English 120 Reader Table of Contents Unit 1 1 Adler, Mortimer | "How to Mark a Book." 4 Cron, Lisa | Excerpt from Wired for Story. 11 Gaiman, Neil | "Why Our Future Depends on Libraries." Unit 2 19 Chee, Alexander | "The Curse." 30 Lamott, Anne | Excerpts from Bird by Bird. 41 Noah, Trevor | Excerpts from Born A Crime. 80 Orwell, George | "Why I Write." 88 Roanhorse, Rebecca | "Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™" 114 Roy, Arundhati | "Why is the Morally Appropriate Language in Which to Think and Write?" 127 Thurston, Baratunde | "Where Did You Get That Name?" from How To Be Black. Unit 4 132 Block, Francesca Lia | "Bones" from The Rose & the Beast. 139 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome | "Monster Culture." 162 El-Mohtar, Amal | "Seasons of Glass & Iron." from Uncanny Magazine 176 Gaiman, Neil | "Ghosts in the Machines." 180 Gaiman, Neil | "Snow. Glass. Apples." from Smoke & Mirrors. 194 Goto, Hiromi | "From Across the River" from Hopeful Monsters. 213 King, Stephen | "Why We Crave Horror Movies." 215 Link, Kelly | "The Hortlak" from Magic for Beginners. 242 Machado, Carmen Maria | "My Body, Herself" from Her Body and Other Parties. How to Mark a Book 1 By Mortimer J. Adler, Ph.D. From The Saturday Review of Literature, July 6, 1941 You know you have to read "between the lines" to get the most out of anything. I want to persuade you to do something equally important in the course of your reading. I want to persuade you to write between the lines. Unless you do, you are not likely to do the most efficient kind of reading. I contend, quite bluntly, that marking up a book is not an act of mutilation but of love. You shouldn't mark up a book which isn't yours. Librarians (or your friends) who lend you books expect you to keep them clean, and you should. If you decide that I am right about the usefulness of marking books, you will have to buy them. Most of the world's great books are available today, in reprint editions. There are two ways in which one can own a book. The first is the property right you establish by paying for it, just as you pay for clothes and furniture. But this act of purchase is only the prelude to possession. Full ownership comes only when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it is by writing in it. An illustration may make the point clear. You buy a beefsteak and transfer it from the butcher's icebox to your own. But you do not own the beefsteak in the most important sense until you consume it and get it into your bloodstream. I am arguing that books, too, must be absorbed in your blood stream to do you any good. Confusion about what it means to "own" a book leads people to a false reverence for paper, binding, and type -- a respect for the physical thing -- the craft of the printer rather than the genius of the author. They forget that it is possible for a man to acquire the idea, to possess the beauty, which a great book contains, without staking his claim by pasting his bookplate inside the cover. Having a fine library doesn't prove that its owner has a mind enriched by books; it proves nothing more than that he, his father, or his wife, was rich enough to buy them. There are three kinds of book owners. The first has all the standard sets and best sellers -- unread, untouched. (This deluded individual owns woodpulp and ink, not books.) The second has a great many books -- a few of them read through, most of them dipped into, but all of them as clean and shiny as the day they were bought. (This person would probably like to make books his own, but is restrained by a false respect for their physical appearance.) The third has a few books or many -- every one of them dog-eared and dilapidated, shaken and loosened by continual use, marked and scribbled in from front to back. (This man owns books.) Is it false respect, you may ask, to preserve intact and unblemished a beautifully printed book, an elegantly bound edition? Of course not. I'd no more scribble all over a first edition of 'Paradise Lost' than I'd give my baby a set of crayons and an original Rembrandt. I wouldn't mark up a painting or a statue. Its soul, so to speak, is inseparable from its body. And the beauty of a rare edition or of a richly manufactured volume is like that of a painting or a statue. But the soul of a book "can" be separate from its body. A book is more like the score of a piece of music than it is like a painting. No great musician confuses a symphony with the printed sheets of music. Arturo Toscanini reveres Brahms, but Toscanini's score of the G minor Symphony is so thoroughly marked up that no one but the maestro himself can read it. The reason why a great conductor makes notations on his musical scores -- marks them up again and again each time he returns to study them--is the reason why you should mark your books. If your respect for magnificent binding or typography gets in the way, buy yourself a cheap edition and pay your respects to the author. 