have
positions to manifest their political be- The New Yorker dedicate several pages to our online crossword
liefs and defend others, Mattis and Rah- her life not once but twice! However, I puzzles with a friend
man took actions that have simply pro- was again dismayed by Thurman’s con-
vided cover for Barr’s dictatorial overreach. clusion: that Fuller’s “example gives you who’s across the room

1
Jo-Ann Maguire much to admire but not enough to envy.” or halfway around
Norristown, Pa. Fuller managed to live an unconventional,
dynamic life during a time that was more the world.
CENTERS OF LEARNING socially restrictive than ours, and yet so-
ciety tends to remember her best for what
Lawrence Wright, in his article about Thurman calls her “profound state of sin- Start playing at
the effect of the Black Death on Europe, gleness.” Independent women are eager newyorker.com/crossword
states that Bologna’s “famous university, to embrace positive depictions of single
established in 1088, is the oldest in the women, and we deserve better than the
world” (“Crossroads,” July 20th). It is cor- tired representations of them as admira-
rect that Bologna’s university was the ble but not enviable.
first to be defined as such, but the West- Alice Astarita
ern concept of a university fails to en- La Jolla, Calif.
compass the respected institutions of
higher education that existed through- •
out Africa and Asia centuries before the Letters should be sent with the writer’s name,
University of Bologna was established. address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to
For example, the Alexandrian Museum [email protected]. Letters may be edited
for length and clarity, and may be published in
of Egypt, a research institution that was any medium. We regret that owing to the volume
noteworthy for its scholarship on science of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 3

 In an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus, many New York City venues are closed.
Here’s a selection of culture to be found around town, as well as online and streaming.
AUGUST 26 – SEPTEMBER 1, 2020

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

Pandemic theatre has been mostly virtual, but the downtown arts center HERE is finding novel ways to get
spectators out of the house. “Cairns” is a self-guided walk through Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, written
and narrated by Gelsey Bell (above). Participants download audio tracks and traverse the grounds, visiting the
graves of such trailblazing figures as Do-Hum-Me, the daughter of a Sac and Fox Nation chief, who was hired
by P. T. Barnum to perform traditional dances before she died, at the age of eighteen, in 1843. Visit here.org.
PHOTOGRAPH BY TONJE THILESEN
 1
ART
walks, undeterred, at the bottom of the page. The
expressive, even urgent, quality found here is an
in response to the pandemic-themed prompt that
supplies the show’s title: “We Live in Real Time.”
illuminating complement to the regimented dy- Roughly a quarter of them vie for attention in
namism of Taylor’s sewn work.—J.F. (shrine.nyc) the storefront display, making ingenious use of
“Judd” postcards, rubber stamps, photographs, fabric
Donald Judd was the last great revolutionary scraps, paint, stickers, a plastic pelvis, and pages
of modern art. The gorgeous boxy objects—he “In Praise of Painting” torn from “Gulliver’s Travels.” A Spam label
refused to call them sculptures—that the Amer- How great are the Met’s holdings in the Dutch pokes fun at electronic mail; a simple sketch of
ican artist constructed between the early nine- Golden Age? Very. This long-term installation, a sweet face advises, “Take care of one another.”
teen-sixties and his death, from cancer, in 1994, which reopens to the public on Aug. 29, rings the Inevitably, there are homages to Ray Johnson,
irreversibly altered the character of Western lower level of the Lehman Wing with scores of considered the father of correspondence art;
aesthetic experience. They displaced traditional lesser-known gems from the mid-seventeenth Keith Haring’s electric baby makes a cameo, too.
contemplation with newfangled confrontation. century, many of them rarely on view before, One punning collage pairs an image of Marcel
That’s the key trope of Minimalism, a term that amid masterworks by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” with

1
Judd despised but one that will tag him until the Hals, and Ruisdael. The period, vivified here, a widely shared sentiment: “Oh how I miss the
end of time. His works register as material prop- began in 1648, when the end of the Eighty Years’ stares of my museum.”—Andrea K. Scott
ositions of certain principles—chiefly, openness War with Spain brought a boom in wealth and
and clarity. They aren’t about anything. They morale, expressed by genre paintings that exalt
afford no traction for analysis while making you the national ideal of gezelligheid—social warmth,
more or less conscious of your physical relation comfort, belonging. A key figure was Gerard ter MUSIC
to them, and to the space that you and they Borch, who had travelled widely and worked
share. As installed at MOMA (the museum at the court of Philip IV, in company with
reopens on Aug. 27) by the curator Ann Temkin, Velázquez. Ter Borch’s lustrous, ineffably witty Aminé: “Limbo”
with perfectly paced samples of Judd’s major domestic scenes inspired a generation of masters, HIP-HOP One glance at the cover of Aminé’s 2017
motifs—among them, floor-to-ceiling “stacks” notably Vermeer, whose genius rather eclipsed début album, “Good for You,” reveals an affable
of shelflike units, mostly of metal-framed, tinted his elder’s. The pictures often star ter Borch’s rapper with a prankster’s instincts: the record,
Plexiglas, which expose and flavor the space they younger sister Gesina, preening in satins or known best for the brightness of such songs as
occupy—the second of the show’s four big rooms enigmatically musing. Herself a painter, she is “Caroline,” featured artwork that showed him
amounts to a Monument Valley of the minimalist cutely funny-looking—pointy nose, weak chin— completely naked on a toilet, staring straight
sublime.—Peter Schjeldahl (moma.org) and desperately lovable. There’s much to be into the camera. Aminé is figuring out how to
said for a world with such a family in it.—P.S. balance his natural impishness with an evolving
(metmuseum.org) career, and “Limbo,” his latest release, offers at
Sam Lavigne and Tega Brain least a partial way forward, through casual beats
When first encountering the digital art work and a touch of earnestness. Some of his more
“New York Apartment,” commissioned by the “We Live in Real Time” serious efforts—“Mama,” an ode to his mother,
Whitney for its Web site, you might think you’ve In his mazy novel about an underground postal and “Easy,” a bland Summer Walker collabora-
stumbled on some phantasmagoric iteration of service, “The Crying of Lot 49,” Thomas Pyn- tion—don’t quite pay off, but he’s at his most
Zillow. Lavigne and Brain have reimagined all chon describes stamps as “little colored windows comfortable when he gets to play around in the
of New York City’s available residential real into deep vistas of space and time.” The same helium-high chorus of “Compensating” or in the
estate as one dizzying listing—an apartment might be said of the array of mail art solicited sardonic swagger of “Shimmy.”—Julyssa Lopez
measuring nearly thirty-seven million square by the indispensable artist-book haven Printed
feet, priced at forty-three billion dollars and Matter, now on view in the windows of the non-
change. The project is presented as a series of profit’s street-level outpost in the Swiss Institute, Boldy James: “The Versace Tape”
simulated 3-D tours, showing four possible ar- on St. Marks Place. More than a thousand sub- HIP-HOPThe thirty-eight-year-old Detroit rap-
chitectural configurations: a sprawling labyrinth, missions from thirty-five countries were received per Boldy James hones his expository nature
a pyramid, and two different towers. A number
of fast-paced videos flash appropriated images of
the meta-apartment’s many features, organized
by categories such as “Pre-war” and “Stain- PODCAST DEPT.
less steel”; there is also a mortgage calculator.
Launched before the lockdown began, the art- When the curator Barbara London
ists’ evolving piece (it updates weekly) has only
become more relevant—it’s both a hallucinatory started a video program at MOMA,
study of interiors and an absurdist critique of in- in 1974, it was the first of its kind at a
come inequality.—Johanna Fateman (whitney.org) major museum. London was studying
Islamic art history when she embarked
Sarah Mary Taylor on her uncharted career, inspired by the
Taylor, a Mississippi artist who died in 2000, forward-thinking artists she met in New
is best known as a quilt-maker; she developed
her distinct style of appliqué and color sense York—“intermedia mavericks,” as she de-
only after she retired from her job as a house- scribes them in her invaluable (and en-
keeper, in 1968. (She had started working as a ticingly personal) book “Video/Art: The
child, picking cotton.) This online exhibition
of her drawings—bright sketchbook works in First Fifty Years.” In her new biweekly
marker, crayon, and graphite pencil, from the podcast, “Barbara London Calling,” she
nineteen-nineties—reveals a more spontaneous interviews innovators—from the alt-Nol-
side. On paper, the artist could quickly render
the wild animals, figures, and hands that appear lywood auteur Zina Saro-Wiwa to the
elsewhere in her work as fabric silhouettes. Un- sonic virtuoso Marina Rosenfeld—about
ILLUSTRATION BY NAN LEE

constrained by the geometric patterns required art, life, and technology. (It’s available via
of a quilt, she played with scale and added telling
details, creating fragmentary narratives that Apple and Spotify.) In the Aug. 26 epi-
reflect her experiences as a Black woman in the sode, the Hong Kong-based artist Sam-
South. In the show’s centerpiece, “Don’t Mess son Young talks about his work at the
with Me,” a host of monstrous creatures and dis-
embodied heads float in a storm of confetti-like intersection of musical composition, per-
marks, hectoring a well-dressed woman who formance, and politics.—Andrea K. Scott

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 5

 city’s lockdown ended. That music is echoed in
AFRICAN POP “Prologue,” which concludes this vivid collection
like a fading memory.—Steve Smith

Fruit Bats: “Siamese Dream”

ROCK Eric D. Johnson, the sole mainstay of the
indie band Fruit Bats, latched onto the Smash-
ing Pumpkins’ widely acclaimed 1993 album,
“Siamese Dream,” as a teen-ager; decades later,
it remains etched on his skin. On this re-creation
of “Siamese Dream,” from Turntable Kitchen’s
“Sounds Delicious” series of full-album covers,
Johnson navigates the songs with intimacy while
freely straying from the record’s blueprint. In
the original, high drama and explosive washes
of guitars greet listeners at every turn. Muting
both elements, Johnson strips the songs of their
grandeur and amplifies their air of loneliness.
The effect is poignant, as if the singer is com-
muning with his younger self.—Jay Ruttenberg

Missy Mazzoli: “Proving Up”

OPERA When Missy Mazzoli’s chamber opera
“Proving Up”—a Western gothic tale that visits
horror upon a homesteading family in Nebraska
The Nigerian singer Burna Boy refers to his blend of regional pop, Fela after the Civil War—had its New York première,
Kuti funk, American rap and R. & B., and dancehall as the hybrid subgenre in 2018, it was somewhat hampered by James
Afro-fusion. After establishing his range—and his stature—on the 2019 Darrah’s opaque staging. An excellent new re-
cording reveals the lacerating power of Mazzoli’s
album “African Giant,” which was as much a homegrown political statement writing, with Christopher Rountree conducting
as a westward expansion, his triumphant return, “Twice As Tall,” feels like the International Contemporary Ensemble and
a colorful reiteration. This, too, is music that showcases Burna Boy’s om- the cast of Opera Omaha’s 2018 production of
the piece. The score, which includes harmoni-
nivorous instincts—while offering glimpses of the diaspora that influenced cas and acoustic guitars, sidesteps genre shtick
them—but the album’s pan-African ethos, most unmistakable on songs such to create modern musical landscapes that feel
as “Alarm Clock” and “Wonderful,” inspires an even more vibrant sound. eerily unwelcoming, bright, and dry, but the
wonderfully specific vocal writing embraces a
The messages might not be as urgent as those that scored “African Giant” its certain classicism in its differentiation of the
Grammy nomination for Best World Music Album, but the beats move with characters. In an American frontier littered
just as much purpose, and their grooves are undeniable. As Burna fervently with broken promises, Mazzoli and the librettist
Royce Vavrek ask us to see those who failed and
navigates a magnificent array of polyrhythmic styles, he continues his mission were forgotten.—Oussama Zahr
of unifying the music diffused from the African continent.—Sheldon Pearce
Smalls
JAZZ The intrepid West Village basement venue
on “The Versace Tape.” With a deep voice and podcast of year-by-year mixes sampling all of Smalls started streaming and archiving perfor-
a no-nonsense delivery, he raps soberly about recorded sound’s history—along with much mances online in September, 2007. Now, amid
the pleasures and ills of the small-time drug more, from Indian raga and country hokum to the pandemic, streaming has become the life-
trade. These lessons in cunning are performed heart-stopping gospel. For nearly three hours, blood of the club. The final week of August finds
with the accumulated wisdom and expertise that the selections floor you, one after another. Al- a nicely varied assembly of artists ushering the
come with experience as a guide and a teacher. most a century on, they’re so immediate it’s month out in style. The bands of the trumpeter
His understated bravado is a perfect match for shocking.—Michaelangelo Matos Alex Sipiagin (Aug. 27) and the saxophonist
the soul sampling of the Vine star turned rap Grant Stewart (Aug. 30) often flaunt high-qual-
producer Jay Versace, whose beats are simple ity hard bop. The drummer Ari Hoenig’s quartet
but elegant. The washed-out production is light Du Yun: exults in charging post-bop (Aug. 31); the trum-
on drums, hanging at a distance until it vanishes peter Jon-Erik Kellso’s small group looks back
“A Cockroach’s Tarantella”

1
completely. Over suppressed, stately trumpets with affection to prewar swing and New Orleans
(“Maria”), the retro R. & B. of the New Cym- CLASSICAL RECORDING The irrepressible, idiosyn- styles (Aug. 29).—Steve Futterman
bals (“Long Live Julio”), and lounge-ready jazz cratic composer Du Yun not only recorded a new
(“Monte Cristo”), James mutters his way through album in late June—with the reliably command-
an extended tale about an expensive, paranoid ing JACK Quartet—but also fast-tracked its
life dealing in street politics.—Sheldon Pearce release, in streaming and downloadable formats, DANCE
on the Chinese label Modern Sky. The 2010 piece
that lends its title to the collection appears in
ILLUSTRATION BY SERGIY MAIDUKOV

Centuries of Sound: “1927” two versions, one narrated by the composer in “And Still You Must Swing”
JAZZ 1927 was a monumental year in American English and another in Chinese. The text, also The virtual edition of America’s foremost dance
recording history—the year of the trailblazing by Du Yun, wrings poignancy from the musings festival, Jacob’s Pillow, finishes, Aug. 27-29, with
feature-length sound film “The Jazz Singer”; of a pregnant cockroach who desires resurrection the American art of tap and a pleasurable yet
of the Bristol Sessions, where Jimmie Rodgers as a human, pondering the expectations and the painful revelation of its profundity. Accompanied
and the Carter Family codified country music; strictures imposed by society and gender. In by a jazz rhythm section, three of today’s finest
and of jazz’s full maturation, with masterpieces “Tattooed in Snow,” written, in 2015, for dis- tap dancers—Dormeshia, Derick K. Grant, and
by Armstrong, Ellington, Moten, and Beider- tanced players, ghostly melodies coalesce from Jason Samuels Smith, with a cameo by Camille A.
becke, among others. All are accounted for on jagged turbulence. The fragile opening impro- Brown—demonstrate both the fundamentals and
the 1927 edition of “Centuries of Sound”—the visation, “Epilogue,” includes sounds recorded the higher math of swing. It’s a joy, and yet this
British radio host James Errington’s monthly at a Wuhan market in March, the day after the partially improvised performance was filmed

6 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020

 shortly after two more Black men, Philando by one, and sit across from a series of actors soldier stands out: Private William Boston (Trai
Castile and Alton Sterling, had died at the hands performing short monologues: part speed dating, Byers, who co-wrote the script with Willmott),
of police officers, in 2016. “It’s not easy when part confessional. It’s a format that adapts easily whose skin color is light and who has recently
your people are dying in the street,” Dormeshia to the Zoom era, and the project is rolling out returned from France with a degree from the Sor-
says, upset, and then she and her colleagues eight new virtual playlets, a batch of which will bonne. What’s more, he has the particular confi-
show how art can help us endure.—Brian Seibert be presented every Thursday night through Sept. dence of the base’s white commander (Thomas
(jacobspillow.org/virtual-pillow) 24. Each is performed by one actor at a time, for Haden Church). Yet Boston, whose parents were
one audience member at a time, remotely. The born enslaved, takes his privilege as a respon-
company has met the political moment, too. The sibility to fight for the rights of Black people;
“Black Dance Stories” latest edition, titled “Here We Are,” honors the when he arrests a white man for killing a Black
This weekly YouTube series, which started in centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, and one, he arouses the vengeful hatred of Houston’s
June, is a talk show—a delightful and necessary all of the microplays in the series are written and white population, which spurs members of the
one, warmly hosted by Charmaine Warren, with directed by women of color; the playwrights in- 24th into armed self-defense. Willmott offers a
Kimani Fowlin and Nick Hall, in which Black clude Jaclyn Backhaus, Lydia R. Diamond, Lynn fervent vision of history as personal experience

1
dance artists speak, as one guest puts it, “without Nottage, Nikkole Salter, and Carmelita Tropi- in scenes of the soldiers’ anguished recollections;
a filter.” Along with the Aug. 27 episode’s par- cana. Tickets are free.—M.S. (bfplny.com/theatre) he dramatizes the moral risks incurred—and
ticipants, Leslie Parker and Wanjiru Kamuyu, the terrible sacrifices endured—in the name of
comes a new short film. In “(another) township progress.—Richard Brody (Streaming on Amazon,
manifesto,” the Zimbabwean-born choreographer Apple TV, and other services.)
Nora Chipaumire addresses historical and cur- MOVIES
rent rebellion impressionistically and with biting
sarcasm. How many times, she asks, must a Black The Juniper Tree
woman sing praises to her dead Black brothers? The 24th This stark and lyrical drama, from 1989, based
Who, she asks, sings and dances for women?—B.S. Kevin Willmott’s passionate and fine-grained on a tale by the Brothers Grimm and starring
new drama, based on a true story, is set mainly Björk, was filmed in Iceland by the American
in 1917, in Houston, Texas, where the 24th In- director Nietzchka Keene. In the wild, a young
Hamptons Dance Project fantry, an all-Black outfit, guards white laborers widowed farmer named Jóhann (Valdimar Örn
In this highly abnormal year, any live dance constructing an Army base yet nonetheless en- Flygenring) meets two wandering sisters, Margit
that’s happening is happening outdoors. The dures the cruelties and horrors of Jim Crow. One (Björk) and Katla (Bryndís Petra Bragadóttir);
second edition of the Hamptons Dance Project,
led by the American Ballet Theatre dancer Jose
Sebastian, is no exception. Its one-hour per-
formances take place on an outdoor stage, just THEATRE FESTIVALS
large enough for solos, duets, and the odd trio,
in the garden of Guild Hall in East Hampton,
New York; up to fifty people can attend (Aug.
29-30). The dancers, almost all of whom are
rising or established stars at A.B.T., include
James Whiteside, Isabella Boylston, Catherine
Hurlin, and Sebastian himself. The program
features the eternal “Dying Swan” (by Michel
Fokine), danced by Skylar Brandt; a new work
by Gemma Bond; and a tap solo choreographed

1
and performed by Demi Remick.—Marina Harss
(hamptonsdanceproject.org)

THE THEATRE

A Killer Party
“If no one is coming to the theatre anymore, well,
then, we have no choice but to bring theatre into
their homes!” the impresario Varthur McArthur
(Michael James Scott) declares—before dropping
dead over a bowl of soup. So begins this mur-
der-mystery musical comedy, which plays out
in nine bite-size episodes. The actors, including
such Broadway regulars as Laura Osnes, Alex
Newell, Jeremy Jordan, and Carolee Carmello,
shot their parts in isolation, but some clever ed- August is typically when Scotland’s capital city turns into a raucous
iting and snappy sound design tie it all together. mecca for theatre artists, comedians, musicians, and adventurous audi-
Kait Kerrigan and Rachel Axler’s in-jokey script
and Jason Howland and Nathan Tysen’s bouncy ences from all over. This summer, of course, Edinburgh’s festival sea-
songs give pep to the “Clue”-like plot, about a son is muted—but not gone. The sprawling Edinburgh Festival Fringe,
Duluth theatre company rife with suspects. The which has helped launch such talents as Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Tim
show has the dopey, D.I.Y. exuberance of theatre
ILLUSTRATION BY EMMA ROULETTE

people who are going a little nuts in quaran- Minchin and last year boasted more than thirty-eight hundred shows,
tine—and who, luckily for us, still want to enter- is hosting a slew of virtual events at edfringe.com (through Aug. 31),
tain.—Michael Schulman (akillerpartymusical.com) from a “laughalong” with a Canadian clown duo to an “eco-opera” with
harmonizing sheep. The Fringe’s loftier cousin, Edinburgh International
Theatre for One Festival, is presenting a video series, at eif.co.uk, called “My Light Shines
What’s theatre without a crowd? Theatre for One On” (through Aug. 28), featuring drama, ballet, and opera performances
has been contemplating this question since the
pre-pandemic days. Back then, spectators would filmed in empty theatres, along with a corresponding light installation
slip into a mobile four-by-eight-foot booth, one that illuminates each venue from within and without.—Michael Schulman

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 7

he marries Katla, and both women move to his young male competitors, whom she faces down Jordan) from college and a coarse rocker (John
farmstead. There, Jóhann’s young son, Jónas with courage and resilience. Mambety’s richly Belushi) from high school. Dianne’s reckless
(Geirlaug Sunna Thormar), who’s deeply de- textured view of urban life fuses fiction and doc- yet finely calculated mission, haunted by her
voted to his late mother, resents his stepmother’s umentary, displaying the rampant poverty and memories of frustration and abuse, combines
presence, and their conflict turns ugly. Mean- endemic misogyny in the modernizing capital. exorcism and revenge. Working with a script
while, Margit and Katla, themselves orphaned, With fable-like lyricism, he contrasts the bitter by the brothers Paul and Leonard Schrader,
bear an ancient curse, which soon threatens their competition among the poor with exemplary Tewkesbury deftly balances a discordant range
new family. Keene films the supernatural tale acts of audacious solidarity—and shows the vital of tones: realistic and symbolic, comedic and
of timeless rusticity with fanatical attention public culture that arises spontaneously from tragic, lucid and unhinged. By way of Shire’s
to the barren and craggy seaside setting; her the struggles of street people. The movie is a masklike performance and a chilling range of
stunningly spare yet phantasmagorical images virtual musical, featuring religious chants from point-of-view shots, mirrors, and frames within
fuse the forces of nature with a spirit of mys- a teacher of Islam, and songs that stream from frames, Tewkesbury evokes a Hitchcockian depth
tery. Björk brings an otherworldly calm to this a boom box in the lap of a wheelchair-bound of subjectivity in what is essentially a first-person
visionary role, and occasionally sings.—R.B. amputee give rise to a street dance, led by Sili, survey of women’s hidden terrors. It’s Tewkes-
(Streaming on Kanopy.) that blends fantasy and practicality with joyful bury’s only feature to date.—R.B. (Streaming on
wonder. In Wolof and French.—R.B. (Streaming Kanopy and Kino Now.)
on Metrograph, Aug. 30-Sept. 4.)
The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun
An extraordinary twelve-year-old actor, Lissa The Selfish Giant
Baléra, stars in the Senegalese director Djibril Old Boyfriends Clio Barnard’s 2013 film is adapted—almost
Diop Mambety’s final film, from 1999. Baléra After writing “Nashville,” Joan Tewkesbury di- beyond recognition—from Oscar Wilde’s fairy
plays Sili Laam, a girl from a shantytown outside rected this drama, from 1979, which links a tense, tale of the same name. The setting has changed
Dakar who, despite a disability that requires tough road trip to the perilous mental landscape utterly, to the margins of modern Bradford, in
her to use crutches, travels to the city and be- of a woman in her thirties. Talia Shire stars as the North of England, and the coarseness of the
comes an itinerant newspaper vender (the only Dianne Cruise, a Los Angeles psychologist who language would make Wilde totter and swoon,
female one there); she’s so successful that she drives cross-country to track down men from her yet his delicacy of feeling is preserved. Arbor
incurs the resentment—and the violence—of her past—including an idealistic filmmaker (Richard (Conner Chapman) is thirteen years old, bored
with school, and angry. Swifty (Shaun Thomas),
his best friend, is more placid, though no less re-
WHAT TO STREAM sourceful. Together, they start scrounging or pil-
fering scrap metal, some of it electrical cable, and
selling it to a scary dealer named Kitten (Sean
Gilder), who—to begin with, at least—has no
conscience to trouble him. You can sense catastro-
phe looming like the power stations that domi-
nate the gray-misted landscape, and much of the
movie is hard to bear, yet it never drags, thanks
to the momentum that Barnard finds in the fable,
and, above all, to the energy that she unleashes
from her young leads. There’s even a horse-and-
trap race, along a freeway, that comes across as
a low-rent, postindustrial fragment of “Ben-
Hur” and is no less thrilling for it.—Anthony
Lane (Reviewed in our issue of 1/13/14.) (Stream-
ing on Amazon, Google Play, and other services.)

Sylvio
In this exquisite yet uproarious fantasy, from
2017, directed by Albert Birney and Kentucker
Audley, a gorilla named Sylvio (Birney, in a
gorilla suit) is a frustrated cubicle jockey at a
debt-collection agency. Sylvio can’t speak, but
he does everything else that humans do, strolling
and driving through his home town of Baltimore
in his trademark red sunglasses and red parka.
Sylvio’s workaday realities conflict with his artis-
In the course of five decades and dozens of films, the documentary filmmaker tic ambitions; he’s an aspiring puppeteer who, at
Les Blank redefined the core of Americana to include Black, indigenous, home, records a sweetly melancholy Web series
featuring a balding Every-white-man doll on
and immigrant cultures and artists—as in “A Well Spent Life,” from 1971, miniature sets. But when Sylvio goes to a local
his portrait of the blues singer and guitarist Mance Lipscomb. (It’s included TV studio to collect a debt, he accidentally ends
in an ample batch of Blank’s films streaming on the Criterion Channel.) up on the air; though he’s an artist of refined
sensibility, he becomes famous for going wild,
The movie, filmed in Lipscomb’s home town of Navasota, Texas, is a deeply and a crisis of conscience results. The directors
contextualized, community-centered vision of the musician (who was born embrace both sides of Sylvio’s temperament,
COURTESY THE CRITERION COLLECTION

in 1895), beginning with his recollection of working as a sharecropper at realizing his frenzied outbursts (including an
outlandish chase scene) as imaginatively and
a time when white bosses treated Black farmhands like beasts of burden. as delicately as his artistic self-doubt. Birney’s
Discussing in detail his hard-won philosophy of love and equality, Lipscomb ingenious Janus-faced pantomime, as Sylvio
also shows it in action—at home with his wife, Elnora, whom he married in struggles voicelessly for a place among human
chatterboxes, channels the infinite grace of the

1
1913, and among friends and neighbors, including at a local dance where he great silent-film comedians.—R.B. (Streaming on
plays. The movie is dominated by the majesty of Lipscomb’s performances, Amazon, Kanopy, and other services.)
which Blank films with a luminous poise; Lipscomb sings in a high, haunted
voice, strumming and plucking his guitar with graceful authority, evok- For more reviews, visit
ing the spiritual dimension of worldly sorrows and joys.—Richard Brody newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town

8 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020

 ordering and picking up feel safe and easy. Each week, Eddy invites a different
Still, it’s much more than convenience chef to design the meal, priced at sev-
that draws lines to Winner, where pastries, enteen dollars per person. Susan Kim,
breads, and sandwiches (especially the formerly of Insa and Chez Panisse, took

1
chicken katsu, on house-made Pullman the opportunity to launch her new busi-
bread) regularly sell out. Eddy, who helped ness, Doshi—short for dosirak, the Ko-
to open Rebelle, in Manhattan, and Wal- rean term for “packed meal”—with a
TABLES FOR TWO nut Street Café, in Philadelphia, is both an beautiful box of fried tofu, soy-pickled
extremely talented chef and a savvy, adapt- eggs, rice, and a salad of soy- and green
Winner able restaurateur. Once the lockdown beans, plus a bracing cup of vinegary
367 Seventh Ave., Brooklyn drove even the most kitchen-averse New iced seaweed broth. The team behind
Yorkers to roasting their own chickens, he Rolo’s, an Italian restaurant in Ridge-
Some of the chef Daniel Eddy’s success decided he had to pivot slightly, to some- wood whose planned springtime début
can be attributed to luck. If you have thing that home cooks were less likely to remains indefinitely delayed, previewed
to open a restaurant one week before attempt. And so Winner’s three-and-a- its repertoire with pillowy pork meatballs
restaurants everywhere are severely half-pound Amish hens—which must be and charred, chewy squares of corn-and-
handicapped by a novel coronavirus, let it pre-ordered—are not merely roasted; they Pecorino focaccia. Hector Medina, until
be a restaurant like Winner, Eddy’s café are salted, smoked, and spatchcocked first, recently a sous-chef at Gotham Bar &
PHOTOGRAPH BY JUSTIN J. WEE FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE

and bakery in Park Slope. Dining in was resulting in an incredibly juicy, complexly Grill, topped his handmade blue-corn
part of his original plan, but the format flavored, evenly cooked bird. tortillas with mushrooms al pastor and
was always going to be counter service The chicken’s fatty drippings are used paired burnt plums with lemon ricotta
only, with a strong focus on takeout. to baste butterball potatoes, and are also and a purée of pinto beans and chorizo.
Winner was designed to be a neigh- reduced into a dark, malty-tasting jus. A “Is it Winner as in ‘winner, winner,
borhood boulangerie and rotisserie, mod- rotating vegetable, such as slow-cooked chicken dinner’?” I asked Eddy the other
elled after the type of establishments that greens or tomato salad, rounds out the day. He demurred—“I enjoy guests
Eddy, who was born in New York and chicken dinner, which perfectly achieves discovering what the word means to
split his childhood between Nicaragua Eddy’s goal of offering something tech- them!”—but allowed that “it feels like
and East Harlem, had come to love nically impressive enough to justify a nice name for a place where you can
during the years he spent in Paris, cook- going out for but dressed-down enough go with four dollars and leave feeling
ing at the chef Daniel Rose’s renowned to incorporate into your weekly routine. like a winner.” Indeed, four dollars is
restaurant Spring. In Eddy’s vision, locals It’s the same calculation behind Win- the price of both the superlative, sub-
could grab croissants and coffee on their ner’s Friends & Family Meal, inspired stantial sourdough baguette, its deeply
way to the subway in the morning, and by the restaurant industry’s tradition of burnished crust perfected by Winner’s
baguettes and spit-roasted chickens on “family meal,” the pre-shift staff supper bread baker, Kevin Bruce, and the pastry
the walk home. Though the commute that line cooks whip up using whatever chef Ali Spahr’s clever Coffee Coffee
part of the equation has been drastically they can scrounge from the walk-in, a Cake, speckled with fragrant ground
diminished, Winner’s target demographic grab-bag buffet that usually has little to beans—a two-in-one breakfast bargain.
is more captive than ever, and a big win- do with what’s on the actual menu and (Sandwiches and dinner items $7-$28.)
dow that opens onto the street makes allows for creative riffing. —Hannah Goldfield
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 9
Join us this fall for the very first
virtual New Yorker Festival,
an eclectic mix of conversations,
performances, and experiences,
featuring some of the most
influential and talented figures
of our time.

For more information and to

purchase tickets, go to
newyorker.com/festival.
@ NewYorkerFest
 THE TALK OF THE TOWN

COMMENT Biden said, had put America on a “path marks had been prerecorded, since the
IF YOU KNOW JOE of shadow and suspicion.” Instead of pro- number of deaths had, at the time of
tecting the country, he had subjected it the Convention, exceeded a hundred
ast week, when the Democratic Na- to his divisiveness, his bigotry, his selfish- and seventy thousand—treating the
L tional Convention, in its virtual state,
nominated Joseph R. Biden as its Pres-
ness, and—in his botched response to
the pandemic—his deadly incompetence.
passing of twenty thousand American
lives as a time stamp, not a tragedy.
idential candidate, Donald Trump de- “It didn’t have to be this bad,” Biden said. Kristin Urquiza, the daughter of
cided to let his supporters in on a se- What was striking was how careful a Trump voter who succumbed to
cret. “Joe, look, he doesn’t know where many Convention speakers were not to COVID-19, said in a short, passionate
he is,” the President said, leaning to- disparage voters who had thought, in video that her father, whose “only preëx-
ward a microphone that had been set 2016, that Trump himself wouldn’t be isting condition was trusting Donald
up in front of Air Force One, in Yuma, this bad. Michelle Obama, the former Trump,” died feeling “betrayed” by the
Arizona, where he had come to accept First Lady, said that he had been given President. Urquiza, who stressed the
the endorsement of the union repre- “more than enough time to prove that disparate impact of the pandemic on
senting border-control agents. Biden, he can do the job,” only to show that communities of color, was joined by a
he said, wouldn’t be able to resist the “he cannot meet this moment.” She raft of Republicans who avowed their
commands of “his new boss,” Bernie urged people to vote for Joe Biden “like own sense of dismay at Trump’s lead-
Sanders. In Yuma and elsewhere, in our lives depend on it.” Trump, in re- ership. John Kasich, the former gover-
speeches that grew darker and stranger sponse, gleefully pointed to her state- nor of Ohio, stood at a grassy crossroads
as the week progressed, Trump pounded ment that the pandemic had cost “more to explain that the country was at a
on the same theme: Biden was “a pup- than a hundred and fifty thousand” lives. crossroads. Colin Powell, George W.
pet,” a “Trojan horse for socialism,” the He took this to be proof that her re- Bush’s Secretary of State, said that he
smiling, cognitively unsound prop of a believed that Biden would restore the
left-wing mob intent on tearing the country’s “moral authority.”
country down. Trump seemed desper- The prominence of such voices made
ate to persuade Americans that what a certain amount of strategic sense: if
they were seeing in the Zoom squares Biden is going to win, he needs to reach
of the Convention was an illusion. voters in the middle. The coronavirus
That Trump would try this gambit has taken so much away from so many
wasn’t surprising, because the reality of Americans; one goal of the Democratic
Joe Biden was looking pretty good. The Convention was to convince the Pres-
risk of a remote Convention was that it ident’s supporters that Trump and his
would feel as if it were taking place any- party ought to pay an electoral price.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA

where or nowhere. But Biden appeared In Arizona, Biden is ahead, and Mark
to know exactly where he was: Delaware, Kelly, the astronaut, is poised to take a
the state he represented in the Senate Senate seat away from a Republican,
for more than three decades. Standing Martha McSally—another reason for
onstage in the empty Chase Center, on Trump’s Yuma trip. (Kelly’s wife, the
the Wilmington waterfront, he spoke former congresswoman Gabby Giffords,
with groundedness, delivering remarks who survived a shooting a decade ago,
that were both genial and forceful.Trump, spoke at the Convention; gun control
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 11
Helping local
businesses
adapt to a new
way of working

August 9, 10:00 AM

Join with Google Meet

Join us for an author-led reading!

Dea and Marc Lavoie of Second Star
to the Right Bookstore in Denver have
always been passionate about reading.
They love hosting weekly in-store
events, but after Colorado’s stay-at-
home order, they had to think of new
ways of doing business.
They quickly turned to Google Meet,
hosting free virtual storytimes for kids,
giving Dea and Marc a new avenue for
sharing their love of books—and a new
way to be a community bookstore.
Find free resources for your small
business at g.co/smallbusiness
was an area where the Party gave the vention can expose conflicts, but it can A retired Amtrak conductor described
stage to activists.) Still, Biden’s edge of also give a party a chance to address how Biden had befriended the train
support over Trump in swing states such them, in Convention-center hallways. crew during his commute, over the years,
as Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Wis- The fractures in the Democratic Party between Wilmington and Washington.
consin, and Florida remains fairly nar- do not always fall neatly along ideolog- The former contenders in the Demo-
row. In that context, the brief speaking ical, generational, or cultural lines. Ob- cratic primary joined a Zoom rap ses-
time allotted to Representative Alex- servers of this Convention, though, sion to talk about “the Joe we know.”
andria Ocasio-Cortez—she made an could sometimes be left with a sense Sanders, who called for unity in the face
appearance to second the nomination that the choice was between Bush Cab- of “authoritarianism,” said he knew Joe
of Sanders—was as deliberate as the inet secretaries and the Squad. What’s well enough to trust him.
decision to give Cindy McCain twice absent in a Zoom D.N.C. is the same Focussing on Biden’s real decency,
as long to recall how much fun Biden thing that’s absent in many virtual com- like decrying Trump’s incompetence,
and her late husband, Senator John Mc- munications: the moments and the was a way for Democrats to blur differ-
Cain, used to have together. places in between. ences in ideology. That may be enough
Yet the Party cannot run so scared That’s a particular loss for Biden, to win the election, because Trump’s in-
of Trump’s smears about “left-wing who thrives in such spaces. Indeed, that decency has been so great and the con-
mobs” that it shies away from its val- people know Joe, and that he knows sequences of his pandemic bungling so
ues or its future. Progressive voters can them, is emerging as a central message severe. Biden and his party do know
help win elections, too. In this respect, of the campaign. Barack Obama, mak- where they are: a lot closer than Don-
the Convention—with its mixture of ing the case for his Vice-President’s ald Trump to winning the election in
recorded and live speeches, actress mod- foreign-policy expertise, said, “Joe knows November. But they also need to figure
erators, musical acts, and a roll call that the world and the world knows him,” out who they are—and what they will
doubled as a tour of the country—went but most often what people knew is fight for.
almost too smoothly. An in-person Con- that Biden treated them with respect. —Amy Davidson Sorkin

THE BIG SCOOP approached the barriers, stopped, then

COMING THROUGH! slowly plowed through them, his tinkly
music providing a taunting soundtrack.
“Mister Smashee!” a neighbor shouted.
Soon, he struck again, and again—
five or six times—and neighbors added
new accusations: shouting matches, near-
fistfights, pedestrians almost clipped
“A NOTHER BLOODY WEEK IN THE
BIG APPLE,” read a recent head-
when the truck swerved onto the side-
walk. Fortifications were discussed. A
line in the Post. New York, it would strip of nails? Residents worried that
seem, is a lawless town this summer. someone could get hurt. “You have these
Shootings are up. Rat sightings, too. little three-foot people that are hard to
The cops are besieged. It’s enough to see,” Emily Fisher, a mother of two, said.
rattle even the most diehard New Yorker. But what was most unsettling was the
Take a case that started on Pacific Street, peculiar willfulness of it all. It was also
a peaceful, brownstone-lined lane in illogical. “You’d be running over your
Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. City Hall had customer base,” Fisher said. A resistance
closed the street to traffic because of formed. Fisher designed T-shirts: Mis-
the lockdown, and, behind protective ter Softee’s waffled face, grinning men- out was planned. “Everybody’s out
wooden barricades, kids played soccer acingly, was slashed with a big red “X.” there,” Dan said. “We’re hiding between
and splashed in inflatable pools on the A thirty-eight-year-old father named cars.” But Mister Smashee was onto
roadway. Things were good. “And then,” Dan decided to confront the driver. He them. When he rolled up, he exited the
Alberto Lizzi, who lives on the block, did, twice: no dice. Dan did not want vehicle and carefully moved the barri-
said, “Mister Softee arrived.” to give his last name, for fear of retri- cades. Foiled. Next, the police opened
Lizzi was home one afternoon when bution. (Old-timers told tales of ice- an investigation. The precinct captain
he heard a noise. The noise was fol- cream men in the nineties defending called in eyewitnesses. The dragnet was
lowed by shouting. Soon, the entire block their turf with baseball bats.) The third closing in.
was yelling. Lizzi ran outside in his time, Dan gave chase on his skateboard. Mister Smashee proved easy to track
Birkenstocks. He started shouting, too. “That’s when I said, ‘You’re done!’” he down, though. An amateur gumshoe,
An ice-cream truck was speeding away. recalled. “The driver just laughed and following the woozy clinking of the
In the street, the barricades lay in splin- said, ‘Oh, I’m done?’” out-of-tune jingle, caught up with him
ters. Witnesses said that the driver had Reporters were tipped off. A stake- near a park in Cobble Hill. He was hand-
14 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020
ing a vanilla soft-serve cone with rain- many Mister Smashees there are, is Pacific just Hollywood for ugly people.” He
bow sprinkles to a kid on a scooter. (“Bye, Street still vulnerable? The resistance found that he had time on his hands.
buddy!” he called, as the boy scooted needed a breather. Dan left for Mary- “I’d never been interested in social media,”
off.) Cornered, the presumed Mister land. Lizzi was in Maine. Defenses were he said. “I can’t stand Facebook.” But he
Smashee said that his name was Gary down. The other day, the amateur gum- became intrigued by the power of Twit-
and that he’d been doing ice cream for shoe was strolling down Pacific when he ter. “Really repulsive meme-ing, the stuff
a couple of years. He was feeling em- heard something suspicious. Was it just that makes you laugh, makes you re-
battled, he said: “Everything’s fucked the wind? The sound grew louder until member,” he said. The right, he went on,
up.” He insisted that he was the victim it could not be denied: a plinky melody, “is great at it instinctively. Whether it’s

1
of a case of mistaken identity. He said twinkling through the summer night. a 4chan board or basement neckbeards,
that he was from Uzbekistan and that —Zach Helfand they nail it.They can distill a huge talking
he employed a part-time driver, also an paragraph into a cat picture.” He con-
Uzbek, who looked a lot like him. The KILLING TIME DEPT. siders Trump’s digital facility “absolutely
employee, he maintained, was the guy CONFESSIONS OF A TROLL genius,” and believes that his frequent
who’d been smashing through barri- Twitter misspellings (“Barrack Obama,”
cades. Gary said that he’d told the man “covfefe”) are intentional. In 2015, while
to get lost. the lawyer’s young children napped, he
The Mister Smashee doppelgänger began trolling. “I’d have a glass of wine,
theory sounded fishy. As proof, Gary, talk to my wife, watch Netflix, and see
who has a neat black beard, pulled out what kinds of things we could do,” he
what he said was the ex-employee’s driv- middle-aged lawyer recently sat said. He would sometimes pass four or
er’s license, which had been left behind
in the truck. There was a resemblance,
A down at a poké restaurant in a
North Georgia town. He was sniffling
five hours a day this way.
The lawyer is not a mainstream Re-
although Gary refused to remove his and dabbing his eyes with a napkin. publican; he likes Bill Clinton and Ber-
finger from the license, where it blocked “Don’t think it’s corona,” he said, pull- nie Sanders. He was also unbothered by
the alleged Mister Smashee’s real name. ing up a Web site on his phone with the recent Senate report on Russia’s elec-
Gary said that he used to like this statistics on diagnoses worldwide. Then tion meddling. (“If you’re not interfer-
town. “If they don’t want an ice-cream he looked at Twitter and began talking ing with elections,” he said, “you’re not
truck over there, it’s O.K.,” he said, of about a different sort of virus. “When doing it right.”) Out of curiosity, he at-
the Boerum Hill gang. “They never buy.” Donald Trump first announced his Pres- tended a far-right gathering, where he
He went on, “To be honest, I’m tired of idential bid, I told my wife, immediately, found the younger attendees to be “maybe
New York, bro. I just want to get the ‘He’s going to be the President,’” he said. a little misguided, but well intended.”
fuck out of here.” The lawyer welcomed the candidacy. He began creating fake Twitter accounts,
Another lead turned up a man named “How to put this and not sound fifteen?” he said, to see “whether I could get more
Dennis, who is in charge of the Mister he said. “I like chaos. I thrive in it.” interactions, more retweets, by being a
Softee territory where Gary operates. For years, the lawyer, who asked not little more radical.” The Confederate
Dennis confirmed that Gary occasion- to be identified, worked in Washington, flag was often his avatar, or the Bonnie
ally used a fill-in. D.C., for the Republican Party. He Blue, a lesser-known Confederate ban-
Presented with these findings, the ice- moved his family south a few years ago, ner. For his handles, he made up acro-
cream resistance was unmoved. Lizzi and having realized, he said, that “D.C. is nyms with a nationalistic tinge, such as
Dan had spoken with Mister Smashee
several times, up close. They were cer-
tain that Gary was their guy. “Unless it’s
two identical twins,” Lizzi said. Dan had
an ace up his sleeve: an iPhone video of
one of the barricade-crashing incidents.
In a grainy, Zapruderish screenshot, the
driver looked like Gary—kind of.
“If you didn’t know him, I’m not sure
that you’d know that it’s him,” Dan said.
“But it’s him.”
A late tip led to a man known as Doc,
who oversees every Mister Softee in
Brooklyn. He had the goods. “I don’t
buy his story,” Doc said. “I told Dennis,
we’ve got to get rid of Gary. I’m not
going to service his vehicle anymore.”
Open and shut. But was it? Whoever
Mister Smashee might be, and however “ You may have invented it, but you really don’t get it.”
FFK: Faith Folk and Kin. He fashioned
the accounts’ ersatz users as boomers or
1
THE PICTURES
who dreams of becoming a Nashville
country star, and in the HBO minise-
gun-rights activists. The latter, he said, MOLECULAR ries “Chernobyl,” as the wife of a
were easy: “Just follow Dana Loesch and firefighter. Pre-production quarantin-
interact with those crazy girls who stay ing is a strange new feature of actors’
up all night tweeting Second Amend- lives. “I was freaking out at the begin-
ment stuff.” He added, “I’d get them to ning, but I’ve kind of slotted into a
retweet me and then my following would rhythm,” Buckley said. She had brought
blow up.” By the time the 2016 race was lots of books, including “Romeo and
under way, he had about twenty accounts, he Irish actress Jessie Buckley awoke Juliet”—she was supposed to play Ju-
each with a few thousand followers. His
fake alt-right accounts amplified Trump’s
T before dawn recently, in a one-bed-
room apartment on the forty-third floor
liet this summer, at the National The-
atre, in London—and her guitar, so she
messaging and distorted Hillary Clin- of a Chicago high-rise. “I call them could take remote lessons. “And I’ve al-
ton’s. (“Something about her makes me hamster apartments,” she said, a few lowed myself to buy nice bottles of red
nervous,” he said.) His fake Antifa ones hours later, of her anodyne surround- wine,” she said. “Me and a light-bod-
spread what he called “disinformation ings: gray couch, dark-wood doors, a ied chilled red are currently dating and
and false stories” to benefit Trump. view of glass skyscrapers. Buckley was in a very serious relationship.”
He pulled up an old account with halfway through a two-week quaran- Before the pandemic, Buckley had
the handle Ruthless Lessruth. “This was tine, before shooting the anthology se- spent six months working on “Fargo”
supposed to be a girl who was married ries “Fargo”; she plays a Minnesota nurse, in Chicago. In April, production shut
to an alt-right guy,” he said. He explained whom she described as “a nice cake with down with two weeks left. “They said,
how he’d used the account to trick an ‘We’re sending you home tomorrow.
Antifa group into protesting an alt-right Pack up your life,’ ” she recalled. “So
rally that didn’t exist: “I P.M.’d the head then I was flying home with Ben
of the Atlanta Antifa and told him that Whishaw, and the two of us were spray-
my ‘husband’ was alt-right and that I ing down our seats. But the captain was
was repulsed by it.” Then, in the guise saying, ‘Oh, it’s fine. I’m going to go on
of the wife, he directed the Atlanta An- holiday next week.’ It was quite mad.”
tifa group to a would-be rally at a Mar- She has spent much of the lockdown
riott Marquis. A bunch of people showed in London with her boyfriend, but first
up. “That was hard to do, to pose as a stayed for six weeks with her parents,
girl with political views that I’m not fa- in Killarney. “Quarantine there is not
miliar with.” Some of his Antifa ac- much different, because we live at the
counts also pushed veganism. “You have foot of a mountain and don’t really see
to find some community to exploit,” he people,” she said. Buckley is the oldest
said. “I’d find an approved vegan ac- of five. Her mother is a harpist and a
count with Antifa leanings and inter- singer, and her father is a bar manager
act with them a bit. It was really tedious. who writes poetry and “is an excellent
But I’m a lawyer—I get into the minu- hippie.” He had called her days earlier
tiae.” Manning accounts on both sides Jessie Buckley  from Ballinskelligs, where her family
of the political spectrum had its risks. has a caravan by the sea. “The way he
“There was always the fear of tweeting a very dark center.” From the apartment, described this seaweed on the rocks, his
something out of the wrong account,” she’d been hearing the blare of sirens mind was just flitting,” she said. “He’d
he said. “Like praising immigration to and helicopters, amid days of clashes be, like, ‘Look, Jessie! It’s like a dead
my alt-right followers or something.” between rioters and police. But what man’s coat!’”
The lawyer’s trolling dropped off in had woken her up was jet lag, after flying When Buckley was seventeen, she
2017. He’d become disillusioned by Trump. from London days earlier. “By about went to London to audition for drama
“He hasn’t done anything he said he was four o’clock, the blue sky in Chicago school but was rejected from her first
going to do,” the lawyer said. “But I’d vote turned into an apocalyptic tornado choice. Distraught, she walked into an
for him over Biden. No one is excited warning, and I’m, like, the County Kerry open call for a BBC reality show called
about Biden.” (“I would have pulled for girl going, ‘Feckin’ tornado! I’m on the “I’d Do Anything,” a singing competi-
Bernie,” he said.) He recently opened a forty-third floor! What does that mean?’ tion in which the winner would star as
new Twitter account. “I just dicked around And then it cleared.” Nancy in a production of “Oliver!” She
on it,” he said. “I watched some of the Buckley is thirty, with a wide, crooked got on the series and won second place,
trending tags. I’m not a conspiracy the- smile and red hair, which she had tucked after one of the judges, Andrew Lloyd
orist. There’s nothing I think is being under a Rosie the Riveter-style pol- Webber, championed her. “He’s always
hidden from us that I care a lot about.” ka-dot bandanna. In the past two years, stayed in contact: ‘Come and have a cup
He sighed. “Maybe I’ve just gotten old.” she has had breakout roles in the film of coffee,’” she said. Years later, she audi-
—Charles Bethea “Wild Rose,” as a Glaswegian ex-con tioned for the movie version of Webber’s
16 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020
“Cats,” but was relieved not to be cast. ington, D.C.,’s Mosaic Theatre Com- The three saddest words in the English
“I don’t know how fluidly feline I would pany, but when a stage version opens, language, Vidal once said, were “Joyce
have been,” she said. “I’d be a very stag- likely next spring, the groundskeeper at Carol Oates.”)
nant, boxlike, kind of anxious cat.” Rock Creek Cemetery would be well Not long after Kaplan finished the
In the new Charlie Kaufman film, advised to keep an eye on Section E, book, Vidal moved his papers (almost
“I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” which Lot 293 ½, where Vidal’s ashes are bur- four hundred boxes’ worth) from the
premières next week, on Netflix, Buck- ied. Vidal outlived Buckley by four years, University of Wisconsin’s Center for
ley plays a young woman who drives to but never forgave the man who called Film and Theater Research to Harvard
the country with her boyfriend, Jake him a “queer” in a 1968 televised debate. University. Months before he died, at
( Jesse Plemons), to meet his parents. When Buckley died, Vidal cheered, “RIP the age of eighty-six, he added a codi-
Or she may be a figment of his imagi- WFB—in hell.” cil to his will, leaving his entire thir-
nation, or the hallucination of a high- The odyssey that Vidal’s remains took ty-seven-million-dollar estate to Har-
school janitor. The movie is, to use the before their interment was no less dra- vard, which triggered a blizzard of
year’s most well-worn adjective, surreal: matic. The writer spent many hours ne- lawsuits after his death and delayed his
characters suddenly age thirty years, or gotiating the details of his grave. From burial for years. “At the end, Gore was
break into songs from “Oklahoma!”“The his villa in Ravello, Italy, he stipulated drinking bottles of Macallan Scotch
first-ever note I got from Charlie, even that his ashes be placed near an Augus- around the clock, having hallucinations,
in the audition, was ‘This girl is molec- tus Saint-Gaudens sculpture commis- in and out of hospitals and well into de-
ular,’” Buckley said. “I’m, like, What the sioned by the historian Henry Adams, mentia,” his half sister Nina Straight
hell does ‘molecular’ mean?” in memory of his wife, who committed said. She was the first to sue the Vidal
During filming, she and Kaufman suicide. This monument is the most vis- estate, to recover a million dollars that
would e-mail odd inspirations back and ited site in the eighty-acre park, just she said she had loaned her brother to
forth: Anne Sexton poems, A.S.M.R. across the street from the former Old fund his lawsuit against Buckley.
videos. Did she ever figure out what Soldiers’ Home, where President Lin- “The end was awful, just awful,” her
“molecular” meant? “I am a molecule of coln summered during the Civil War. son Burr Steers said. “He was no longer
myself,” she speculated, of her charac- Vidal, who made millions in real estate, Gore—just a deranged old man, killing
ter. “But I’m made up of atoms that Jake understood its first three command- himself with booze.” Steers, who had
has created, which then explode and dis- ments: location, location, location. taken possession of his uncle’s ashes, filed
integrate.” Flustered, she blew a rasp- Vidal also instructed that he and suit, too, claiming ownership of Vidal’s
berry. “I was crap at science.” She had a Howard Austen, his partner of fifty- house in Los Angeles, which had been
week left in solitude in her hamster apart- three years, be buried near the grave of left to him in a previous will. Later, Steers
ment, then four days of shooting “Fargo,” Jimmie Trimble, a blond athlete whom sued to have the estate trustee, Andrew
opposite Jason Schwartzman. “We have Vidal met when both were students at Auchincloss, his third cousin, removed
swabs every three days,” she explained; St. Albans School. Trimble was killed for “reckless misconduct,” claiming that
the protocols would allow the actors to at Iwo Jima, but he lived for the rest of Auchincloss had tried to defraud him.
play their scenes without social distanc- Vidal’s life in fevered fantasies. By plac- Vidal, who liked to say that, after fifty,
ing. “We’re molecules!” she said, light- ing his own remains between those of litigation replaces sex, probably would
ing up. “Finally, I get to be a molecule! Trimble and Adams—a descendant of have enjoyed the flurry of lawsuits. After

1
This is what he meant! I get it!” two American Presidents, who was bur- numerous depositions and document
—Michael Schulman ied next to his wife—Vidal was, as he dumps, Straight dropped her suit, Steers
wrote, “midway between heart and mind, lost the L.A. house, and Auchincloss re-
LEGACY DEPT. to put it grandly.” mained trustee of the estate. How the
DUST TO DUST Like a pharaoh gilding his tomb, ashes made it from Los Angeles to Rock
Vidal continued making legacy prepa- Creek Cemetery, where they were in-
rations: he commissioned his biography terred in 2016, in a small private cere-
to be written in his lifetime by Fred mony, is a mystery. Steers’s attorney, Eric
Kaplan, who accompanied Vidal and M. George, had no comment, citing “a
Austen to the cemetery in 1994, to com- strict confidentiality clause.” For some-
plete their final interment papers. Kap- one who thrived on publicity to be bur-
“ N ever offend an enemy in a small
way,” Gore Vidal once wrote. The
lan signed as their witness and later pub-
lished a well-received book (“Gore Vidal:
ied with no fanfare seems pathetic, but
a public Facebook page, GoreVidalNow.
prickly writer, who thrived on making A Biography”), but, when the Times com, indicates that there is at least one
enemies, may soon be spewing venom dismissed Vidal as a “minor” writer in keeper of the literary banshee’s flame.
from six feet under. Eight years after his its review, Vidal fired off a letter to the The site is managed by Michelle Gore,
death, he is scheduled to cast shade on editor, blaming Kaplan. He claimed, who is married to a third cousin of Vidal’s
his nemesis, William F. Buckley, Jr., in preposterously, that he thought he’d com- and who visited Vidal in Italy. “Gore, I
a new play by Alexandra Petri, called missioned the biographer Justin Kaplan, miss you each day,” she writes. A sweet
“Inherit the Windbag.” The play is in not Fred Kaplan. (Kaplan was not the coda for a curmudgeon.
virtual rehearsals right now, at Wash- only writer to be pulverized by Vidal. —Kitty Kelley
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 17
 on film. More than a thousand movies
ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS and TV shows feature the composer on
their soundtracks, yoking him to all

WAGNER IN HOLLYWOOD
manner of rampaging hordes, march-
ing armies, swashbuckling heroes, and
scheming evildoers. The “Ride” turns
The composer left astonishing marks on the cinema. up in a particularly dizzying variety of
scenarios. In “What’s Opera, Doc?,”
BY ALEX ROSS Elmer Fudd chants “Kill da wabbit”
while pursuing Bugs Bunny. In John
Landis’s “The Blues Brothers” (1980),
the “Ride” plays while buffoonish neo-
Nazis chase the heroes down a high-
way and fly off an overpass. Most in-
delibly, Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apoc-
alypse Now” (1979) upends Griffith’s
racial duality, making white Americans
the heralds of destruction: a helicopter
squadron blares the “Ride” as it lays
waste to a Vietnamese village.
Action sequences are only one facet
of Wagner’s celluloid presence. A col-
orful—and often shady—array of Wag-
ner enthusiasts have appeared onscreen,
from the woebegone lovers of Robert
Siodmak’s noir “Christmas Holiday” to
the diabolical android of Ridley Scott’s
“Alien: Covenant.” The composer him-
self is portrayed in more than a dozen
movies, including Tony Palmer’s extrav-
agant, eight-hour 1983 bio-pic, starring
Richard Burton. But the Wagneriza-
tion of film goes deeper than that. Cin-
ema’s integration of image, word, and
music promised a fulfillment of the idea
of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work
of art,” which Wagner propagated at
one stage of his career. His informal
system of assigning leitmotifs to char-
acters and themes became a defining
n February, 1915, D. W. Griffith’s si- film characterizes as oppressive African- trait of film scores. And Hollywood has
I lent film “The Birth of a Nation”
opened at Clune’s Auditorium, in Los
American rule. The score for this se-
quence is dominated by Richard Wag-
drawn repeatedly from Wagner’s gal-
lery of mythic archetypes: his gods, he-
Angeles. It was advertised as the most ner: a passage from his early opera roes, sorcerers, and questers.
amazing motion picture ever made— “Rienzi,” followed by a modified ver- This contradictory swirl of associ-
the “eighth wonder of the world.” Sub- sion of “The Ride of the Valkyries,” ations mirrors the composer’s fractured
sequent showings featured orchestras from “Die Walküre.” At the moment legacy: on the one hand, as a theatri-
of up to fifty musicians playing a multi- of triumph—“Disarming the blacks,” cal visionary who created works of
composer score assembled by the movie- the title card reads—Wagner gives way Shakespearean breadth and depth; on
music pioneer Joseph Carl Breil. The to “Dixie,” the unofficial anthem of the the other, as a vicious anti-Semite who
film, set during and after the Civil South. Another card spells out what became a cultural totem for Hitler. Like
War, is based on “The Clansman: An kind of nation Griffith wants to see operagoers across the generations, film-
Historical Romance of the Ku Klux born: “The former enemies of North makers have had trouble deciding
Klan,” a baldly racist novel by Thomas and South are united again in common whether Wagner is an inexhaustible
Dixon, Jr. In the movie’s climactic scene, defence of their Aryan birthright.” store of wonder or a bottomless well
Klan members ride forth on horses to “The Birth of a Nation” set the pace of hate. But that uncertainty also mir-
save a Southern town from what the for a century of Wagnerian aggression rors the film industry’s own ambigu-
ous role as an incubator of heroic fan-
Film composers have honed Wagner’s leitmotif system to a near-exact science. tasies, which can serve a wide range of
18 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 ILLUSTRATION BY MAX LÖFFLER
political ends. When Hollywood talks dium volume; then comes a trickier wind- Matthew Wilson Smith, in a pene-
about Wagner, it is often—consciously and-string texture, with staggered entries trating essay on the film, concludes,
or not—talking about itself. and downward-swooping patterns; and, “Griffith’s use of Wagner married some
finally, horns and bass trumpet lay out of the most reactionary energies of
hen the lights went down at the the main theme. Successive iterations of Bayreuth to groundbreaking techniques
W Bayreuth Festspielhaus in 1876,
for the première of the “Ring of the
the material are bolstered with trumpets,
more horns, and four stentorian trom-
of filmic integration.” This is a reason-
able assessment, although it bears men-
Nibelung” cycle, a kind of cinema came bones, but the players are initially held tioning that W. E. B. Du Bois, in his
into being. The Viennese critic Eduard at a dynamic marking of forte, allowing 1903 story “Of the Coming of John,” had
Hanslick, no friend of Wagner’s, felt that for a further crescendo to fortissimo. used Wagner in a diametrically opposed
he was looking at a “bright-colored pic- When two tarrying Valkyries, Rossweisse way—as an expression of the inner yearn-
ture in a dark frame,” as in a diorama and Grimgerde, finally join the group, ing of a Black man who will die at the
display. The composer had intended as the contrabass tuba enters fortissimo be- hands of a horse-riding white mob: “A
much, saying that the stage picture should neath the trombones, giving a sense of deep longing swelled in all his heart to
have the “unapproachability of a dream powerful reinforcements arriving. rise with that clear music out of the dirt
vision.” The orchestra was hidden in a and dust of that low life that held him
sunken pit known as the “mystic abyss”; agner figured in silent-film scores prisoned and befouled.” Du Bois might
its sound wafted through the room as if
it were transmitted by a speaker system.
W from the outset. The “Ride” was
employed for battles and horses; the
have pointed out that Dixon and Griffith’s
racism had no need for a German an-
The inaugural performances took place “Magic Fire” music, during which the tecedent. If anything, the influence moved
in a near-blackout. From the Festspiel- god Wotan encloses the Valkyrie Brünn- in the opposite direction: the Nazis ad-
haus, according to the media theorist hilde in a ring of fire, accompanied flick- mired and emulated American laws that
Friedrich Kittler, “the darkness of all our ering flames. The “Flying Dutchman” curtailed the rights of African-Americans
cinemas derives.” overture served for seas and storms, and other minorities. The insertion of
Bayreuth’s technical achievements “Tannhäuser” and “Parsifal” for religious “The Ride of the Valkyries” into “The
predicted cinematic sleights of hand. In scenes, and, of course, the “Lohengrin” Birth of a Nation” tells us more about
the “Ring,” magic-lantern projections Bridal Chorus for weddings. the cultural arrogance of American white
evoked the Valkyries on their flying Given those habits, the use of the supremacy than it does about Wagner’s
steeds; in “Parsifal,” the Grail glowed “Ride” in “The Birth of a Nation” was nefarious impact.
with electric light. Clouds of steam hardly unusual, but modern viewers
generated by two locomotive boilers have to wonder about the agenda be- n the sound era, the lush production
smoothed over changes of scene, in an-
ticipation of the techniques of dissolve
hind the selection. When Griffith read
Dixon’s novel, the ride of the Klan es-
I values of golden-age Hollywood called
for a sonic carpet extending from the
and fade-out. Wagner’s music itself pro- pecially seized his attention: “I could opening titles to the final frame. Max
vides hypnotic continuity. When the ac- just see these Klansmen in a movie Steiner, who scored some three hundred
tion of “Das Rheingold” shifts from the with their white robes flying.” The idea films between 1930 and 1965, honed the
Rhine to the area around Valhalla, the of Wagnerian accompaniment may leitmotif system to a near-exact science.
stage directions say, “Gradually the waves have occurred to him early. According In “Casablanca,” “As Time Goes By” is
turn into clouds, which resolve into a to the film’s star Lillian Gish, Breil and famously sung by Dooley Wilson, but
fine mist.” In the score, rushing river Griffith squabbled over the “Ride”; the melody also courses through Stein-
patterns give way to shimmering trem- Griffith wanted to make adjustments er’s score, undergoing expressive permu-
olos and then to a more rarefied texture to the music, but Breil said, “You can’t tations. The composer Erich Wolfgang
of flutes and violins—what the scholar tamper with Wagner!” Griffith appar- Korngold, the doyen of the swashbuck-
Peter Franklin describes as an “elabo- ently won the argument. As the Klan ler picture, subjected leitmotifs to so-
rate upward panning shot.” In the de- hordes assemble—a famous shot shows phisticated development, variation, com-
scent into Nibelheim, the realm of the scores of white-clad horses and riders bination, and compression.
dwarves, the sound of hammering an- traversing an open field—we hear a bit Wagner’s own music rumbled through
vils swells in a long crescendo before of the “Rienzi” overture. Then, as the action-adventure pictures (“The Lion
fading away. This is like a dolly shot: a riders undertake their rescue missions, Man”), historical epics (“The Viking”),
camera moves in on the Nibelungs at the rearranged “Ride” pipes up. The romantic dramas (“The Right to Live”),
work, then draws back. galvanizing effect of this sequence on gangster movies (“City Streets”), sci-
The convocation of the nine Valky- audiences of the day can be gauged by ence fiction (“Flash Gordon”), West-
ries in Act III of “Walküre” is Wagner’s a report from a screening in Atlanta: erns (“Red River Valley”), and horror
finest action sequence—a virtuoso exer- “Your spine prickles and in the gallery (Tod Browning’s “Dracula” and “Freaks”).
cise in the massing of forces and the ac- the yells cut loose with every bugle Frank Borzage’s 1932 adaptation of
cumulation of energy. At the beginning, note.” “The Birth of a Nation” is cred- “A Farewell to Arms” ends with Gary
winds trill against quick upward swoops ited with bringing about a revival of Cooper holding the lifeless body of
in the strings; horns, bassoons, and cel- the Klan, which had terrorized African- Helen Hayes and exclaiming “Peace!”
los establish a galloping rhythm, at me- Americans after the Civil War. while “Tristan und Isolde” swells. Less
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 19
sentimental is Borzage’s nightmarish part of his research, Capra watched ner’s sonic zest to demonize him entirely,
montage of war scenes, scored to a mish- Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the as the case of cartoons shows. The music
mash of the “Ride” and other “Ring” Will” (1935), and his first reaction was historian Daniel Ira Goldmark counts
motifs. From “The Birth of a Nation” to tell himself, “We can’t win this war.” more than a hundred Warner Bros. car-
onward, the “Ride” has almost always In his memoir, he wrote of Riefen- toons with Wagner on their soundtracks.
signified male derring-do, ignoring the stahl’s film, “Though panoplied with During the war, when cartoons were
femaleness of the Valkyries. One excep- all the pomp and mystical trappings of deployed for propaganda purposes, some
tion can be found in Josef von Stern- a Wagnerian opera, its message was as of those references took on an anti-
berg’s 1934 “The Scarlet Empress,” about blunt and brutal as a lead pipe: We, the Nazi charge. In “Herr Meets Hare,”
the rise of Catherine the Great: a Valky- Herrenvolk, are the new invincible Bugs Bunny finds himself in the Black
rie fantasia accompanies Marlene Die- gods!” (“Triumph of the Will” contains Forest, where he confronts a Hermann
trich’s climactic horse charge into the a ninety-second excerpt from “Die Göring type. Carl Stalling’s score dresses
palace of the tsar. Meistersinger,” in a sequence devoted Göring in a frantic cluster of Wagner
Comedians treated Wagner more ir- to old Nuremberg.) On reflection, themes. Yet citations in “Hare We Go”
reverently. In the Marx Brothers’ “At the Capra decided that Nazi sound and and “Captain Hareblower” bear no trace
Circus” (1939), Margaret Dumont hires fury could be turned against itself. The of Nazi evil. In one anti-Japanese car-
a snooty French conductor and his or- result was “Why We Fight,” a series of toon—“Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips”—
chestra to perform at her estate, in New- seven films that mixed sober history Wagner is actually converted to the
port, Rhode Island. Groucho and com- lessons with taunting commentaries on Allied cause. Stalling’s score uses the
pany—circus performers who wish to Fascist and Imperial Japanese poses. A Siegfried motif to signify the prospect
eliminate this rival group so that they team of skilled Hollywood composers, of Bugs’s rescue by an American war-
can collect a paycheck from Dumont— including Dimitri Tiomkin, Alfred ship—a rescue that he ultimately re-
direct the Frenchmen to a barge at the Newman, and David Raksin, worked fuses, in favor of the company of a sexy
water’s edge, then cut them loose. In the on the project. female rabbit. The film-music historian
closing shot, the musicians play the “Lo- “Prelude to War,” the first episode Neil Lerner has noted the uncomfort-
hengrin” Act III prelude while floating of “Why We Fight,” quickly delivers a able alignment of an Americanized
obliviously out to sea—a fine metaphor musical answer to the series’ guiding Wagner with a gratuitously racist de-
for the predicament of classical music question. As the narrator speaks of a piction of Japanese people.
in a pop-culture age. battle between a free world and an en-
slaved one, the orchestra quotes Sieg- hen Charlie Chaplin watched

T he onset of the Second World War

inevitably darkened Wagner’s Hol-
fried’s principal theme from the “Ring,”
in muted, menacing form. The theme
W “Triumph of the Will,” his im-
mediate impulse, according to Luis
lywood image. For most of the thirties, recurs dozens of times in the series, in Buñuel, was to burst into laughter. The
the studios shied away from anti-Nazi dissonant variations. These creative orator onscreen seemed to be an in-
messages, unwilling to offend German manglings give the enemy a readily sane variation on Chaplin’s Little Tramp
sensibilities. Warner Bros.’ 1939 thriller identifiable sonic tag and also supply persona, down to the toothbrush mus-
“Confessions of a Nazi Spy,” with a a forward-thrusting energy. Even as tache. The experience unnerved him,
score by Max Steiner, marked a turn- though, as it did many leftist filmmak-
ing point. When the film was rere- ers who witnessed the technical virtu-
leased, in 1940, with a documentary-like osity of German cinema being applied
epilogue about recent German victo- to sinister ends. In 1940, Chaplin re-
ries, the score was augmented with dis- leased “The Great Dictator,” a lavish
torted allusions to the “Ride” and other satire of Hitler’s histrionics. Inevitably,
“Ring” themes. During the same period, Wagner is on the soundtrack, yet Chap-
the cliché of the Wagner-loving Nazi lin makes the surprising choice to de-
took hold. In the 1940 drama “Escape,” tach the music from the Nazi context.
a Nazi general (Conrad Veidt) has an The ethereal prelude to “Lohengrin,”
affair with a widowed aristocrat (Norma Wagner is being painted black, he lends suggesting the sacred power of the Holy
Shearer) who is becoming conscious a heroic dimension to the proceedings. Grail, is heard twice in the film, serv-
of the evil of the regime. When Veidt From time to time, we hear patriotic ing first to puncture Nazi iconography
plays Wagner at the piano, Shearer says, American tunes orchestrated in a Wag- and then to amplify a message of peace.
“Oh, do play something else.” He says, nerian mode. The U.S. side, too, had Hitler is caricatured as Adenoid
“I thought ‘Tristan’ was our favorite its fantasies of invincibility. “Why We Hynkel, a nincompoop of a Führer who
opera.” She responds, “Perhaps I’ve Fight” opens with a statement that by jabbers mock-German and is more than
heard it too often.” war’s end the American flag should be a little fey. He prances about, tinkles
Shortly after America entered the “recognized throughout the world as a on a piano with candelabra all around,
war, Frank Capra set to work making symbol of freedom on the one hand, of and, at one point, holds a flower in an
propaganda films that explained the overwhelming power on the other.” Oscar Wilde-like pose. When his pro-
country’s mission to young recruits. As Hollywood was too addicted to Wag- paganda minister, Herr Garbitsch, raises
20 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020
the idea of killing all the Jews and mak-
ing Hynkel “dictator of the world,” Hyn-
kel becomes so excited that he scurries
up the drapes and exclaims melodrama-
tically, “Leave me, I want to be alone!”
As the high, thin, shining music of the
“Lohengrin” prelude begins, Hynkel
slides down the drapes and prowls across
the floor to an enormous globe. “Em-
peror of the world,” he murmurs. He
plucks the globe from its stand and
spins it on a finger, laughing hysteri-
cally. A singular ballet ensues, as Chap-
lin bounces the ball from hand to hand,
off his head, off his foot, and, twice, off
his butt.
A parallel story arc shows the travails
of a Jewish barber, identical in appear-
ance to Hynkel. The oppressor and the
oppressed switch roles: Hynkel is mis-
taken for the barber and sent to a con-
centration camp; the barber finds him-
self addressing a Hynkel rally, his closing “Honey, if the government won’t contact-trace Kimberley’s
speech a stirring critique of capitalist pool parties, I will simply do it myself.”
ruthlessness and a plea for brotherhood.
After the crowd cheers, he sends a mes-
sage to his girlfriend, Hannah, who is
• •
in exile. The music of “Lohengrin” re-
turns as the barber reaches his perora- while supervising a scheme involving rectors who were a potent influence in
tion: “We are coming into a new world, Hitler clones. Conversely, when the Franz wartime and postwar Hollywood knew
a kindlier world, where men will rise von Papen character in “5 Fingers” (1952) Wagner better than their American
above their hate, their greed and brutal- says, “Wagner makes me ill,” the audi- counterparts did, and they often used
ity. Look up, Hannah!” Hannah—in a ence learns that he is not wholly evil. By him as a marker of a damaged, poi-
field, listening to the barber on a radio— metaphorical extension, the composer soned past. In Billy Wilder’s “A For-
gazes in wonder. “Listen!” she exclaims, became a favorite musical selection for eign Affair” (1948), set in occupied Ber-
her eyes shining. “Lohengrin” swells all sadists and cold-blooded killers. In Jules lin, American authorities investigate
around her, as if playing from on high. Dassin’s noir “Brute Force” (1947), a the Nazi past of a cabaret singer, played
As the film scholar Lutz Koepnick prison guard who follows a pseudo- by Marlene Dietrich. They watch a
writes, Chaplin uses Wagner to both Nietzschean philosophy of “the weak newsreel of a gala performance of “Lo-
“condemn the abuse of fantasy in fas- must die” puts on a recording of the hengrin,” at which Hitler is seen kiss-
cism and warrant the utopian possibil- “Tannhäuser” overture as he prepares to ing the singer’s hand. “They certainly
ities of industrial culture.” For some torture a prisoner in his office. fiddled big while Berlin burned,” one
viewers, Chaplin’s idealism may seem At the same time, Wagner could still observer snaps. “ ‘Lohengrin,’ you know,
wincingly naïve, just as his lampoon of serve older, more innocent symbolic swan song,” another says.
Hitler may seem to trivialize Nazi hor- functions. In William Dieterle’s “Magic The otherworldly bliss of “Tristan”
rors. Yet naïveté is at the core of Chap- Fire,” a fairly ridiculous 1955 bio-pic, plays a nobler but still darksome role in
lin’s enduring appeal. Sergei Eisenstein, Alan Badel portrays Wagner as a manic Jean Negulesco’s “Humoresque” (1946),
who made his own cult of Wagner, Romantic in the grip of a controlling a melodrama with a streak of noir. A
once called Chaplin “the true and muse, spouting dialogue like “Tristan is dissipated socialite ( Joan Crawford) falls
touching ‘Holy Innocent,’ whose image dying—and you ask me how I am!” The in love with a rising violin soloist ( John
the aging Wagner dreamed of.” composer beloved by cinematic tortur- Garfield) who comes from a lower-class
ers still led countless brides down the immigrant background. His vacillating
n the postwar era, the motif of Wag- aisle, including Marilyn Monroe and responses to her advances send her into
I nerian evil ran rampant. In movies on
war and spy themes, a liking for the com-
Jane Russell in “Gentlemen Prefer
Blondes,” in which the Bridal Chorus
terminal despair, and she commits sui-
cide by walking into the ocean. As she
poser is nearly as reliable an indicator from “Lohengrin” morphs into a reprise goes to her end, a radio broadcasts the
of Nazi affiliations as a swastika arm- of “Two Little Girls from Little Rock” violinist performing an arrangement of
band. In “The Boys from Brazil” (1978), and “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” Isolde’s final monologue, the so-called
Josef Mengele savors the “Siegfried Idyll” The Central European émigré di- Liebestod. The female lead has all the
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 21
characteristics of the femme fatale, and flight. The Nazis employed the same down and kill a renegade officer named
her death is necessary for the matura- conceit: in a German newsreel, the “Ride” Colonel Kurtz, who, like Conrad’s vil-
tion of the male protagonist, as the mu- underscores a segment documenting a lain, has gone mad in the jungle and
sicologist Marcia Citron has argued. paratrooper assault on Crete. created a private empire.
Nonetheless, the disconcerting inten- Given that history, the “Ride” seems Milius, a Jewish American with con-
sity of Crawford’s performance suffuses a foreordained choice for the helicop- servative leanings, did not intend an
the film—restoring the dire, desperate ter operation in “Apocalypse Now.” The antiwar message. He began work on
Romantic aura that tends to fall away idea of an air-cavalry unit blasting Wag- “Apocalypse” in the wake of the Arab-
when Wagner goes to Hollywood. ner originated in the mind of the film’s Israeli War of 1967, during which he
screenwriter, John Milius, who had heard had excitedly followed the Israeli ad-
or decades before Coppola’s “Apoc- that American forces in Vietnam were vance. He told the writer Lawrence
F alypse Now,” aerial warfare had been
stirring thoughts of the Valkyries and
using music to galvanize troops and de-
moralize the enemy. Years later, he re-
Weschler, “Tracking that victory day
by day, I was throbbing to the Doors—
their “air-horses,” as Wagner called them. called, “They didn’t play Wagner, they ‘Light My Fire’ was the big hit that
In Proust’s “Time Regained,” the Ger- played rock ’n’ roll and stuff like that. summer—and of course to Wagner.”
manophile dandy Robert de Saint-Loup But I really thought the Wagner would Although some scholars have linked
watches a zeppelin raid on Paris, circa work.” Nothing if not ambitious, Milius’s the helicopter scene to the Ku Klux
1916, and exclaims, “The music of the script gestures toward other exalted cul- Klan assault in “The Birth of a Nation”
sirens was a ‘Ride of the Valkyries’!” tural artifacts. The chief literary point (the air-cav men have the bearing of
During the Second World War, an Ar- of reference is Joseph Conrad’s “Heart horsemen), Milius was apparently un-
turo Toscanini performance of the “Ride” of Darkness.” Willard, a Special Ops aware of Griffith’s use of the “Ride.”
was associated with B-17 bombers in soldier, is sent on a mission to track At the outset of the sequence, Lieu-
tenant Colonel Kilgore, the leader of
the air-cav unit, explains his method-
ology to Willard’s men, throwing in a
racist slur:

KILGORE: We’ll come in low out of the ris-

ing sun, and about a mile out we’ll put on the
music.
LANCE: Music?
KILGORE: Yeah, I use Wagner—scares the
hell out of the slopes. My boys love it.