2 Why is marking up a book indispensable to reading? First, it keeps you awake. (And I don't mean merely conscious; I mean awake.) In the second place; reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The marked book is usually the thought-through book. Finally, writing helps you remember the thoughts you had, or the thoughts the author expressed. Let me develop these three points. If reading is to accomplish anything more than passing time, it must be active. You can't let your eyes glide across the lines of a book and come up with an understanding of what you have read. Now an ordinary piece of light fiction, like, say, Gone with the Wind, doesn't require the most active kind of reading. The books you read for pleasure can be read in a state of relaxation, and nothing is lost. But a great book, rich in ideas and beauty, a book that raises and tries to answer great fundamental questions, demands the most active reading of which you are capable. You don't absorb the ideas of John Dewey the way you absorb the crooning of Mr. Vallee. You have to reach for them. That you cannot do while you're asleep. If, when you've finished reading a book, the pages are filled with your notes, you know that you read actively. The most famous "active" reader of great books I know is President Hutchins, of the University of Chicago. He also has the hardest schedule of business activities of any man I know. He invariably reads with a pencil, and sometimes, when he picks up a book and pencil in the evening, he finds himself, instead of making intelligent notes, drawing what he calls 'caviar factories' on the margins. When that happens, he puts the book down. He knows he's too tired to read, and he's just wasting time. But, you may ask, why is writing necessary? Well, the physical act of writing, with your own hand, brings words and sentences more sharply before your mind and preserves them better in your memory. To set down your reaction to important words and sentences you have read, and the questions they have raised in your mind, is to preserve those reactions and sharpen those questions. Even if you wrote on a scratch pad, and threw the paper away when you had finished writing, your grasp of the book would be surer. But you don't have to throw the paper away. The margins (top as bottom, and well as side), the end-papers, the very space between the lines, are all available. They aren't sacred. And, best of all, your marks and notes become an integral part of the book and stay there forever. You can pick up the book the following week or year, and there are all your points of agreement, disagreement, doubt, and inquiry. It's like resuming an interrupted conversation with the advantage of being able to pick up where you left off. And that is exactly what reading a book should be: a conversation between you and the author. Presumably he knows more about the subject than you do; naturally, you'll have the proper humility as you approach him. But don't let anybody tell you that a reader is supposed to be solely on the receiving end. Understanding is a two-way operation; learning doesn't consist in being an empty receptacle. The learner has to question himself and question the teacher. He even has to argue with the teacher, once he understands what the teacher is saying. And marking a book is literally an expression of differences, or agreements of opinion, with the author. There are all kinds of devices for marking a book intelligently and fruitfully. Here's the way I do it: Underlining (or highlighting): of major points, of important or forceful statements. Vertical lines at the margin: to emphasize a statement already underlined. Star, asterisk, or other doo-dad at the margin: to be used sparingly, to emphasize the ten or twenty most important statements in the book. (You may want to fold the bottom comer of each page on which you use such marks. It won't hurt the sturdy paper on which most modern books are printed, and you will be able take the book off the shelf at any time and, by opening it at the folded-corner page, refresh your recollection of the book.) 3 Numbers in the margin: to indicate the sequence of points the author makes in developing a single argument. Numbers of other pages in the margin: to indicate where else in the book the author made points relevant to the point marked; to tie up the ideas in a book, which, though they may be separated by many pages, belong together. Circling or highlighting of key words or phrases. Writing in the margin, or at the top or bottom of the page, for the sake of: recording questions (and perhaps answers) which a passage raised in your mind; reducing a complicated discussion to a simple statement; recording the sequence of major points right through the books. I use the end-papers at the back of the book to make a personal index of the author's points in the order of their appearance. The front end-papers are to me the most important. Some people reserve them for a fancy bookplate. I reserve them for fancy thinking. After I have finished reading the book and making my personal index on the back end-papers, I turn to the front and try to outline the book, not page by page or point by point (I've already done that at the back), but as an integrated structure, with a basic unity and an order of parts. This outline is, to me, the measure of my understanding of the work. If you're a die-hard anti-book-marker, you may object that the margins, the space between the lines, and the end-papers don't give you room enough. All right. How about using a scratch pad slightly smaller than the page-size of the book -- so that the edges of the sheets won't protrude? Make your index, outlines and even your notes on the pad, and then insert these sheets permanently inside the front and back covers of the book. Or, you may say that this business of marking books is going to slow up your reading. It probably will. That's one of the reasons for doing it. Most of us have been taken in by the notion that speed of reading is a measure of our intelligence. There is no such thing as the right speed for intelligent reading. Some things should be read quickly and effortlessly and some should be read slowly and even laboriously. The sign of intelligence in reading is the ability to read different things differently according to their worth. In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through you -how many you can make your own. A few friends are better than a thousand acquaintances. If this be your aim, as it should be, you will not be impatient if it takes more time and effort to read a great book than it does a newspaper. You may have one final objection to marking books. You can't lend them to your friends because nobody else can read them without being distracted by your notes. Furthermore, you won't want to lend them because a marked copy is kind of an intellectual diary, and lending it is almost like giving your mind away. If your friend wishes to read your Plutarch's Lives, Shakespeare, or The Federalist Papers, tell him gently but firmly, to buy a copy. You will lend him your car or your coat -- but your books are as much a part of you as your head or your heart. 