The music kicks in, and shots timed to

Wagner’s downbeats show speakers
affixed to the aircraft. That strict rhythm
is broken when the camera focusses on
the two Black members of Willard’s
company, played by Albert Hall and
Laurence Fishburne. Their disbeliev-
ing faces highlight the subtext of the
scene: white Americans are assaulting
a nonwhite village to the music of a
racist composer. Another irony is that
this pageant of masculine savagery is
driven by music that once had femi-
nist connotations.
The version of the “Ride” that we
hear in “Apocalypse” comes from the
Decca label’s celebrated recording of the
“Ring,” with Georg Solti conducting.
Coppola took about five minutes of music
from the first hundred and forty-three
bars of Act III of “Walküre,” making a
few cuts and telescoping some sections.
The sound designer and editor Walter
Murch played a crucial role in creating
a seamless flow of sound and image.
“The monks are pretty cheap—the ink is where they get you.” The entrance of the main Valkyrie
motif coincides with a wide shot of four-
teen helicopters in flight. The soldiers
ready their guns; Kilgore nods to the
music. Another wide shot coincides with
a gleaming B-major chord, after which
the trombones take over the theme.Then
comes a brilliant stroke: one bar before
the trombones complete their phrase,
the camera cuts to the Vietnamese vil-
lage that is about to be struck.The adren-
aline rush of men, machines, and music
abruptly ceases as the camera lands in
a quiet courtyard outside a school. Mil-
ius had specified in his screenplay an
armed Vietcong stronghold, but Cop-
pola paints a more idyllic scene, with
children singing as they come out to
play. A female Vietcong soldier sud-
denly appears, ordering an evacuation,
and Wagner seeps in from a distance.
The trombones finish their statement,
and the Valkyries enter with their “Ho-
jotoho!” The first missile is fired when “It really makes you feel insignificant.”
the Valkyrie Helmwige reaches a sus-
tained high B. Houses explode, and vil-
lagers are mowed down.
• •
The operatic bravado falters amid
the chaos of battle. Copters land; sol- self in the peculiar position of showing how they could resonate allegorically
diers jump out. A young Black soldier the defeat of his and Coppola’s com- for modern audiences. “The incompa-
is badly wounded when a comrade fires plex, multivalent scheme. The cut to rable thing about myth is that it is al-
into a house and sets off an explosion. the quiet village fails to have a sober- ways true, and its content, through ut-
Tellingly, Wagner drops out at the mo- ing effect on the marines. When the most compression, is inexhaustible,” he
ment the soldier falls. The sight of blood Wagner resumes, one of them shouts, wrote. Wagner’s master array of bor-
gushing from his leg shuts down the “Shoot that motherfucker!” rowed, modified, and reinvented ar-
Valkyrie fantasy. It is an astonishing cultural transfor- chetypes—the wanderer on a ghost
An indictment of American hubris mation: the “Ride” remade into an an- ship, the savior with no name, the
is intended, yet the visceral impact of them of American supremacy. This dis- cursed ring, the sword in the tree, the
the filmmaking saps the movie’s capac- placement is of a piece with other sword reforged, the novice with un-
ity for critique. “Apocalypse” soon be- troubling historical continuities of the suspected powers—lurks behind the
came a military fetish object, its Wag- postwar era: Nazi scientists migrating blockbuster fantasy and superhero
ner scene influencing real-life behavior. to America, Gestapo-style torture tech- narratives that hold sway in contem-
A Black Hawk helicopter blared the niques resurfacing in Iraq, the cult of porary Hollywood.
“Ride” at the time of the American in- the sculpted body perpetuating Riefen- It is probably no coincidence that
vasion of Grenada, in 1983. Eight years stahl’s Aryan ideal. Eric Rentschler, in the superhero emerged in the nineteen-
later, a PsyOps unit played it ahead of his book “The Ministry of Illusion” thirties, at a time when totalitarian re-
the Battle of 73 Easting, in the Iraqi des- (1996), writes, “Contemporary Ameri- gimes were overrunning Europe and
ert, during the first Gulf War. Speakers can media culture has more than a su- Russia. The objectification of the young
mounted on Humvees boomed out the perficial or vicarious relationship with male body in Communist and Fas-
“Ride” at Fallujah in 2004, during the the Third Reich’s society of spectacle.” cist propaganda probably influenced
second American war in Iraq. Nothing in film history demonstrates the trend: liberal-democratic societies,
In a Wagnerian mise en abyme, Sam that idea as vividly as “Apocalypse Now,” derided as weak, required warriors of
Mendes’s film “Jarhead” (2005), based in which the German will to power gives power. The chiselled and buxom tor-
on Anthony Swofford’s memoir of mil- way to God-bless-America imperialism. sos of comic-book characters seem to
itary service during the first Gulf War, be descended from the fin-de-siècle
has a scene in which young marines agner’s influence is nowhere sketches of Wagner heroes and hero-
thrill to a screening of “Apocalypse,”
singing along with the “Ride” and
W more enduring than in the realm
of myth and legend. He manipulated
ines by such illustrators as Arthur Rack-
ham and Franz Stassen. The philoso-
pumping their fists in the air. Murch Teutonic and Arthurian myths with pher Slavoj Žižek has observed that
also edited “Jarhead,” and found him- consummate dexterity, understanding the motif of concealed identity, a staple
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 23
of comics and superhero movies, re- but without critical distance, American- beefed up to superhero proportions,
calls Lohengrin, the knight with no accented heroes absorb the iconogra- hunts down the Red Skull, laying waste
name. Like Lohengrin’s ill-fated bride, phy of an evil empire. to his laboratory. Wagner is a monster
Elsa, girlfriends of Superman and Bat- Fantasy films flooded the global from the European past who must be
man jeopardize the relationship when marketplace at the beginning of the ejected, but only after the sound de-
they ask too many questions. twenty-first century, with Wagnerisms signers have obtained a thrill or two
Modern fantasy began with the re- strewn throughout them. Peter Jack- from the roar of the “Ring” orchestra—
lease of George Lucas’s “Star Wars,” in son’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, in line much the same trick that Capra pulled
1977, which paid homage to the “Flash with J. R. R. Tolkien’s novels, is in- in “Why We Fight.”
Gordon” and “Buck Rogers” serials of conceivable without the central con- Any myth is vulnerable to ideolog-
the thirties. The project drew Wagner ceit of the “Ring”—the all-powerful ical simplification and distortion, as
comparisons almost from the outset. trinket that corrupts all who covet it. the political scientist Herfried Münkler
Susan Sontag had coined the term Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s “Matrix” has argued. Superhero narratives in
“pop-Wagnerian” to describe Nazi-era trilogy (1999-2003) brushes against “Par- which unheralded individuals acquire
German films; Pauline Kael applied it sifal,” Wagner’s mystical final opera, exceptional abilities can speak for mar-
to the second “Star Wars” installment, with its themes of initiation and en- ginalized communities, but they may
“The Empire Strikes Back.” As in the lightenment. In the first film, the young also encourage the sort of grandiose
serials, the sci-fi future of “Star Wars” computer hacker Neo is drawn into self-projection that the Wagner op-
is given neo-medieval, chivalric features. an underground movement led by a eras inculcated in the hordes of fin-
Lightsabres stand in for swords; Darth man named Morpheus, who divulges de-siècle youth who daydreamed about
Vader is a Black Knight with a hidden that the everyday world is an illusion fulfilling Lohengrin, Siegfried, or
identity. The critic Mike Ashman has manufactured by a master race of ma- Brünnhilde roles. In “The Matrix,” the
noted various similarities to the “Ring.” chines. Morpheus’s summary of the newly enlightened Neo is given a
When the hero Luke Skywalker seizes Matrix—“It is the world that has been choice between two pills: a red pill,
his father’s lightsabre, he is like Sieg- pulled over your eyes to blind you from which will make his knowledge per-
fried mending Siegmund’s sword. And the truth”—invokes the philosophy of manent, and a blue pill, which will re-
when Yoda, the wizened Jedi master, Arthur Schopenhauer, who had an im- store the veil of illusion. Members of
trains Luke in a swampy forest the sce- mense influence on Wagner’s later the American far right, who have a
nario recalls the dwarf Mime’s relation- work. As Žižek points out, Morpheus’s few Wagnerites in their midst, have
ship with Siegfried, except that Yoda is concept of the “desert of the real” is made that fable their own: their “red-
on the side of good. equivalent to the wasteland that lies pill moment” is when they cast aside
A more unsettling echo comes at behind Klingsor’s seductive magic gar- multicultural liberalism.
the end, when Luke, Han Solo, and den in “Parsifal.” Morpheus is like the The chief lesson to be drawn from
Chewbacca, having led the Rebellion sage old Gurnemanz in the opera, lead- the case of Wagner is that the worship
to victory, are honored at a temple cer- ing an adept into secret knowledge. of art and artists is always a dangerous
emony. Fanfares give way to a vigorous The science-fiction commentator An- pursuit. In classical music, the slow,
march version of John Williams’s “Force” drew May pinpoints the apparent fitful learning of that lesson has had a
theme, which recalls Wagner’s Sieg- clincher: at the climax of the film, Neo salutary effect: contemporary Euro-
fried motif. Lucas chooses a curious vi- stops bullets in midair, reënacting Par- pean productions of Wagner’s operas
sual design for this scene. The camera sifal’s feat of arresting Klingsor’s spear routinely confront the darker side of
watches from behind as the trio pro- mid-flight. his legacy. Perhaps it is time to con-
ceeds down a long stone walkway, with Democratic mass culture prefers to template the less fashionable question
troops arranged in rigid rows, toward consider itself exempt from the forces of how Hollywood films and other
a dais behind which imposing pillars that made Wagner vulnerable to ex- forms of popular culture can be com-
rise. The shot has two clear cinematic ploitation by the Nazis. Fantasy artists plicit in the exercise of American he-
predecessors: the hero Siegfried’s en- like to believe that they are creating al- gemony—its chauvinist exceptional-
trance into Gunther’s court in Fritz legories of liberal good versus reaction- ism, its culture of violence, its pervasive
Lang’s silent epic “Die Nibelungen,” ary evil. A scene in the 2011 Marvel economic and racial inequities. The
and Hitler’s march through the Nurem- Studios film “Captain America: The urge to sacralize culture, to transform
berg parade grounds in “Triumph of First Avenger” explicitly inserts Wag- aesthetic pursuits into secular religion
the Will.” Although Lucas has denied ner into that binary opposition. Johann and redemptive politics, did not die out

1
that Riefenstahl influenced the scene, Schmidt, a Nazi operative turned global with the degeneration of Wagnerian
the likeness seems too close to be ac- terrorist known as the Red Skull, is Romanticism into Nazi kitsch. 
cidental. To be sure, his heroes break working away in his mountain labora-
out in goofy grins, undercutting the so- tory, with bits of the “Ring” playing on From Yahoo! News.
lemnity of the tableau. But this aw- a Victrola. As at Hitler’s Bavarian re-
RATS TRAINED TO DRIVE TINY CARS FIND IT
shucks appropriation of Fascist style treat, alpine peaks are visible through RELAXING, SCIENTISTS REPORT
makes the allusion no less strange or massive windows. Captain America, a
disturbing. As in “Apocalypse Now,” scrawny kid who has been scientifically Apparently, they actually enjoy the rat race.

24 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020

 PROMOTION

SHOUTS & MURMURS

MRS. NICE GUY

BY ALEXIS WILKINSON

To Whom It May Concern: ogy (from the Latin nescius, meaning

“ignorant”). So not only do your com-
Mr. Nice Guy and I have been made ments make you look stupid—they
aware of your recent comments and, also remind us of our painful patri-
to quote you, I must request “No more.” mony. As our neighbors Mr. and Mrs.
Just because our last name has the Dumbass can tell you, life has never
word “nice” in it (the name was an- been a walk in the park for us.
glicized, on Ellis Island, from “Nice And, yes, the Nice Guys may finish
Goy,” but that’s a story for another last, but that’s only because we care
day) does not mean that your dispar- about our partners’ pleasure. We are
agement can continue unabated. I am a humble people. We are tired of being
writing this letter, on behalf of the pushed aside and made the butt of
entire Nice Guy family, to demand the joke.
that you cease and desist all further Enough is enough. Our neighbor
insults and recriminations based on Ms. Enough has said as much to me.
our surname. We didn’t land on being called Nice
Despite what the media would have Guys. Being called Nice Guys landed
you believe, my husband is not a push- on us.
over. He is, in fact, one of the most Mr. Nice Guy fully intended to take
stubborn and strong-willed people you this matter to court, but I asked him
could ever have the misfortune to meet. to wait, so that I could reach out per-
And the fact that neither I nor any sonally and ask you to reconsider your
other female member of this family choice of words. Mr. Nice Guy has a
ever enters into the equation reeks of team of lawyers on retainer, and he
sexism. Members of the Nice Guy will be unwavering in his battle to right
family have been law-abiding citizens this wrong. I know because I have seen
of this country for generations, and, and felt the full weight of his legal re-
for the sake of our children, Becky solve. After our pending divorce, owing
Nice Guy and Chad Nice Guy, the to “irreconcilable differences,” becomes
disrespect must stop. The bullying and final, I plan to retain the Nice Guy
other torment inflicted on these young- name. Therefore I seek to stop its deg-
sters are of even greater concern to us radation and debasement from this
than the damage to our family’s honor day forward.
LUCI GUTIÉRREZ

and reputation is. You have been warned.

In your flippant use of our name,
you are likely ignorant of the fact that Sincerely,
the word “nice” has a hurtful etymol- Mrs. Karen Nice Guy 
 descent, and to armadillos by conver-
ANNALS OF SCIENCE gent evolution. They eat termites as well
as ants, but they are virtually incapable

THE SOBBING PANGOLIN

of harming any other form of living
creature, except in their own defense.
The kitchen worker dipped this one
How a threatened animal may be linked to the pandemic’s beginnings. into a storm sewer to revive it, then let
it walk a few steps. Its snout was pointy,
BY DAVID QUAMMEN essentially an aiming device for its long,
noodle-like tongue. Its eyes were dark
little beads, shiny but uncomprehend-
ing. Its belly, unprotected by scales, was
a pale-cream color. This was a white-bel-
lied pangolin, one of four African spe-
cies, three of which are native to south-
ern Cameroon. It tried to hide, pushing
its head into a small hole in the ground
near the wall. But even with its sizable
front claws, and the strength and in-
stincts of a burrower, it had no chance
of digging its way to safety. What will
you do with it? I asked the young man.
It would be eaten, he said. Pangolin is
commonly consumed in Cameroon, as
in many different parts of Central Af-
rica and also in Asia, where the other
four species are native.
They are elusive creatures, seldom
seen even by those who spend consid-
erable time walking in African forests.
In 1999 and 2000, J. Michael Fay, an
American ecologist and conservation-
ist, made an epic foot journey, with the
support of Congolese and Gabonese
field crews: four hundred and fifty-six
days through the last great intact for-
ests of Central Africa, trekking a zig-
Pangolins are susceptible to capture by humans—and to coronaviruses. zag course from the northeast corner
of the Republic of the Congo to the At-
he town of Yokadouma lies in re- A young man from the kitchen staff lantic Ocean, fording rivers, mucking
T mote eastern Cameroon, close to
the border with the Central African Re-
had just brought this piteous creature
back from the town market. He carried
across swamps, tunnelling by machete
through trackless thickets, and some-
public, at a juncture of narrow roads it by its tail as it dangled, groggy and times strolling easily along elephant
that—when I visited, in May, 2010, near helpless. It was reddish brown, like the trails beneath closed forest canopy.
the end of the long dry season—were roadside trees, and for the same reason—it Pausing every twenty paces or so, he re-
unpaved and parched, their laterite clay was caked with dust. The scales cover- corded methodical notes and calibra-
pounded to powder by logging trucks ing its head, body, and tail looked like tions in his Rite in the Rain notebooks
rumbling north from the Republic of the rusty metal feathers. Pangolins are amaz- on every manner of biological observa-
Congo. The town’s name translates as ing animals, loosely known as scaly ant- tion. Through the length of his expedi-
Standing Elephant, and in the central eaters because of their armored skin and tion, Fay saw one pangolin. I happened
roundabout stood an elephant statue, its their diet, their elongated heads and to be with him that day, but I missed it.
tusks and part of its trunk broken off, their toothless mouths, though they Yet pangolins are disastrously sus-
rebar protruding. I checked in to the aren’t closely related to true anteaters. ceptible to capture by humans. When
BRENT STIRTON / GETTY

Hotel Elephant, whose dining room had In fact, they constitute a group of their they are attacked or challenged, their
a gorilla skull hung on one wall, a py- own, one of the oddest of mammalian default mode of defense is to roll into
thon skin stretched beside it. I remem- orders, the Pholidota, which contains a ball, like a pill bug, scales on the out-
ber the place because it was here, on the only eight living species (the order of side, tender parts within. The name pan-
following morning, that I met my first bats comprises fourteen hundred spe- golin comes from peng-goling, which in
pangolin, which was also my last. cies). They are similar to carnivores by Malay means “roller” or “that which rolls
26 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020
up.” This defense works well against Malaysia for use in traditional Chinese in 2012, watching three diners enjoy a
such predators as lions and leopards but medicine (T.C.M.) in China and Hong seven-hundred-dollar pangolin meal. A
not against one with a brain and a pair Kong. Chinese tradition, as inscribed in server carried the animal, alive, into the
of hands, capable of battering a pango- old texts, holds that pangolin scales, restaurant in an old sack. It was balled
lin open or carrying it back to a village. ground to powder or burned to ash, can up in its defense posture, showing only
Pangolins are also susceptible to be useful against ant bites, midnight scales and claws. “They took out a large
coronaviruses, and that trait has given hysterias, evil spirits, malaria, hemor- rolling pin and clubbed it unconscious,”
them an unexpected role in the mystery rhoids, and pinworm, and for stimulat- Challender said. Then “they took some
of how SARS-CoV-2, the COVID-19 virus, ing lactation in women. Science doesn’t scissors and used the scissor blades to
found its way into people. Sampling of support these claims—the scales con- cut the throat.” The blood was drained
tissues from dead pangolins has shown sist merely of keratin, the same mate- out and mixed with alcohol for the din-
that some carry viruses very similar to rial as your hair and your nails. ers, and the flesh was cooked.
SARS-CoV-2. Did a population of these “There’s a lot of finger-pointing at
animals serve as intermediate hosts, within other cultures,” Sarah Heinrich said re- s the Asian populations declined,
which a bat virus lived briefly—or maybe
for some decades, acquiring adaptations
cently from her home near Potsdam. The
finger could point in many directions.
A African pangolins began flowing
east in large quantities. Since early times,
that could make it devastating to humans? Most of the pangolin skins exported many peoples of sub-Saharan Africa have
The evidence is complicated. And the between 1975 and 2000 went to North “harvested” pangolins, trapping the an-
question is only more charged given that America, where they were turned into imals with snares, tracking them with
all eight pangolin species are presently handbags, belts, wallets, and fancy cow- dogs, or coming across them in the for-
being pushed toward extinction. Their boy boots. Pangolin leather was espe- est. The hunters traditionally consumed
possible involvement in the COVID-19 cially prized because the animal’s skin their catch or sold it into local bush-meat
story gives them a weird ambivalence, bears an eye-catching, almost reptilian, markets. Eventually, the meat became
endangered and (perhaps) dangerous. diamond-grid pattern. The Lucchese popular in cities, too, such as Libreville,
Even as so many humans suffer and die, boot company, bootmaker to Lyndon in Gabon, and Yaoundé, in Cameroon,
it’s worth asking the pangolin question: Johnson, among others, produced pan- and that led to rising prices around the
has our hunger for these humble creatures golin-leather boots before 2000, when start of the twenty-first century. The
got us into a global catastrophe? CITES set the export quota for wild-caught scales mostly moved through the ports
Asian pangolins to zero, essentially mak- and airports of Nigeria and Cameroon
angolins are solitary animals, each ing the international commerce illegal. to Asia, especially China and Vietnam.
P one foraging on its lonesome, the
adults coming together briefly to breed.
By then, the pangolin populations
in China and parts of Southeast Asia
“I know we’re serving as a transit
point,” Olajumoke Morenikeji told me
The female carries her single offspring had been drastically depleted, not just recently. She’s a zoologist, and a founder of
piggyback for some months, and sleeps to make American cowboy boots but the Pangolin Conservation Guild Nigeria.
with it curled tenderly within her armor. also for regional consumption. At one To judge from the thousands of kilo-
Although pangolins are hard to find, point, some hundred and fifty thou- grams of scales seized, she said, “you can’t
they must have once seemed endlessly sand pangolins in China went to the have all that just coming from Nigeria.”
abundant. Between 1975 and 2000, ac- knife monthly, their meat eaten and Luc Evouna Embolo, an officer for
cording to the German biologist Sarah their scales used in T.C.M. “Such was TRAFFIC, an international network that
Heinrich and her colleagues, drawing the magnitude of this exploitation,” the monitors the wildlife trade, gave a sim-
on the database of the Convention on Oxford University-based pangolin ex- ilar account from Yaoundé. Increasingly,
International Trade in Endangered Spe- pert Daniel Challender and three co- middlemen incite local people to collect
cies of Wild Fauna and Flora (a multi- authors wrote, “that it apparently led to pangolins from the field and sell to them.
national compact known as CITES), the commercial extinction of pangolins The middlemen sell to urban business-
roughly seven hundred and seventy-six in China by the mid-nineteen-nineties.” men who illegally export the animals. A
thousand pangolins became merchan- Importing pangolins was more practi- villager might get paid three thousand
dise that was traded legally on the in- cal than hunting down the few indige- C.F.A. francs (roughly five dollars) for a
ternational market. That flow of prod- nous ones that remained. pangolin that will be worth thirty dol-
ucts included almost six hundred and Challender did some of his doctoral lars in Douala, Cameroon’s economic
thirteen thousand pangolin skins, ex- field work in Vietnam, conducting mar- capital, and much more in China. In 2017,
ported from countries including Ma- ket surveys, gathering price data on pan- police made one seizure amounting to
laysia, Indonesia, and Thailand. golin scales, visiting restaurants where more than five tons of scales, for which
Pangolin scales are a separate com- the meat was served. “If you go into a two Chinese traffickers were arrested.
modity, highly valued in some cultures restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City,” he In late 2016, CITES had decided to
for their supposed efficacy in traditional told me, “you’re going to be paying three make all international trade of wild-
medicines. Between 1994 and 2000, al- hundred and fifty dollars a kilo for a caught pangolins and their parts illegal,
most nineteen tons of pangolin scales pangolin.” It might be grilled, or boiled but the traffic continued. Its scope could
(accounting for roughly forty-seven in a hot pot with ginger and spring on- now be gauged only from the fraction
thousand pangolins) were exported from ions. He recalled sitting in a restaurant, seized by customs officials and other
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 27
national enforcement authorities or de- ropsies showed a pattern of swollen lungs more lethal but less transmissible than
tected by non-governmental investigators. containing frothy fluid, and in some cases SARS-CoV (as that first virus became
By one estimate, almost nine hundred a swollen liver and spleen. A trio of sci- known), was also a coronavirus trace-
thousand pangolins have been smuggled entists based at a Guangzhou govern- able to bats, though in that case the bat
during the past two decades. Some were mental laboratory and at the Guangzhou virus had established itself in camels for
alive. Some were dead, peeled of scales Zoo, led by Jin-Ping Chen, took tissue some decades before spilling over into
and frozen gray. The scales were con- samples from eleven of the animals and humans. Another notion about the new
cealed in sacks or boxes within shipping searched for genomic evidence of viruses. virus’s host was snakes—a suggestion
containers, sometimes labelled as cashews, They found signs of Sendai virus, harm- made in late January, 2020, based on ten-
oyster shells, or scrap plastic. Those who less to people but known for causing ill- uous evidence, and quickly dismissed.
track this commerce, such as Challen- ness in rodents. They also found frag- The attention swung back to bats on
der and Heinrich, say that pangolins ments of coronaviruses, a family high on February 3rd, when a group led by
seem to be the most heavily trafficked the watch list of viruses potentially dan- Zheng-Li Shi, of the Wuhan Institute
wild mammals in the world. gerous to humans. Still, this was not big of Virology, presented genomic data
There is a vogue in urban China for news when the Chen group published showing a close similarity between the
ye wei, or “wild tastes”—wildlife meat, its report, on October 24th. The scien- new virus and a coronavirus sequence
supposedly imbued with healthful, in- tists noted that either Sendai or a coro- they had found, half a dozen years ear-
vigorating properties. Some consumers navirus might have killed these pango- lier, among horseshoe bats in a mine shaft
cherish the notion that eating pangolin lins, that further study could help with in Yunnan Province, a thousand miles
is a revered national tradition. But that pangolin conservation, and that such vi- southwest of Wuhan. The genome of this
notion has lately been challenged. Ear- ruses might be capable of crossing into bat virus, now called RaTG13, was 96.2
lier this year, a Chinese journalist named other mammals. per cent identical to the new human
Wufei Yu published an Op-Ed in the Three months later, the word “corona- coronavirus. This was strong evidence
Times highlighting old texts that advise virus” carried a different ring. An initial that the new virus originally came from
against consuming the flesh of certain small cluster of “abnormal pneumonia” bats, but a four-per-cent difference be-
wild animals, notably snakes, badgers, cases had appeared in Wuhan, the cap- tween the genomes was far from a per-
and pangolins. Yu found that in 652, ital of Hubei Province; soon the num- fect match. Four per cent, in fact, implies
during the Tang dynasty, an alchemist ber had exploded to thousands, and the decades of evolutionary divergence.
named Sun Simiao warned about “lurk- city was in lockdown; Chinese sources Where had the new virus spent that
ing ailments in our stomachs. Don’t eat had revealed that a “novel coronavirus” time—in what population of bats or other
the meat of pangolins, because it may was the cause of this disease; the first ge- animals—and how had it spilled from
trigger them and harm us.” A millen- nome had been sequenced and released, one of them into its first human host?
nium later, in a compendium of med- by a Chinese team led by Yong-Zhen With those questions pending, another
ical and herbal lore now considered Zhang, of Fudan University, and with candidate for the intermediary emerged.
foundational to T.C.M., the physician one Western partner, Edward C. Holmes, On February 7th, the president of South
Li Shizhen cautioned that eating pan- who arranged to make the sequence pub- China Agricultural University, in Guang-
golin could lead to diarrhea, fever, and lic on a Web site called Virological, run zhou, declared at a press conference that
convulsions. Pangolin scales could be by a colleague at the University of Ed- a team from her institution, in work not
useful for medicines, Li Shizhen al- inburgh; cases had started turning up yet published, had found what may be
lowed, but beware the meat. elsewhere, including South Korea, Sin- an intermediate host of the virus, bridg-
Zhou Jinfeng, a noted conservation- gapore, and the United States; the World ing the gap between bats and humans:
ist who heads the China Biodiversity Health Organization had declared a pangolins. According to a report by Xin-
Conservation and Green Development global health emergency; and everyone hua, the official Chinese news agency,
Foundation, in Beijing, added a caus- was now watching. Scientists who un- the pangolin virus that the researchers
tic dismissal. “It’s not a matter of tra- derstand zoonotic diseases—the diseases had investigated was a ninety-nine-per-
dition,” he told me by Skype. “It’s a caused by pathogens that pass from non- cent match with the coronavirus show-
matter of money.” human animals into humans—had begun ing up in people.
asking, Which animal was the source? The announcement was an overstate-
nd now, along with the traffic of Everything comes from somewhere, and ment of what the researchers had found,
A pangolins into China, a new con-
cern has arisen: the traffic of certain vi-
novel viruses come to people from wild-
life, sometimes through an intermediary
but it caused a flurry of headlines. Even
the CITES secretariat, based in Geneva,
ruses. There was an unheeded signal last animal that may or may not be wild. echoed the claim, tweeting the next day
year. On March 24, 2019, the Guangdong Bats were prime suspects, because that “#Pangolins may have spread #coro-
Wildlife Rescue Center, in Guangzhou, the SARS virus that surfaced in 2002— navirus to humans,” and sugaring that
took custody of twenty-one live Sunda highly lethal and transmissible, but sour tweet with video footage of cute
pangolins that had been seized by cus- quickly contained by the middle of pangolins—one of them a female with
toms police. Most of the animals were 2003—had been a coronavirus hosted a juvenile on her back—climbing tree
in bad health, with skin eruptions and by bats. The MERS virus, which emerged branches and snooping for ants. The
in respiratory distress; sixteen died. Nec- on the Arabian Peninsula in 2012, even implication was: these adorable animals
28 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020
carry lethal viruses, so best to leave them it—and walked across Yokadouma to panzee population from which a sim-
alone. When the study from South China the local headquarters of the Ministry ian virus (now called SIVcpz) spilled
Ag. went online, the big result was not of Forests and Wildlife. In a conference from a single chimp into a single human,
quite as big as advertised, though it room there, I met with the chief of the with catastrophic results for tens of mil-
was still dramatic. The coronavirus ge- wildlife section, Apollinaire Otto Mbala, lions of people. The spillover evidently
nome that these researchers had assem- and several other officers, including occurred in the extreme southeastern
bled, from pangolin lung-tissue samples, Achille Mengamenya, the conservator corner of Cameroon. Many chimps
contained some gene regions that were of the nearby Boumba Bek National across Africa are infected with variants
ninety-nine per cent similar to equiva- Park, who wore a military-style uniform of the SIVcpz virus. But those in south-
lent parts of the SARS-CoV-2 genome— with a thick belt and shoulder boards. eastern Cameroon carry what seems to
but the over-all match wasn’t that close. We talked about legal hunting (for an- have become the exact pandemic strain
Maybe two coronaviruses had merged in imals such as duikers, small forest an- of the AIDS virus. How had the spill-
a single animal, the researchers wrote, and telopes), illegal hunting (for gorillas and over happened? Possibly during an act
swapped sections of their genomes—a chimpanzees), and the status of ele- of butchery, after the human had snared
“recombination event.” Such an event phants (they could sometimes, in some or speared the chimp; at that point, a
may even have proved fateful, by patch- areas, be fair game). When bush meat cut on the human’s hand or arm could
ing one genomic section of a pangolin was confiscated, Mbala told me, it was have allowed blood-to-blood transfer
coronavirus together with a bat corona- auctioned, the proceeds going into min- of the virus. This scenario was specu-
virus. That section, known as the recep- istry coffers. We also discussed AIDS, a lative, and it came to be known as the
tor binding domain (R.B.D.), endowed severe problem in the region and my cut-hunter hypothesis.
the composite virus with an extraordi- reason for coming to southeastern Cam- Mbala turned his laptop to show
nary capacity to seize and infect certain eroon: to investigate the connection be- me a photo of a dead gorilla, killed six
human cells, including some in the re- tween wildlife as food and the emer- months earlier, not far from the national
spiratory tract. gence of that disease. park. The poacher had escaped. What
The South China Ag. team got its Humans are especially susceptible happened to the gorilla’s body? I asked.
samples from pangolins at the Guang- to viruses from our closest evolution- Mbala hesitated uncomfortably, then
dong rescue center, some of which had ary kin, and I was interested in the pas- said that it had been auctioned: “The
previously been sampled by Jin-Ping sage of a certain chimpanzee virus into locals will eat it. It is meat, after all. It’s
Chen’s group. The team’s study, of which its first human host. Back at the Hotel very valuable.”
Yongyi Shen was a senior author, gave Elephant, I had a journal paper, much Chimpanzees are valued similarly.
vividness to a technical report when it annotated during my rereadings, by a From an officer of a conservation group
noted that the rescued pangolins “grad- group led by Beatrice H. Hahn, then in Yokadouma, I heard about a circum-
ually showed signs of respiratory dis- of the University of Alabama at Bir- cision ceremony called beka, practiced
ease, including shortness of breath, ema- mingham, that cast light on the geo- by the Bakwele people of the region,
ciation, lack of appetite, inactivity, and graphic origin of the AIDS pandemic. for initiating a young boy into manhood.
crying.” Pangolins are sensitive, hard to Hahn and her colleagues pioneered a He said that it involves an all-night
keep alive in captivity even under solic- technique of extracting viral genomic vigil, continuous drumming, certain
itous care; the harsh conditions of being evidence from chimpanzee fecal sam- drugs to keep the boy awake, a bath at
trafficked internationally would make ples and, by comparing those data with dawn, then a day of walking, and finally
them especially susceptible to infection. H.I.V. genomes, had located the chim- the crescendo, when a masked officiant
But what killed those sixteen pangolins?
Was it Sendai virus, or a coronavirus, or
some other cause unrelated to concerns
about human health? We’ll probably
never know. Later in the paper, buried
in a section on methodology, Shen and
his co-authors added that the animals
“were mostly inactive and sobbing, and
eventually died in custody despite ex-
hausting rescue efforts.” Sobbing might
be taken as a metaphor for respiratory
struggle, but, then again, sometimes a
sob is just a sob.

n that morning in southeastern

O Cameroon, I left the doomed pan-
golin at the hotel—I knew I couldn’t
save it except temporarily, and to salve
my own conscience, by trying to buy “Oh, that’s my little place in the country.”
 yet declared publicly—was a novel coro-
navirus. Then the market was promptly
cleaned by a team of masked, white-
clad workers spraying sanitizer. The
coronavirus was found—genomic bits,
plus a touch of viable virus that could
be grown in a lab—but it came from
wastewater or door handles or other
surfaces, not from wild animals. If any
live animals caged at Huanan were tested
for the coronavirus, those results have
never been announced.
A later review of the first forty-one
hospitalized patients clarified that most,
but not all, of them had been exposed
to the market. Some—including the
• • earliest patient, whose symptoms began
on December 1, 2019—had no known
cuts off the boy’s foreskin. Traditionally, ammunition.) Chimpanzees were gen- contact with Huanan. This suggests that
beka also required the amputated arms erally taken with snares, and the dan- the coronavirus was already circulating
of a chimpanzee, to be eaten by vil- gerous moment was when a hunter among people in the city as early as No-
lage elders. Recently, the Bakwele had closed in on that tethered, frantic, en- vember, and that an infected person—
shifted to gorilla arms, the officer told raged animal to finish it with a spear. not an infected wild animal—may have
me, because of availability. “Chimps are “Il y en avait beaucoup d ’accidents de carried it into the market.
becoming more and more scarce.” chasse,” Mengamenya said. Lots of hunt- The first human victim probably
Two days later, I accompanied Men- ers got hurt. Chimpanzees are power- did get infected from a wild animal.
gamenya, the conservator, on an anti- ful, and they bite. It reminded me of But it’s unknown whether that animal
poaching sweep through Boumba Bek the hypothetical cut hunter. A moment was a bat or a pangolin or something
National Park. We crossed the Boumba of bloody contact could yield many bad else, or whether it was in a cage on its
River by dugout canoe, bushwhacked outcomes, one of which was infection way to Wuhan, or maybe living in the
through the forest, counted gorilla nests, with a new virus. wild, defecating on somebody’s vege-
waded along waist-deep channels, fol- This answered the question that had table garden.
lowed muddy trails potholed with ele- brought me to southeastern Cameroon: As the pandemic took hold, the Chi-
phant footprints, and looked for signs Yes, the hunting and eating of chimps nese government enacted several mea-
of people who shouldn’t be there. We and gorillas continues. And, as long as sures against the sort of commerce that
found an abandoned poachers’ camp, it does, humanity stands in jeopardy of made wet markets notorious. On Feb-
with three thatched-roof shelters, a another spillover the likes of H.I.V. But, ruary 24th, the Standing Committee of
fish-drying rack (beneath which a fire of course, subsequent events have shown, the National People’s Congress, Chi-
still smoldered), and a small bag of reya too, that apes aren’t the only animals na’s highest legislative body, adopted a
chips, a traditional poison made from hosting viruses to which humans may ban on selling or eating wild animals.
the seeds of a vine. At the tip of an be catastrophically susceptible. On June 5th, pangolins native to China
arrow, it would work against monkeys were upgraded to the highest level of
and other small game, Mengamenya ex- tories, in our connected era, spread wildlife protection. Days later, word
plained, and he ordered the camp burned.
We slept on the riverbank and con-
S even more quickly than viruses. One
story of COVID-19 that spread early and
leaked that pangolin scales would
be removed from the “Chinese Phar-
tinued the next day. As we walked, Men- widely was that the outbreak had begun macopoeia,” the official compendium
gamenya answered my questions about among people associated with the Hua- of T.C.M.
traditional hunting in this part of Cam- nan Seafood Wholesale Market, in Uncertainty over the origins of the
eroon. The reya poison, for instance: a Wuhan. It was a wet market, where vend- virus continued. At least three more sci-
hunter would grind it to powder, apply ers offered wildlife for eating—from entific papers on the subject appeared
it to crossbow arrows, shoot a monkey, civets to wolf pups, porcupines, and between February and May, two from
then follow the animal for half an hour snakes—as well as seafood, domestic Chinese teams and one from a group
until it fell, helpless, out of a tree. Hunt- meat, and other perishable food items. at the Baylor College of Medicine, in
ing gorillas required dogs, many men, (Pangolins would have been traded less Houston. All three based their analy-
and a chaotic process of surrounding a openly.) The market was shut down on ses, as had Yongyi Shen’s group at South
big ape and then spearing it. (Hunting January 1st, in response to the “abnor- China Ag., on genomic data from pan-
with rifles or shotguns was easier, of mal pneumonia” outbreak, and scien- golins at the rescue center in Guang-
course, but many local people couldn’t tists took samples in search of what they dong. One group reported that pango-
afford them, and we had seen no spent may have suspected—but no one had lins seem to carry a coronavirus so
30 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020
similar to SARS-CoV-2 that it might be Laboratory, on Long Island. Others get things were notable about the animals,
the source of the pandemic. Part of their peer-reviewed quickly, because of their Lam told Holmes: “They’ve got this
evidence was that crucial section of the urgency, and go online under the aegis respiratory disease. And guess what.
pangolin coronavirus genome, the re- of eminent journals including Nature, They’ve got, like, this coronavirus in
ceptor binding domain, which bears an Cell, and The Lancet. Still another paper, them.” Another coronavirus, not a fa-
uncanny resemblance to the R.B.D. in published this spring by Nature, exam- miliar one, but also resembling SARS-
the pandemic virus. Another group said, ined samples from a different batch of CoV-2. Holmes told me, “I thought,
No, our analyses do not support the idea rescued pangolins—from Guangxi Well, that’s extraordinary.”
that the pandemic virus came directly Province—as well as genomic evidence Holmes signed on to assist with his
from a pangolin. The third group, post- from the much studied Guangdong specialty, analyzing genomic data. What
ing their report as a preprint, before peer pangolins. These scientists found two surprised him was not just that two dis-
review, agreed with Yongyi Shen: this distinct lineages of coronavirus closely tinct groups of pangolins both carried
SARS virus looks as though it could be related to SARS-CoV-2. coronavirus infections, or that both vi-
the result of a recombination event—a Two coronaviruses, both resembling ruses were similar to the human virus,
switching of genome segments in the our nemesis bug? It seemed to suggest but that they were distinct from each
body of one animal—or maybe several that pangolins are brimming with in- other. “That’s what is so striking,” he
such events, accidentally combining visible menace. The first author on the said. “There are two lineages, and the
genes from bat viruses, pangolin viruses, Nature paper was Tommy Tsan-Yuk Lam; Guangdong ones are closer to SARS-
and even other viruses to become the the senior author was a famed virus CoV-2 than the Guangxi ones. But
extremely well-adapted virus causing hunter in Hong Kong, Yi Guan; and they’re both close. Right? So it’s not
the nightmare of COVID-19. among the other authors was Edward that there’s one outbreak in pangolins.”
There’s also a possibility that the vi- C. Holmes, who brokered the release of Two distinct coronaviruses, each sim-
ruses carried by smuggled pangolins do the first SARS-CoV-2 genome. So I asked ilar to SARS-CoV-2, one with a recep-
not reflect the typical viral burden of Holmes, by Skype, for illumination. tor binding domain to which human-
wild pangolins. They might not really lung cells are highly susceptible, had
be pangolin viruses at all, but infections dward C. Holmes is a brilliant evo- travelled into southern China in smug-
acquired from other wild animals under
the conditions of the trafficking chain—
E lutionary biologist, the author of
an authoritative book, from 2009, titled
gled pangolins.
“What are the odds?” Holmes said.
stress caused by shortage of food and “The Evolution and Emergence of The odds are low. The finding suggests,
water and oxygen, human handling, RNA Viruses” (they are the fastest- he added, that there are many more
temperatures too hot or too cold, close evolving and most dangerous kinds of dangerous viruses lurking in pangolins
confinement in cages adjacent to vari- virus, and include the coronaviruses). than we have detected so far. But not
ous doomed creatures. That could ex- Born in England, Holmes is now a just in pangolins—don’t forget bats,
plain the respiratory symptoms: pan- professor at the University of Sydney, carrying their own share of coronavi-
golins, unlike bats, may be unaccustomed with close connections to colleagues in ruses, some of which are only a few
to these viruses. One group of scien- China. He has a quick wit and a per- decades of evolutionary change from
tists looked at pangolins near the sup- fectly round, bald head. His friends and having the capacity to infect and kill
ply end of the trade flowing toward his Twitter followers know him as humans. And not just bats. What other
China, collecting throat and rectal swabs Eddie. When I first met him, ten years animals may have played a role during
from three hundred and thirty-four ago, at Penn State, where he worked at that stretch of missing decades, which
Sunda pangolins in Peninsular Malay- the time, his office was decorated with he called the evolutionary gap? “What’s
sia and the state of Sabah (Malaysian a poster depicting Bart Simpson in a in the gap?” he asked. “I don’t know.
Borneo) that had either been seized cartoon version of “Nighthawks,” the Raccoon dogs?” Raccoon dogs are tree-
from smugglers, or otherwise rescued, Edward Hopper painting. Why Bart climbing canids with black masks, na-
between 2009 and 2019. Not one sam- Simpson? I asked. Because he looks like tive to East Asia and also sold as food.
ple tested positive for a coronavirus. me, Holmes said. “Bamboo rats?” Confession: I’ve eaten
The scientific discussion of the pan- “In February, I get contacted by those, in China, myself. “Who the hell
demic’s origins is still in kaleidoscopic Tommy Lam,” he told me now. Lam, a knows?” Holmes said. “But until we go
flux. Among even just the hypotheses former postdoctoral fellow of Holmes’s, there and sample them we’re never
for which empirical evidence exists— was working in Hong Kong with Yi going to know. That’s the critical thing.
ignoring the nutcase theories, the un- Guan. Lam explained that he and Guan To resolve the origins.”
supported slanders, and the paranoid had obtained viral genome sequences More field research is needed, he
speculations purveyed online—ideas from pangolins confiscated by customs meant. More sampling of wild animals.
vary, and some sets of data conflict with authorities in two different provinces— More scrutiny of genomes. More cog-
others. Journal papers are appearing not just the rescue-center ones but also nizance of the fact that animal infec-
faster than ever, many of them posted, some seized during 2017 and 2018 in tions can become human infections, be-
before peer review, on such “preprint” Guangxi Province, which shares a bor- cause humans are animals. We live in
Web sites as bioRxiv, hosted by the der with Vietnam and therefore lies a world of viruses, and we have scarcely
well-respected Cold Spring Harbor along a pangolin-trafficking route. Two begun to understand this one. 
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 31
 PROFILES

MAN IN THE MIDDLE

After a centrist career, Joe Biden is running on transformation. Can he unite his party—and the country?
BY EVAN OSNOS

elcome to my mom’s house,” due on Capitol Hill, to pay their respects deals.) Biden renovated an old garage
“W Joe Biden called from the
bottom of the stairs, an in-
to the recently deceased John Lewis, of
Georgia, a civil-rights icon who endured
and his mother moved in. “I’d walk in
and she’d be in that chair downstairs,
stant before his sweep of white hair rose a fractured skull at the hands of state facing the fireplace, watching televi-
into view. troopers in Selma, Alabama, before ris- sion,” he said. “There’d always be a care-
The former Vice-President of the ing to the House of Representatives and giver on the stool, and she’d be hearing
United States and the Democratic nom- becoming known as the “conscience of her confession.”
inee for President reached the second Congress.” It would be a rare excursion. Joe Biden has been a “public man,”
floor of a cottage at the foot of his prop- Since the Covid shutdown began, in as he puts it—holding office, giving in-
erty in Greenville, Delaware, a wooded, March, Biden had circulated mostly be- terviews, dispensing anecdotes—for five
well-to-do suburb of Wilmington. He tween his back porch, where he con- decades. I last interviewed him, mostly
wore a trim blue dress shirt, sleeves rolled vened fund-raisers on Zoom, a gym up- about foreign affairs, in 2014, when he
to the elbows, a pen tucked between the stairs, and the basement rec room, where was in the White House and Donald
buttons, and a bright-white N95 mask. he sat for TV interviews in front of a Trump was hosting Season 14 of “The
It was ninety-nine days to the election. bookcase and a folded flag. The cam- Apprentice.” Biden is seventy-seven
The death toll from the coronavirus pan- paign apparatus had scattered into the years old, and he looks thinner than he
demic was approaching a hundred and homes of some twenty-three hundred did six years ago, but not markedly so.
fifty thousand, three times as many lives employees. Biden seemed pleased to have His verbiage is as meandering as ever.
as America lost in Vietnam; the econ- company. Before I could ask a question, James Comey, the former F.B.I. direc-
omy had crumbled faster than at any he explained the origins of the cottage. tor, once wrote that the typical Biden
other time in the nation’s history; in Port- When his father, Joe, Sr., fell ill, in 2002, conversation originated in “Direction A”
land, Oregon, federal agents in unmarked Biden renovated the basement of the before “heading in Direction Z.” (In
uniforms were tear-gassing protesters, main house and moved his parents in. December, Biden’s campaign released
whom Donald Trump called “sick and “God love him, he lasted for about six a doctor’s summary of his medical rec-
deranged Anarchists & Agitators.” On months,” he said. “I thought my mom ords, which pronounced him a “healthy,
Twitter that day, Trump warned that the would stay.” She had other ideas. (Biden’s vigorous” man of his age.)
demonstrators would “destroy our Amer- mother, the former Jean Finnegan, plays The implications of age, in one form
ican cities, and worse, if Sleepy Joe Biden, a formidable role in his recounting of or another, hover over the Presidential
the puppet of the Left, ever won. Mar- family history. In grammar school, he race. Trump took office as the oldest
kets would crash and cities would burn.” recalls, a nun mocked him for stutter- President in history; he is now seventy-
The man who stands between Amer- ing, and his mother, a devout Catholic, four. To deflect questions about his men-
icans and four more years of Trump told her, “If you ever speak to my son tal acuity, he and his allies present Biden
lives with his wife, Jill, on four sloping like that again, I’ll come back and rip as senile, a theme that dominates right-
acres that overlook a small lake. These that bonnet off your head.”) wing TV and Twitter. Biden sees little
days, the Biden place feels as solemn After Jean became a widow, Biden of it; he doesn’t look at social media. If
and secluded as an abbey. To avoid con- said, she offered him a proposition: “She there is something big, his staff will in-
tagion, Biden’s advisers had put me in said, ‘Joey, if you build me a house, I’ll clude a tweet in the morning roundup
a carriage house, a hundred yards from move in here.’ I said, ‘Honey, I don’t of news that he reads on his phone. But,
the house where the family lives. The have the money to build you a house.’ he said, “I don’t look at a lot of the com-
cottage, styled in Celtic themes (green She said, ‘I know you don’t.’ She said, ments. I spend the time trying to focus
shutters, a thistle pattern on the throw ‘But I talked to your brothers and sister. on the trouble people are in right now.”
pillows), doubles as a command post for Sell my house and build me an apart- By the end of August, ten weeks be-
the Secret Service, and large men with ment.’” For years, Biden, who relied on fore the election, Biden led Trump by
holstered guns stalked in and out. Biden his government salary, was among the an average of at least eight percentage
settled into an armchair across the room least prosperous members of the United points. But no earthly inhabitant ex-
from me and splayed his hands, a so- States Senate. (In the two years after pected an ordinary end to the campaign.
cially distanced salute. “The docs keep he left the Vice-Presidency, the Bidens Some polls showed the race tightening,
it really tight,” he explained. earned more than fifteen million dol- and Trump and the G.O.P. held a per-
Later that afternoon, the Bidens were lars, from speeches, teaching, and book sistent advantage in perceptions of their
32 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020
Biden has described himself as a “transition candidate,” able to overcome generational and ideological rifts.
PHOTOGRAPH BY WIDLINE CADET THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 33
handling of the economy. “I feel good of leadership, particularly in the pan- kitchen with news that the specials were
about where we are,” Biden said. “But I demic, have become clear even to stead- gone, and all that was left was oatmeal.
know that it’s going to get really, really fast Republican advocates. “Everybody (Of course, they always had the option
ugly.” As Trump disputed the legitimacy knows, even people supporting him: This of more rat poison.)
of mail-in voting, his Postmaster Gen- is all about his self-interest. It’s all about Maurice Mitchell, the national direc-
eral was brazenly cutting service in ways him,” he told me. “It has had profound tor of the Working Families Party, told
that could prevent ballots from being impacts on people’s ability to live their me, “People said, ‘Oh, this man’s a hack.’
counted. Trump’s campaign was trying life.” Still, it might not suffice to change He’s not an ideological person, and ide-
to deter Black voters, running commer- voters’ minds. When Biden character- ology clearly matters to us. He was run-
cials claiming that, as one put it, Biden izes Trump’s supporters, they are not ning a retrograde candidacy during the
had “destroyed millions of Black lives”; duped or culpable or deplorable. “They primary. It was all about going back to
Republican operatives were helping think that they will be materially better the track we were on with the Obama
Kanye West, the pro-Trump hip-hop off if he’s President,” he said. “He has years.” Mitchell, who is also a leader in
star, get on the ballot in multiple states. gotten through, I think, to some de- the Movement for Black Lives, said that
Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence warned gree—to about forty per cent—saying, Biden’s change of tone caught the atten-
that, as in 2016, Russians were working ‘The Democrats are socialists. They’re tion of progressives: “He’s recognizing
to damage Trump’s opponent, this time here to take away everything you have.’” that this might be a Rooseveltian mo-
with phone recordings edited to support Republicans have long accused Dem- ment. He’s not all the way there—no-
the canard that Biden had used the ocrats of plotting to smuggle socialism body thinks Joe Biden is a progressive
Vice-Presidency to help his son Hunter into the United States. But levelling that star—but he can be a product of either
make money in Ukraine. charge against Biden, whose career has your most cynical thinking or a product
For a front-runner, Biden was hardly been distinguished mostly by careful cen- of your most optimistic thinking.”
sanguine. “I am worried about them trism, is an awkward task. Biden entered In a recent interview, I asked Barack
screwing around with the election out- the Democratic primaries with a narrow Obama how he interprets Biden’s swerve
come,” he said. “When the hell have goal: to end the Trump Presidency. Most to the left. “If you look at Joe Biden’s
you heard a President say, ‘I’m not sure Americans, he argued, did not want a goals and Bernie Sanders’s goals, they’re
I’ll accept the outcome’?” revolution. At an early fund-raiser in not that different, from a forty-thou-
New York, he promised not to “demon- sand-foot level,” he argued. “They both
he trials of 2020 have dismantled ize” the rich and said that “nothing would want to make sure everybody has health
T some of the most basic stories we
Americans tell ourselves. The world’s
fundamentally change.” (Online, people
circulated mock campaign posters, in the
care. They want to make sure everybody
can get a job that pays a living wage.
richest, most powerful country has color-block style of Obama’s “Hope” pic- They want to make sure every child gets
botched even rudimentary responses to ture, with the slogan “Nothing Would a good education.” The question was
the pandemic—finding masks, making Fundamentally Change.”) But, by the one of tactics, Obama suggested. “A lot
tests—and some agencies have proved time Biden effectively clinched the nom- of times, the issue has to do with ‘How
to be so antiquated and starved of re- ination, in March, he had begun to de- do we go about that, and what are the
sources that they’ve used fax machines scribe his candidacy as a bid for systemic coalitions we need?’ ” he said. “What I
to share data. The White House offered change on the scale of Franklin Roos- think the moment has done is to change
policies that read like mock Kafka; even evelt’s New Deal. According to a senior some of those calculations, not because
as people were advised against dining aide to Bernie Sanders, Biden told Sand- necessarily Joe’s changed but because
out, it was proposing a corporate tax ers, in a phone call about a possible en- circumstances have changed.”
break on business meals. On Fox News dorsement, “I want to be the most pro-
in April, Jared Kushner, the President’s gressive President since F.D.R.” he tensions afflicting the Demo-
son-in-law and one of the leaders of the
coronavirus response, declared the Ad-
That evolution has confounded crit-
ics on all sides. Biden was simultaneously
T cratic Party reflect a clash between
liberal meliorism—the “long view” pol-
ministration’s effort “a great success accused of being a socialist puppet and itics of Obama and Biden—and the im-
story.” Since then, at least a hundred a neoliberal shill. To his detractors on patient movement that Sanders calls a
and ten thousand more people have the left—especially younger, highly edu- “revolution.” The two factions claim com-
died. And, in the midst of the pandemic, cated, more ideological Democrats who peting virtues: one emphasizes realism,
the death of George Floyd under a po- are active online—Biden was a creature coalition-building, and practical politics,
liceman’s knee opened a second epochal of the ancien régime and a cheerleader and the other the inescapable evidence
turn in American history—a reckoning of the national-security state, with such that “reform” has failed to confront per-
with the entrenched hierarchy of power, timid appetites for change that, when vasive inequalities, the cruelties of Amer-
which Isabel Wilkerson, in her new he won on Super Tuesday, the price of ican health care and incarceration, and
book, “Caste,” calls “the wordless usher health-care stocks went up. Liberals were ecological catastrophe.
in a darkened theater, flashlight cast dismayed that the most diverse Presi- The division is as much generational
down in the aisles, guiding us to our as- dential field in history had yielded a as it is ideological. Young Americans
signed seats.” white man in his eighth decade. It was have been reared on fiascoes—the inva-
Biden believes that Trump’s failures as if a waiter had returned from the sion of Iraq, the response to Hurricane
34 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020
Katrina, the 2008 financial crisis—and
have come to blame that record partly
on gerontocracy. The median American
is thirty-eight years old. The median U.S.
senator is sixty-five. The current Con-
gress is among the oldest in history. Sen-
ate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
is seventy-eight; House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi is eighty. The difference in age
often underlies a profound difference in
world view. In the words of Patrick Fisher,
a Seton Hall professor who specializes
in the political dynamics of age, “Demo-
graphically, politically, economically, so-
cially and technologically, the genera-
tions are more different from each other
now than at any time in living memory.”
Millennials constitute the largest gen-
eration in America today, and the most
diverse in the nation’s history. They en-
tered the job market during the worst
recession since the nineteen-thirties.
People under twenty-five have faced un-
employment rates more than double
those of other age groups. By 2012, a
record number of adults between eigh-
teen and thirty-one were living with
their parents. In the twenty-tens, as
Trumpism was germinating on the right,
a rival political movement was growing “Don’t feel like talking? Fine. Maybe it’s time
on the left, driven by young people. Many you had a little chat with my partner.”
had put their hopes in Obama, and con-
cluded that if he could not marshal po-
litical parties to act then nobody could.
• •
Between 2013 and 2017, the median age
of members of the Democratic Social- “This idea of purity, and you’re never portunity to have the focus and be in
ists of America dropped from sixty-eight compromised, and you’re always polit- focus for the rest of the country. There’s
to thirty-three. Many others expressed ically woke, and all that stuff, you should an incredible group of talented, newer,
a desire for a socialism that was closer get over that quickly,” he said. younger people.” Ben Rhodes, an ad-
to the New Deal. In 2019, Greta Thun- Biden has expressed frustration with viser to Obama in the White House,
berg, the Swedish teen-ager who in- young people’s tepid participation in said, “It’s actually a really powerful idea.
spired a global climate strike, told the elections. Last year, he griped that, as It says, ‘I’m a seventy-seven-year-old
United Nations, “Change is coming, Trump won in 2016, “they sat home, white man, who was a senator for thirty
whether you like it or not.” didn’t get involved.” Yet, when we spoke years, and I understand both those lim-
When I asked Obama about the recently, he took pains to sound more itations and the nature of this country.’
tensions in the Party, he cast them as conciliatory. “This generation has really Because, no matter what he does, he
features of “the traditional Democratic been screwed,” he said. “These were re- cannot completely understand the frus-
idea.” He said, “You have a big-tent party. ally the most open, the least prejudiced, tration of people in the streets. That’s
And that means that you tolerate, lis- the brightest, the best-educated gener- not a criticism. It’s just a reality.” A se-
ten to, and embrace folks who are differ- ation in American history. And what’s nior Obama Administration official ob-
ent than you, and try to get them in the happening? They end up with 9/11, they served that Biden’s acknowledgment
fold. And so you work with not just lib- end up with a war, they end up with the also contained a subtler message: “This
eral Democrats, but you work with con- Great Recession, and then they end up country needs to just chill the fuck out
servative Democrats—and you are will- with this. This generation deserves help and have a boring President.”
ing to compromise on issues.” That was in the middle of this crisis.” To Varshini Prakash, a twenty-seven-
a gentle jab at Democrats who see com- In the spring, Biden began describ- year-old co-founder of the Sunrise Move-
promise as a failing. In comments last ing himself as a “transition candidate,” ment, an organization that presses for
year, Obama bemoaned the emergence explaining, “We have not given a bench action on climate change, Biden recog-
of a “circular firing squad” in the Party. to younger people in the Party, the op- nized the urgency of showing more than
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 35
 way back from golf, that he was sad­
dened, and that “Melania and I send our
prayers to he and his family.”
In the Presidential race, the upheav­
als of 2020 have afforded Trump abun­
dant opportunities to look racist and
inept, while sparing Biden, a famously
loose­lipped campaigner, the risks of
slogging through a full schedule. His
aides disputed suggestions that they
have been purposely allowing Trump
to hog the spotlight, but, in May, Biden
said frankly, “The more he talks, the
better off I am.”
Reticence has never been Biden’s de­
fault mode. Even in Washington, the
windbag Mecca, he distinguished himself.
When Obama, newly elected to the Sen­
ate, heard Biden hold forth in a meet­
ing of the Foreign Relations Committee,
he passed an aide a three­word note:
“Shoot. Me. Now.” A former longtime
staffer recalled that he learned to flex
“And no matter how many times they got it redelivered his knees during the boss’s speeches to
they were never home to receive the package.” avoid fainting. Biden knows his repu­
tation and sometimes jokes about it.
When his microphone once malfunc­
• • tioned during a television interview, he
said, “They do this to me at the White
rhetorical interest in the young left. “You state, a century and a half ago. Like oth­ House all the time.”
have a Presidential candidate who essen­ ers, Biden had challenged Republicans Biden’s conspicuous appetite for
tially staked his career on advocating in­ to honor Lewis by restoring the Voting human connection was likely a big fac­
cremental solutions,” she told me. “Then Rights Act—to “protect the sacred right tor in his primary victory. Pete Butti­
he finds himself at this moment where to vote that he was willing to die for,” as gieg, one of his opponents, observed
people are fed up with much of the status Biden put it. The law had served as a Biden backstage before a debate. “Some
quo he represents—an economic system check on racial discrimination at the polls candidates would be talking to each
that has reigned supreme for forty years, from 1965 to 2013, when the Supreme other,” he told me. “Some candidates
that he was part of advocating for, but Court ruled that conditions no longer would be talking almost to themselves.”
also health, climate, gun violence, immi­ required it. Since then, Republicans in But Biden was kibbitzing with the stage­
gration. All of these have reached a fever many states have expanded efforts to bar hands or trying to buck up the new­
pitch. I think COVID­19 was the moment voters through specious requirements; in comer candidates. “I think any human
that pushed it over the edge, where he rec­ the Senate, McConnell has blocked bills being who’s around is somebody that
ognized if he doesn’t have a way to meet seeking to restore the act. he’s equally happy to engage and talk
his incrementalism with the level of trans­ In the preceding days, Lewis’s casket to and listen to,” Buttigieg said.
formative change that people are crying had retraced an arc of the Black freedom Biden vacillates between embrac­
out for, he’s going to be in deep trouble.” struggle, beginning in his home town of ing the image of a kindly grandfather
Troy, Alabama, crossing the Edmund and bridling at it. When, in 2015, the
or the ride to Lewis’s memorial, Biden Pettus Bridge, in Selma, and stopping at late­night host Stephen Colbert referred
F boarded an armored black S.U.V. He
had changed from campaign­from­home
the newly christened Black Lives Mat­
ter Plaza, near the White House. At the
to him on the air as a “nice old man,”
Biden called him the next day, Colbert
attire into mourning clothes—a crisp Capitol, Biden laid his hand on the cas­ told me: “He goes, ‘Listen, buddy, you
white shirt, dark suit and tie, and black ket and made the sign of the cross. call me a nice old man one more time
mask. At the Capitol Rotunda, he and Trump, for his part, had skipped the and I will personally come down there
Jill were met by Nancy Pelosi, whom memorial. Lewis once declared that he and kick your ass.’ I laughed, and he
they hadn’t seen since the lockdowns was not a “legitimate President,” to which laughed. I said, ‘Don’t worry. I won’t call
began. They huddled in conversation, Trump responded, in an unsubtle slur, you a nice old man, because clearly you’re
and then the Bidens approached Lew­ that Lewis’s congressional district was not that nice.’ ”
is’s flag­draped casket, which rested on “crime infested.” Under pressure to say In truth, Biden’s effusiveness has al­
the spot where Abraham Lincoln lay in something, Trump had tweeted, on the ways disguised a prickly side. Among
36 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020
staff, he is known for giving support to Joe Biden that will talk at you because Northwestern University who grew up
talented people without connections, he thinks he has enough words and ex- near Wilmington and has written about
but he can also be curt and demanding, pertise to muscle through any situation?” its racial politics, describes the city as sus-
leaving the menial work of fund-rais- pended between North and South—
ing to others. He sometimes lavishes n the usual telling, Joseph Robinette closer to New York City than to Raleigh,
more gratitude on strangers who want
selfies than on aides who have spent
I Biden, Jr., is a product of the Silent
Generation, the cohort of cautious
but still so segregated that African dip-
lomats, driving through on the way to
years keeping him in office. Jeff Con- Americans born between the Great De- Washington, were sometimes denied ser-
naughton, a disenchanted former aide, pression and the end of the Second vice at rest stops. “There’s probably a met-
once called Biden an “egomaniacal au- World War, who were too young to have aphorical lesson in the fact that Biden
tocrat.” But Connaughton, who became fought overseas and too old to lead the hails from a place that has this mythical
a lobbyist, also admired Biden’s con- counterculture. To be born in America reputation as a middle-ground state,”
tempt for the corrupting glad-handing in 1942 as a white heterosexual male was, Gadsden told me. “It’s emblematic of a
of Washington. “Biden never lifted a generally speaking, to win a cosmic lot- kind of imagined center.”
finger for me or for one of my clients,” tery. Because of low birth rates during Biden played bit parts in protests
he wrote, in his book, “The Payoff.”“Un- the Depression and the war, the gener- against segregation, including walking
like most of Congress, he hardly ever ation was exceptionally small—the first out of a Wilmington diner that refused
schmoozed with the Permanent Class. in American history to be smaller than to serve a Black classmate in 1961 and
He did the best he could to stay as far the one before it. Its members enjoyed picketing the segregated Rialto movie
away from it as possible.” more attention and resources from their theatre the following year. Later, he some-
For all his longevity in Washington, parents, smaller class sizes, and high rates times exaggerated his role (“I marched”),
Biden has never quite belonged to the of college admission. The New Deal and but in 2013, during a ceremony commem-
technocratic élite. To the dominant Dem- the G.I. Bill gave them benefits, loans, orating the march in Selma, Biden ex-
ocrats—the Clinton and Obama circles— and federal work programs, which thrust pressed remorse that he had not done
he was too mawkish with the Scranton millions of white Americans into the more. “I was involved in my state, in a
Joe routine, too transparent in his ambi- middle class. The sociologist Elwood small way, which was still fighting the
tion. Biden is the first Democratic nom- Carlson, assessing their fortunes in his lingering vestiges of Jim Crow,” Biden
inee without an Ivy League degree since book “The Lucky Few,” described an told the audience, “but I regret and, al-
Walter Mondale, in 1984. In a milieu of age when American companies expanded though it’s not part of what I’m supposed
Rhodes Scholars and former professors, workforces, built pensions, and distrib- to say, apologize. It took me forty-eight
he is thin-skinned about condescension, uted stock—a combination that pro- years to get here. I should’ve been here.”
real and imagined. When Obama chose duced “the financially luckiest genera- He attended, barely, Syracuse Uni-
him as his running mate, he said, “I want tion of the twentieth century.” versity’s law school, where he had to re-
your point of view, Joe. I just want it in Their advantages shaped their ideas peat a course because he failed to prop-
ten-minute increments, not sixty-min- about government, money, race, and op- erly footnote a paper in his first year. (He
ute increments.” Biden chafed, telling portunity. They were a homogeneous lot; claimed to have skipped so many classes
David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, nearly nine out of ten were white and that he didn’t know the rules.) He met
“I still think I’d be the best President.” born in the United States. They tended, Neilia Hunter, an English major, and, in
But, after a year of observing Obama, as Carlson put it, to “view their successes the solemn prose of his memoir, “Prom-
Biden told Axelrod that he had been mis- in life as their own achievements, rather ises to Keep,” “I fell ass over tin cup in
taken: “The right guy won, and I’m just than thinking in terms of the social con- love.” They married, Biden became a
really proud to be associated with him.” text that made their success possible.” In public defender, and, in 1972, after a short
Biden’s insecurities fed a certain open- politics, their right wing included “the stint on a county council, he made an
ness and vulnerability. Even after de- most conservative Republicans of any audacious run for the U.S. Senate. He
cades in national office, he talked to generation in the twentieth century.” was an underdog, polling thirty points
anyone in reach, partly because he was Biden fit the mold in some respects behind J. Caleb Boggs, a low-energy in-
trawling for what others knew and he and defied it in others. The eldest of four cumbent. Biden, twenty-nine years old,
did not. The senior Obama Adminis- siblings, he was ten when his father, out played up his youth, campaigning with
tration official, who periodically briefed of a job, moved the family to Delaware, his photogenic family and publishing
Biden, recalled, “He would talk for ninety where he cleaned boilers and sold used ads with the tagline “He understands
per cent of the conversation. And yet cars. Joe was a middling but popular stu- what’s happening today.”The Wilming-
he always picked something up. At the dent at Archmere Academy, a private day ton Evening Journal observed that vot-
end, we’d get up and walk out, and he’d school; to defray his tuition, he worked ers his age “get that ‘new hero’ look when
clap me on the back: ‘Great talk.’ And on a grounds crew. While at the Univer- Biden raps about how the old guard has
I’d be a bit dazed.” The official added, sity of Delaware, he played football and bungled things.” He won, by just three
“So the question is which Joe Biden worked one summer as a lifeguard at a thousand votes.
governs: The one that is sincerely open public pool, where he came to know young On the afternoon of December 18th,
and searching for the perspectives that Black men who lived in a nearby hous- a few weeks after the election, Biden’s
will help him be more effective? Or the ing project. Brett Gadsden, a historian at life came apart. Neilia was behind
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 37
the wheel of the family’s white Chevy beside his bed and rated each day from mer, white suburbanites heckled Biden
station wagon, returning with their three one to ten, to track his progress. He for his willingness to support court-
kids from buying a Christmas tree. A adopted his father’s belief that fate even- ordered busing. He became their cham-
tractor-trailer, loaded with corncobs, hit tually apportions each person, or each pion—the Democratic Party’s leading
them broadside, leaving the road littered family, a balanced ledger of fortune. anti-busing crusader. Gadsden, of North-
with campaign brochures. Neilia and “The bigger the highs,” he liked to say, western, was among the students in the
Naomi, the baby, were killed. Hunter, “the deeper the troughs.” Wilmington area who were bused to a
age two, suffered a head injury; Beau, mostly Black school over Biden’s oppo-
who was three, was hospitalized for hen Biden arrived in the Senate, sition. “Personally, I think my classmates
weeks with broken bones.
Biden, who had lived a life of almost
W in 1973, he focussed mainly on
staying there. A freshman profile in Wash-
and I benefitted greatly from the oppor-
tunity,” he told me. “It is understand-
preposterous good fortune, thought of ingtonian magazine noted, “Senator able, in a strict political sense, that Biden
suicide. In “What It Takes,” the classic Biden doesn’t believe issues make much opposed busing in the early nineteen-
study of the minds of politicians, Rich- difference in an election—personality seventies. As a matter of history, how-
ard Ben Cramer wrote of Biden’s grief and presentation are the key.” In office, ever, Biden purposefully chose to ignore
about the accident: “All of it, all of them— he was careful to avoid becoming known a long record of violations against the
all they’d done—did not matter. Gone.” as a liberal. constitutional rights of Black children.”
The press wanted a simple tale of a brave National partisan polarization was at That put him “squarely within the lib-
widower, Cramer wrote, but “Joe was so a historic low, and voters often divided eral retreat from civil rights that dates
sick of it, he could puke.” their loyalties among candidates from back to the busing backlash and runs
Biden considered resigning his Sen- multiple parties. In 1974, on the basis of through President Clinton’s politics of
ate seat, but was talked out of it by a his support of civil rights and opposi- triangulation,” he said.
Party elder, Mike Mansfield. As a single tion to the war in Vietnam, Biden re- As Biden rose in the Senate, he was
father, he took to riding the train back ceived a high rating from Americans for rebuilding his family. On a blind date,
to Delaware each night from Washing- Democratic Action, a progressive non- in 1975, he met Jill Jacobs, an aspiring
ton. Ted Kaufman, one of Biden’s clos- profit group. He complained about it. teacher from the Philadelphia suburbs.
est aides, told me, “Six months after the “Those ADA ratings get us into so much Jacobs puzzled over the man who was,
accident, he would come into the office trouble that a lot of us sit around think- as she put it, “nothing like the side-
and he would be in as bad a shape as he ing up ways to vote conservative,” he burned, bell-bottom-wearing guys I
was the day of the accident. He had one told a reporter. “When it comes to civil was used to dating.” They married in
of Neilia’s rings, and he’d put it on his rights and civil liberties, I’m a liberal, 1977. (In their White House years, Jill
little finger. If he came into the office but that’s it. I’m really quite conserva- Biden taught English at Northern Vir-
with that ring on his finger—oh, boy, tive on most other issues. My wife said ginia Community College, becoming
you knew he was really hurting.” I was the most socially conservative man the first-known sitting Second Lady to
Over the years, Biden learned tac- she had ever known.” hold a paying job.)
tics for coping. He kept a pen and pad At a community meeting that sum- Biden’s ambitions and insecurities pe-
riodically bedevilled him. Running for
President in 1987, he took to quoting the
British Labour leader Neil Kinnock,
then stopped mentioning Kinnock and
kept using the words. Reporters linked
that plagiarism—an unconscious mis-
take, he said—with his rejected paper in
law school, and, at an event, a voter
pressed him about his record. Biden
seethed. “I probably have a much higher
I.Q. than you do,” he said, bragging that
he’d received “a full academic scholar-
ship” and “ended up in the top half of
my class,” neither of which was true. His
race was over. (For years, he blamed the
loss on opposition research and an over-
zealous press. But, in 2007, when he was
running for President again, he put the
excuses aside. “The bottom line was, I
made a mistake, and it was born out of
my arrogance,” he told a reporter. “I didn’t
deserve to be president.”)
“Make sure people remember Lewis and Clark and Scherling!” In the Senate, Biden accrued a record
that, to today’s progressives, resembles I’ve always tried,” he said last year. “We lition of “people of color, young people,
the counts in an indictment. Overseeing thought we were told by the experts that and moderate to progressive whites.” In
the confirmation hearings of the Su- crack, you never go back—that it was 2008, Obama won an astonishing two-
preme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, somehow fundamentally different. It’s thirds of millennials.
he failed to insure that Anita Hill’s ac- not different. But it has trapped an en- When Obama asked Biden to join
cusations of sexual harassment were tire generation.” the ticket, some Democrats were baffled.
fairly and fully examined. He voted In “Locking Up Our Own,” a Pulit- Biden, running as a candidate in that
for the deregulation of Wall Street, the zer Prize-winning study of criminal jus- year’s primaries, had failed to crack one
Defense of Marriage Act, the North tice and racial politics, James Forman, per cent in the Iowa caucuses. But Obama
American Free Trade Agreement, the Jr., describes mass incarceration as the admired his feisty debate performance,
war in Iraq. During the primaries, Eliz- consequence of “a series of his knowledge of foreign
abeth Warren faulted him for having small decisions, made over leaders, and his connections
legislated “on the side of the credit-card time, by a disparate group in D.C. Biden was also, as
companies.” Jacobin, the socialist mag- of actors.” At bottom, they Axelrod put it to me, “cul-
azine, described him in a headline as could be traced to what turally and geographically
“the Forrest Gump of the Democratic Forman calls the “politics well situated”: he made
Party’s Rightward Turn.” of responsibility,” a theory Obama more attractive to
Nothing in Biden’s record has dogged of personal discipline, con- older working-class Mid-
him more than his role in drafting the sonant with the individ- western whites, who might
1994 crime bill, the most sweeping leg- ualism of the Silent Gen- not feel a natural connec-
islation of its kind in American history. eration and the boomers, tion to a Black former com-
The bill contributed to the problems of that was voiced regularly at munity organizer. Beneath
mass incarceration by creating a federal the top of the Democratic Party. In Bill the raw electoral calculation, Biden and
“three strikes” law, encouraging longer Clinton’s Inaugural Address in 1993, he Obama shared a basic belief that Amer-
jail terms, and granting billions of dol- vowed to “offer more opportunity to all icans craved unity in politics. Running
lars to states to build more prisons. and demand more responsibility from for President, Obama called attention to
At the time, the bill had support all.” In addition to the crime bill, the fraying social bonds. He told an audi-
from some Democrats on the left, in- politics of responsibility inspired wel- ence in 2008, “I’m talking about an em-
cluding Bernie Sanders, and from Black fare reform in 1996, which limited fed- pathy deficit, the inability to recognize
political leaders, including Representa- eral benefits for the poor, and bank- ourselves in one another, to understand
tive James E. Clyburn, of South Caro- ruptcy legislation in 2005, supported by that we are our brother’s keeper and our
lina. Clyburn had learned through diffi- Biden, which made it harder for Amer- sister’s keeper—and, in the words of
cult experience that many of his Black icans to resolve their debts. Dr. King, we are all tied together in a
constituents were less enthusiastic than When I asked Cornell William ‘single garment of destiny.’”
white liberals about criminal-justice re- Brooks, a Harvard professor, an activist, Biden’s vision was less transcendent.
form. At a town-hall meeting in 1994, and a former head of the N.A.A.C.P., “Look,” he told me, “I never expect a for-
he had voiced skepticism about an ini- to assess Biden’s record in Washington, eign leader I’m dealing with, or a col-
tiative for stricter sentences. “I got my he offered an image reminiscent of Biden’s league senator, a congressperson, to vol-
head handed to me in that meeting, and mental ledger of highs and lows. “Peo- untarily appear in the second edition of
everybody in that meeting was Black,” ple love the fact that he faithfully and ‘Profiles in Courage.’ So, you got to think
Clyburn told me recently. “Crack co- well served the nation’s first African- of what is in their interest.” And yet
caine was a scourge in the Black com- American President—and hate his lead- Biden’s accounting of political interests
munities. They wanted it out of those ership on the crime bill. They are trou- sometimes nudged him closer to pro-
communities, and they had gotten very bled by his positions on busing, but they gressives. In May, 2012, while Obama
tough on drugs. And that’s why yours measure him as a historical whole, and was weighing an endorsement of same-
truly, and other members of the Con- by the stature of his sincerity,” Brooks sex marriage, Biden beat him to it, telling
gressional Black Caucus, voted for that said. “The things which are most disqui- an interviewer that he was “absolutely
1994 crime bill.” Clyburn, like Biden, eting about Joe Biden, to the progres- comfortable” with the idea. Obama’s aides
remains proud that the bill included the sive wing of the Democratic base, are were incensed. A former Biden staffer
Violence Against Women Act, a ban the very things that are most disquiet- recalled, “We were told that his public
on assault weapons, and money for com- ing about the Democratic Party.” activities were going to be curtailed for
munity policing and drug courts. In the the week.” Many outsiders saw the mo-
fall of 1994, Republicans took control he Obama Presidency was sup- ment as a typical Biden gaffe, but White
of the House, and Clyburn faults them
for changes they instituted. “They kept
T posed to mark a new chapter in the
generational story of American politics,
House officials recognized a pattern in
Biden’s calculations. “He is very much a
all the punitive stuff and got rid of the the triumph of what Stacey Abrams, weathervane for what the center of the
good stuff,” he said. Biden has offered the voting-rights activist and former left is,” the senior Obama Administra-
similarly qualified regrets. “I know we Georgia gubernatorial candidate, calls tion official told me. “He can see, ‘O.K.,
haven’t always gotten things right, but the “new American majority”—a coa- this is where the society is moving. This
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 39
is where the Democratic Party is mov- Colbert. They had some shared experi- played on a reservoir of existing anger,
ing, so I’m going to move.’” ence: when Colbert was a child, his fa- he thought: “It didn’t just happen with
As the country recovered from the ther and two brothers died in a plane Trump. I’m not even sure Trump un-
financial crisis, Biden distributed stim- crash. Before the taping, they met alone derstands it.”
ulus funds and managed a vast array of backstage. “It was one of the most com- Many of Biden’s primary opponents—
local and state interests; later, he used pact and affecting conversations I think notably Sanders and Warren—were run-
his sway with Congress to help pass the I’ve ever had,” Colbert told me. During ning forthrightly progressive campaigns:
Affordable Care Act. At times, though, the interview, Biden talked about mourn- a Green New Deal, Medicare for All,
Democrats grew irritated by Biden’s be- ing his son, struggling to retain his com- free public college, decriminalized bor-
lief that he could manage Republican posure. Colbert, informed by his own ders. They were winning widespread sup-
leaders toward compromise. In the last experience, saw a purpose in putting port, especially among young people. By
days of 2012, Bush-era tax cuts were set that anguish in public view. “He ex- the end of this decade, millennials and
to expire, which would have raised $3.7 presses the loneliness of grief and makes Generation Z are on pace to constitute
trillion in revenue over the next decade. you feel less alone,” he told me. a majority of America’s eligible voters. In
To try to keep the tax cuts, Republicans Biden’s association with pain and re- 2018, twenty millennials were elected to
threatened to default on the U.S. debt silience at times puts him outside the Congress, including Alexandria Ocasio-
for the first time in history. Biden ne- usual bounds of retail politics. “People Cortez, a Sanders supporter and a dem-
gotiated a last-minute compromise with come up to him, and this is all they want ocratic socialist who upset a powerful
McConnell: they agreed to recoup six to talk about: ‘How do I get through moderate Democrat in the Bronx. But