4 5 Once upon a time really smart people were completely convinced the world was flat. Then they learned that it wasn’t. But they were still pretty sure the sun revolved around the Earth … until that theory went bust, too. For an even longer period of time, smart people have believed story is just a form of entertainment. They’ve thought that beyond the immense pleasure it bestows—the ephemeral joy and deep sense of satisfaction a good story leaves us with—story itself serves no necessary purpose. Sure, our lives from time immemorial would have been far drabber without it, but we’d have survived just fine. Wrong again. Story, as it turns out, was crucial to our evolution—more so than opposable thumbs. Opposable thumbs let us hang on; story told us what to hang on to. Story is what enabled us to imagine what might happen in the future, and so prepare for it—a feat no other species can lay claim to, opposable thumbs or not.1 Story is what makes us human, not just metaphorically but literally. Recent breakthroughs in neuroscience reveal that our brain is hardwired to respond to story; the pleasure we derive from a tale well told is nature’s way of seducing us into paying attention to it.2 In other words, we’re wired to turn to story to teach us the way of the 6 world. So if your eyes glazed over back in high school when your history teacher painstakingly recited the entire succession of German monarchs, beginning with Charles the Fat, Son of Louis the German, who ruled from 881 to 887, who could blame you? Turns out you’re only, gloriously, human. Thus it’s no surprise that when given a choice, people prefer fiction to nonfiction—they’d rather read a historical novel than a history book, watch a movie than a dry documentary.3 It’s not because we’re lazy sots but because our neural circuitry is designed to crave story. The rush of intoxication a good story triggers doesn’t make us closet hedonists—it makes us willing pupils, primed to absorb the myriad lessons each story imparts.4 This information is a game changer for writers. Research has helped decode the secret blueprint for story that’s hardwired in the reader’s brain, thereby lifting the veil on what, specifically, the brain is hungry for in every story it encounters. Even more exciting, it turns out that a powerful story can have a hand in rewiring the reader’s brain—helping instill empathy, for instance5—which is why writers are, and have always been, among the most powerful people in the world. Writers can change the way people think simply by giving them a glimpse of life through their characters’ eyes. They can transport readers to places they’ve never been, catapult them into situations they’ve only dreamed of, and reveal subtle universal truths that just might alter their entire perception of reality. In ways large and small, writers help people make it through the night. And that’s not too shabby. But there’s a catch. For a story to captivate a reader, it must continually meet his or her hardwired expectations. This is no doubt what prompted Jorge Luis Borges to note, “Art is fire plus algebra.”6 Let me explain. Fire is absolutely crucial to writing; it’s the very first ingredient of every story. Passion is what drives us to write, filling us with the exhilarating sense that we have something to say, something that will make a difference. But to write a story capable of instantly engaging readers, passion alone isn’t enough. Writers often mistakenly believe that all they need to craft a successful story is the fire—the burning desire, the creative spark, the killer idea that startles you awake in the middle of the night. They 7 dive into their story with gusto, not realizing that every word they write is most likely doomed to failure because they forgot to factor in the second half of the equation: the algebra. In this, Borges intuitively knew what cognitive psychology and neuroscience has since revealed: there is an implicit framework that must underlie a story in order for that passion, that fire, to ignite the reader’s brain. Stories without it go unread; stories with it are capable of knocking the socks off someone who’s barefoot. Why do writers often have trouble embracing the notion that there is more to creating a story than having a good idea and a way with words? Because the ease with which we surrender to the stories we read tends to cloud our understanding of stories we write. We have an innate belief that we know what makes a good story—after all, we can quickly recognize a bad one. When we do, we scoff and slip the book back onto the shelf. We roll our eyes and walk out of the movie theater. We take a deep breath and pray for Uncle Albert to stop nattering on about his Civil War reenactment. We won’t put up with a bad story for three seconds. We recognize a good story just as quickly. It’s something we’ve been able to do since we were about three, and we’ve been addicted to stories in one form or another ever since. So if we’re hardwired to spot a good story from the very first sentence, how is it possible that we don’t know how to write one? Once again, evolutionary history provides the answer. Story originated as a method of bringing us together to share specific information that might be lifesaving. Hey bud, don’t eat those shiny red berries unless you wanna croak like the Neanderthal next door; here’s what happened.