hundred billion dollars of that revenue, it?’ ” Mike Donilon, his chief strategist, Biden believed that his peers had missed
while allowing some tax cuts to become said. When Biden and Obama worked a crucial lesson of the midterm elections:
permanent. Harry Reid, the Senate Ma- a rope line, Biden sometimes took so forty-three House districts had moved
jority Leader, was said to be so appalled long that aides had to re-start the sound- from Republicans to Democrats, as some
by the terms that he threw the paper- track. Reporters and operatives joked older, moderate voters recoiled from
work in a fireplace. (Reid denies this.) that this was Biden’s timeworn shtick, Trump’s party. “We won by not going
A few months later, Biden’s personal lingering too long for pictures and gab- after the opponent but after the issues un-
life changed in a way that shadowed his bing about his team, the Phillies. Peo- derlying what the opponent supported,”
remaining years in the White House. ple who have worked with him describe he told me. “They were running against
In the summer of 2013, his son Beau, it differently. “The music will be blaring, Obamacare, and all of a sudden you heard
who was the attorney general of Dela- and people will be screaming for a selfie, them say, ‘I didn’t say I was for doing
ware and a father of two, was diagnosed and some staff person will be pushing away with that.’” Biden had a chance with
as having glioblastoma, an aggressive him on, and he will just stop,” Donilon some fed-up Trump voters, according to
form of brain cancer. Father and son said. “He will sit there, and he will talk Samuel Popkin, a veteran pollster and
were unusually close; Biden sometimes to this person.” the author of “Crackup,” a forthcoming
told friends that Beau had “all of my book on the Republican Party. “Farm
best qualities and none of my worst.” n the summer of 2017, Biden was in bankruptcy is near the highest it’s been
Beau entered a gruelling regimen of sur-
gery and experimental treatments. In a
I semi-retirement, working to support
cancer research and telling anyone in
in thirty years,” Popkin said. In 2018,
Trump flew to Wisconsin, promising
highly personal book about those years, earshot that he could have beaten Trump. what he called the “eighth wonder of the
“Promise Me, Dad,” Biden recalled tell- (He had considered running in 2016, world”—a factory to be built for Fox-
ing Obama that he planned to take out but was still mourning his son’s death. conn, the Taiwanese electronics company.
a second mortgage, to cover the mount- Besides, he later recalled, with evident “Foxconn barely built anything in Wis-
ing bills. “Don’t do that,” Obama said. pique, Obama was “convinced I could consin,” Popkin said.
“I’ll give you the money. I have it. You not beat Hillary.”) In planning his campaign, Biden fo-
can pay me back whenever.” (Biden never That August, after white suprema- cussed on reforms that stopped well
took him up on it.) On May 30, 2015, cists carried torches through Charlottes- short of revolution. Instead of Medi-
Beau died, at the age of forty-six. In his ville, Virginia, Biden watched as Trump care for All, he wanted to augment Oba-
diary, Biden wrote, “It happened. My spoke approvingly of the “very fine peo- macare, by lowering the Medicare eli-
God, my boy. My beautiful boy.” ple” on both sides. “I thought, Holy gibility age from sixty-five to sixty, and
For years after the car crash, Biden God, this guy is going to be so much adding a “public option”—an idea that
had talked about it only occasionally; worse than I thought he was,” Biden was considered radical a decade ago but
he worried how people would respond, told me. He read “How Democracies conservative by the new standards. His
and vulnerability clashed with the bluff Die,” by the Harvard political scien- campaign cited polls showing that a
style of his generation. Now aides saw tists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Zi- majority of potential Democratic-
a change. “The whole Beau experience blatt, and heard echoes of it in the head- primary voters identified as moderate
just killed off the arrogant stuff,” a for- lines. “Look what’s being done. Look or conservative, and more than half were
mer colleague told me. what’s being said. Not just by him but over the age of fifty. “The young left is
In the fall of 2015, Biden went on by his followers and some of his elected important,” Anita Dunn, a top Biden
“The Late Show,” hosted by Stephen colleagues,” Biden said. Trump’s actions adviser, told me. “But so are older white
40 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020
 he said on MSNBC. Some Democrats
remained unsatisfied. Biden was seek-
SEPTEMBER FIRST AGAIN ing to be the standard-bearer of a party
in which rising progressives disdained
Blighted light at the tip not only sex abuse and harassment but
Of a branch, why so early also the imbalances of power that had
Do you turn?—leaf enabled the problems to persist.
Dipped in vermillion, Biden began the race as the front-run-
Close to the end, you point ner, but he seemed unfocussed and out
To a sidewalk wet of step. During a debate, he botched an
Once with names invitation to text the campaign at “30330”
Signed in cement to seal, and instead declared, perplexingly, “Go
For all time, a vow to Joe 30330.” Rather than eliciting do-
Uttered by two nations, it generated a night of Twitter
Standing under the crown memes, such as “How do you do, fellow
Of a tree you cleave to still, kids?” In debates, he rarely fought back
For now: solitary witness and sometimes yielded the floor with the
Standing alone, limbs unfortunate phrase “My time is up.” Do-
Crisscrossing in shadows nors backed away. By February, Biden’s
Beginning to scrawl campaign was spending less money in a
Lines to a world hell- month than Michael Bloomberg’s spent
Bent (with or without intent) on an average day. Kate Bedingfield, the
On obscuring campaign’s communications director,
Whatever they meant. struggled to draw attention to Biden’s
Blighted light policy ideas. “I say the word ‘achievable,’
At the topmost bough, and it gets derided as ‘That’s not ambi-
Little flag hailing tious,’ ” she told me.
Another day, do not go At times, Biden’s disconnect looked
So early to ruin, green, deeper than his wobbly debate perfor-
Do not turn so soon. mances or his disinterest in social media.
At a fund-raiser in June, 2019, he teed
—Phillis Levin up an anecdote he had told for years
about working with the segregationist
senators Herman Talmadge, of Georgia,
people above the age of sixty-five, be- legations.) But, Flores said, Biden’s hab- and James Eastland, of Mississippi. “We
cause they actually gave the election to its showed “a lack of empathy for the didn’t agree on much of anything,” Biden
Donald Trump last time.” women and young girls whose space he said. “We got things done. We got it
In the spring of 2019, just before Biden is invading.” Biden, who had prided him- finished. But today you look at the other
announced his candidacy, he ran head- self on his tactile approach to retail pol- side and you’re the enemy.” Biden added
long into his past—and the widening itics, responded in a statement that “not that Eastland “never called me ‘boy.’ He
gap in sensibilities between generations. once—never—did I believe I acted in- always called me ‘son.’”
Lucy Flores, a former Nevada state leg- appropriately. If it is suggested I did so, One of his rivals, Senator Cory
islator, published an account of a public I will listen respectfully. But it was never Booker, of New Jersey, issued an im-
encounter with him at a 2014 rally in Las my intention.” mediate condemnation: “You don’t joke
Vegas. He had smelled her hair, held her At least six women added similar about calling Black men ‘boys.’” Booker
shoulders, and given her “a big slow kiss complaints. But others came forward to told me that what frustrated him was
on the back of my head,” she wrote. For defend him, arguing that banishing not that Biden had worked with seg-
years, journalists had written about Biden from a race against Trump, who regationists. “I work with people across
Biden’s uninvited displays of affection— bragged of grabbing women’s genitals, the aisle who have beliefs that are offen-
bumping foreheads with women (and would be an act of misguided absolut- sive and that defend Confederate mon-
sometimes men), rubbing noses, whis- ism. Issues of gender flared again later uments,” he said. The problem was glibly
pering awkwardly in people’s ears. Flores, in the campaign, after Tara Reade, a for- boasting about it. “I did not, at that
a Democrat, described feeling “anger” mer Senate staffer, accused Biden of point, believe that Joe Biden under-
and “resentment.” She did not consider sexually assaulting her twenty-seven stood that when people like my father
Biden’s behavior sexual—she has distin- years earlier. She said that he pinned were called ‘boy’ at work that that would
guished it from the allegations of assault her to the wall in a Senate hallway, be so humiliating to them,” Booker said.
and misconduct that more than twenty groped her, and penetrated her with his He admires Biden, which made it worse,
women have made against Trump in re- fingers. Biden emphatically denied the he told me: “It was just one of those
cent years. (Trump has denied these al- accusation. “It never, never happened,” moments that many Black people feel,
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 41
where you’re just, like, ‘You?’ ” Booker threes. This ain’t the Father, Son, and the that they scrambled to support Biden.
was walking out of a CNN studio when Holy Ghost. This is about ‘you, your fam- But Biden had also prevailed by reject-
Biden called to apologize. “He was will- ily, and your community.’” ing tribalism; even as his rivals said that
ing to show me a great degree of vul- His urgency reflected an unapolo- he was too old, too conciliatory, and too
nerability and to put his imperfections getic pragmatism. Biden might not ex- tainted by his record, he resisted respond-
on the table,” Booker recalled. “I’ve been cite people in New York or Silicon Val- ing with attack ads. His advisers believed
in politics a long time—I know when ley, but in South Carolina, where a white that Biden could prevail over the “doubt
I’m being worked over. I’ve watched supremacist had massacred Black pa- in the chattering class,” Bedingfield said.
him change and be willing to wrestle rishioners just after Trump announced “We’re not going to spend all day trying
with this.” his candidacy, the spectre of four more to win the latest Twitter war.”
Biden finished a distant fourth in years of Trump was graver than any pol-
Iowa, and fifth in New Hampshire. icy dispute. On February 26th, Clyburn n June 1st, a week after the mur-
The campaign was assessing how much
money it would need in order to pay
supplied an emotional endorsement: “I’m
fearful for my daughters and their fu-
O der of George Floyd, I walked
downtown from my home in D.C. to a
staffers if it shut down. Biden turned ture, and their children, and their chil- protest in front of the White House.
over his senior staff, promoting Dunn dren’s future.” With Biden at his side, After a few nights of unrest in Wash-
to the top of the campaign, and an- he said, “We know Joe. But, most im- ington, the scene had settled into a sit-in.
nounced a promise to put the first Black portantly, Joe knows us.” Protesters took turns at a bullhorn.
woman on the Supreme Court. His polls Biden won South Carolina by twenty- Among the homemade signs, I no-
barely budged. If he had any hope of nine points. With astonishing speed, his ticed a strikingly skillful painting of Floyd.
staying in the race, it would come down rivals dropped out and endorsed him. It was in the hands of Kandyce Baker, a
to South Carolina, where Black voters There were huge surges in turnout (up thirty-one-year-old university adminis-
make up roughly sixty per cent of the by nearly fifty per cent in Texas and a trator who had come to the rally from
Democratic-primary electorate. hundred per cent in Virginia), including her home, in Frederick, Maryland. “I had
No one mattered more to that pro- many college-educated suburban inde- to do something,” she told me. Baker
cess than James Clyburn, the highest- pendents and Republicans who had once had been especially shaken by the death
ranking African-American in Congress supported candidates like Mitt Romney. of Ahmaud Arbery, who in February
and the godfather of South Carolina On Super Tuesday, Biden won ten out was tailed by three white men and shot
Democrats. During the civil-rights move- of fourteen states. Sanders stayed in awhile to death while he jogged in a suburb
ment, he and John Lewis had helped longer, but the race was effectively over. in south Georgia. As a marathoner and
found the Student Nonviolent Coordi- In barely three days, Biden had gone a Black woman, Baker had often run
nating Committee. Clyburn holds some from the edge of oblivion to victory. He through neighborhoods where she felt
distinctly progressive positions, on alle- had received help not only from Cly- unwelcome. I asked her about Presiden-
viating poverty and expanding commu- burn but also from Warren, who swiftly tial politics. “Unfortunately, I will be vot-
nity health centers, but he believes in dispatched Bloomberg, denouncing his ing for Biden,” she said. “Bernie Sanders
hewing to the center. When his centrism derogatory comments about women. Yet was my candidate.” She went on, “I don’t
leaves younger Black activists Ron Klain, one of Biden’s have faith that Joe Biden is going to have
unsatisfied—as happened closest advisers, said that it Black issues at the forefront. I don’t feel
recently, after he tweeted “no is wrong to suggest that the like he’s going to have millennial issues
to defunding the police”— turnaround was a fluke— at the forefront when it comes to stu-
Clyburn points to a display “like he somehow lucked dent-loan debt. So I’m nervous.”
of hundreds of turtle sculp- into all this.” When Biden For Biden, a rejection by young Black
tures in his office, represent- declined to savage his de- and Latino voters could be a disaster.
ing a belief in slow and bate opponents, it was “stra- When Hillary Clinton ran in 2016, Black
steady progress. tegic,” Klain said. “If the turnout declined for the first time in
Less than a week before only way to get the nomi- two decades; in some places, such as
the primary, Clyburn and nation was to destroy all Milwaukee, the drop-off proved criti-
Biden were at a reception these other people, he was cal. “I’m going to vote for him because
aboard the U.S.S. Yorktown, a retired air- going to inherit a party that wasn’t going I can’t have Trump in office,” Baker said.
craft carrier docked near Charleston. to win anyway.” “That’s literally the only reason.”
Biden had slid to second place, far behind A less soaring telling of the primary A few hours after I met Baker,
Sanders. Clyburn ushered him into a pri- is that Biden benefitted from fear of both the intersection where we talked was
vate room and advised him, bluntly, that Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Once swarmed by police wielding batons and
he needed to tighten up. “Your speeches it became clear that Biden was in a tear gas; they were there to sweep away
are senatorial,” he said. “That’s not the two-person race, the prospect of nomi- protesters, so that Trump could walk
way you win an election.” He continued, nating Sanders was so unappealing to over from the White House and pose
“You got to look at this the way my fa- moderates—including some fellow-can- with a Bible in front of St. John’s Epis-
ther, the fundamentalist preacher, did on didates, older Black voters in places like copal Church. It was a pageant so
Sunday mornings. He always did it in South Carolina, and big-money donors— roundly condemned that General Mark
42 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020
Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, publicly apologized for his pres-
ence. Within days, the N.F.L. reversed
its position on kneeling during the na-
tional anthem. Booksellers across the
country were swamped with orders for
books about racism and Black history.
Mississippi stripped the Confederate
symbol from its flag.
Biden seized the moment. In a speech
on July 4th, he urged listeners to “rip
the roots” of “systemic racism” out of
American life. He joined the calls for
banning police choke holds, adopting a
national standard for the use of force,
and narrowing “qualified immunity,” the
legal shield that protects public officials
against federal civil-rights suits. Biden’s
moves thrilled progressives but incensed
some police. For years, he’d maintained
cozy relations with the National Asso-
ciation of Police Organizations; now its
executive director, Bill Johnson, lamented
that he “used to be a stand-up guy.”
Biden leapt ahead in the polls, but,
as ever, he was wary of tilting too far to
the left. As long as Trump was inflam-
ing liberals by running an openly rac-
ist campaign, Biden was not going to
risk turning off moderate voters. Trump
was already broadcasting a commercial
that featured a ringing phone in a dark,
empty police station. The narrator said,
“If you’re calling to report a rape, please
press one.” The ad ended with Trump’s
new tagline: “You won’t be safe in Joe
• •
Biden’s America.”
Like most establishment Democrats, age of traditional policing,” Kennedy said. tured by cell phones. Lifting his phone
Biden rejected “defunding” police, a broad When I spoke with Biden about the from the arm of the chair, he said, “This
term for proposals that range from abol- prospects for real change—to incarcer- phone has changed a lot of things. Watch-
ishing departments to moving money ation, policing, and entrenched racism— ing Floyd’s face pinned against that curb
toward mental health, education, and so- he offered an analogy to the civil-rights and his nose being crushed, I mean, the
cial services. He said, however, that po- era, and the iconically cruel police boss vividness of it was, like, ‘Holy God. That
lice should receive federal funding only of Birmingham. “When I was a kid in still happens today?’ ”
if they met “basic standards of decency high school, Bull Connor sics his dogs Biden said that the year’s events had
and honorableness,” and he proposed on those elderly Black women going to dismantled a myth deeply embedded in
spending three hundred million dollars church in their Sunday dress, and on lit- his consciousness. For years, he’d been
to reinvigorate a decades-old idea of tle kids, with fire hoses, literally ripping telling a parable about the morning of
“community policing.” David Kennedy, their skin off,” he said. “He thought he Obama’s Inauguration: “I called my two
a professor at John Jay College of Crim- was driving a wooden stake into the heart sons and my daughter up, and I said,
inal Justice, told me that he hopes Biden of the civil-rights movement.” Instead, ‘Guys, don’t tell me things can’t change.’ ”
adopts a newer approach to violence pre- images of the violence consolidated sup- Hunching forward in his seat, he told
vention, focussing not on communities port behind Martin Luther King, Jr., and me that Trump had made a mockery of
but on small numbers of individuals at forced white leaders in Washington to that parable. “I’m embarrassed to say, I
the highest risk of being involved in gun take steps that led to the Voting Rights thought you could defeat hate. You can’t.
violence. Such a program, applied na- Act of 1965. In Biden’s telling, white peo- It only hides,” he said. “It crawls under
tionally, “could cut in half the gun vio- ple in America were now experiencing the rocks, and, when given oxygen by
lence that devastates America’s minority a similar awakening, prompted by the any person in authority, it comes roar-
communities, without doing the dam- horrific images of police violence cap- ing back out. And what I realized is, the
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 43
 Members included Varshini Prakash, of
the Sunrise Movement, which during the
primary had graded Biden’s climate plan
an F. At the first meeting, Kerry asked
Prakash to speak first. The Sanders con-
tingent wanted all-clean electricity by
2030; they were happy to settle for 2035.
The biggest unresolved point of conten-
tion was fracking. “It’s not like I walked
out of there with Bernie’s Green New
Deal in hand, and I did not expect to,”
Prakash said. “But it was a lot more collab-
orative, actually, than I was anticipating.”
Sean McElwee, an influential activ-
ist who co-founded the nonprofit think
tank Data for Progress, criticized Biden
fiercely at the outset of the campaign.
He told me recently that his view had
changed. “I think a lot of people who
just shit on the Democratic Party haven’t
spent a lot of time talking to mainstream
actors within the Democratic Party eco-
system,” he said. “The reality is, that
ecosystem is very liberal.” He contin-
ued, “I think people should just take a
step back and look at what Biden has
done. A.O.C. is someone I like a lot.
She said that she wouldn’t vote for him
“They’re the expensive, noise-cancelling kind, so you can finally sleep in.” in the primary, and that in a different
country she would be in a different party
• • from him. And he could have responded
to that by being, like, ‘Fuck you.’ But in-
stead he responded to that by being,
words of a President, even a lousy Pres- tally change,” Biden said that America like, ‘How about you come in and write
ident, matter. They can take you to war, was due for “some revolutionary insti- my climate policy?’ ”
they can bring peace, they can make the tutional changes.”
market rise, they can make it fall. But Once Biden secured the nomination, n a weekday afternoon in late July,
they can also give hate oxygen.” Sanders endorsed him—moving far more
quickly than he had in 2016. “I have a
O Biden was at a preschool in New
Castle, Delaware, preparing to talk about
n the usual course of a Presidential better relationship with Joe Biden than economics. Schools had been closed for
I campaign, a Democrat leans left
during the primary and then marches
I had with Hillary Clinton,” Sanders ex-
plained, candidly. To unify their plat-
months, because of the virus; on the play-
ground, the swings were coiled out of
right in the general election. Biden went forms, Biden and Sanders set up task reach. Inside, Biden was holding a sim-
the opposite direction. Exit polls had forces on criminal justice, economics, ed- ulacrum of a campaign event that resem-
revealed a stark warning: even in states ucation, health care, immigration, and bled a scene from an avant-garde play:
where he prevailed, many voters pre- climate change. The task forces were a no crowds, no rope lines, just a scatter-
ferred the more ambitious plans, from crucial test of whether the left and cen- ing of reporters, each of us masked and
Sanders and Warren, on issues like the ter factions of the Party could get along. marooned in a white cardboard ring. The
economy and health care. Both sides were wary. Biden told me, “I P.A. system was playing Alicia Keys and
Within weeks, Biden had picked up had to be sure that Bernie was serious, Beyoncé to a silent, huddled assemblage.
Warren’s plan to ease student debt and that he wasn’t going to make this an ideo- The economic shutdown had pro-
overhaul the bankruptcy system—which logical jihad. I said, ‘Bernie, if you want duced what Jerome Powell, the chair-
entailed repealing parts of a law he these set up in order for me to insist that man of the Federal Reserve, called a
helped pass. He embraced a limited ver- I be for Medicare for All . . . this is not “level of pain that is hard to capture in
sion of Sanders’s plan for tuition-free where it’s going to go.’ But I said, ‘I’m words.” Forty per cent of the low-in-
college, and dropped his opposition to open, I hear you, I’m ready to listen.’” come Americans who had jobs in Feb-
federal funding for abortions. Almost Biden recruited Ocasio-Cortez to ruary lost them in March and early April.
precisely a year after assuring skittish chair the climate task force, alongside Twelve years after the financial crisis,
voters that “nothing would fundamen- former Secretary of State John Kerry. the virus had again exploded corporate
44 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020
America’s mythology of self-reliance. “It’s not going to require legislation. I’m The prospect of unity helped lift
Some of the largest payments in a con- not proposing any.” When we spoke, I Obama into the White House. But the
gressional rescue package intended for asked what he meant. No legislation? valence of the concept has changed.
small businesses went instead to the “That is really shorthand,” Biden said. “Obama raised people’s expectations,”
financial sector. Millions of dollars in As he explained it, America’s corporate Michael Kazin, a historian and the co-ed-
emergency cash went to “family offices,” establishment has acknowledged the itor of the leftist quarterly Dissent, told
the personal investment companies that need for fundamental changes. He cited me. “People on the left—to use this too-
manage fortunes for hedge-fund bil- the Business Roundtable, a group of cor- aggregated term—would say, ‘We like
lionaires and other wealthy individuals. porate C.E.O.s, which last year an- what he promised to do, but he didn’t
Biden stepped to the lectern to an- nounced a shift away from the dominant follow through.’ The question is how
nounce a $775-billion investment in the focus on shareholder value. He said, “All much was his fault, how much was struc-
caregiving economy, providing funds for those people understood that they are tural impediments, and how much was
universal preschool, in-home care for the eating their own seed corn.” the timing and what he had to do to save
elderly, and paid family leave, of the sort Nevertheless, he told me that he the economy.” Kazin went on, “Some of it
that is routine in other developed na- would push for legislation: a measure, is because he believed in bipartisanship.
tions. The plan clearly targeted the needs proposed by Warren, to forbid compa- He thought too much of his own abili-
of Americans who strain to balance work nies to use excess revenues to purchase ties, I think, to persuade people on the
with caring for children and, often, aging their own stock, rather than to invest in basis of his personality and his rhetoric.”
parents. “I was a single parent for five wage increases or in research. Biden said, When I spoke to Obama, he was at
years,” Biden told the reporters. “Even “I’ve been talking with a bunch of my his house on Martha’s Vineyard, labor-
though I had a lot more support than a economists, saying, ‘What are the types ing over his Presidential memoir. He
lot of people going through tough times of legislation that require greater cor- endorsed Biden soon after Sanders
today, it was hard.” The plan, he said, porate responsibility?’That has to occur.” dropped out, and has played a surgical
was “a moral and economic imperative.” I sensed that Biden was straining to public role in the campaign—appearing
It would be funded partly by rolling say as little as possible about his economic alongside the candidate in a video con-
back Trump-era tax breaks for real-estate vision, which could be less a matter of versation and at a fund-raiser. He and
investors. Ai-jen Poo, who leads the tactical evasion than of ideological un- Biden speak frequently by phone, though
National Domestic Workers Alliance, certainty. Biden is more than sentimen- they don’t draw much attention to those
tweeted that Biden’s proposal marked tally attached to the working class, and exchanges. Trump, after all, would love
the first time in twenty years that a Pres- he is embracing some leftist technocratic to portray a Biden Administration as a
idential candidate had made “investments fixes that would help it. But he gives no covert restoration of the Obama years.
in the care economy a core strategy in indication that he is preparing for a bit- I asked Obama about young people
their economic agenda. Not a side issue, ter, costly fight to overturn the primacy who are dismayed that the Democratic
an add-on, or a special interest.” A Trump- of the corporate establishment. As Mau- establishment has not achieved greater
campaign spokesman responded to the rice Mitchell, of the Working Families progress. He raised the example of health
proposal by saying that it would “remake Party, put it, “We’ve already put trillions care. “Joe and I were both painfully aware
America with socialist policies.” of some of the constraints and limita-
The caregiving plan was the latest tions,” he said. “But it’s what we could
in a series of speeches in which Biden get done then, and twenty-plus million
had called for sweeping economic people got health insurance. Missouri
changes. He planned to spend seven just expanded Medicaid, so maybe that’s
hundred billion dollars on American several hundred thousand more. And
products and research, to create jobs now you have an opportunity to make
around electric cars, artificial intel- it that much better. So I think one re-
ligence, and other technologies, with- sponse to the younger generation is, Yes,
out the tariffs and the xenophobia of you should push harder! Because that’s
Trump’s “America First” policy. He had of dollars into the economy with bailout how progress happens.”
announced a two-trillion-dollar clean- after bailout. Are we propping up sys- Obama is touchy about suggestions
energy and infrastructure plan that tems that have brought us here?” that his Administration was too willing
would eliminate carbon emissions from to compromise. “My legislative agenda,
power plants by 2035. s Trump sank in the polls, Biden Joe’s legislative agenda, was at least as
For all of Biden’s Rooseveltian zeal,
it was unclear how far he would go on
A reached numbers unmatched by
any challenger to an incumbent since
bold and aggressive as many of the young
people’s agendas right now,” he said. “If
the explosive issues of wealth, taxes, and the advent of modern polling. Demo- you asked Joe and I what regrets we
corporate exploitation. At a fund-raiser crats weighed what would happen if might have, or what lessons we learned
in July, hosted by investors and execu- they won. Biden said that he was seek- from my Administration, it’s not that
tives, Biden said, “Corporate America ing to “unify the nation.” But what could we were insufficiently bold in what we
has to change its ways.” Then he added that mean? Is the pursuit of unity just proposed. It’s that we continued to be-
a comment that inflamed progressives: a recipe for paralysis? lieve in the capacity of Republicans in
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 45
Congress to play by the rules, and to be of congressional harmony, many younger Some analysts believe that Biden’s
willing to negotiate and compromise.” Americans think that he sounds de- reputation as a centrist could make it
When Obama ran for reëlection, in luded—or, worse, unwilling to join diffi- easier for him to achieve changes that
2012, he hoped that a victory would lead cult fights. He was mocked last year for might seem more threatening coming
to a more amenable Congress. “The fever suggesting that members of Congress from a doctrinaire progressive. In McEl-
may break,” he said at the time, “because would undergo an “epiphany” after wee’s research, swing voters are more
there’s a tradition in the Republican Party Trump was gone. To his mind, though, likely to support climate-change action
of more common sense than that.” That the prospects for bipartisanship hinge if it is framed as a way to create good
hope is long gone. “When I speak to on the margin of victory. “If we win, and jobs and to bring down energy costs.
young people, I say to them, Look, our we pick up five or six Senate seats, I Mike Donilon, who has advised Biden
climate proposals were very aggressive— think there will be an epiphany,” he told on and off for thirty years, told me that
we just couldn’t get them passed,” he told me, “because all you need then is three, Biden believes people in Washington
me. “And the reason we couldn’t get them or four, or five Republicans who have often negotiate in precisely the wrong
passed was not because lobbyists and seen the light a little bit.” He went on, way: “Everyone immediately goes to the
corporate donors were whispering in our “I don’t think you can underestimate bottom-line absolute toughest moment
ears! The reason we couldn’t pass them the impact of Trump not being there. in the negotiation. They’re, like, ‘We’ve
was because we didn’t have sixty votes in The vindictiveness, the pettiness, the got to solve this before we solve anything
the Senate. And the same is true for get- willingness to, at his own expense, go else.’ So you don’t solve that—and you
ting a public option on health care, and after people with vendettas, like you saw don’t solve anything else.” He said, “It
getting immigration reform passed.” with Sessions”—Jeff Sessions, the for- doesn’t mean we compromise on prin-
Obama went on, “Through its actions, mer Attorney General, whom Trump ciples, but you’ve got to at least see them.”
the Republican Party has discredited the had helped torpedo in the recent Ala- In Obama’s view, progressives will
old-style negotiations and compromises bama primary. accept some flexibility if it produces re-
that existed in Congress when Joe first The senior Obama Administration sults. “I don’t think it is the actual items
came in. And it’s probably taken him a official worries that Biden’s optimism on the policy checklist that they’re gonna
little time to let go of that, because I could be costly: “Does he see his role be looking for,” he said. “What they’re
think he has experience of being able to as someone who can bring in the Never gonna want to see is, Show us that you
get stuff done. And I think it’s been pain- Trumpers and build some bipartisan can make the machinery of government
ful for him, to see what’s happened to consensus? I know from experience that’s work to reflect what we believe in and
institutions like the Senate.” a trap. We walked right into it. Your what we care about. Show us that if the
Biden often says that America “can- people lose faith, the Republicans never majority of Americans support doing
not function without generating con- give you credit, you waste a lot of time— something about climate change, that
sensus.” But, when he conjures the image and you end up with the Tea Party.” you can actually get something done,
and it doesn’t just get ground down to
nothing by the time it gets through the
U.S. Senate or the U.S. House.”
If Biden is elected, his prescriptions
for America’s troubles will be informed
by two divergent strands of his biogra-
phy: the myths that undergird the pol-
itics of responsibility, and his own en-
counters with misfortune. In a new book,
“The Tyranny of Merit,” the Harvard
political philosopher Michael Sandel
writes, “Even as inequality has widened
to vast proportions, the public culture
has reinforced the notion that we are
responsible for our fate and deserve
what we get. . . . If we succeed, it is
thanks to our own doing, and if we fail,
we have no one to blame but ourselves.”
In the age of pandemic and systemic
injustice, Sandel argues, “a lively sense
of the contingency of our lot can inspire
a certain humility: ‘There, but for the
grace of God, or the accident of birth,
or the mystery of fate, go I.’ ”
“I just want to meet someone without using a dating app but also Biden, ever the weathervane, is bet-
without having to leave my apartment. Is that too much to ask?” ting that America wants a different pol-
itics. He understands what goes on in But, for a people in mourning, he might their position or recognizing, like, ‘Hey,
the minds of Congress members—the offer something like solace, a language that was 2015, and now I have more in-
balancing, the hedging, the triangula- of healing. formation.’ But I need Kamala to explain
tion—and he believes that at least a few what happened,” Baker said. “It’s not
of them are ready to coöperate with him. or years, Biden has relied on a small enough to just say you’ve evolved.”
But his image of unity puts even greater
weight on a force beyond the political
F clutch of aides, including Donilon,
Klain, and Kaufman—a lineup that Po-
When Harris spoke at the Democratic
National Convention, in late August, she
mechanics of Washington: the prospect litico Magazine described last year as “a offered more encouragement than expla-
of making people feel as if someone in lot like Biden: old and white and with nations. “I’m so inspired by a new gen-
the capital is listening. long experience in Demo- eration,” she said. “You are
Every day, Biden’s aides try to get cratic party battles of a by- pushing us to realize the
him on the phone with a regular per- gone era.” The portrait ig- ideals of our nation.” The
son. One afternoon in April, he was nores the likes of Symone Convention, like so many
patched through to Mohammad Qaz- Sanders, a thirty-year-old things these days, was con-
zaz, in Dearborn, Michigan.Three weeks former Bernie Sanders aide fined to screens, but the con-
earlier, Qazzaz, who runs a coffee-roast- who is among the most in- straints only accentuated the
ing business, had tested positive for fluential Black advisers in sense of personal urgency.
covid-19. When Biden called, he was Biden’s campaign. But Biden Obama presented an appeal
quarantined in his house, trying to pro- recognizes that meeting the to Americans, especially the
tect his wife and two children. needs of the country will re- young, to reject cynicism and
Qazzaz, who recorded the call and quire a radical expansion of apathy. “That’s how a de-
played it for me, told Biden that his the people and the experiences repre- mocracy withers until it’s no democracy
daughter, who is two, did not under- sented around him. “I think it’s really at all, and we cannot let that happen,” he
stand why he would not come out of important—really, really important— said. In his telling, individualism con-
his bedroom: “She keeps telling me, that my Administration look like the veyed responsibility, not license. “Do not
‘Baba, open the door. Open the door.’ ” country,” he said. let them take away your power,” he said.
As he described his situation, his voice In August, Biden picked Kamala It was all a prelude to Biden’s sober-
broke, and he tried to steady himself. Harris, the junior senator from Califor- ing case for moral decency, for reason-
“I’m sorry, Mr. Vice-President,” he said. nia, as his running mate. She would be ableness, for mourning what he called
“Don’t be sorry,” Biden said. “I think the first Black person, the first South this “season of darkness.” In a speech that
your emotional state is totally justified. Asian, and the first woman to serve as did not mention Trump by name, Biden
And, as my mom would say, you have Vice-President. At Biden’s side for the argued that Americans are not captive to
to get it out.” announcement, Harris showed a ready the failures of the past and the present.
Biden told Qazzaz that he, too, once appetite for the fray, saying of Trump’s “I will draw on the best of us, not the
had children too small to understand a economy, “Like everything else he inher- worst,” he declared, and quoted Ella Baker,
crisis unfolding around them. “Nothing ited, he ran it straight into the ground,” the icon of civil rights, who said, “Give
is the same, but I have some sense of and hammering him for the fact that people light and they will find a way.”
what you’re going through,” Biden said. “an American dies of covid-19 every One after another, ordinary people at-
He suggested that Qazzaz play a simple eighty seconds.” Trump and his surro- tested to enduring hardship. Kristin Ur-
game with his daughter through the door, gates struggled to agree on a mode of quiza, a thirty-nine-year-old from Ari-
asking her to guess a number or a color. attack; they mocked Harris’s voice and zona, told the story of her father, Mark
“Tell her stories about what it’s going to her name, and, in an e-mail to support- Anthony Urquiza, who had voted for
be like when Daddy gets better,” he said. ers, called her “the meanest, most hor- Trump, believed his assurances about the
They talked for a while about Qazzaz’s rible, most disrespectful, MOST LIB- pandemic, and, she said, “died alone, in
father, who emigrated from Jerusalem. ERAL of anyone in the U.S. Senate.” the I.C.U., with a nurse holding his hand.”
“Look, you’re going to get through this,” Harris, like Biden, was never the choice Brayden Harrington, a thirteen-year-old
Biden said. “We are the nation we are of progressives. Though she has one of from New Hampshire, gave credit to
because we’re a nation of immigrants.” the Senate’s most liberal voting records, Biden for telling him that they belonged
The call was supposed to last five min- progressives are uncomfortable with many to “the same club—we stutter.” The offi-
utes; they talked for twenty-two. of her choices as a district attorney and cial roll call, usually a banal ritual on the
Listening to Qazzaz’s call was rem- as California’s attorney general, when she Convention floor, was reborn as a video
iniscent of Roosevelt’s famous line: “The hesitated to make some police reforms parade, surveying America’s diversity and
Presidency is not merely an administra- and aggressively prosecuted truancy. After vastness, from the Caribbean to the Da-
tive office. . . . It is preëminently a place the announcement, I called Kandyce kotas and Alaska. The effect was strange
of moral leadership.” Joe Biden’s life is Baker, who had described herself as “un- and comforting and exhilarating, befit-
replete with mistakes and regrets. And, fortunately” supporting Biden. Baker was ting an era in which Americans are wak-
if he comes to the Presidency, he is un- pleased to have a Black woman on the ing to an unsettling conviction: a politi-
likely to supply much of the exalted ticket but wary of the political calcula- cian may give us light, or at least not
rhetoric that reaches into a nation’s soul. tions. “I’m all for candidates changing obscure it, but we must find the way. 
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 47
Terence Layne used the phrase “pandemic trauma.” He knew that he was suffering from it, too. In April, he said, “I’m saturated
48 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020
 OUR LOCAL CORRESPONDENTS