… Stories were simple, relevant, and not so different from a little thing we like to call gossip. When written language evolved eons later, story was free to expand beyond the local news and immediate concerns of the community. That meant readers—with hardwired expectations in place —had to be drawn to the story on its own merits. While no doubt there were always masterful storytellers, there’s a huge difference between sharing a juicy bit of gossip about crazy Cousin Rachel and pounding out the Great American Novel. Fair enough, but since most aspiring writers love to read, wouldn’t all those fabulous books they wolf down give them a first-class lesson in 8 what hooks a reader? Nope. Evolution dictates that the first job of any good story is to completely anesthetize the part of our brain that questions how it is creating such a compelling illusion of reality. After all, a good story doesn’t feel like an illusion. What it feels like is life. Literally. A recent brain-imaging study reported in Psychological Science reveals that the regions of the brain that process the sights, sounds, tastes, and movement of real life are activated when we’re engrossed in a compelling narrative.7 That’s what accounts for the vivid mental images and the visceral reactions we feel when we can’t stop reading, even though it’s past midnight and we have to be up at dawn. When a story enthralls us, we are inside of it, feeling what the protagonist feels, experiencing it as if it were indeed happening to us, and the last thing we’re focusing on is the mechanics of the thing. So it’s no surprise that we tend to be utterly oblivious to the fact that beneath every captivating story, there is an intricate mesh of interconnected elements holding it together, allowing it to build with seemingly effortless precision. This often fools us into thinking we know exactly what has us hooked—things like beautiful metaphors, authenticsounding dialogue, an interesting character—when, in fact, despite how engaging those things appear to be in and of themselves, it turns out they’re secondary. What has us hooked is something else altogether, something that underlies them, secretly bringing them to life: story, as our brain understands it. It’s only by stopping to analyze what we’re unconsciously responding to when we read a story—what has actually snagged our brain’s attention—that we can then write a story that will grab the reader’s brain. This is true whether you’re writing a literary novel, hard-boiled mystery, or supernatural teen romance. Although readers have their own personal taste when it comes to the type of novel they’re drawn to, unless that story meets their hardwired expectations, it stays on the shelf. To make sure that doesn’t happen to your story, this book is organized into twelve chapters, each zeroing in on an aspect of how the brain works, its corresponding revelation about story, and the nuts and bolts of how to actualize it in your work. Each chapter ends with a checklist you can apply to your work at any stage: before you begin writing, at 9 the end of every writing day, at the end of a scene or a chapter, or at 2:00 a.m. when you wake up in a cold sweat, convinced that your story may be the worst thing anyone has written, ever. (It’s not; trust me.) Do this, and I guarantee your work will stay on track and have an excellent chance of making people who aren’t even related to you want to read it. The only caveat is that you have to be as honest about your story as you would be about a novel you pick up in a bookstore, or a movie you begin watching with one finger still poised on the remote. The idea is to pinpoint where each trouble spot lies and then remedy it before it spreads like a weed, undermining your entire narrative. It’s a lot more fun than it sounds, because there’s nothing more exhilarating than watching your work improve until your readers are so engrossed in it that they forget that it’s a story at all. 10 11 Why Our Future Depends on Libraries, Reading and Daydreaming: The Reading Agency Lecture, 2013 It’s important for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whether they might be biased. A declaration of member’s interests, of a sort. So, I am going to be talking to you about reading. I’m going to tell you that libraries are important. I’m going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do. I’m going to make an impassioned plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things. And I am biased, enormously and obviously: I’m an author, often an author of fiction. I write for children and for adults. For about thirty years I have been earning my living through my words, mostly by making things up and writing them down. It is obviously in my interest for people to read, for them to read fiction, for libraries and librarians to exist and help foster a love of reading and places in which reading can occur. So I’m biased as a writer. But I am much, much more biased as a reader. And I am even more biased as a British citizen. And I’m here giving this talk tonight, under the auspices of the Reading Agency: a charity whose mission is to give everyone an equal chance in life by helping people become confident and enthusiastic readers. A charity