SURVIVAL STORY
A New York City bus driver faces a pandemic and an uprising.
BY JENNIFER GONNERMAN

n the morning of March 23rd, to you in the mirror as you are prepar-

O Terence A. Layne drove a half-

empty M116 bus across Man-
hattan, starting on the Upper West Side.
ing for work.” He added, “If no one else
thanks you, if no one else recognizes you,
know that I do.” He uploaded the video
He went around parked cars and stopped to three Facebook groups for transit
at red lights, all the while contemplating workers and continued on his route.
Covid-19—the “microbial enemy,” as he Layne has been navigating a bus
called it, that was sweeping through New through the streets of New York City for
York City. Most of Manhattan’s work- twenty-one years, and he knew how
ers were staying home, and many of its thankless the job could be. Every veteran
wealthier residents had fled the city, but bus operator has stories about customers
Layne and his fellow transit workers were who screamed at them, or cursed them
still showing up to their jobs each day, out, or spat on them. As a rookie, Layne
in order to keep the city’s buses and sub- was attacked by an irate motorist wield-
ways running. Layne knew that his col- ing the steering-wheel lock known as the
leagues were terrified of contracting Club. Throughout March, the sound of
Covid-19, and as he drove along 116th passengers coughing added stress to the
Street he tried to imagine what he might job. Then, on March 26th, Local 100 of
say to them to lift their morale. the Transport Workers Union, which rep-
Layne, who is fifty-five, wore the bus resents the city’s subway and bus work-
operator’s winter uniform—navy tie, sky- ers, announced its first two deaths from
blue dress shirt—and a knit hat with a Covid-19: Peter Petrassi, a forty-nine-
patch for his depot, Manhattanville, in year-old subway conductor, and Oliver
West Harlem. After his last passengers Cyrus, a sixty-one-year-old bus opera-
exited, he propped his phone in the bus’s tor. Layne knew Cyrus; they both worked
front window and began recording a out of the Manhattanville Bus Depot. At
video message to his colleagues. “Broth- the depot, Cyrus was known as a quiet
ers and sisters,” he said, standing in the man who could often be found reading
aisle of the bus, “I want to thank you all a book in the locker room.
for stepping up and coming to work today Layne was at the depot when he heard
and showing what leadership looks like. the news. “I was shocked,” he recalled.
We are performing an essential and in- “At this point, now it had come home.”
valuable task.” He reminded his co-work- During the next ten weeks, the pandemic
ers that they were not only delivering would act like a slow-moving Triangle
hospital personnel to their jobs. “What Shirtwaist fire, rippling through the ranks
about the person that needs dialysis? of the Metropolitan Transit Authority
What about the person who needs reg- and killing more than a hundred of its
ular cancer treatments?” he said. “We are employees. This spring, the M.T.A.,
helping all of these people live and sur- which runs the city’s buses and subways,
vive this global pandemic.” endured a significantly higher death toll
He went on, “Ordinarily we’re not from Covid-19 than other government
appreciated. We’re not valued. Let’s face agencies in New York City, including the
it: the squeegee man of the crack era is police and fire departments.
held in greater regard and higher esteem Transit workers kept the subways
than a New York City transit bus oper- and buses moving while New York City
ator. . . . We just have to reconcile our- was on lockdown, and, as the city began
selves to the fact that sometimes the only to reopen, they were once again on the
recognition you’re going to receive is front lines. In the midst of all of this
with grief and anger.” from the woman or man reflected back stood Terence Layne, a native New
PHOTOGRAPH BY KHOLOOD EID THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 49
 to find employment in higher titles.”
Layne is now Local 100’s chief shop stew-
ard at the Manhattanville depot. “I just
believed it was my duty to preserve this
for generations to come,” he said.
The M.T.A. runs twenty-eight bus
depots, each of which has a distinct per-
sonality. Manhattanville, where some
five hundred and fifty bus operators work,
is known for its collegial spirit. “There’s
a lot of camaraderie, and we in Man-
hattanville have a reputation for stand-
ing up to management when necessary,”
Layne said. The depot has four levels:
mechanics work on the first floor; the
second and third floors hold the parked
buses; and the top floor is known as “the
penthouse.” Managers have offices there,
and the bus operators have their “swing
“I’m through sending friendly reminders, Jerry. room,” where they hang out when they’re
Are you coming to the potluck or not?” on break. The swing room can be a noisy,
rollicking place, where workers eat to-
gether and play pool.
• • “We spend time either commiserat-
ing or swapping stories about what we’ve
Yorker whose life had imbued him with On April 12th, the New York Age, a Black dealt with,” Layne told me. Some of the
a deep understanding of the challenges newspaper, reported that the boycott was stories are about misbehaving passen-
confronting his city. “People think of working: the bus companies “are suffer- gers. A customer can curse out an oper-
front-line workers—the grocery work- ing a tremendous financial loss due to ator, get off the bus, and suffer no con-
ers, transit workers, the first responders, the drop of patrons.” A month after the sequences. Layne likens the operator’s
cops, firefighters—as having helped the boycott began, its leaders, the union, and predicament to that of the waitstaff in a
city get through it. But that’s not what the bus companies signed an agreement restaurant. “There are certain positions
happened,” he said. “We helped the city at the 132nd Street Depot. The two com- that our society has identified as those
survive it.” panies committed to hiring a hundred kinds of people that we can abuse and
Black drivers and seventy Black mechan- mistreat simply because we are having a
or the past century, a bus depot has ics, and promised to insure that Blacks bad day or maybe because we are dis-
F stood in Manhattanville, on the far
west side of Harlem. There is no marker,
held seventeen per cent of jobs, roughly
reflecting their share of Manhattan’s pop-
satisfied with the service,” he said. “And
the bus operator falls into that category.”
however, to indicate that a crucial mo- ulation. The leaders of the boycott de- Driving a bus in New York City is
ment in the city’s history took place there. clared, “This is not the end but merely also physically more taxing than passen-
In the nineteen-thirties, two private bus the beginning in the historic struggle of gers might imagine. In the driver’s seat
companies had their offices at the 132nd the Negro people of the 20th century to all day, bouncing over potholes and un-
Street Depot, as it was called then, and assert their rights.” even pavement, bus operators are prone
they refused to hire Blacks as bus driv- Today, the Metropolitan Transit Au- to an ailment known as “whole-body vi-
ers or mechanics. In March of 1941, the thority operates the city’s bus lines, and bration.” (“If you think of a box of crack-
Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and Blacks make up nearly half of the forty ers—if you shake it up really hard, those
other community leaders held a rally thousand M.T.A. workers in Local 100. crackers are going to begin to disinte-
with more than a thousand people at the Five years ago, Layne took a course at grate,” Layne said. “That pretty much is
Abyssinian Baptist Church to call for a the City University of New York on the what happens to our skeletal system over
bus boycott. Supporters picketed bus history of the transit system, and he time.”) Older operators often develop
stops in Harlem, urging people to stay makes a point of informing other bus problems with their back and their legs.
off the buses. “Don’t Ride Here! Ride operators about what he learned. “Be- Some limp as they walk through the
Where Negroes Can Work,” one plac- fore the early forties, Black people could depot. Layne said, “You can just tell the
ard declared. Another urged, “Walk so not even operate buses. We were restricted way they’re moving, which is slowly, that
that Negro men may live.” to either being caretakers or janitors or they’re in pain.”
The Transport Workers Union came porters,” Layne told me. “The union, the Despite the challenges of being an
out in support of the boycott. (The union’s T.W.U., was a fundamental part in kick- M.T.A. bus operator, Layne, who has
bus workers had recently gone on strike, ing that door in and making it possible three children, says that he has “one of
and Harlem leaders had supported them.) for people like myself and my forebears the best jobs in New York.” He explains:
50 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020
“There are few jobs where you can make ily, she worked as a manager at a hos- bricks from the roof of an apartment
a very decent living, get really good pital in Brooklyn, while he did odd jobs building; the crowd on the street flipped
health coverage, and earn a pension after and played gigs. over a car. The next day, the Daily News
twenty-five years of service that don’t When Terence was five, he began at- ran the headline “Lenox Ave. Becomes
require a college degree.” Starting pay tending the Muhammad University of a Battleground.”
for a New York City bus operator is Islam, a school at Mosque No. 7, on West A year later, another incident involv-
$24.87 an hour. After five years on the 116th Street, in Harlem. The curriculum, ing the N.Y.P.D. left a deep impression
job, the pay rises to $35.53 an hour, or which included lessons in Arabic, was on Terence. “I remember learning about
seventy-four thousand dollars a year for more demanding than that of most pub- a young Black boy, ten years old, killed
a forty-hour week. With overtime, some lic schools, and in the afternoons the male while he was with his stepfather,” he said.
bus operators make more than a hun- students had martial-arts classes and prac- The child’s name was Clifford Glover.
dred thousand dollars a year. ticed marching in formation. “We were On April 28, 1973, Glover and his step-
Since becoming a shop steward, in being groomed to be warriors and sol- father were walking in South Jamaica,
2014, Layne has spent his off hours on diers—it was, in effect, a military school,” Queens, when a plainclothes patrolman
union tasks. At lunchtime, he says, he Terence recalled. “There was an adver- named Thomas Shea approached them.
cannot walk through the swing room sarial relationship that we were taught The two thought they were being robbed
without a co-worker’s pulling him aside and bred into from the very beginning.” and ran. Shea shot the boy in the back.
to discuss a grievance or ask a question. In that relationship, there was no doubt He went on trial for murder, but a jury
If a bus operator gets into a serious ac- who the enemy was: “The theology is acquitted him.
cident, Layne might have to report to the that the Black man is the Supreme Being, Terence’s mother left the Nation of
scene. He receives no additional pay for and the white man is the Devil.” Islam in 1972, and his father left about
his union work, but he has no regrets. “I Relations between the city’s Black a year later. The family moved to Queens,
think I have found my calling,” he said. residents and its police force were espe- and Terence entered the city’s public-
cially tense at the time, and on April 14, school system. For high school, he won
erence Layne grew up in Brooklyn 1972, an infamous chapter in New York admission to Brooklyn Tech, one of the
T and Queens, but his family has roots
in Harlem. His father, Alexander Layne,
City’s history unfolded inside Mosque
No. 7. That morning, the New York City
city’s specialized high schools, but by
sophomore year he had stopped attend-
a jazz musician, was born at Harlem Police Department received a phone call ing classes. Looking back on those years,
Hospital in 1939. A few years ago, Alex from someone who claimed to be a de- he says, “The path to delinquency is
gave Terence a walking tour of his child- tective, reporting that there was an officer never dramatic. It always starts with: ‘Oh,
hood haunts. Alex pointed out the block, inside the mosque who was in need of we’re not going to go to class. Oh, we’re
on West 127th Street, where his own fa- help. The call turned out to be a hoax— going to get a tre bag and smoke some
ther, an immigrant from St. Vincent, had there was no officer in distress—but, be- weed. You know what, I think I’m going
operated a grocery store. They stopped fore that had been determined, four to put this bag of chips under my shirt
by the apartment building where he grew officers entered the mosque. They got instead of paying for it.’ . . . You just keep
up, on St. Nicholas Avenue. Alex also into a scuffle with a large group of Na- going down that road until, inevitably,
took Terence by the imposing Gothic tion of Islam members; the officers were someday robbing somebody or climb-
structure on West 135th Street that housed ing through a window or stealing a car
the public school he attended, the High sounds like a good idea. Because you’ve
School of Music & Art. He began playing kind of already abandoned education,
the double bass in high school, and by and now you need something to do with
the time he was twenty, in 1959, he had your time, and if you have spare time
joined the house band at Count Basie’s you need money.”
night club. Between 1982 and 1984, Layne was
In 1963, Alex and his wife, Senora, sent to state prison twice, for robbery
moved to Brooklyn, and in the fall of and attempted burglary. He was incar-
1964 Terence was born. At the time, cerated for nearly five years, with stops
Alex’s career was taking off; in 1964, he beaten, and one of them, Phillip Car- at Elmira and Auburn prisons. “I broke
performed in Africa and Europe with dillo, was shot. He died six days later. my parents’ heart with that,” he said.
Miriam Makeba. But five years later he Terence, who was seven, recalls school “They couldn’t understand what hap-
joined the Nation of Islam and stopped ending abruptly that day. “We were lined pened to me. I couldn’t understand much
touring. He became Alex 6X, and his up in military formation outside the of it, either.” When he first went to prison,
son became Terence 3X. As a young school for what seemed like a long time,” his mother visited him. “But he came
child, Terence sometimes tagged along he said. He remembers “a lot of people home and he messed up again,” Senora
when his father, dressed in a suit and standing around and looking, a lot of recalled. “At that point, that was it. It was:
bow tie, peddled the Nation of Islam’s police vehicles, what seemed to be bed- ‘You know what? You had an opportu-
newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, on street lam.” A school bus took him home, but nity to change—you didn’t.’” She stopped
corners. By 1970, Alex and Senora had the scene outside the mosque grew in- visiting and wrote infrequently.
two more children. To support the fam- creasingly chaotic. Teen-agers flung His father stayed in closer contact,
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 51
sending letters and travelling to see him. when they’re bad, and the firefighter sees said, “and now we have transit workers
“He never gave up. I guess he just felt people when they need help, but the bus who are passing away today.”
like he could still connect with me and operator sees people as they really are.” Patrick Warren, chief safety officer
try to get me to understand the harm Layne said, “He’s right. I get to see New for the M.T.A., said that the agency ini-
that I was doing to myself and others,” Yorkers as they really are.” He had al- tially banned wearing masks “because
Terence said. He remembers his father ways enjoyed writing, and some days he health officials were saying it was a risky
writing to him, “You made a pretty good wrote about moments he had witnessed thing to do.” He added, “They said it
mess of your life so far, but once you get while on the job: a young father strug- would be detrimental or more risky to
out—if you straighten up and fly right, gling with a stroller who slipped onto wear a mask because it causes you to
if you stop now—you’ll always be able the bus without paying, a customer he touch your face more.” Speaking of the
to say, ‘Hey, look, I did this as a teen- hadn’t seen in a decade whose “five o’clock union, he said, “They’re not health offi-
ager.’” One line in particular stayed with shadow” had turned “completely white.” cials, either, and they didn’t know . . .
him: “You can shoot out of there like a Sometimes he shared his writings with whether or not it was a healthy thing to
rocket and never look back.” his mother, whom he now calls his “best do, in my opinion. But what they did
In the eighties, the New York state- friend.” She said, “I think driving the feel was that the workforce would feel
prison system had a robust education bus actually gave him a much more em- better by wearing masks, that it was a
program, and Terence took advantage pathetic sense of people.” feel-good, confidence thing.”
of it, earning his G.E.D. and taking col- One day in 2014, during a layover on By March 8th, the M.T.A. had put
lege courses. He also began questioning his route, Layne wrote a poem that he out another memo, stating that employ-
what he had been taught as a child about titled “Like Me.” It began, “When I ar- ees could wear masks “if this makes
white people. “I began to come across rived at the last stop, /I saw a man soundly them more comfortable during this
white people that had been kind to me— sleeping in the rear of the bus/He seemed time.” But masks were difficult to ob-
counsellors in prison, teachers that re- to have come from no where good, head- tain, and the M.T.A. didn’t provide them.
ally wanted to help me learn—and how ing to no place better, /He had dark skin, “They refused to give us masks,” Felix
do you reconcile this human being, who and coarse hair . . . Like me.” The poem Hidalgo, a bus operator from the Man-
I’ve been taught is the Devil, with the continues, “I patiently and gently tried hattanville depot, said.“Everybody was
fact that they are actually treating me to wake him, . . . After a minute or two, mad—and bringing stuff from their own
with kindness and compassion?” he said. he rose to his feet/Disoriented, Unbal- homes to clean the buses they were driv-
“That doesn’t look like a devil to me.” anced, lumbering forward in search of a ing.” Layne got a few surgical masks
By the time Terence left prison, in door, to pass through. /And as I climbed from a friend. Stores were sold out of
1986, his parents had separated. He back into my seat, / through the tears in disinfectant wipes, but he discovered a
moved in with his father, in Queens. my eyes,/I watched him amble down the box under his kitchen sink. Though the
Harlem’s jazz scene had diminished street / into the uncertain void that we M.T.A. said that it was cleaning its
significantly, and Alex Layne was driv- call, ‘The Future’ . . . /Like me.” buses more frequently, he began bring-
ing a yellow cab. Terence, who had been ing several wipes to work each day and
a barber in prison, found a job at a bar- n early March, as Covid-19 began to using them to disinfect the steering
bershop on West 125th Street, in Har-
lem, and continued working there for
I seize the local media’s attention, the
M.T.A. prohibited its employees from
wheel of his bus and any knob or but-
ton he might touch.
the next fourteen years. In 1995, he mar- wearing masks. A memo issued to tran- At the start of March, Layne’s bus
ried a woman with two children. By sit workers explained that, because “masks had been noisy in the mornings with the
then, he had a child of his own, and to- are not medically necessary” and are “not sounds of children on their way to school.
gether they had another child. part of the authorized uniform,” they But after Mayor Bill de Blasio shut down
One day in the late nineties, Layne “should not be worn by employees during schools, on March 16th, and Governor
was at the barbershop, seated in his bar- work hours.” At the time, the C.D.C. Andrew Cuomo closed nonessential busi-
ber chair, when he opened the Daily did not recommend that healthy people nesses, the following week, the school-
News and saw an announcement that wear them. The union’s leaders fought children and most of the commuters van-
the M.T.A. was hiring bus operators. the mask ban, facing off against M.T.A. ished. To protect bus operators from
Business at the shop had slowed, and the executives at a meeting on March 5th. contracting Covid-19, the M.T.A. began
job looked appealing. It promised a steady Tony Utano, the president of Local 100, cordoning off the first several seats of
income and health insurance—neither said, “They kept throwing the C.D.C. each bus with a yellow chain. Passengers
of which he had. He sent in an applica- in there, and I kept saying, ‘The experts were required to board through the back
tion and, in June of 1999, he started his have been wrong. I don’t see any harm door, and since the fare box is at the front
career as a bus operator, at the Gun Hill in us wearing a mask for extra protec- they were allowed to ride free of charge.
depot, in the Bronx. He worked at three tion.’ ” He brought up the fact that, after On March 27th, Layne wrote on his
other depots before arriving at Manhat- 9/11, officials assured the public that Facebook page, “This morning, as I
tanville, in 2010. the air in lower Manhattan was safe to waited at a red light at the corner of
One day, a supervisor at Manhattan- breathe, which turned out to be untrue. 125th St. and Malcolm X Boulevard, a
ville told him something that he never “When the towers went down, three young Hispanic woman approached her
forgot: “The police officer sees people thousand transit workers showed up,” he car and glanced at me. . . . She then
52 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020
reached into her car and grabbed this uaries for Miguel Chumpitaz, sixty, who was assigned the task of, as he put it,
packet of sanitizing wipes and walked had been “one of the most beloved mem- “looking after the sick and shut-in.” Each
over to my driver-side window and bers” of the Jackie Gleason Bus Depot, afternoon, he would get the “sick log”
handed them to me. . . . I thanked her in Sunset Park; Emmanuel Jacob, also from the crew dispatcher and sit in the
for her compassion and kindness; she sixty, whose colleagues called him Jake depot’s union office, calling and texting
smiled and advised me to be careful out the Snake because of the pool skills he his colleagues who had the virus.
here. . . . People like her are the reason displayed in the swing room at the East One of them was Felix Hidalgo, who
we are going to prevail.” New York depot; and Ramon Gutier- had six-year-old twin daughters and a
That day, the M.T.A. announced that rez, sixty-two, who drove the BX18 bus form of blood cancer that requires him
it would supply masks to its employees through the Bronx and was so popular to take chemotherapy pills. Layne would
(eschewing the C.D.C.’s advice). By then, with passengers that some of them, when ask Hidalgo how he was feeling. “It
thirteen hundred M.T.A. workers had they learned of his death, began to sob. started off with chills; I felt like I was in
been quarantined because they had the Whenever Layne had a layover, he the meat locker,” Hidalgo told me. “I had
virus, or had been exposed to someone would look at his phone, visiting Face- three blankets on, and it felt like I had
who had it, or were showing Covid-like book groups for bus operators. Often, nothing. And then it went from the chills
symptoms. On March 31st, Governor he discovered news of another death. to the body aches. I felt like—you know
Cuomo announced that forty-three thou- The words scrolled across his screen like the cartoon character that they pick up
sand people in New York City had tested a ticker tape of grief and mourning. from the legs and slam him from build-
positive for Covid-19. The following day, “Every morning that I go to work, I ing to building, or tree to tree? That’s
Mayor de Blasio revealed that more than wonder if today is the day,” he wrote on exactly how I felt.”
thirteen hundred had died. Both men Facebook. “I’m not surrendering to fear Layne found some bus operators se-
warned that the worst was yet to come. and morbidity, but the danger is real . . . questered in their bedrooms, trying not
In March, Covid-19 had struck wondering how many of us, and who, to infect their families; others were liv-
Layne’s family, too. His father was eighty is going to make it to the other side of ing alone. “You could hear it over the
but still worked as a jazz musician, per- this tribulation.” phone. Not only were they sick but they
forming in restaurants and clubs. Layne In April, Layne began driving the were in terror,” he said. Some “were afraid
called him “an unsung legend in the jazz M96, the crosstown bus that traverses to seek medical attention simply be-
world.” But in the second week of March Ninety-sixth Street. It’s usually a popu- cause they didn’t want to go to a place
he began showing symptoms of the lar line, but his bus was virtually empty. where they felt there was a greater chance
virus. “When I first found out, he seemed Across the city, bus ridership was down of them becoming sicker.” He had to
to be O.K.,” Layne said. “But a few days more than eighty per cent. Many of coax a few to visit an urgent-care cen-
later we were told he was getting weaker Layne’s passengers were essential work- ter. One day after making calls, Layne
and not doing as well.” In late March, ers who got off at one of the two hospi- said, “I’ll never be the same. I don’t know
Alex Layne was admitted to Harlem tals on his route, Mount Sinai or Met- if I can get that dry, raspy cough out of
Hospital. “The gravity of this pandemic ropolitan. By April 6th, nearly six my head.”
really set in,” Layne said. “He doesn’t thousand M.T.A. employees had been By now, Layne could relate to the
even deal with the public like I do, and quarantined. As a shop steward, Layne families of transit workers who had died,
he had it.”
On April 6th, Governor Cuomo
tweeted, “Thank you to NY’s transit
workers who are showing up every day.
Because of them, doctors, nurses, first
responders, grocers, pharmacists & all
essential workers can get where they need
to go.” Meanwhile, during the previous
eleven days thirty-three transit workers
had died. James Gannon, the son of a
bus operator, is the director of commu-
nications for Local 100. In the past, when-
ever a Local 100 member died Gannon
would write up a few paragraphs about
his or her life for the union’s Web site.
This spring, he spent a sizable portion
of each day as an obituary writer and en-
listed the help of two co-workers. “They
just came so fast I couldn’t keep up with
them,” he said.
Bus operators endured some of the
greatest losses. Local 100 published obit- “Teach a man to fish, and he’ll tell everyone he invented fishing.”
 tirely in order to minimize the virus’s
spread and protect employees.
Layne didn’t agree with that idea,
but, he said, “I can’t help but wonder
whether or not some of this loss of life
was preventable.” The matter of when
transit workers were given P.P.E. “has
garnered a fair measure of resentment
towards senior management,” he said.
“Hindsight is 20/20 vision, so you can’t
say with certainty what may or may not
have happened. But one thing is for
sure—had the P.P.E. been issued ear-
lier, certainly we wouldn’t be able to
“I would have won if I hadn’t stopped to program my G.P.S.” complain about the fact that it wasn’t.
We feel that we were at risk longer than
we should have been.”
• • In May, the M.T.A. took an addi-
tional step to protect bus operators by
because he was struggling with an in- had died, but there were many possible installing a vinyl curtain alongside the
tense grief of his own. After his father explanations, ranging from age (more chain blocking off the front of the bus.
was admitted to Harlem Hospital, Layne than a quarter of the city’s transit work- Some bus operators weren’t convinced
said, “we received one text from him, and ers were fifty-five or older) to race and that it would be effective. “It’s just a sheet
that was it.” On March 30th, a nurse was ethnicity (Blacks and Latinos, who make of clear plastic that doesn’t even extend
“kind enough to put his phone on speaker up two-thirds of Local 100’s M.T.A. em- from the floor to the ceiling,” Layne said.
by his ear . . . so me, my siblings, and his ployees, were dying at a higher rate than “That certainly is not going to stop an
wife could speak to him.” Alex Layne other New Yorkers) and the challenges airborne virus from travelling around
died the next day. “We couldn’t see him; of social-distancing on the job. the cabin.” As the weather grew warmer,
we couldn’t be there to comfort him. Inside the Manhattanville Bus De- the city’s buses became more crowded
There was nothing, absolutely nothing, pot, life had changed. Some employees and tensions were evident. Masks were
that we could do,” he said. “That was the stopped eating in the swing room, and required, and when passengers boarded
worst part of it all.” instead ate alone in their cars. Of the bus a bus without one, other riders some-
The family held a funeral in Brook- operators who had been ill, some never times yelled at them. One day in late
lyn, and Alex was buried in the Ever- returned to work. Those who did come May, Layne’s bus was standing-room
greens Cemetery. In the weeks after his back appeared gaunt, exhausted. Among only, with passengers squeezed together
death, as Terence drove his bus across his colleagues, Layne sensed that grief in the aisle. “You can’t practice social dis-
Manhattan, memories of his father crept was rampant; many had lost friends or tancing if you have thirty-five to forty
into his mind. “I’ll see something that relatives. “So many of us have lost our people crammed into the back of a forty-
reminds me of a conversation we had or parents, I don’t even want to try to count,” foot bus,” he told me. “We’re sitting on
something that he did,” he told me. “I Layne said. “It’s almost like a whole gen- a simmering pot here.”
might see another musician with their eration has been decimated.” He used Layne could feel his stress level ris-
instrument or maybe pass by a club or the phrase “pandemic trauma.” He knew ing, and not only because of the condi-
block where he performed.” It was diffi- that he was suffering from it, too. One tions on his bus. The news was also a
cult to accept that he would never see his day, he wrote on Facebook, “I’m satu- factor. First, there was the video of a
father again. “Nobody lives forever, but I rated with grief and anger.” white woman calling the police on a
certainly didn’t expect to lose him this As the death toll mounted, the fury Black man in Central Park after he asked
soon,” he said. “The way he moved around of Local 100 members over the loss of her to put her dog on a leash. Then, on
and took care of himself, and by his phys- their co-workers grew louder. Tramell May 25th, there was the footage of a po-
ical condition, we easily could have seen Thompson, a subway conductor who lice officer in Minneapolis killing George
him being around for another ten years.” leads a dissident group within the union, Floyd by pressing his knee against Floyd’s
He added, “It still doesn’t seem real.” has his own YouTube channel, where he neck. “I’m accustomed to dealing with
attacked Governor Cuomo, who appoints what comes with being a Black man in
y May 11th, Covid-19 had killed an the M.T.A.’s chairman, for not acting this country. But I’m just livid,” Layne
B estimated twenty thousand New
Yorkers—more than seven times the num-
more quickly to protect the city’s tran-
sit workers. He also attacked Local 100’s
said the next day. “The only thing that’s
not susceptible or vulnerable to even a
ber of people who died in the city on leaders, accusing them of not doing global pandemic: racism.”
9/11. The virus’s death toll included a enough for their members. Some em- As a bus operator, Layne had been
hundred and seventeen M.T.A. employ- ployees believed that the city’s transit on the receiving end of racial slurs from
ees. Nobody knew exactly why so many system should have been shut down en- passengers, motorists, and cyclists. He
54 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020
estimated that such incidents occurred gether in the swing room. Several days falloff in ridership, combined with the
“five or ten times a year easily.” After he later, Layne was at another protest, this increased cost of cleaning the buses and
got off work on May 29th, he went to time near Gracie Mansion. He knew the subways, has been financially dev-
a march protesting police brutality and that his father would have been proud astating. The possibility of service cuts
racism in lower Manhattan. During the of him; his parents had raised him to and layoffs is looming.
past three decades, he had attended many speak out against injustice. The M.T.A. has announced that it
rallies held to draw attention to the kill- Whenever Layne attended a rally, will start charging for bus service again
ings of Black men, from the white mob he was careful to protect himself from on August 31st, and passengers will board
attack on Michael Griffin, in 1986, to Covid-19. At one protest, he wore a sur- through the front to pay the fare. The
the N.Y.P.D.’s shooting of Amadou Di- gical mask, then tied over it a navy ker- agency has been installing barricades—
allo, in 1999. But this time Layne was chief emblazoned with Local 100’s logo. either a vinyl curtain or a hard plastic
taken aback by the scene; he estimated Standing on the perimeter of the event, shield—next to the operators’ compart-
that half the crowd was white. “I’ve never he pulled down his face coverings, took ments. Some operators were alarmed,
seen anything like this,” he said. “I knew out his phone, and pressed Record: “As however, when they realized that they
that there were young white people that the heir apparent to the benefits of the will have to keep the barricade open while
were getting involved, but I had no idea civil-rights movement that my parents, they drive, so that they can see the right-
that the numbers were as large as it is— my grandparents, and all my forebears hand mirror.
and that made me feel good.” fought in—the struggle, the sacrifice, the At the same time, assaults on bus
That evening, thousands of people martyrdom that allowed someone like operators have been on the rise. In May,
gathered outside the Barclays Center, in me to be able to be in the position in life an operator told Layne that a passen-
Brooklyn. The N.Y.P.D. detained some that I am today—I have an absolute re- ger had hurled a can of soup at him.
of them and loaded them onto an M.T.A. sponsibility to make sure that I carry that More recently, another operator reported
bus, presumably to take them to Cen- baton and pass it forth to my children.” that she had been spit on by a passerby.
tral Booking, but the bus operator stepped “Someone just came over to the win-
off, refusing to transport them—and be- t the end of June, Layne started a dow, which she had open, and spit in
came an instant hero on Twitter, where
a video of the scene went viral. “Kudos
A new bus route: the M98. It begins
in northern Manhattan, in Washington
her face,” Layne said. Some riders still
board without a mask, making the job
to him,” Layne said. “Local 100 has been Heights, and ends on the Upper East even more stressful. On July 20th, a pas-
a part of the civil-rights movement since Side, at East Sixty-seventh Street and senger attacked a sixty-two-year-old bus
the nineteen-forties. We’re not going Lexington Avenue. “I’m picking up striv- operator after the operator asked him
to be commandeered and forced into a ers, commuters,” Layne told me. “The to put on a mask.
law-enforcement role.” jobs may range from office worker to a News of such assaults spread fast in-
Later that night, Local 100 sent a re- domestic, somebody who works on the side the Manhattanville depot. “I don’t
minder of the union’s policy. “T.W.U. Upper East Side as a nanny or maid.” even have the words to describe how low
Local 100 Bus Operators do not work The worst of the pandemic seemed to morale is,” Layne told me in July. “No-
for the NYPD,” the union said on Twit- have passed, and the city was reopening. body is happy to be here. Happy to have
ter. “All T.W.U. Operators should refuse According to the M.T.A., the agency’s a job, yes. But nobody comes bopping
to transport arrested protestors.” The into the depot on a regular basis brim-
union went on to put out another state- ming with joy. That’s just not the kind
ment, saying that Floyd’s death brought of work we do. We are not treated well.”
back memories of a police killing in New Layne went on vacation in late July, but
York: “The death of Eric Garner, caused he couldn’t stop thinking about the job.
by a police chokehold in July 2014, hit “We were being lionized as heroic three
home in the hardest of fashions for our months ago,” he said. But now “we’re
union. His sister was, and is, a Bus Op- back to business as usual.” He added,
erator in Brooklyn; his mother a retired “You don’t turn around and mistreat the
Train Operator and his aunt, a Station people who helped you get through it—
Agent.” Gwen Carr, Garner’s mother, last death from Covid-19 occurred on that’s where I become livid.”
had been at her job driving the N train June 2nd; its death toll stands at a hun- This year, for the first time, Layne
when her son was killed. dred and thirty-one. dreaded going back to work after vaca-
On June 4th, Layne attended a me- This spring, as many New Yorkers tion. But on August 10th he returned
morial rally for Floyd at Cadman Plaza, lost their jobs, Layne sometimes re- to the depot. He pulled his bus out on
in Brooklyn. Some of his co-workers minded his co-workers, “At the end of time, at 6:36 a.m., and headed north to-
who could not attend staged their own the day, we are still working, we are still ward the first stop on his route. “I don’t
protest inside the Manhattanville depot, gainfully employed—and we can’t lose want to be cynical, but I don’t know
then posted a photograph of it on Face- sight of that.” But the pandemic plunged if anybody is going to remember that
book: fourteen men and two women, the M.T.A. into a financial crisis. The during this period it was the bus oper-
most wearing masks, many in bus- agency had serious budget problems be- ators who helped this city survive,” he
operator uniforms, taking a knee to- fore Covid-19 arrived, and the drastic said. “People have a short memory.” 
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 55
 FICTION

56 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 ILLUSTRATION BY BOBBY C. MARTIN, JR.
 e were just boys, ten-, eleven-, I climbed up after him. “Smokes, John B. often punctuated a point by

W and twelve-year-olds, five

colored and one white. But
for our smallclothes, each of us was most-
Paddy, that’s as nice a knife as I’ve seen.”
The mother-of-pearl handle, the
spey blade.
the length of tense silence that followed.
“You can’t be pals with every nig-
ger on the island,” he said. “Dick is no
all naked. We stood on the rickety reach “Uncle John gave it to me.” Patrick exception.”
of pier, its planks care-laid but well used, held it out for the others to see. “Said I Though it was Patrick who’d been
us colored boys’ black glistening in the was becoming a man and deserved such scolded, I felt that it was me who had
noontime bright, the white one not yet a thing.” He threw his head back and disappointed my father.
leathered like the sunbeat beefs that free- slurped down the oyster, then opened Turning, John B. said, “Make sure
ranged the island. Our britches and cov- another and extended it toward me. those beds are planted before I see any
eralls and burlap shirts lay pell-mell near I just stood there looking down at of you around the house. You two, with
the spot on the shore where Ebo Joe it. “Mass John B. told us to plant those me.” And, though he was already headed
Meekins knelt, inspecting the line of the out past the second duck blind,” I said, up the shore, each of us knew to whom
skiff he was refitting. The old Negro was “not to eat them.” which orders had been addressed. Pat-
either fifty or a thousand, the one age The other boys gathered up behind rick and I scooped up our clothes and
as imponderable to us as the other, and me. followed after, the others unhitching
he paid us no more mind than we did “Half the Sand Banks are laughing the dugout and pushing off.
him. On the water, cleat-hitched to the at his fool notion of planting oyster John B. spoke briefly to Ebo Joe, who
pier, rocked the dugout full of oysters beds,” said Patrick, slurping down the immediately stopped what he was doing
that we were supposed to be ferrying one I’d refused. “Hellfire, there will al- and removed his hat, then John B. con-
over to Ashbee’s Harbor. Up and down ways be oysters.” tinued on. Patrick carried his boots over
it rolled with each leap or dive, as we Fields Midgett, protectful of me, told a shoulder, tied together by the laces. In
plunged into the water one at a time or Patrick, “Richard don’t need none of short pants and a burlap shirt, I had no
in twos and sometimes all six at once. that. Besides, Easterns taste like snot.” shoes to carry. With John B.’s back now
I was young, square-shouldered but “Naw, they good,” said Bill Charles. to us, Patrick aped his posture and gait,
elseways long of limb, with knots for “But fried and on day-old bread.” but I ignored him. I rushed after John B.
knees and elbows, and I climbed from The rest chimed in then, proffering as he disappeared into the trees.
the Croatan Sound up onto the dug- the ways and hows of oyster-eating—
out. Straddling it, a foot on each gun- this, without any of us noting the som- e made the mile-long march
wale, I began walking its edge. The
wood’s rough grain dug into the pads
bre white man who had emerged from
the thicket of pitch pine.
W across the island in silence, Pat-
rick aping, me ignoring. At Shallowbag
of my feet with each shuffle-step for- John B. Etheridge walked up the shore, Bay, where most Roanoke Islanders lived,
ward. The other boys waded nearby, smoking a pipe. He wore bibbed dun- we joined up with John B.’s younger
wondering at my balancing act. garees over a white work shirt, closed at brother Tart, and our party of four took
“You look like one of Uncle John’s the collar by a string tie, his everyday the sloop Margery & Sarah and sailed
barn cats,” Patrick, the white one, shouted duck-cloth coat over that. A slouch hat across the sound to Nags Head. We
up, and he splashed water to challenge shaded his face. John B. owned the dug- landed south of Jockey’s Ridge and
my progress. out and the oysters, much of the island, trekked over the stark dunes, through
I halted my walk so as to keep my in fact, including me and two of the oth- patches of dwarf pine and thorny scrub
balance and taunted back at him, “That ers. He stopped a short distance from us. toward the sea. Topping the last rise, we
the best you got? You can do better than “Patrick! Those oysters are for my saw a wrecked schooner, pitched on her
that, Paddy-boy.” Then I started rock- oysterage!” side near shore. A three-master, though
ing the dugout in place—down and up The others scrambled to gather up only two remained. A party had already
each gunwale, down and up—pushing their clothes, all but me. I remained set upon the carcass, six or seven men
out waves and making the others work aside Patrick. We both stood stock still rummaging through the hull and the de-
to stay aloft. on the pier, heads hanging. bris scattered nearby for whatever might
“I’ll fix your arse,” said Patrick. John B. stormed up. “What are you prove of value. They made piles high up
He swam forward, grabbed a gun- thinking?” on the beach, gulls wheeling overhead.
wale, and yanked down hard. But I sprang “Me and Dick were just letting the The wind ripped steady and strong,
overtop of him and stretched a splash- boys have a break is all,” said Patrick. whipping up sand, a stinging reminder
less dive into the briny water beyond. John B. glared at this boy whom he of the recent storm that had blown
The others swarmed, wrestling to keep had taken in as a son upon a dear older through, this wreck a vestige of it. Wil-
me below the surface, all but Patrick, brother’s death. “How many times do liam Creef, clearly in charge of the other
who had pulled himself onto the pier. I have to tell you? When I leave you in party, started up the dune as John B.
“Youall hungry?” he called. charge, you have to take charge.” His led us down it. “I was wondering when
He went to his trousers, retrieved a voice evened, though the hard look in the Roanoke Island Etheridges would
penknife, and returned with one of the his eyes did not soften. “Not Dick, you.” come inquiring.”
larger oysters from the floor of the dug- He didn’t look at me at all. “What do we have?” asked John B.
out. He pried at it until it cracked open. “Yes, sir, Uncle John,” said Patrick. “Near sunup I seen her lurching in
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 57
the surf, all torn apart and her sails blown his way through the scattered timber. plied, and remove me from the grim
to hell,” Creef said. “There ain’t much He lifted what remained of the arch chore altogether? The solidarity of fam-
to prog for. A few salvageable barrels board, the name Molly McNeal in- ily, that fool and infantile notion?
of salt is all, most of them shattered be- scribed thereon, then tossed it aside. Patrick stood only a few feet past
fore coming ashore.” Patrick, walking along the wrack line Colie, the wire-rimmed frames sitting
That was very likely prevarication, of the beach, knelt and retrieved a pair skew-whiff across his face. “Hellfire,
it seemed to me. I looked over toward of bent spectacles and put them on. no! Why would I?” His anger was sud-
Patrick and found mirrored in his face Before I could join him, Creef ’s den, his bravado clearly a show for the
a like skepticism. youngest, Colie, a year or so my junior, Creef boy. He turned and sauntered
“And there is three dead,” Creef tossed a pick and shovel at my feet. down the beach.
added, pointing up the dune. “Go on up there and bury them dead,” “Go on, Dick!” The boom of John B.’s
Patrick and I stared in the direction he said. voice startled me, his towering figure
his finger had indicated, at the bloated A punishing, arduous task—and grisly, staring over, face stern. “Do what you
corpses of three mariners. It appeared even for me, a boy who had seen death were told to.”
to be two men, each one the pale blue before, for what Sand Banker had not? So I had at it, dragging one sagging
of death, and a woman, her skull crushed Our stretch of coast was called the corpse at a time up to firmer ground.
and half torn away. She was recogniz- “Graveyard of the Atlantic” and known Their wrists where I grabbed hold felt
able as female only by the tattered re- the world over for just this reason: num- of pickled pork knuckle, firm yet giving,
mains of a muslin dress that clung berless ships and likewise many men had but the bodies were dead weight so
defiantly to her body. I knew to drop not survived it. But these ones here, these it was impossible hard, even with the
my eyes. three dead? I found them hard to stomach. woman, whom I could not bear to lay
John B. didn’t react to the news of Turning toward Patrick, I asked, eyes upon, particularly when what was
the loss of life any more than he had to “You coming, Paddy?” It was more plea left of her dress fell away. I worked out
Creef ’s claims of a want of bounty. He than query. my anger with the spade, gashed at my
and Creef moved off down the beach, And even as I uttered it, I asked my- hurt with the pick, digging a pit deep
discussing the particular apportionments self why I had done this. Why had I enough to guard against the sea’s over-
of this shared find. Tart joined the other lowered myself to begging? And what wash and to keep off gulls and gnaw-
Creefs, working the wreck. Patrick and did I expect of Patrick? That my blood ers—and likewise deep enough to top-
I followed after. Two Creefs had stacked cousin who sometimes professed me ple Patrick over into, had I had the chance.
the larger pieces of planking into a sin- “nigh on a brother” might assist in the I caught sight of John B. staring at
gle pile and begun to burn off the wood dire undertaking? Or, better still, that me when it was clear he thought me
to salvage the iron. Giant fingers of he might call on the advantage of our not looking. The set of his eyes betrayed
smoke stretched skyward. Tart picked shared name, and the rank that it im- an aspect that always surprised—some-
thing akin to pride.
Later, the salvaging done, the two
parties stared down the dune as the last
of the Molly McNeal burned, while
nearby I continued with the burials. The
men spoke among themselves as though
I possessed no more hearing than did
the spade that I wielded. Tart and the
younger Creefs joshed that one of the
dead sailors looked a Brazilian nigger,
and they wondered lewdly at the role
of the lone woman in such a piebald
crew. Patrick lingered among them.
Old man Creef wryly cadged John B:
“I expect you could take all seventeen
barrels and sell them up to Norfolk or
thereabouts, if you had a mind to. Or
down to Hatteras.” He glanced my way
and lowered his register a notch. “There
is Army men down there. One camp
or the other will surely take them.”
He seemed to imagine us colored
unknowing of such things.
“Armies?” John B. inquired. And I
was surprised, for how could he not
“They can’t divorce us if they can’t find us.” know of the new war’s encroachment
upon the Banks? But by his face I rec- knew what we knew and so, amongst bounty for families that never went unfed
ognized him to be playing ’possum, hop- us, mixed blood was drylongso, just or- but were not quite fed enough. As au-
ing to learn some particulars he might dinary. Not for my mother, though. thor of the idea, I was allotted the two
not yet be aware of. Ma’am had been born a Dough slave, biggest drum. Each was nigh as long as
Creef nodded, conspiratorially. “The was bought in her teen years from Ben’s my thigh and all but as thick. Hooking
Northern lot is taking it to them main- brother Warren, and there was no love a hand in a gill of each, I lugged them
land boys, it is said.” lost for anybody of that family, any more up to the Etheridge House.
This information was general. than there was for the Etheridges. She The fish were heavy and it was a
“Right,” said John B. He went into forbade me to interact with Matthew, far hike.
his pocket and brought forth paper ten- Mark, and Luke. One time, I asked why. I passed through the kitchen, greet-
der and a few silver coins, then pushed “Vicy think having some tiny-small ing Ma’am Dinah, who was dishing
them into the old man’s outstretched say in things with Ben be worth the broth into a ceramic serving bowl. She
palm. “You must be a religious man, Creef. price it cost to get it,” Ma’am said. tossed up a silent hand as hello, then
Fortune just washes up at your door.” Ma’am was a lean woman, angled returned to her work, paying me and
“The Lord giveth, and He taketh,” and taut. She could spark tinder with a my load little mind, as my presence here-
said the other. “Who am I to question?” shuddersome look and wasn’t one to ex- abouts was regular and never unexpected.
As the Creefs gathered to leave, plain herself. But given that she’d started I pushed into the doorway to the din-
John B. waved Tart and Patrick toward in I asked more—the thing a mixblood ing room and stood there, eyes lowered.
him. I overheard him instructing: “You slave boy knows yet still doubts the full The family was at table after church,
see, that there is his place. This is yours.” truth of. over at Roanoke Island Baptist, which
I didn’t have the heart to look over. “With John B., was the price he of- John B.’s father, Adam, had built. John B.
I knew my father to be talking to my fered too high?” sat across from his wife, Mistuss Mar-
cousin about me. “Offered!” was all she said. gery, Missie Sarah across from Patrick.
“When he’s done,” I heard, “have Her silences spoke louder than her Sarah saw me first.
Dick load those barrels into our boat. words, and the one that followed merely “Hey there, Dick! What have you
If it appears he’ll not be able to finish reprised what I already knew without got?”
alone, you may lend a hand.” providing any connecting bits to help “I brung you a couple of drum,” said
“Yes, sir,” I heard Patrick say, though me make a song of the scattered verses. I, raising my face.
the helping hand never did arrive. The worst of what I knew could wake “ ‘Brought you,’” Sarah corrected. “I’ve
me from sleep and seemed like an ac- taught you better than that.”
mong an isolated people, increas- cusation against me, of what a man “I brought you a couple of drum,” I
A ing your slave stock was as diffi-
cult as finding new blood for brides.
should do or had not done. said, and extended my arms toward the
table, though each one ached and trem-
Mulattoes were the result, open secrets. y birthday fell on a Sunday that bled from the exertion of the trek over.
I stood as a model illustration, a “scion”
of the Etheridge House and broadly
M autumn. Thirteen. Early, well be-
fore sunrise, I slipped lightly into the
Patrick looked mightily impressed.
But as he rose to inspect the catch Mis-
known as such, though a branch in- chattel house behind Midgett Manor tuss Margery scolded, “Stay right where
scribed with my name would nowhere and stirred awake first Fields Midgett, you are, Patrick! You are not dismissed.”
be found on the family tree. then Bill Charles, and bid them join I said to John B., “I borrowed your
Though few, some Sand Bankers were me. Neither much appreciated my creep- nets for the venture and expect I owe
not so guarded about publicly acknowl- ing up on their pallets at that hour, yet you something for their use.”
edging the kinships. Millie Evans (white) both followed after, with little goading There was a hint of a smile on
and Abiah Owens (colored), over at or much need of convincing. We were John B.’s face. “You might ought to ask
Whalebone Junction, and Vicy Bowser friends true. permission beforehand rather than as-
(colored) and Ben Dough (white), down It was our free day, made for sack- sume my nets are for public purpose,”
to Kinnakeet, were openly coupled, with ing out for as long as was tolerated be- said he. “But I appreciate your honesty,
children and all, though in neither case fore whatever chores would be com- and the initiative.”
were they legally married, as the laws of pelled by ma’ams and paps, then the “I wanted to show you what I can
the state disallowed it. I would see Ben weekly camp-meeting after that. The do when given the chance,” I said, aim-
Dough on Roanoke with his tawny sons, three of us hauled one of John B.’s ing for an assertive tone and not that
Matthew, Mark, and Luke, regular if not fifteen-yard seine nets over to the Cro- of a question. “I’m becoming grown and
often; he and John B. would barter fresh atan Sound. With Fields on one end thought maybe you’d give me a chance
catch for whatever naval stores Dough and Bill Charles on the other, I man- to run one of your fishing boats.”
might need from John B.’s supplies. aged the arced stretch in between. We Patrick jumped in: “Me and him
White Bankers made no more fuss of dragged the shallows till the sun reached could run it together, Uncle John.” He
the Doughs’ presence than they might midmorning height, camp-meeting time, added, “Of course, I would supervise.”
of wild Corolla ponies found pasturing and brought in more mackerel and red “I’ve seen how you supervise Dick,”
in their yard of a morning. drum than we could carry. Fields and said John B. “As for you”—he turned
Likewise for colored Bankers. We Bill Charles both took a share, precious back to me—“you would do well to
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 59
show a little less of these superior ca­
pabilities, lest I have you out bright and
early every morning before your duties, TO ANTIGONE, A DISPATCH
catching our noontime meal.”
Mistuss Margery cleared her throat, Antigone, dead siblings
though she maintained her focus plate­ are set. As for the living,
wise. “Does it not worry you, John, pick me for a sister.
an industrious servant with his own
program and aims, and maybe an axe I, too, love a proper funeral.
to grind?” Drag, Dig, and Sisters’ Pop­Up Burial.
The hint of smile quit John B.’s
face. “Why should it? I’ve taught him Landlady,
his place.” I make the rounds of graves
“As I’m sure Goodman Turner up in keeping up my family’s
Southampton County thought he had topnotch properties.
taught the nigger Nat his,” said Mis­
tuss Margery, moving carrot coins about On a torture instrument
with her fork. called an accordion
No one seemed to suspect that I un­ I stretch my fingers
derstood the reference. I left my eyes into those of a witch.
low so as not to give away that I did.
For raw spleen, John B. could match My guts have been emptied
crossedness for crossedness. “Dick will like bellows
one day be to our darky community what for the best sound.
we are to the Sand Banks. Etheridge
stock always shows its pedigree.” Once we settle your brother,
The strained muteness of the room I’ll show you forests
portended the peril that might of a sud­ of the unburied dead.
den befall me with this barbed turn. We’ll clean the way only two sisters
But I’d noted my father’s words: he had can clean a house:
spoken of my “pedigree.” no bones scattered like dirty socks,
The silence stretched. no ashes at the bottom of kneecaps.
“Take them back to Mammy Dinah,”
I heard John B. say, his words still sharp,
though directed at me and no longer After he left, it was my ma’am’s turn “Not in my eyes, it ain’t,” she said.
at his wife. to scold me: “You got to carry whatever “And not in my cabin. No, son. That
I slipped out of the room and left load he command you to, but not aught word is not permitted here.”
the drum on the kitchen counter and else.” She wasn’t talking about Patrick. Insolence wasn’t ever my way, and
scooted out the door. She knew about the two big drum. so it was as though I was hearing some
Later that afternoon, Patrick turned Word travels fast on an island, espe­ other self speak. “May not be for you.
up at Ma’am’s cabin. “Hey, Dick!” he cially among its colored. “He don’t do But for us­all else it is.”
hollered, calling me outside—boldly for you, you do for him. So you don’t “Pardon?” Ma’am said. “What did
but not too bold. Whatever he might owe him one precious thing.” you say?”
be learning about his station as white My ma’am supposed that my atten­ I’d accomplished something with my
folk, every blessed soul on the island tion toward John B. was a sign that I had sunrise venture and John B.’s acknowl­
knew his place with my mother. no buck. I knew this. But it wasn’t that, edgment of it, and it bore remarking.
I dragged myself to the door and not ever. I had buck and then some. No, Me, the man of our household and head
Paddy waved me over. He scolded, “Why it was because the man was my father. in the making of the colored section.
didn’t you tell me you boys was seining I told her, “Mass John B. say I got Me, Richard.
today? I’d have joined you.” initiative and I got drive and might can “For everybody else,” I said, “ ‘Mass’
“It’s family Sunday, Paddy,” said I. run one of his boats.” I didn’t expect be the man’s first name.” I couldn’t help
“Your place is over at Roanoke Island her to feel the pride from this that I myself. I added, “And he a pretty good
Baptist, then up to the House for din­ myself felt, but I knew she would rec­ one, too, I expect, as masters go.”
ner, with the family.” ognize its useful implication. “That be Contrary words did not fluster my
I’d meant the words to sting. more catch and whatnot for you and ma’am. They brought forth her rage.
He went on about being left out of me, and for everybody!” “You think because he let you hang
the fun, as was his right. I demurred “ ‘Mass’?” she said. “His name ‘Master’?” about his house that he think you spe­
but did not bow, as befit my blood— She awaited a reply. cial? That you different?”
my “pedigree.” I offered none. The unceasing silence commanded
60 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020
 but then for sure. Fanny was often the
only girl, but none made a distinction.
She was just Fanny. And, at most-all we
undertook, she was tops. She swam bet-
Why bicker with husbands about dishes ter than Fields and knew whisper-tales
when we’ve got mountains of skulls to shine? on island folk that us others did not and
was generally first picked when we chose
Labor and retribution we’ll share, not girly secrets. sides for chuck-farthing. Whatever the
endeavor, she gave as good as she got.
Brought up by dolls and monuments, The only difference was that she wore a
I have the bearings of a horse and a bitch, sack dress and covered her head in a bon-
I’m waterproof, net where I and the others had on short
I’m cement in tears. pants and plaited straw hats.
She and I first recognized ourselves
You can spot my graves from afar, to be more than just playmates one night
marble like newborn skin. out on Shallowbag Bay. I’d been left be-
hind to unload John B.’s haul of terrapin
Here, history comes to an end from the Margery & Sarah, and Fanny
like a movie was shelling a basketful of shrimp out on
with rolling credits of headstones, the dock. Night had fallen and she was
late getting them to Ma’am Beulah for
like a movie serving at suppertime. I left my chores
with nameless credits of mass graves. and squatted aside her and helped her at
it. Our knees touched as our hands worked
Every ditch, every hill is suspect. in unison. We got the shelling done be-
fore trouble befell her for tarrying, and
Pick me for a sister, Antigone. feeling as much joyful as relieved I leaned
In this suspicious land over and kissed her, unprovoked. Just as
I have a bright shovel of a face. easeful as that, a natural thing to do.
I would swear to this, at least, though
my memory may have tailored the par-
—Valzhyna Mort ticulars. It may have been her that ini-
tiated the kiss. For that was Fanny.
It’s said that, on account of unrelent-
that I raise my face. It defied me not to! there, sobbing into her chest, I saw the ing proximity, island folk can some-
I refused. beautiful girl she had once been, the face times fool themselves into believing an
“You ain’t sleeping in it, though, is from my earliest memory—welcoming earnestness of feeling that isn’t in fact
you?” eyes; honey on a fingertip that I sucked true. With Fanny, it wasn’t fooling. That
I responded then, my voice as soft at; hummed words that might be song first kiss confirmed it.
as smoke. “He taught me letters. Not or maybe just nonsense feather sounds. “How is it you did not know it until
to no slave boy other, just to me.” “Making a baby don’t make a father,” now?” she asked a few nights later, sit-
“It weren’t John B. what taught you she told me. “Remember that. Soon as ting alongside me at our secret spot over
but his daughter. All he did was not dis- you start to thinking elseways, you have by Uppowoc Creek. “The top coons of
allow it.” She harrumphed fiercely, but forsook your own self. You got to un- the top buckras must surely breed the
only so as to catch her breath. “He al- derstand, son: he own you. Just like you bestest pickaninnies, no? Why would I
lowed his daughter a pet to play with had owned them dead drum.” choose some other?”
of a Sunday afternoon, a grinder’s mon- I knew my ma’am to be right, as sure She was joshing, of course. But not,
key on a leash.” as day begets night and night becomes too. We were children yet, but not chil-
Her silence went gentle then, and I day. But pups will favor their paps. I knew dren for long. Such was the life of a
realized that it was because my cheeks this, too. A boy will seek out his father. slave. Even at our young age, I recog-
were shiny with wet. Ma’am didn’t abide nized that she was the one I would ven-
soft, but she sat in her sewing chair ’d known Fanny on about as long as I’d ture down the road with.
and pulled me into her lap. My body
stretched almost as long as hers, yet I
I known anyone, excepting Ma’am. She
was a part of our pack—of Fields Midg- addy and I were in the barn, groom-
curled up small and sank into her breast.
I never knew my ma’am’s true age,
ett and Bill Charles, Dorman Pugh and
the rest, and Paddy, too, when he’d make
P ing John B.’s stock. Paddy loved those
horses nigh on as much as did John B.,
only that she’d bore me when of about himself a part of us. Depending on the and he often joined me in carrying out
as many years as I had turned that day. season and our Masses’ moods, we might horsely duties. The scree-screeing of
She always seemed older. But curled up not find one another save for Sundays, cicadas from outside the open barn door
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 61
was a music we worked by. Even if, with thinks it impractical and not a good use recalled our closeness coming up, fondly,
age, we occupied diverging stations, we of your time.” with a regret hardly befitting a soon-
still talked much, too, open and free. We Despite my ma’am’s admonition, this to-be man, and not fit of a slave ever,
were debating how best to treat Syntax, was the proper way of referring to my no matter the age. And so I wanted this
the prize of the stable but that had father. now rare feeling to last. I told him, “I
been favoring her hind leg. Paddy wanted I’d cast the words jokey but meant think I might make a gift of your art-
heat but I knew cool to be better, to keep them as a caution to Paddy also, to fore- piece to Fanny.”
the swelling down. It went my way, as warn of John B.’s inevitable outburst of Not asking permission, mind you,
Paddy tended to trust my judgment on anger. This newfound interest was just just confiding.
such things. one more thing that seemed to disap- “Annie Aydlett’s handmaid?” he said.
As I cool-wrapped the leg atop the point John B. about his nephew. But “You got something going with her?”
fetlock, he showed me a picture he had Paddy retorted, “Uncle John thinks that It wasn’t joy for me that I saw in his
drawn. It was nice, right nice, of a ship- whatever I do, if he did not bid it done, look but something other.
wreck, with Sand Bankers on the dunes is a poor use of my time. I’ll make my “Well, let me tell you,” he continued,
working to salvage the lumber and sails. fortune one day on my skill with pen and “you ain’t the only bull in the yard sniffing
He’d titled it “Graveyard of the Atlantic” ink, with oil painting, and Uncle John after that heifer. I tried to get her into
and had captured justly the ominous will see that I’m all the man any Ether- the woods myself just the other week.”
look of the dark, heavy surf. I was no idge ever was, and me, by my own path.” Crowing again, raw and ugly. He
judge; all I knew of fine arts and picture- I reached the picture back at him. was not done. “She wasn’t having none
making were illustrations in books and He smiled broad and would not take of it. But you know it’s just a matter of
the portraits of famous Etheridges that it. “Go on and keep it. You can be my time. A nigger-gal ain’t keeping noth-
lined the walls of the Etheridge House. first customer.” ing from nobody.”
But, to tell by Paddy’s drawing, he had “But I ain’t paid you aught for it,” Even then I gave him the benefit of
a flair for it. said I. the doubt. I tried to teach him better.
He said, “You’re pure hell with a horse, “Well, you can still be my first cus- “Is that what you think of me, Paddy?
you boat well and fish even better, but tomer, so long as you don’t tell anyone Am I just a nigger, too?”
here’s something I’ll always best you at. I gave it away for free. Tell them I made “I’ve known you all my life,” said
I can draw the hairs on a fly’s arse and you muck out the horse stalls for it or Paddy, seeming dismayed, as though
get the shading just right.” something.” he’d not recognized his words to be
Paddy could crow with the best of “Smokes, Paddy-boy, I got to do that cruel and the knowledge was only now
them. anyway.” dawning. “It’s different with you, we
I told him, playful, “Mass John B. It was moments such as this one that come up together. You’re like family.”
“Like family? Patrick, you and I are
family.”
My defiance brought on his anger,
which was always close at hand and ig-
nited high-hot. “Nobody ever whipped
you! You tell me one time you was
whipped, maltreated. Hell, we learned
you letters. You sleep well right here
nearby us, eat well. What more do
you want?”
I dropped my eyes—not out of def-
erence, no!—but because to not do so
was to take the next step in this rising
encounter, and that could only end
poorly. I understood just then some-
thing about the source of his constant
rivalling with me. If I bettered Patrick
at most-all, it was because overseeing
me and the others rather than working
alongside us had softened him by com-
parison. I was sure he fared well when
with other white boys. But when with
me or Fields or Dorman? Not hardly.
To see his face—clenching, even as
his eyes darted elseways—it was as though
in that moment he recognized it as well.
“I remember my first Machiavellian phase.” Silence blanketed the barn, so thick
that it smothered the nature noises be- and eyes lowered, a platter outstretched habit, and our gazes locked. Was it re-
yond the open door. toward Mistuss Margery but not close morse I saw in his face, or was that
He said, his voice subduing, “We enough that she might successfully spear merely what I hoped to see? I wished
ought to take Uncle John’s sloop over a fillet of the grilled bluefish. that the truth might expose itself. What
to the Alligator River come Sunday. “The Union Army is nearby, across did the man behold when he looked
Black bear is pesking this time of year. the sound at Chicamacomico,” I heard upon me? A son claiming his station,
I bet you if we laid some traps we could myself saying. “They are taking on col- with the begrudging pride that this
get us one.” ored laborers and I will go there in the might inspire, or a slave of a sudden be-
“Yes,” I said. “I’m sure we could.” morning and enlist.” come ungovernable?
“It’d be fun! And well worth it—for I’d directed this at John B., but Pat- No such wish granted. Just his ex-
the hide and claws.” rick was the one who reacted. His face pressionless face and the sharp clink of
“Yes, sir,” I said, “if you wish it.” All broke into a familiar, impish smile, as tiny metal—Mistuss Margery hotly
but calling him “Mass Patrick.” poking at pieces of fish, heedless that
He realized I would not join in his no one else had been served.
empty banter. Pointing toward the stalls, “But Uncle John! He can’t,” cried
he spat a command about me mucking Patrick, less in protest than as a plea.
them once I was done with Syntax, then He turned toward me. “It’s their war,
stormed out. And I did so, making sure not ours. They will move on and things
to leave his sketch among the drop- will . . . And who knows but that you
pings and chips that I carted off. might get . . .”
I felt regret again then, only not He seemed not to know at whom
wistful this time but a shameful, shame- to aim his appeal, only that it was fall-
ful remorse. A heifer, he’d said; not though I were taunting him with prank- ing on deaf ears, as neither his uncle
keeping nothing from nobody. I real- ful play. Then it shifted, from amused nor I would face him, each of us fac-
ized that, as with my ma’am and to surprised and on to something darker, ing the other.
John B., I’d merely looked after my darker like I’d only on rare occasion seen. Then Patrick’s voice changed. I heard
own hurt. I hadn’t even attempted a “The hell you will.” something like contempt. “When you
defense of Fanny. None else moved, not even a flinch. are killed and your nigger head is just
Ma’am Molly’s Peter stood stiff as stat- some ornament hanging from the gum
ar had broken out at the end of uary, the platter outstretched. tree aside the square on Shallowbag
W the summer. Our Masses pre-
tended it was a foreign affair to do with
“The hell you will!” Patrick repeated,
only stronger, as though it was him the
Bay, we will leave it there for all to see
what you have chosen.”
faraway concerns, but we colored whis- master of the house and not John B. He pushed off fiercely from the table
pered on it. When the Northerner Army Though, indeed, it would be him and toward me, his chair toppling back-
landed down at Hatteras Island, to our one day who took the seat at the top ward. Our statures mirrored one anoth-
south, and overran the Confederate of the dining-room table, Patrick be- er’s, as always, only now I felt taller, as
States soldiers from inland, we knew come John B. This, too, was clear. My though looking down upon his approach-
it in the slave cabins before serving the place would be out at the cabins, at- ing form. Our shoulders collided, delib-
breakfasts over which our Masses would tempting to own things I had no right erately, as he went past and out the door.
dispute the implications. to own. New and not new at all. I had It felt as nothing to me. I noted only
The implications were clear. The come to feel a great need to protect the sharp breeze from the east that
Northerners were headed our way, to- Fanny, and, though my ma’am was proof smelled of salt. I did not wait to be ex-
ward Roanoke. of the folly of the notion, I deemed my- cused but quit the room and returned
And so the implications were like- self capable of it. Hence the course I to my ma’am’s cabin. I hadn’t aforehand
wise clear for me. I found myself that was undertaking. told her of my intention, hadn’t even
evening walking up the lane that ran Just then Mistuss Margery speared told Fanny. It had come to me so of a
alongside Uppowoc Creek, past the a fillet of bluefish—a sharp clink! of sudden that I’d followed the need to act
barn and the windmill partly obscured metal tine on metal platter. She had yet without pondering it further, not for fear
by evening fog, toward the Etheridge to speak a word and refused even to look of a change of mind but from the great
House. Then standing in the vestibule, at me. Ma’am Molly’s Peter slipped out relief one feels at a Bible-like epiphany.
grayly lit by lantern light. Then afore the side door thereon, off to the kitchen, “You couldn’t just run off like other
the great doors to the dining room. though aught other had been served. colored do?” Ma’am said when I told
Had I knocked or just entered? John B. said, “The Yankees will soon her, her angled face unsparing. “You
Dinner conversation of a sudden overrun the island. You will do as you needed to beg for his approval?”
stopped as they noted me there, astrad- will from here on, Dick.” “Tell me,” she added. “Did you get
dle the threshold. Mistuss Margery and “Yes, sir,” I said, wondering was the it?” 
Missie Sarah. Patrick. John B. Ma’am “sir” still mandatory or even appropriate.
Molly’s Peter, the colored boy who served I did not drop my eyes, though, as NEWYORKER.COM
meals, was still now, too, his head bowed was custom and had always been my The author on complicated backstories.