which supports literacy programs, and libraries and individuals, and nakedly and wantonly encourages the act of reading. Because, they tell us, everything changes when we read. And it’s that change, and that act of reading, that I’m here to talk about tonight. I want to talk about what reading does. What it’s good for. Once in New York, I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons —a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth—how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, fifteen years from now? And they found they could predict it 12 very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based about asking what percentage of ten- and eleven-year-olds couldn’t read. And certainly couldn’t read for pleasure. It’s not one-to-one: you can’t say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations. And I think some of those correlations, the simplest, come from something incredibly simple. Literate people read fiction, and fiction has two uses. Firstly, it’s a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it’s hard, because someone’s in trouble and you have to know how it’s all going to end . . . . . . that’s a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, you’re on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a postliterate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but these days, those noises are gone: words are more important than they ever were. We navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the Web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we’re reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only get you so far. The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books and letting them read them. I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children’s books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. I’ve seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was R. L. Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy. It’s tosh. It’s snobbery and it’s foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn’t hackneyed and worn out to someone encountering it for the first time. You don’t discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong 13 thing. Fiction you do not like is the gateway drug to other books you may prefer them to read. And not everyone has the same taste as you. Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the twenty-first-century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and, worse, unpleasant. We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy. (Also do not do what this author did when his eleven-year-old daughter was into R. L. Stine, which is to go and get a copy of Stephen King’s Carrie, saying, “If you liked those you’ll love this!” Holly read nothing but safe stories of settlers on prairies for the rest of her early teenage years, and still glares at me whenever Stephen King’s name is mentioned. The second thing that fiction does is to build empathy. When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world, and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. You’re being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you’re going to be slightly changed. Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals. You’re also finding out something as you read that will be vitally important for making your way in the world. And it’s this: THE WORLD DOESN’T HAVE TO BE LIKE THIS. THINGS CAN BE DIFFERENT. Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Once you’ve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. And discontent is a good thing: people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different, if they’re discontented. And while we’re on the subject, I’d like to say a few words about escapism. I hear the term bandied about as if it’s a bad thing. As if “escapist” fiction is a cheap opiate used by the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the only fiction that is worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirroring the worst of the world the reader finds herself in. 14 If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldn’t you take it? And escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with (and books are real places, make no mistake about that; and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armor: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real. As C.S. Lewis reminded us, the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers. Another way to destroy a child’s love of reading, of course, is to make sure there are no books of any kind around. And to give them nowhere to read those books if there are. I was lucky. I had an excellent local library growing up. I had the kind of parents who could be persuaded to drop me off in the library on their way to work in my summer holidays, and the kind of librarians who did not mind a small, unaccompanied boy heading back into the children’s library every morning and working his way through the card catalogue, looking for books with ghosts or magic or rockets in them, looking for vampires or detectives or witches or wonders. And when I had finished reading the children’s library I began on the adult books. They were good librarians. They liked books and they liked the books being read. They taught me how to order books from other libraries on interlibrary loans. They had no snobbery about anything I read. They just seemed to like that there was this wide-eyed little boy who loved to read, and they would talk to me about the books I was reading, they would find me other books in a series, they would help. They treated me as another reader—nothing less, nothing more— which meant they treated