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 63

 THE CRITICS

THE ART WORLD

THE GREAT OUTDOORS

A return to Storm King.

BY PETER SCHJELDAHL

hat’s with the metal-band- suite of eight of them, currently installed ture! Conjoining the made with the un-

W worthy name of Storm King,

the marvellous sculpture
park—or, better, landscape with sculp-
under cathedralesque oak and black-
walnut trees, is modestly scaled. Not so
the vista-dominating, gestural arrays of
made, gratifying both. Sculpture parks
emerged as game preserves and labora-
tories for big art. Storm King’s early con-
tures in it—about fifty miles north of mostly steel elements by a favorite of centration of works by relevant artists
Manhattan, in Cornwall, New York? I’ve the collectors since 1968, Mark di Su- of the late nineteen-sixties and seven-
just spent some happy hours there, sprung vero, which at times suggest playground ties includes some formulaic banalities,
from months of art deprivation, on the facilities for giants. Nine of those were tending to presume a surefire magic in
occasion of the Storm King Art Cen- supplemented last year by a three-year embowered angular geometry, but even
ter’s reopening to visitors with timed loan of “E=mc²” (1996-97)—a tower, there you may savor the zest of a mo-
tickets. The setting is thundery enough, more than ninety-two feet high, whose ment when sculpture jumped into na-
under the mighty brow of one of the converging I-beam legs are topped by ture’s lap. The history is complicated and
highest mountains of the Hudson High- flaring forms in stainless steel that grab obscured, in the art world, by the con-
lands, in a valley of variegated hills, lawns, at the sky. Also monumental are two temporaneous development, in the six-
meadows, forest, and waters, along with maximum-sized stabiles by art’s fore- ties, of Minimalism, which, by engag-
elegant alterations that include arboreal most bejeweller of air, indoors or out, ing the physical presence of viewers,
allées and plantings with deference to Alexander Calder. There are major shrugs off its surroundings. (The park’s
native flora—some five hundred acres works, as well, by Richard Serra, Andy chastely white modular piece by Sol Le-
hosting roughly a hundred art works. I Goldsworthy, and, most recently, Maya Witt doesn’t mind a bucolic site one way
hadn’t known, until I was told during Lin, whose earthwork “Storm King or another.) As a consequence, Mini-
my visit, that the park’s name owes its Wavefield” (2007-08) represents a vast malism sidelined poetic potencies that
provenance to the Romantic exaspera- expanse of mid-ocean waves, up to fifteen prove their lasting worth at Storm King.
tion of a writer who, in 1853, pressed lo- feet high, with grassy undulations.
cals to rebrand their principal mountain Sculpture parks proliferated, world- rior visitors won’t be kept away by
Storm King from—get ready—Butter
Hill. That nineteenth-century embrace
wide, in the second half of the twenti-
eth century, in the wake of an identity
P learning that few installations in
this pandemic summer are new. The
of the hyperbolic anticipated the moxie, crisis for large three-dimensional art. park’s changing light, breezes, and the-
in 1960, of two art-loving businessmen, Modernist austerity had stripped sculp- atre of clouds will do for novelty. The
Ralph E. Ogden and his son-in-law ture of its traditional architectural and best recent addition, on view until No-
H. Peter Stern, who gradually acquired civic functions: there were no more in- vember 9th, is “River Light” (2019), a
much of the valley. They founded the tegrated niches and pedestals, few new ring of nine high-flying cyan-blue silk
park as a nonprofit entity, made a mu- formal gardens, and an epochal apathy flags that Kiki Smith derived from a
seum of an existing château on a hill- regarding statues—until lately! (We are sun-sparkled film she made on a walk
top, and pondered the ambient possibil- now practically neo-Victorian in our along the East River. Wind stirs the
ities of the terrain. awakenings—rude, for the most part— fabric to rippling, soft applause. The en-
In 1967, Ogden bought thirteen works to symbolism in statuary.) Never mind semble suggests a rallying point for an-
from the estate of America’s greatest the odd plaza-plunked, vaguely human- gels. Also new is “A stone that thinks
ABOVE: LALALIMOLA

sculptor, David Smith. Mostly made of ist Henry Moore. Where could one put of Enceladus” (2020), a piece by a young
welded steel, they deploy a repertoire of outsized works that were almost invari- New York-based artist, Martha Tuttle,
shapes, from the surreally animate to ably abstract—modernism’s universalist which consists of a mowed field stud-
the nobly abstract, gracing dancerly pos- ideals persisting—to give them a chance ded with boulders and cairns and rather
tures with lyrical drawings in space. A of seeming to mean something? In na- hectically festooned with carved rocks
64 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020
Mark di Suvero’s “Figolu,” from 2005-11. Some of his works at Storm King suggest playground facilities for giants.
PHOTOGRAPH BY JUSTINE KURLAND THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 65
 and molded glass stones. Close by, simultaneously upon and within—and,
propped on an island in a pond, is a in this case, as—the ground it occupies.
startling curio, the hull of an America’s The effect that she achieves, in com-
Cup-grade racing boat that, in 1994, was mon with Serra’s “Fork,” is a placeness
prettily decorated with a mermaid motif that centers the world while you are in
by Roy Lichtenstein. Its abrupt presence, its vicinity. Neither work could have a
which you may less look at than gawk home more hospitable than Storm King.
Introducing the at, invokes the metaphysical truth that Repeatedly, there are medium-sized
everything has to be somewhere. Storm objects that, spotted from a distance and

Get WIRED King’s prevalent rectitude might serve

as a foil for other sorts of interesting
drawing you to them, precipitate new
relations of yourself to the landscape at

Podcast
shocks, within appropriate limits. large. It’s like a recurrent bonus for tiny
I can’t remember why, on a visit many pilgrimages. Louise Bourgeois’s writh-
years ago, I was unimpressed by “Storm ing cluster of silvered-bronze eyeball
hosted by King Wall” (1997-98), by Andy Golds- shapes that electrically light up from
Lauren Goode. worthy—perhaps residual fatigue with within now and then—“Eyes” (2001)—
a fashion, in the seventies and eighties, requires a bit of a climb to be viewed
for back-to-the-land schmaltz. The work properly. You may then be reluctant to
strikes me now as rigorously intelligent move along, so engrossing is the work’s
as well as ecstatic. Made of rocks that rambunctious grotesquerie and smack-
were gathered from the surrounding re- on-the-ground adamancy at the edge of
gion, impeccably hand-laid, the wall a lovely wood. That’s a happenstantial
snakes nearly half a mile through the quality of the finest things at Storm King:
park’s roughest terrain—clinging to art that, beyond looking good, feels keenly
slopes, plunging into ravines, ostensibly aware of where it is and what it’s doing
even passing underwater. The gratuitous there. It’s a forgiving standard for lesser
labor-intensiveness generates a paean to art, which gets by on seeming eager to
the first human being who placed one please if ever you find yourself in a mood
stone atop another, and to every other for it. Every piece hints at a story of its
News from since then and in time to come. Hiking
the erratic land, you chance upon dis-
curatorial nomination and election, in-
viting judgment on the judgments that
tomorrow continuous views of the wall, proceed-
ing at the pace of a waking dream. Sim-
were made—a perambulatory discourse,
if you’re so inclined.
Get WIRED is a new podcast ilarly inexhaustible is the authority of In lockdown times, there’s euphoria
about how the future is realized. Serra’s “Schunnemunk Fork” (1990-91), in going much of anywhere, not to speak
Each week, we burrow down four rectangular steel plates protruding of a journey to a tract of paradise. You
new rabbit holes to investigate from the sides of a gentle rise. The work could say that I was primed for giddi-
the ways technology is changing looks smaller than I remember, from a ness on this occasion. I noticed unac-
our lives—from culture to time when I wrote that it induced “con- customed intensity in my responses to
business, science to design. sciousness of the earth’s sullen, imme- the art works that I encountered, taking
Through hard-hitting reporting, morially surging mass.” It turns out that them in like gulps of air after escaping
intimate storytelling, and audio a few years ago Serra decided to forgo a miasma. It was a gift of refreshed aes-
you won’t hear anywhere else,
any mowing around the plates, which thetic innocence, which I think awaits
Get WIRED is the smartest,
sharpest, most thorough show now peek out almost shyly from rustling us all when we are set free in even non-
on how tech transforms what it grasses: less imposing, their aggressive- curated environs—I’ve been feeling apol-
means to be human. ness a kept secret, and very beautiful. ogetic to certain trees, near my home,
The Maya Lin “Storm King Wave- for my past indifference to their beauty—
field,” just beyond sight of the Serra, is and a lesson in joys that we used to take
Listen and subscribe to a tour de force by the designer of, to my for granted. We will have peeled eyes. I
Get WIRED on Apple mind, the single most successful work should warn that attendance at Storm
of American public art in contempo- King is limited right now: visitor tick-
Podcasts, Spotify, or
rary memory, the Vietnam Veterans Me- ets are capped at three hundred per day,
wherever you get your morial—a cenotaph for shared mourn- from Wednesday to Monday. But the
podcasts. ing—in Washington, D.C. (Still, it place, which will stay open into Decem-
proved divisive enough—we are talking ber this year, is very apt to exist for at
about America—to acquire the neigh- least as long as you do. And just to know
boring complement of a statuary group and to think about it brightens a world,
of three heroic G.I.s.) At Storm King, our present one, that is crisscrossed with
Lin extends the idea of form that exists shadows. 
 woman? Ferrante posed that question,
A CRITIC AT LARGE partly to herself, thirteen years ago, in
an interview with the Italian magazine

HOSTILE LOVE
Io Donna. She had not yet published
her Neapolitan quartet, an epic bil-
dungsroman in four volumes, narrated
The willful daughters of Elena Ferrante. by a writer named Elena, which has
sold some sixteen million copies. But
BY JUDITH THURMAN her earlier novels—“Troubling Love,”
“Days of Abandonment,” and “The
Lost Daughter,” a triptych of stories
about women in extremis—were a pre-
view of her power. This body of work
defies the conventions of writing “like
a woman” as radically as did Mary Shel-
ley’s “Frankenstein.”
In “Days of Abandonment” (2002),
the narrator, Olga, who once had lit-
erary ambitions but shelved them when
she married and had children, answers
her author’s question. “To write truly,”
she reflects, “is to speak from the depths
of the maternal womb.” Ferrante has
an attunement to her characters that
one might call maternal, yet she ac-
cepts no constraints on what a female
can say, and, more fundamentally, on
what she can feel. Her fiction rattles
the cage of gender.
Interviews suggest that Ferrante found
her vocation on the late side, around
forty. Nothing verifiable is known about
her youth, but, she told Io Donna, “I
learned to write by reading mainly works
by men.” Their heroines (she specifies
Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, and
Chekhov’s lady with a little dog) engaged
her more fully, she said, and seemed more
like “real women” than did the female
protagonists of women novelists.
he pseudonymous Italian novelist Familial rancors, long simmering, lead There are writers of her sex whom
T Elena Ferrante has written pro-
foundly about two subjects for some
to the revelation that her parents are
flawed human beings. Ferrante has a
Ferrante admires—Elsa Morante and
Virginia Woolf among them. Those
thirty years: the fraught bond between gift, perhaps even a genius, for making who disappoint her appear to have a
mothers and daughters, and the brutal- great literature out of melodrama. But common failing. “I always read stories
ity of life in proletarian Naples. Her lat- the overwrought language of her new by women with trepidation,” she told
est work of fiction, “The Lying Life of book doesn’t illuminate the anguish that another Italian magazine. “I expect
Adults” (Europa), is a surprising devia- it seeks to plumb. Giovanna admits, in something that seemed unsayable to
tion for her. Its narrator, Giovanna Trada, the first paragraph, that she is clueless appear miraculously on the page.” The
is a woman on the brink of middle age about her own story: it may, she says, unsayable is either what you may not
who is recounting the disaffections of “merely be a snarled confusion of suffer- say, because of who you are, or what
her privileged adolescence, some thirty ing.” Had this been a young writer’s you cannot admit, because you have
years ago. The teen-ager she conjures is coming-of-age story, one could praise internalized a taboo.
obsessed with her looks, about which its abundant flashes of brilliance and Ferrante’s style is blunt—at times
she despairs for three hundred pages. forgive its excesses. Coming from a mas- even careless—as if she were delib-
Just as doggedly, she moons after a local ter, its puerility is a mystery. erately rejecting centuries of precios-
heartthrob who is dating a skinny friend. What does it mean to write like a ity in women’s prose. “When I write,
it’s as if I were butchering eels,” she
Ferrante can blur the boundaries between a woman’s older and younger self. told Io Donna. “I pay little attention to
ILLUSTRATION BY SONIA PULIDO THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 67
the unpleasantness of the operation.” triarchies like that of Ferrante’s Naples. embodiment in the hostile love—em-
The word “revulsion” recurs so often Male authors may have taught Fer- powering and subversive, jealous and
in her pages that it is almost a tic. She rante to write, but none of them grew reverent, steadfast and treacherous—
revels in descriptions of incontinence: up as a girl. “A secret cord that can’t be between two friends whom we meet
leaking tampons and spastic ejacula- cut binds us to the bodies of our moth- as girls of eight, in the slum where they
tions. Women novelists before her have ers,” she wrote in a newspaper column. were born, and follow for six decades,
seethed at the benevolence expected of “There is no way to detach ourselves, or through the upheavals of postwar Ital-
them—the Brontë sisters are a notable at least I’ve never managed to.” But there ian society. Elena Greco and Raffaella
example. But Ferrante is a brawler, not is a way. Ferrante suggested it, crypti- Cerullo (Lenù and Lila) seem fated
a seether. She co-opts the pugnacity of cally, in response to a question about Ol- from the outset to become their moth-
a male voice to express the unsayable ga’s battles with her daughter: they lead ers—weary drudges brutalized by their
about female dilemmas, and this bel- her to accept her child’s “hostile love as men, who wreak that violence on their
ligerence feels revolutionary. a vital feeling.” Hostile love is also vital daughters, if not by blows then by dis-
A Ferrante novel typically begins to literature. The characters who seem paragement. In that respect, each of
with the violent rupture of a primal at- most “real” to us were created by a writer them has been invisible to herself un-
tachment, and a woman’s discovery of unafraid of its contradictions. til her friend gives her the gift of be-
how enslaved she has been to it. Delia, ing seen.
in “Troubling Love” (1992), is unhinged reud defines “the uncanny” as the Lila, a self-taught prodigy, will make
by her mother’s apparent suicide. Olga
becomes deranged when her husband
F terror of what is most familiar—
what frightens us most about home, even
her fortune as a pioneer of computer
technology, but not before an abusive
deserts her for a younger woman. Elena as it compels us to return there. The Na- teen-age marriage cuts short her edu-
learns, in the opening pages of “My Bril- ples of Ferrante’s work has precisely this cation. She survives a hellish interlude
liant Friend” (2011), the quartet’s first gothic allure. The city is a mother’s body, in a sausage factory, which engages
volume, that her best friend from child- pungent and labyrinthine, loathsome her in the violent class struggles that
hood has abandoned her, after sixty years, and beloved, from which she cannot de- polarized Italy in the seventies. Her
by vanishing without a trace. Parents, tach herself. It was there that I first read life is a series of insurrections against
children, and men back these women Ferrante in Italian. male despotism, beginning with her
into corners, from which they lash out— Italians have been notably less smit- father’s. Just as she threw rocks at the
sometimes viciously. But they are, above ten with Ferrante than her foreign fans local boys who tried to bully her, she
all, caged in their own bodies, taut to have. They are famously pious about rebels against the institutions that do
bursting with rage and shame. Ferrante maternity, and Ferrante’s narrators tend the same: daughterhood, wifehood, ma-
perceives their claustrophobia as a con- to be bad mothers who are emancipated ternity, capitalism, the Camorra (Na-
flict between their imperative desires by their neglect. Reading her in En- ples’s Mafia). Not even love can hold
and those of others, to whom their iden- glish isn’t the same experience. Ann Lila fast. She understands it as a form
tity is beholden. In that respect, they are Goldstein has translated all of Ferran- of martyrdom like all the others. When
not unlike Shelley’s monster. te’s work, and many bilingual readers she disappears, leaving her best friend
There is a vast bibliography of an- feel that she has improved the prose. It bereft, it isn’t a surprise to Lenù: that
alytic theory on this subject, much of may not be a coincidence that Ferrante is how Lila has always lived, beholden
it dating to the nineteen- has called translators her to no one.
seventies, when it electrified “only heroes.” Translation, Elena lacks Lila’s courage for sacri-
the young feminists of Fer- she wrote recently, “draws lege; she is a female version of Balzac’s
rante’s generation, and she us out of the well in which, provincial strivers, whose climb out of
has acknowledged its in- entirely by chance, we are poverty is enabled by a vigilant false
fluence. The theory situated born.” Goldstein has nearly self and a talent for ingratiation. De-
the roots of misogyny in an perfect pitch for Ferrante’s cades pass, and she matures into a sex-
infant’s conflicting impulses voice, yet it has an accent ually liberated intellectual who juggles
toward a mother’s body: to on the page that English motherhood and a career. Her books
devour, penetrate, and pos- cannot quite capture, which on working-class Naples, appropriated
sess; to be cherished, mas- is itself the echo of another from Lila’s hardships, make her a fa-
tered, and contained. Only language—the harsh, often mous writer. But whenever the story
later are these desires rigidly classified obscene dialect of Campania. Ferrante shifts away from Lila it loses a mythic
as male or female. Most cultures can’t balks at using dialect explicitly, yet her dimension and becomes something
tolerate the ambiguity for long. A boy prose bears its imprint like the welt more ordinary: a bourgeois novel.
is socialized to suppress his “female” marks of a slap. Although Ferrante’s audience isn’t
yearnings, and is rewarded for it with Ferrante’s early novels are rooted in confined to women, she has inspired
the prestige of maleness; a girl’s reward the notion that primal attachments an ardent following among them, partly
for surrendering to passivity is male ap- shape the way that human beings dom- because few writers have evoked fe-
proval. At their most unforgiving, these inate and submit to one another. In the male friendship more truthfully, or have
asymmetries help to sustain archaic pa- quartet, she gives that premise a vivid given it the place in an ambitious epic
68 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020
that male friendship has held in liter­
ature since the Iliad. (There is some­
thing of Achilles in Lila: a noble heart
capable of feral cruelty.) And, if her
readers tend to identify with one bril­
liant friend or the other, many feel a
primal attachment to their creator.
In part for that reason, Ferrante’s
identity and gender—even her singu­
larity (is she really one person?)—have
been matters of fervid speculation. In
2016, Claudio Gatti, an investigative
journalist for Il Sole 24 Ore, a business
newspaper, claimed to have unmasked
her. He had hacked into the royalty state­
ments of Ferrante’s Italian publisher,
Edizioni E/O, a small house to which
she has been loyal. Inexplicably vast sums,
he discovered, had been paid to the ac­ “ You can’t pull this every time we need to decide where to eat.”
count of Anita Raja, a translator from
the German and an E/O stalwart. Raja, • •
who is sixty­seven, was born in Naples,
her father’s native city, but grew up in
Rome; her mother was a Polish Jew who Journalists ask versions of the same ques­ deserted alley, with a skinny boy who
had escaped the Holocaust. If she has tions, and her replies run on for pages, was mainly interested in getting her to
published fiction, she has never signed sometimes donnishly. She corresponds “caress” him. She still has a penchant for
any. But her husband, Domenico Star­ with directors who have filmed her nov­ lean men, especially those with a reced­
none, is one of Italy’s most prominent els, and with fangirls who tell her that ing hairline. Pregnancy was a “seesaw of
men of letters, whose best­known work they were “blown away” by them. “Fran­ joy and horror.” She dislikes the way
is set in Naples, where he was born into tumaglia,” Ferrante notes, is an expres­ she looks in photographs and is the last
the same generation and class as Lenù sion in dialect that conjures “debris in a guest to leave a party: “My problem is
and Lila. He has vehemently denied muddy water of the brain.” She makes leave­taking itself. I don’t like to sepa­
having written or co­written Ferrante’s a creative­writing lesson of her own flot­ rate from people.”
novels. Yet if their author is a man he sam—reprinting manuscript pages from What should readers make of these
has pulled off one of the most improb­ her early novels which didn’t make the books—a slight, cozy memoir and a hefty
able—not to mention galling—imper­ cut, often because they were, she felt, intellectual autobiography that, together,
sonations in the annals of fiction. too explanatory. “It’s my own fastidious­ run to nearly five hundred pages? At the
Whoever Ferrante may be, however, ness that censors me,” she tells a critic. very least, no one should entertain illu­
the author’s relationship with the public Last year, Ferrante published “Inci­ sions about their veracity. “As I child, I
resembles a game that mothers play with dental Inventions,” a collection of weekly was a big liar,” Ferrante writes in a col­
infants: peekaboo. Even as she dodges musings and personal sketches for the umn. She put so much effort into her lies
bounty hunters like Gatti, she seems to Guardian, which added to the inventory that she forgot they weren’t true. “Fran­
take unusual pleasure in explaining her­ of what we know about her (or of what tumaglia” conveys a more explicit warn­
self. In 2003, she published “Frantu­ she wants us to think that we know). ing. A critic asks her for a “brief descrip­
maglia,” a volume of letters and inter­ The prose is confiding and, in places, tion” of herself, and she cites the response
views with critics, reporters, filmmak­ pontifical. Those who are “given the of Italo Calvino to a nosy scholar: “I don’t
ers, fans, and her publishers, the earliest job of telling stories,” she notes, “should give biographical facts, or I give false ones,
dating from 1991. Two subsequent edi­ construct fictions that help seek the or anyway I always try to change them
tions enlarged the contents; an English truth of the human condition.” Ferrante from one time to the next. Ask me what
translation appeared four years ago, with the columnist claims to have more than you want to know, but I won’t tell you
the subtitle “A Writer’s Journey.” one daughter and a granddaughter. Her the truth, of that you can be sure.”
The reclusive cipher turns out to be daughters “let me know I should keep
a garrulous interview subject, so long as quiet” but help her with technology. She endacity is the theme of “The
the conversations are conducted by
e­mail. There is something poignant
adores plants and cats. She hates excla­
mation points. Snakes are her worst fear,
M Lying Life of Adults.” Its title is
the heading a teen­ager might give
about her eagerness to hold forth, and and failure used to be. Tobacco was once to a page in her diary, before filling it
it makes you wonder whether, over her drug of choice—she started smok­ with evidence of her parents’ hypocrisy.
the years, anonymity hasn’t become ing at twelve. At fifteen, she discovered That, in essence, is the story that fol­
another experience of claustrophobia. sex, which she primly calls “love,” in a lows, which is set in Naples, in the
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 69
nineteen-nineties. Its narrator is about ement and works as a maid. She and slums but is now a theology student in
forty. She has, she tells us portentously, Andrea hate each other incandescently. Milan—and the fiancé of Enzo’s daugh-
“slipped away” from the places and the “The face of Vittoria” is a coded ex- ter. Roberto is an evangelist for selfless
events that she is recounting, and is “still pression that both parents use to de- love, rather than the hostile variety, and
slipping away.” The slippage, though, is scribe a cultivated person who has re- everyone reveres him. Giovanna’s mis-
never explained, except that the middle- vealed a hidden vulgarity. Muttered ery elicits his compassion, and he tells
aged Giovanna confounds herself un- darkly, in the dialect of her father’s her the magic words: “You’re very beau-
critically with the teen-ager she was. childhood, the phrase shatters Giovanna tiful.” This paragon of male virtue is
That blurring of boundaries between like a curse. She takes it to mean that such a rarity in Ferrante’s fiction as to
an older and a younger woman, or an she has suddenly become “very ugly.” fairly guarantee a takedown in a se-
older and a younger self, is a Ferrante Everyone assures her that she isn’t ugly quel—one that the novel’s loose ends
signature. Characters like Delia, Elena, at all, but she ceases to believe any of seem to promise.
and Olga inhabit a troubled past, and the certainties she once accepted, start- Three years pass as the men posture
relive its traumas with an immedi- ing with her sense of worth. and the women weep over them. At
acy that makes them visceral for the To assuage her angst, Giovanna seeks nearly sixteen, Giovanna realizes be-
reader. But these women never relin- out the aunt whom she is said to re- latedly, “I had been deceived in every-
quish their authority in the present to semble. Vittoria proves to be a beauti- thing. . . . But the mistake had been to
shape the story. In the course of events— ful, foulmouthed Fury out of Eurip- make it a tragedy.” Delivered of her vir-
a few days or weeks in the early novels, ides by way of “The Sopranos.” She ginity in a touchingly bathetic scene,
a lifetime in the quartet—a character tells Giovanna an instructive story. she runs away to Venice with one of
separates from her avatars and comes Some twenty years earlier, she fell in the sisters she used to play with, a bud-
to understand the nature of their at- love, for the first and only time, with ding novelist. “On the train,” she con-
tachment. One might call that achieve- a married policeman named Enzo, who cludes, “we promised each other to be-
ment of consciousness hostile self-love. fucked her like a god (she describes come adults as no one ever had before.”
But its lucidity is missing from “The their coitus in detail to Giovanna), Great novelists conjure human be-
Lying Life.” though only eleven times. Her happi- ings under stress without making them
In the first chapter, Giovanna has ness was destroyed when Giovanna’s case studies. “I think that authors are
just entered puberty. She is the cher- father revealed the affair to Enzo’s wife devoted, diligent scribes, who draw
ished only child of an attractive couple, and their three children. Soon after- in black and white following a more
Nella and Andrea. Both parents teach ward, the policeman “died of grief.” or less rigorous order of their own,”
high school, and her father is an intel- Andrea, his sister explains, ruined her Ferrante told a journalist. But, she
lectual of some note. They own an apart- life on the pretense of saving it. added, “the true writing, what counts,
ment in an upscale neighborhood, where In the rendezvous that follow, Vit- is the work of the readers.” In “The
they often entertain their best friends, toria is alternately “threatening and en- Lying Life of Adults,” she seems to
whose two daughters are Giovanna’s veloping.” She introduces Giovanna to confuse her readers with the journal-
playmates. All three girls have been the working-class kin she has never ists to whom she has explained her
raised liberally—no nonsense about re- met, and to Enzo’s family, which em- work didactically. “Lies, lies, adults
ligion or abstinence. Illustrated primers braces her. She also dares her niece to forbid them and yet they tell so many,”
taught them the facts of life, or at least ferret out her parents’ lies. When the Giovanna thinks.
its mechanics; they masturbate guilt- girl discovers that they have been un-
lessly, sometimes together.
Giovanna is something new in Fer-
faithful, she loses respect for them—
and any scruples about lying herself.
“ T he Lying Life” has passages of
electric dialogue and acute per-
rante’s fiction: a daddy’s girl. She and As her breasts swell, and males take ception. But its crude hinting and
Andrea share an enviable complicity. notice, Giovanna starts dressing like “a telegraphing suggest an author who
“I had much more fun with him than dissolute woman” in an effort to feel distrusts her reader’s discernment, and
with my mother,” she says. He lets her “heroically vile.” She even gives a hand they made me wonder if Ferrante hadn’t
know that she is “indispensable.” She job to Enzo’s hapless son. (Masochism drafted the story as a much younger
ought to be on her way to becoming has always been a quack remedy for a writer, still honing her craft. Consider
one of those lucky daughters who are sense of unworthiness.) the artifice of the “cursed” bracelet that
at ease with their desires because an Giovanna isn’t blind to her aunt’s is coveted by every female character,
adoring father has sanctioned them. coarseness, or insensible to her tyranny, and given to or stolen from each of
But puberty has made her moody, and, yet she admires the code that Vittoria them in turn. It winds up on the floor
on the evening when the story begins, lives by, which consists of not taking of the bachelor pad where Giovanna
Andrea learns that Giovanna’s latest shit from anyone and loving one man is deflowered. If you missed the sym-
report card is mediocre. She overhears forever, even a dead one. Vittoria’s fidel- bolism, turn to page 135: Giovanna
him tell her mother that she is “getting ity extends to God. She drags her niece muses, “The bracelet, however you
the face of Vittoria.” Vittoria is her fa- to church, where Giovanna has a coup looked at it, in whatever type of story
ther’s younger sister, a plebeian virago de foudre for a charismatic lay preacher you inserted it . . . showed only that
who still lives in their parents’ old ten- named Roberto, who was born in the our body, agitated by the life that
70 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020
writhes within, consuming it, does
stupid things that it shouldn’t do.” Who
wrote this sentence? Not a master of BRIEFLY NOTED
the unsayable.
At a certain age, every artist contem- Summer, by Ali Smith (Pantheon). Shuttling between the
plates her unfinished business. Having Covid-19 crisis and the Second World War, the final install-
focussed on mothers for three decades, ment of Smith’s Seasonal Quartet follows two pairs of sib-
perhaps Ferrante wanted to take on a lings: Sacha and Robert Greenlaw, teen-agers in present-day
father and a daughter. Since she has no Britain, and Daniel and Hannah Gluck, who were separated
comfort zone, it wasn’t that she stepped by the country’s wartime internment program. As the novel
out of it to imagine the bond between unfolds, the teen-agers and the now elderly Daniel are drawn
Andrea and Giovanna, and its disrup- together by a theft that took place decades before. Both time
tion. In the absence of a mediating adult lines examine catastrophes—unethical immigration policies,
sensibility, however, the drama never climate change—and the linguistic distortions that accom-
transcends the emotional confines of pany them. Sacha, terrified by the Earth’s devastation, con-
the adolescence it depicts. siders the face masks of the pandemic: “They’re like noth-
Ferrante’s magisterial social history ing at all, dead leaves, blowaway litter, compared to the real
of class gave significance to events, in masks, the ones on the faces of the planet’s liars.”
the quartet, that might otherwise have
seemed like episodes in a telenovela. But Antkind, by Charlie Kaufman (Random House). The protago-
“The Lying Life of Adults” affords no nist of this début novel, by the screenwriter of “Being John
sense of Italy in the nineteen-nineties, Malkovich” and “Adaptation,” is a film critic, B. Rosenberg,
except for the abstract Marxist chatter who becomes the sole audience for a wildly ambitious film
that excites Andrea and his friends, or that takes three months to watch. When its enigmatic cre-
the vague liberation theology that flavors ator, Ingo Cutbirth, dies mid-screening, Rosenberg takes it
Roberto’s sermons. Giovanna’s father upon himself to bring the reels to show his editor, but they
and her aunt were born in a blighted combust en route, leaving him with a single frame. His quest
neighborhood, but, thirty years after to reconstruct the film is continually interrupted by vaude-
Lenù left one like it, its boundaries are villian set pieces, hypnotism sessions, and his own digressive
porous: there is television reception and rants on the nature of cinema, including several about
public transport; Vittoria tootles around Kaufman’s works. The result is an unmistakably Kaufman-
Naples in her own car. Besides, Giovanna esque metafictional fantasia.
is only a tourist in the città bassa, be-
guiled by its exotic locals. She goes God’s Shadow, by Alan Mikhail (Liveright). Seeing the Ot-
back to her studies, and makes up a toman Empire as pivotal in shaping the Western world, this
lost year. With her father’s encourage- history casts developments such as the Reconquista, the In-
ment, she starts reading the Gospels, quisition, the Reformation, and exploration of the New World
in Greek. Yet she does so as a way into as responses to rising Islamic power. Mikhail focusses on
Roberto’s heart. Like almost all the fe- Selim, who, in 1517, became the first Ottoman ruler to be
males in the novel, whatever their age both sultan and caliph, and whose military and administra-
or their class, Giovanna is abjectly de- tive skill tripled Ottoman territory, making it the largest and
pendent on the love of someone with most powerful empire in the world. Though the Ottomans
a penis. In that respect, she represents generally granted religious freedom, European rulers obses-
a disheartening surrender of the ground sively feared Muslim expansion; Mikhail traces the influence
that Olga, Lila, Elena, and Ferrante of this paranoia on the Islamophobia that continues to in-
herself fought to liberate. form American politics.
For all the signage in “The Lying
Life of Adults,” it is hard to say what Memorial Drive, by Natasha Trethewey (Ecco). “To survive
Ferrante’s intentions were. She has cho- trauma, one must be able to tell a story about it,” the author
sen, for mysterious reasons, to abdicate writes, in a memoir that sets the story of her mother’s mur-
the two greatest sources of her power: der, by an abusive partner, in 1985, in the context of the ineq-
the hostile love of mothers and daugh- uities suffered by Black women in the South. In Georgia,
ters, and the Vesuvian rumble beneath monuments of the Confederacy loom amid the writer’s per-
the surface of a squalid habitat where sonal monuments, such as the apartment where a chalk outline
men and women are trapped in arche- of her mother’s body was once traced, reminding her “what
typal roles. Perhaps a sequel will give is remembered here and what is not.” Trethewey examines
those intentions a more artful focus. Or patterns of neglect—the murder occurred after a police officer
perhaps something unsayable blocked who was supposed to be monitoring their apartment left his
her access to their truth.  post—and concludes, “They could have saved her.”
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 71
 of Old English literature “more like
BOOKS masonry than music.” (In addition to
writing “The Hobbit” and the “Lord

MOTHERING THE MONSTER

of the Rings” trilogy, both distinctly
inflected by Norse and Anglo-Saxon
mythology, Tolkien was a prominent
A “Beowulf ” for our moment. scholar of Old English.) The effect,
when read aloud, is something like
BY RUTH FRANKLIN boots marching on gravel, with Yoda-
style inversions. James Joyce famously
parodied it in “Ulysses”: “Before born
babe bliss had.”
Headley, a novelist known primar-
ily for her works of fantasy for young
adults, is the most recent of the dozens
of modern English translators who have
taken on the poem, which runs three
thousand one hundred and eighty-two
lines long. They range from scholars
like Tolkien (who spent decades re-
vising his translation before deciding
not to publish it; it appeared posthu-
mously in a 2014 edition put together
by his son Christopher) to the poets
Seamus Heaney and Stephen Mitch-
ell, both of whom have produced lyri-
cal and critically admired versions. Very
few of these translators are women,
which is unsurprising. “Beowulf ”—
in which the eponymous hero, a man
of gigantic, and perhaps supernatu-
ral, strength, defends King Hrothgar
and the Danes against Grendel, a part
man, part monster who is plaguing the
kingdom—tends to be perceived as a
masculine poem, its vocabulary and
its ethics those of the battleground
and the mead hall. (If I had wanted
to discuss spears or honor codes with
the doctor, Old English would have
few weeks ago, during a visit to appear in the modern English alpha- served just fine.) The men in “Beo-
A the doctor, I laughed out loud
when the online check-in portal sug-
bet: the diphthong “æ” (ash), as well
as two letters that represent the “th”
wulf ” drink and boast and fight; the
women, even the queens, exist mainly
gested Old English as my language sound, “þ” (thorn) and “ð” (eth). Its un- to pass around the mead cup and to
preference, and not only because I hap- intelligibility is evident from the first mourn their fallen kinsmen.
pened to have with me Maria Dahvana line of “Beowulf ”: “Hwæt wē Gār- There is one notable exception. As
Headley’s “Beowulf ” (MCD), a new Dena in geārdagum.” the warriors sleep off their drunken
translation of the long poem that is Even without understanding the celebration of Grendel’s defeat at Beo-
one of the oldest surviving works of meaning (roughly, “We of the Spear- wulf ’s hands, Grendel’s mother shows
literature in the language. Without se- Danes in the days of yore”), we can up to avenge her son’s death in a surprise
rious study, no speaker of contemporary notice a few things about Old En- attack. Headley writes that, as a child
English could converse in or even read glish poetry. Each line is broken up “on the hunt for any sort of woman
Old English (also known as Anglo- into two half lines, separated by a cae- warrior,” she came upon this character
Saxon), a language as distinct from its sura; the focus is on metre and allit- in an illustrated encyclopedia of mon-
modern equivalent as many foreign eration, not rhyme. J.R.R. Tolkien, in sters and assumed, naturally, that Gren-
tongues. Of Germanic origin, it con- his lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters del’s mother was the focus of the story.
tains numerous elements that don’t and the Critics,” called the structure When Headley finally read the poem,
she was dismayed that scholars had
Maria Dahvana Headley’s translation gives Grendel’s mother new humanity. treated the character as a marginal fig-
72 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 ILLUSTRATION BY JOOHEE YOON
ure, an extension of her child, or as as a child, were storming the dusty pied with definitions of masculinity:
only partially human. halls of the library, upending the what makes a man, or how a man can
In 2018, Headley published “The crowded shelf of “Beowulf ” transla- make himself.
Mere Wife,” an astonishing novel in tions to make room for something The narrator is at once looking back
which she reimagines the “Beowulf ” completely new. and looking forward; the poem may
story, setting it in modern times and have been composed as early as the
placing the female characters at its
center. Grendel’s mother becomes an
“ H wæt,” the first word of “Beo-
wulf,” has no direct equivalent
eighth century A.D., but it describes,
with fantastic touches, a world that ex-
Iraq War veteran, her child likely the in modern English. Tolkien described isted a couple of hundred years earlier.
result of rape, while Wealhtheow, Hroth- it as “a note ‘striking up’ at the begin- He interrupts himself to comment on
gar’s queen, is represented by Willa, a ning of a poem,” calling the listener the action, to foreshadow events to come,
wealthy suburban housewife who posts or reader to attention. In his transla- or to add a Christian gloss. “I mean,
photographs of her home-cooked meals tion, he rendered it as “Lo!,” follow- personally?” he says after Beowulf ’s
and suppresses her fantasies of violence. ing John Mitchell Kemble, whose in- defeat of Grendel, as Hrothgar rains
The novel is both a brilliant investi- fluential 1837 translation was one of gifts down like “pennies from Heaven”
gation of the man-monster dichot- the earliest in modern English. Ste- on the hero. “I’ve never seen any-
omy—the line between them is not as phen Mitchell avoided picking any thing / like it, so many treasures. . . . No
clear as we might think—and a caus- single word, apparently in response to fighting? No fury? Nope, bro, this
tic sendup of contemporary family life. new linguistic research arguing that was / a certain type of night.” (Cue “Oh
In their own way, the novel suggests, “hwæt” was not an interjection but, What a Night” on the jukebox.) “Any-
all women are warriors, even if their rather, imparted an exclamatory tone one knows how fair it was:/ bro, more
armor takes the form of a sequinned to the entire sentence. Heaney went than fair” is his assessment of Beowulf ’s
cocktail dress. for “So,” explaining that he wanted reward. (For comparison, Heaney: “A
Dedicated to “Anonymous and all his version of the poem to sound as fair witness can see how well each
the stories she told,” “The Mere Wife” if one of his Irish relatives were tell- one behaved.”)
includes some tantalizing snippets of ing the story: “So. The Spear-Danes But we get ahead of ourselves. The
“Beowulf ” as translated by Headley. in days gone by / and the kings who story opens with Hrothgar, King of the
Now we have the full version, and it ruled them had courage and great- Spear-Danes (in modern-day Den-
is electrifying. The lack of scholarly ness./ We have heard of those princes’ mark), building a magnificent hall,
apparatus is deceptive: Headley has heroic campaigns.” Other translators Heorot, to celebrate his successes in
studied the poem deeply and is con- have opted for “Attend,” “Listen,” “Be- war and to reinforce his dominance.
versant with some of the text’s most hold,” “Yes!” and—unfortunately— (There are echoes here of the Tower of
obscure details. Though she comes to “What ho!” Babel.) Grendel, whom Headley calls
“Beowulf ” from a feminist perspec- Headley’s version opens: a “woe-walker”—the poem doesn’t de-
tive, her primary purpose is not po- Bro! Tell me we still know how to talk about scribe him physically, except to suggest
lemical or political but, as she writes,  kings! In the old days, his prodigious size and strength—is
to render the story “continuously and everyone knew what men were: brave, bold, enraged to hear the men drinking and
cleanly, while also creating a text that  glory-bound. Only singing. Why? The original text doesn’t
felt as bloody and juicy as I think it stories now, but I’ll sound the Spear-Danes’ give a reason. “Grendel hurt, and so he
 song, hoarded for hungry times.
ought to feel.” hunted,” Headley suggests. He so ter-
Headley’s version is more of a re- Bro? In Headley’s vision, the “Beo- rorizes the Spear-Danes that they aban-
writing than a true translation, reënvis- wulf ” narrator is “an old-timer at the don Heorot after dark, leaving the great
aging the poem for the modern reader end of the bar, periodically pounding hall deserted.
rather than transmitting it line for line. his glass and demanding another.” In- After twelve years of this, “News
It is brash and belligerent, lunatic and deed, the poetic tradition from which went global.” Across the sea, in Geat-
invigorating, with passages of sublime the poem arises is an oral one, in which land (modern-day Sweden), Beowulf
poetry punctuated by obscenities and poetry may have been sung by bards— gathers “fourteen fists for hire” and
social-media shorthand—Grendel is called “scops”—who entertained the sails for Hrothgar’s kingdom. The
“fucked by fate,” Wealhtheow, “hash- kings and their entourages after feasts. watchman who greets them at the cliffs
tag: blessed.” Not everyone will admire Headley’s intervention is not only hu- might be a bouncer at a bar more ex-
all the linguistic and stylistic choices morous and attention-grabbing but clusive than the one where the narra-
she has made; that crunching noise in also historically justified. The poem, tor hangs out: “There’s a dress code!
the background is the sound of her she points out, was probably com- You’re denied.” “Kindly give us / direc-
predecessors rolling in their burial posed by a man for a largely male au- tions and we’ll get gone,” Beowulf
ships. Hrothgar’s thanes are his “fight- dience. But she also hears a satirical assures him.
family,” Wealhtheow admires Beo- quality in the boasts and pledges that Headley is obviously enjoying her-
wulf ’s “brass balls,” treasure is “bling.” constitute much of the characters’ self, and never more than when she’s
But the over-all effect is as if Head- speech. The men of “Beowulf ”—not speaking in the voice of her hero,
ley, like the warrior queen she admired least the protagonist—are preoccu- “hard-core in his helmet,” who might
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 73
have apprenticed with Omar from You know how it is: every castle wants ing up for battle, is “indifferent to
“The Wire.” His speech is ridiculous, invading, and every family death”; Headley’s “gave zero shits.”)
glorious, and irresistible. Here, hav- has enemies born within it. Old More important, it’s unclear from
grudges recrudesce.
ing come to relieve Heorot from its the description of Grendel’s mother
“early curfew,” he introduces himself whether she’s meant to be understood
to Hrothgar:
“ B eowulf ” scholars may stop us here.
Wait a minute! they say. That’s
as a monster or as a human woman.
As Headley notes, the Old English
Every elder knew I was the man for
 you, and blessed not in the original: not the antler-tipped word “fingrum” is often translated as
my quest, King Hrothgar, because towers, not the generalization about “claws,” but Grendel’s mother uses a
 where I’m from? burning castles, not the familiar mode knife during her fight with Beowulf,
I’m the strongest and the boldest, of address (“You know how it is”). and “wielding a knife while also pos-
 and the bravest and the best. They’re right, bro. But “Beowulf ” trans- sessing long nails is—as anyone who’s
Yes: I mean—I may have bathed in
 the blood of beasts, lators have always taken liberties with ever had a manicure knows—a near
netted five foul ogres at once, the poem—in part because the source impossibility.” The character is called
 smashed my way into a troll den text is faulty. It was originally written “aglaec-wif,” which others have trans-
and come out swinging, gone down on vellum about a thousand years lated as “wretch,” “ogress,” “hell-bride,”
 skinny-dipping in a sleeping sea ago by two scribes, who are believed to and even “ugly troll lady.” But Head-
and made sashimi of some sea monsters.
Anyone who fucks with the Geats? have been working from an even older ley asserts that it is a female equivalent
 Bro, they have to fuck with me. . . . copy. In 1731, a fire broke out in the of the noun “aglaeca,” which means
Now, I want to test my mettle on building where it was stored; someone awe-inspiring. Many versions also call
 Grendel, best him, had the presence of mind to throw the Grendel’s mother a “sea-wolf,” but the
a match from man into meat. manuscript out a window, but every Old English equivalent for this is
 Just us two,
hand to hand. Sweet. page had been badly burned. Thus “brimwylf ”—and the manuscript it-
pieces of the “Beowulf ” story have been self reads “brimwyl,” which, Headley
Headley’s cadences and her revi- lost, both in the fire and, as Headley points out, could easily be a scribal
sionist spirit owe a debt to Lin-Man- puts it in her introduction, “in the ges- error for “brimwif,” “sea-woman.” (Not
uel Miranda. When Unferth, one of tation of the written version itself, one of six translations by men which
Hrothgar’s men, challenges Beowulf ’s which was at the mercy of memory I consulted noted this possibility.) By
stories of a swimming contest with an- and (presumably) mead.” contrast, Headley’s translation allows
other warrior named Breca, their back- In addition to such confusions, for the monstrous element but also
and-forth might be taken from the there’s a surprising lack of agreement emphasizes the character’s recogniz-
Cabinet battles in “Hamilton.” “I heard among scholars about the literal mean- ably human emotions:
no one could convince you two of clar- ing of many lines. When Beowulf dives Grendel’s mother,
ity,/ that you dove overboard, surfing into the sea in search of Grendel’s warrior-woman, outlaw,
on stupidity,” Unferth sneers. “Let me mother, who lives in a kind of under-  meditated on misery. . . .
drop some truth / into your tangent,” water castle, does the poet say that he carried on a wave of wrath,
Beowulf shoots back. “Let me say it swims for most of the day before reach-  crazed with sorrow,
looking for someone to slay,
straight: / You don’t rate and neither  someone to pay in pain
did Breca / when it came to battle. The for her heart’s loss.
gulf ? You’re cattle,/ and I’m a wolf.”
Later, the narrator tells us that Unferth Those scribes who recorded “Beo-
“unexpectedly stanned” Beowulf by wulf ” did make mistakes. The manu-
lending him a sword for the fight with script shows that they sometimes
Grendel’s mother. crossed out and emended each other’s
But Headley’s “Beowulf ” also has work. A tantalizing example of these
moments of more traditional poetry, emendations has to do with Grendel’s
as when Hrothgar’s court scop sings genealogy. In one of the many ways in
the song of Hildeburh, a woman who ing the bottom or that he gets there which the text retroactively applies a
loses both her son and her brother on while it is still daylight? What should Christian slant to pagan mythology,
the battlefield and watches them burn be done with the combat scene be- Grendel is said to be a descendant of
on a single pyre: “Fire comes from the tween the two of them, in which Gren- Cain, who begat “ogres and elves and
same / family as famine. It can feast, del’s mother seems to sit unceremoni- evil phantoms” (Heaney), cursed to
unfulfilled, forever.” Or when the nar- ously on Beowulf—a verb that “will wander the earth as penalty for their
rator foreshadows the destruction simply not do,” as one translator com- ancestor’s fratricide. But Headley be-
of Heorot: plains? Heaney renders it as “pounced lieves that Grendel is neither a wan-
upon him.” Headley, concerned with derer nor a fugitive; he lives in a hall
The hall loomed, golden towers
antler-tipped; neither fidelity nor heroic style, says with his mother. What if the standard
it was asking for burning, but that that she “turned on him, gripping / and interpretation is wrong? In the origi-
hadn’t happened yet. flipping him.” (Heaney’s Beowulf, suit- nal text, the first scribe wrote that
74 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020
Grendel was descended from “Ham’s
kin,” which the second scribe emended
to “Cain’s kin.” (In Old English, the
spellings of “Ham” and “Cain” are sim-
ilar.) The curse of Ham—punishment
for seeing his father, Noah, naked—
was that the descendants of one of his
sons would be slaves, which has been
interpreted as a Biblical justification
for slavery.
Toni Morrison, in an essay called
“Grendel and His Mother,” published
last year in the posthumous collection
“The Source of Self-Regard,” examines
the way both figures are presented as
“beyond comprehension . . . mindless
without intelligible speech.” Neither
has or requires a motive; evil “is pre-
ternatural and exists without explana-
tion.” Morrison lingers on the moment
in which Beowulf vanquishes Gren-
del’s mother. After Unferth’s sword
fails Beowulf, he tries unsuccessfully
to attack her with his bare hands. Sud-
denly, a ray of light—the narrator im-
plies that this is God’s doing—shines
upon a nearby sword, part of Grendel’s
mother’s armory. Beowulf grabs it and
beheads her, then beheads her son’s
corpse. The sword melts away, leaving
him holding only the hilt. Morrison is
unconvinced by the usual interpreta-
tion: that the steel was melted by the
monsters’ foul blood. “The image of
Beowulf standing there with a moth-
er’s head in one hand and a useless
hilt in the other encourages more lay-
ered interpretations,” she writes. “One
being that perhaps violence against vi-
olence—regardless of good and evil,
right and wrong—is itself so foul the
sword of vengeance collapses in ex-
haustion or shame.”
Morrison’s and Headley’s revision-
Now hear this.
ist readings highlight some of the chal-
lenges “Beowulf ” presents to the mod- Narrated stories, along with podcasts,
ern reader. But both also demonstrate are now available in the New Yorker app.
the richness with which the oldest texts
still speak to us. They may be “only Download it at newyorker.com/app
stories now.” Nevertheless, they are sto-
ries in which readers—perhaps espe-
cially those who come from outside
the mainstream of those texts’ tradi-
tions and approach them without pre-
conceptions—can continue to find
meaning. With a “Beowulf ” defiantly
of and for this historical moment,
Headley reclaims the poem for her au-
dience as well as for herself. 
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 75
 white man’s world.” Black media-mak-
ON TELEVISION ers put technology in the service of fur-
thering the good word of Black libera-

FOR US, BY US
tion politics. The titles of the new shows
that sprang up around the country con-
veyed an ethos of frank talk: “Say Brother,”
Rewatching “Black Journal,” on WNET. “Like It Is,” “Positively Black.”
In the première of “Black Journal,”
BY DOREEN ST. FÉLIX the presenter Lou House delivers a short
monologue on the history of the Black
free press. But the episode is decidedly
of its time, which was, like ours, one of
transformation, violent and hopeful by
turns. It opens with footage of Coretta
Scott King as she addresses the Har-
vard class of ’68, a new widow urging
young people to protect their future.
The Ebony journalist Ponchitta Pierce,
acting as correspondent, invokes the de-
cade’s dilemma: “Will their search be
for middle-class detachment or insight-
ful involvement?”
From a chic, wood-panelled studio,
House and his co-host, William Greaves,
introduce each segment, which usually
takes the form of a profile—of a move-
ment, a town, a dissident. Huey New-
ton, interviewed from jail, corrects mis-
information about the Black Panther
Party. Ronnie Tanner, at the time the
only Black jockey racing at the major
tracks, muses on the loneliness of the
gig. The sobriety lifts with a skit by the
influential satirist Godfrey Cambridge,
Jesse Jackson with the “Black Journal” host Tony Brown, in 1976. in which two white executives brain-
storm how best to portray the Negro
n early spring, we rubbernecked back Journal” was a news program “about on “The Equality Network,” while a
I to 1918, another year when a pan-
demic killed thousands and flatlined
Blacks and for Blacks”—one that aban-
doned the euphemistic notion of the
token Black employee, played by Cam-
bridge, winces as they blabber. “We’ll
economies. By the summer, with the “Black community,” restoring to the peo- just treat ’em not as Negroes,” one of
uprisings that followed the police kill- ple a sense of their variety. The virtue we the executives exclaims, clamping his
ings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, call soul—“Black Journal” embodied it. hands on Cambridge’s shoulders, “but
and Rayshard Brooks, we had returned Originally a monthly, hour-long show, dark white people!”
to 1968. The insurrections in Minneap- “Black Journal” was part of a small ex- Recently, calls for representation on
olis and Portland, and their promise, or plosion of Black radio and television that TV have been replaced with demands
threat, of civil transformation, seemed emerged at the end of the sixties, partly for structural power. Five decades ago,
to recall those which took place in New- in response to the recommendations of “Black Journal” fought for this vision.
ark and Detroit a half century ago. Our the Kerner Commission, a 1967 investi- The network NET hired Greaves, Kent
ideologue-in-chief aped Richard Nix- gation, launched by Lyndon Johnson and Garrett, St. Clair Bourne, Madeline An-
on’s “law and order” sales pitch—or per- led by the governor of Illinois, Otto derson, and Charles Hobson—all of
haps he was updating the white suprem- Kerner, Jr., into the causes of the race whom became important figures in
acy of George Wallace. riots. “What white Americans have never Black documentary-making. After a
It was fitting, then, that in July fifty- fully understood but what the Negro can staff strike, the show’s executive pro-
nine episodes of the public-affairs maga- never forget—is that white society is ducer, Alvin Perlmutter, a white news-
zine show “Black Journal” became avail- deeply implicated in the ghetto,” the re- man, agreed to step down, and Greaves
able to stream, for the first time, as part of port’s introduction read. The Kerner took over. As he wrote in a 1970 Op-Ed
the American Archive of Public Broad- Commission denounced police brutal- for the Times on the need for Black-led
casting. Running, in more or less its orig- ity and voter suppression—and the media, media, “For the black producer, televi-
WNET

inal iteration, from 1968 to 1977, “Black for reporting “from the standpoint of a sion will be just another word for jazz.”
76 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020
 Under Greaves, “Black Journal” loos- Fissures in Black opinion were drama-
Created by the editors of
ened, warmed, and radicalized, with seg- tized in lively panel discussions shot in
ments on the political consolidation of the New York studio, where militant ac- ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST,
Black Muslims and on the Black Arts tivists brushed with integrationists. In a AD PRO is the members-only resource
and antiwar movements. “Black G.I.” conversation about the role of the Black
examined the racism experienced by woman in reforming American society, for design industry professionals
Black soldiers in the Vietnam War; at Marian Watson, a TV producer, her hair
one point, a brother, sweating on a river- wrapped in a tignon, accuses Jean Fair-
boat in Upper Saigon, observes, “I don’t fax, a legal-defense lawyer for the
like killing anybody . . . but it’s a job, N.A.A.C.P., of careerist betrayal. “I think
you know?” One needn’t strain to draw you’re very comfortable sitting in your
a line to Spike Lee’s doleful recent fea- office, and trying to be very community-
ture, “Da 5 Bloods.” oriented from your desk, in your plush
The show responded to a growing air-conditioned place,” she says.The cam-
conviction, among Black Americans, era pans to Fairfax, who, smiling tightly,
that they were members of an inter- responds, “It’s not very plush.”
national diaspora. An insider energy In the midst of my immersion in
flowed. The introductory graphic was “Black Journal,” I returned to a television
in the colors of the Pan-African flag. special, hosted by Oprah Winfrey in June,
House and Greaves took to wearing da- titled “Where Do We Go from Here?”
shikis. Letting their Afros bloom, the In response to the summer’s civil unrest,
pair invited the curious Black Ameri- Winfrey had brought together figures in-
can to explore the avant-garde of Afro- cluding the actor David Oyelowo, the
centricity. House, who later took the politician Stacey Abrams, and the Rev-
name Wali Sadiq, greeted viewers in his erend Dr. William J. Barber II. It was a
baritone: “Jambo! Assalamu alaikum, sentimental education, in which Win-
brothers and sisters, and welcome to frey’s personal myth was folded into the
‘Black Journal.’ ” cause of the greater resistance—a kind

PHOTO BY PAUL RAESIDE

of anti-racist entertainment.
s I revelled in the archive, my sense On “Black Journal,” by contrast, the
A of what constitutes the unit of the
television hour was seriously upended;
complexities of Black fame are brought
to the fore. Sitdown interviews—with
“Black Journal” is defined by an oracu- controversial leaders like Kwame Ture MEMBERSHIP INCLUDES
lar, anti-colonial time. Hard reports were (formerly Stokely Carmichael) and
gorgeously, patiently rendered, frequently Louis Farrakhan—were pointed, tense.
trailing off onto a sensual plane. Watch- Some of the best interviews were with .Exclusive, must-read industry
ing segments on Compton and Chi- Black entertainers who had, in the twi- and market news
cago, I was reminded of the rigorously light of the civil-rights struggle, “crossed
subjective work of the contemporary over,” only to find themselves in a ra- .Trend reports and the best
filmmakers RaMell Ross, Yance Ford, cial limbo. Consider Sammy Davis, Jr., new product sources
Ja’Tovia Gary, and Garrett Bradley. A his face lined with cosmic exhaustion.
profile of the inhabitants and the de- “Why do you feel there is a group of .Effective tools and events
tractors of Soul City, a planned com- brothers and sisters who don’t like you?” to grow your business
munity in North Carolina, founded by Brown asks him. “Because there was a
the civil-rights figure Floyd McKissick, whole lot of brothers and sisters who .Searchable AD archive spanning
segues into a visit with Alice Coltrane, didn’t like Jesus Christ!” Davis retorts. 100 years of magazine issues
three years a widow after John’s death, Davis and Lena Horne both appeared
at the family estate, and that flows into on the show to advocate for the release .More essential resources
footage—knowingly titled “a black com- of Angela Davis, who gave her first na- that only AD has access to
mercial”—shot at Morehouse College, tional television interview, after her ac-
in which Nina Simone performs “To quittal, in 1972, to “Black Journal.” Fame
Be Young, Gifted and Black.” The art is a currency to be traded for the free-
pieces were as urgent as the documen- dom of the people on the ground. When
taries; after all, “Black Journal” was track- a young Nikki Giovanni interviews
ing a revolution. Horne, she asks about her recent deci-
When, in 1970, Tony Brown, the for- sion not to appear on an unnamed “white Join now and save 20% off
mer host of Detroit’s “Colored People’s show.” Horne clasps her hands. “I didn’t your annual membership
Time,” took over from Greaves, “Black feel like giving my life to someone that
Journal” became more of a talk show. I don’t feel very close to,” she says.  ARCHDIGEST.COM / JOINNOW
 Anne has a MacBook: a chic acces-
THE CURRENT CINEMA sory to go with her hats, her lace blouses,
and her ankle-length skirts. I immedi-

POWER STRUGGLES
ately thought of the video screen on
which the Prince of Denmark—played
by Hawke—delivers his first soliloquy,
“Tesla” and “Coup 53.” in Almereyda’s “Hamlet” (2000). But
that movie was in modern dress, whereas
BY ANTHONY LANE “Tesla” is a costume picture, and the
presence of new technology is both jar-
here is a lovely scene in Michael he takes out a large cigar. “Gotta light?” ring and deliberate, to go with the anach-
T Almereyda’s new film, “Tesla,” in
which two renowned inventors come to-
he asks. “Tesla” is a sombre affair, yet it
flickers with quiet jokes, and the idea
ronisms (references to “upgrades,”“P.R.,”
and Google) that pop up in the dia-
gether. One is Thomas Edison (Kyle of Thomas Edison asking for a light is logue. All of which is part of the direc-
MacLachlan). The other is Nikola Tesla one of the sparkiest. It certainly suits tor’s deep game. He is clearly impatient
(Ethan Hawke), the maestro of alternat- this famous meeting of minds. with the conventional shape of the bio-
ing current, who was born in 1856, in a But wait. A voice-over interrupts, pic, and he can’t spot a rug without pull-
remote village in the Austro-Hungarian telling us, “This meeting never hap- ing it from under our feet. (Also, I sus-
Empire, and became an American citi- pened.” We have been watching a fan- pect, his budget is far from limitless.)
When Tesla goes to Niagara, for exam-
ple, where vast hydroelectric generators
have been constructed to his design, he
stands not beside the actual falls but in
front of an engraved print of them, mag-
nified to the size of a backdrop. So how
come he’s looking wet and windswept?
There is another reason for the Mac-
Book: you can’t help wondering what
Tesla would have made of it. I can imag-
ine his flipping it over, unscrewing the
back, and feasting on the chips. (Would
he have blown a fuse, in a surge of de-
light, on learning that Elon Musk had
bestowed the name Tesla on an electric
car, or would he have been pissed that
he didn’t think of it first?) The movie
shows him beavering away on various
projects—out on the storm-strewn plains
Ethan Hawke plays Nikola Tesla in Michael Almereyda’s film. of Colorado, say, where a sphere on a
stick, atop a tower, catches lightning at
zen in 1891. Their encounter takes place tasy, not a fact. The voice belongs to his behest. Though his plan is to deploy
two years after that, in Chicago, which Anne Morgan (Eve Hewson), who nature’s energy for industrial purposes,
is staging the World’s Fair—illuminated warms to Tesla, despairs of his inward- the sight of his invention at work, all
by a quarter of a million light bulbs, we ness, and worries that he will founder crackle and glow, will remind most mov-
hear, and consuming “three times more in the raging commercial world. Being iegoers of “Frankenstein” (1931). Not that
electricity than the whole city itself.” the daughter of J. Pierpont Morgan Tesla leaps around like a nutty profes-
Anyway, Tesla walks into a bar. There, (Donnie Keshawarz), she knows some- sor, crying, “It’s alive!” Moody and un-
already seated at the rear, is Edison, who thing of that world. She is both a char- thrillable, he maintains his dark reserve.
offers a plate of pie. “An American meal,” acter in the film and its narrator, often I half wish he would stick a finger into
he says. Tesla barely touches his food, turning to address the camera directly. his own machine, mid-tempest, and give
whereas Edison, who is older, infinitely It’s a well-poised performance from himself a jolt.
richer, and always short of time, eats Hewson, who takes care to conceal what Tesla was a singular creature, pos-
fast, stabbing at his pie as if he wanted Anne, an heiress who can have anything, sessed of unusual habits, with a touch
to hurt it. He brags of his latest cre- truly wants. Tesla, perhaps; but can he of the night about him, and it’s no sur-
ations, one of which, the Kinetoscope be had, and is he worth the having? “You prise that actors should be drawn to him.
(“Moving pictures—everybody will like need me,” she says to him, narrowing He was played, in “The Current War”
that”), is wheeled to the table like a des- her gaze, though whether he needs pro- (2017), by Nicholas Hoult and, in “The
sert cart. Having suavely proposed that tecting or seducing is a nice matter that Prestige” (2006), by David Bowie, one
he and Tesla go into business together, she leaves us to decide. of the very few people by whom Tesla
78 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 ILLUSTRATION BY ANJA SLIBAR
could be outstranged. The latest Tesla Alice Cooper. The problem is that the Mossadegh. Darbyshire is dead, but in
is the most tenebrous to date—a kind world, for Tesla, was not there to be ruled. the mid-nineteen-eighties he was in-
of secular sequel to Ernst Toller, the pas- It was there to be transformed. He was terviewed on TV, and, though the foot-
tor played by Hawke in “First Reformed” no Edison, and he was definitely no J. P. age of him has since vanished (either
(2017). As viewers, we were simultane- Morgan. The only power that Tesla because it was censored by sinister forces
ously attracted and repelled by Toller’s craved was the sort that flows from a or because, you know, stuff gets thrown
anguish; Tesla is no less magnetic, but socket in the wall, and, to judge by this away), Amirani unearths a typescript of
does the balance not tip toward the neg- larky and lugubrious film, he dreamed his words. A coup! They are then spo-
ative? Must he always flinch from our of such power being freely shared. “When ken—or acted out, on camera—by Ralph
sympathy? Listening closely, I could wireless is applied, the Earth will be con- Fiennes. In a pleasing paradox, this sly
swear that I heard the whirr of a dy- verted into a huge brain,” he says, as if introduction of dramatic artifice ren-
namo inside his cerebellum. Armed with he were peering ahead, through a crack ders the whole thing more real.
a stack of napkins, he sits at a dinner in time, to the Internet. That’s enough The film’s editor is Walter Murch,
table and wipes his cutlery, his plate, and to make anyone go mad. who worked on “The Conversation” and
his wineglass, before risking a sip. When “The Godfather: Part II” (both 1974),
Anne takes him roller-skating, holding he precipitous overthrow of Mo- so there’s not much that he doesn’t know
him tight, he veers away and tumbles to
the floor, felled by the proximity of her
T hammad Mossadegh, the Prime
Minister of Iran, in 1953, is a matter of
about conspiracy—how it leaks into a
movie like the smell of drains. Does the
necklace. “Sometimes I have a rather record. So is the involvement of the new film deserve such expert treatment?
unfavorable reaction to pearls,” he says. American and British intelligence ser- Well, even if much of the material is
Tesla lived until 1943, and died at the vices in the planning and execution of common knowledge, the momentum
New Yorker—not, I regret to say, in the this brazen—and, in the long run, pro- of the plot can hardly fail to engross,
offices of this magazine, whose employ- foundly ill-advised—upheaval. Detailed and in Fiennes’s delivery of Darbyshire’s
ees would have been honored to host excerpts from an official C.I.A. history recollections, drawling and sublimely
his passing, but in the midtown hotel of it were published twenty years ago cynical, you catch the authentic note of
of the same name. He was alone at the in the Times. What, then, remains to be weary post-imperial pique. Mossadegh’s
time, if a soul so rudely jostled by dug up in “Coup 53,” a new documen- most trenchant act, after he was dem-
thoughts can ever be alone. In later years, tary, directed by Taghi Amirani? ocratically elected, in 1951, was to na-
he had grown yet more eccentric, and The movie comes equipped with its tionalize the oil industry, thereby snub-
Almereyda’s movie, in melancholy trib- own built-in trailer. At the start, we see bing the British (who had owned the
ute, follows suit. The action loses volt- Amirani looking pensive on a train. Anglo-Iranian Oil Company) and be-
age, and there are lengthy scenes involv- “Nothing in my thirty-year career as a reaving them of a priceless resource.
ing, of all people, Sarah Bernhardt documentary-maker has prepared me Worst of all, he liked to receive visitors
(Rebecca Dayan), who sees in Tesla a for the remarkable discovery I’m about in bed. As one smooth Englishman says,
match for her intensity. Near the end, to make on this journey,” he says. (Sorry “His way of living and general appear-
in a gesture that feels at once desperate to be picky, but how can you be sure it’s ance didn’t strike one as being the sort
and endearing, Almereyda arranges for remarkable if you haven’t made it yet?) of person you think of as a Prime Min-
his hero to sing “Everybody Wants to The first half hour is mainly a paper ister.” Hence the need for a coup. When
Rule the World,” a nagging song by trail, and it leads us to Norman Dar- a fellow in pajamas takes charge, the
Tears for Fears, from 1985. Huh? byshire, a name that suggests the griz- empire strikes back. 
The problem is not that Tesla is grun- zled landlord of a pub. In fact, he was
gily out of tune, or that he grips the mi- once the head of M.I.6 in Tehran, and NEWYORKER.COM
crophone stand with gloved hands, like was a major player in the ousting of Richard Brody blogs about movies.

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THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 31, 2020 79

 CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST

Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose three
finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this week’s cartoon, by Teresa Burns Parkhurst,
must be received by Sunday, August 30th. The finalists in the August 17th contest appear below. We will
announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the September 14th issue. Anyone age thirteen
or older can enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com.

THIS WEEK’S CONTEST

“ ”
..........................................................................................................................

THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION

“Do you struggle endlessly through here often?”

Dennis Michael Burke, Phoenix, Ariz.

“Sorry, I said hold the rocks.” “I don’t need your approval. I just need you to tie the laces.”
Kris Fiocca, Akron, Ohio Leila Cheikh, Sydney, Australia

“ You think that’s punishment?

Try an eternity of listening to pickup lines.”
Tyler Stradling, Mesa, Ariz.
ADVOCACY.
IS THE NEW
BLACK
TAKE ACTION NOW
Mitchell Johnson
Catalog by request:
[email protected]

Follow on instagram:
@mitchell_johnson_artist

Mitchell Johnson of Menlo Park, California—an American Academy in Rome Visiting Artist (2015) and a Josef and Anni Albers
Foundation Artist in Residence (2007)—is the subject of the monograph, Color as Content, and the documentary film, The Artist of
Silicon Valley. Johnson’s color- and shape-driven paintings are known for their very personal approach to color and have been exhibited
in Milan, New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Johnson divides his time between his favorite painting locations in Europe,
New England, New York City, Asia, and California. His paintings are in the collections of 28 museums and over 600 private collections.
The most recent museum acquisitions were by Museo Morandi in Bologna, Museum of Modern Art in Rome, Tucson Museum of Art,
and Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. Johnson moved to the Bay Area in 1990 after finishing his MFA at Parsons in New York.
Follow @mitchell_johnson_artist on instagram to stay informed about exhibits, color talks, color workshops and new publications.