me with respect. I was not used to being treated with respect as an eight-year-old. Libraries are about Freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university, about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information. I worry that here in the twenty-first century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them. If you perceive a library as a shelf of books, it may seem antiquated or outdated in a world in which most, but not all, 15 books in print exist digitally. But to think that is to fundamentally miss the point. I think it has to do with nature of information. Information has value, and the right information has enormous value. For all of human history, we have lived in a time of information scarcity, and having the needed information was always important, and always worth something: when to plant crops, where to find things, maps and histories and stories—they were always good for a meal and company. Information was a valuable thing, and those who had it or could obtain it could charge for that service. In the last few years, we’ve moved from an information-scarce economy to one driven by an information glut. According to Eric Schmidt of Google, every two days now the human race creates as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization until 2003. That’s about five exabytes of data a day, for those of you keeping score. The challenge becomes, not finding that scarce plant growing in the desert, but finding a specific plant growing in a jungle. We are going to need help navigating that information to find the thing we actually need. Libraries are places that people go for information. Books are only the tip of the information iceberg: they are there, and libraries can provide you freely and legally with books. More children are borrowing books from libraries than ever before—books of all kinds: paper and digital and audio. But libraries are also, for example, a place that people, who may not have computers, who may not have Internet connections, can go online without paying anything: hugely important when the way you find out about jobs, apply for jobs or apply for benefits is increasingly migrating exclusively online. Librarians can help these people navigate that world. I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, over twenty years before the Kindle showed up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath resistant, solar operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them. They belong in libraries, just as libraries have already become places you can go to get access to ebooks, and audiobooks and DVDs and Web content. A library is a place that is a repository of, and gives every citizen equal access to, information. That includes health information. And mental health information. It’s a community space. It’s a place of safety, a haven from the world. It’s a place with librarians in it. What the libraries of the future will be 16 like is something we should be imagining now. Literacy is more important than ever it was, in this world of text and e-mail, a world of written information. We need to read and write, we need global citizens who can read comfortably, comprehend what they are reading, understand nuance, and make themselves understood. Libraries really are the gates to the future. So it is unfortunate that, round the world, we observe local authorities seizing the opportunity to close libraries as an easy way to save money, without realizing that they are, quite literally, stealing from the future to pay for today. They are closing the gates that should be open. According to a recent study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, England is the “only country where the oldest age group has higher proficiency in both literacy and numeracy than the youngest group, after other factors, such as gender, socio-economic backgrounds and type of occupations are taken into account.” Or to put it another way, our children and our grandchildren are less literate and less numerate than we are. They are less able to navigate the world, to understand it to solve problems. They can be more easily lied to and misled, will be less able to change the world in which they find themselves, be less employable. All of these things. And as a country, England will fall behind other developed nations because it will lack a skilled workforce. And while politicians blame the other party for these results, the truth is, we need to teach our children to read and to enjoy reading. We need libraries. We need books. We need literate citizens. I do not care—I do not believe it matters—whether these books are paper or digital, whether you are reading on a scroll or scrolling on a screen. The content is the important thing. But a book is also the content, and that’s important. Books are the way that the dead communicate with us. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, the way that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told. I think we have responsibilities to the future. Responsibilities and obligations to children, to the adults those children will become, to the world they will find themselves inhabiting. All of us—as readers, as writers, as citizens: we have 17 obligations. I thought I’d try and spell out some of these obligations here. I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good thing. We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future. We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. We have an obligation to use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside. We have an obligation to use the language. To push ourselves: to find out what words mean and how to deploy them, to communicate clearly, to say what we mean. We must not attempt to freeze language, or to pretend it is a dead thing that must be revered, but we should use it as a living thing, that flows, that borrows words, that allows meanings and pronunciations to change with time. We writers—and especially writers for children, but all writers—have an obligation to our readers: it’s the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were—to understand that truth is not in what happens but in what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all. We have an obligation not to bore our readers, but to make them need to turn the pages. One of the best cures for a reluctant reader, after all, is a tale they cannot stop themselves from reading. And while we must tell our readers true things and give them weapons and give them armor and pass on whatever wisdom we have gleaned from our short stay on this green world, we have an obligation not to preach, not to lecture, not to force predigested morals and messages down our readers’ throats like adult birds feeding their babies premasticated maggots; and we have an obligation never, ever, under any circumstances, to write anything for children to read that we would not want to read ourselves. We have an obligation to understand and to acknowledge that as writers for children we are doing important work, because if we mess it up and write dull books that turn children away from reading and from books, we’ve lessened our own future and diminished theirs. 18 We all—adults and children, writers and readers—have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different. Look around you: I mean it. Pause, for a moment. Just look around this room that we’re in. I’m going to point out something so obvious that it tends to be forgotten. It’s this: that everything you can see, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided it might be easier to sit on a chair than on the ground and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you in London right now without us all getting rained on. This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, in this city, exist because, over and over and over, people imagined things. They daydreamed, they pondered, they made things that didn’t quite work, they described things that didn’t yet exist to people who laughed at them. And then, in time, they succeeded. Political movements, personal movements, all begin with people imagining another way of existing. We have an obligation to make things beautiful, to not leave the world uglier than we found it. An obligation not to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation. We have an obligation to clean up after ourselves, and not to leave our children with a world we’ve shortsightedly messed up, shortchanged, and crippled. We have an obligation to tell our politicians what we want, to vote against politicians of whatever party who do not understand the value of reading in creating worthwhile citizens, who do not want to act to preserve and protect knowledge and encourage literacy. This is not a matter of party politics. This is a matter of common humanity. Albert Einstein was asked once how we could make our children intelligent. His reply was both simple and wise. “If you want your children to be intelligent,” he said, “read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” He understood the value of reading, and of imagining. I hope we can give our children a world in which they will read, and be read to, and imagine, and understand. Thank you for listening. I gave this lecture for the Reading Agency, a UK charity with a mission to help people become more confident readers, in 2013. 19 20 THE CURSE I turned fifteen on an exchange program in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the capital of the state of Chiapas, in Mexico, some three hundred miles north of the Guatemalan border. My host family was named Gutiérrez, and I never asked them if the town took its name from their forebears, but if it did, they wore their fame lightly, though they were a powerful and prosperous family. The father, Fernando, had been a stevedore, of the kind who worked for him now, and the mother, Cela (pronounced Che-la), was a dance teacher. They lived like people who felt lucky to be alive, and I loved them right away. Their son, Miguel Ángel, had lived the previous year with me and my family in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. He had told his parents stories of me, and so they greeted me like a child they’d always known but never met. They had a handsome modern house of gleaming wood, glass, and stucco, surrounded by high walls topped with barbed wire and trees with enormous crowns, their leaves arrayed in stars, that I would learn were mangoes. The first night, the family told me over a cheerful and friendly dinner that they were not going to speak to me in English for the rest of the summer, no matter how confusing it was. And that this was to teach me to speak Spanish. I laughed as I agreed, in Spanish, to their terms, intimidated but sure of my purpose and already wanting to please them. That night, as I lay awake trying to sleep, I heard the knock of ripe mangoes falling from the trees that circled the house and ran up and down the street. The noise ranged, depending on the ripeness, from the plop of a tennis ball to a pulpy sort of splash to the occasional smash when one of them would crash through a car windshield. We need to cut that tree down, my host mother said the next morning. She would say it whenever this happened, but they never did. It was as if they accepted the broken windshields as the price of the mangoes, which we ate as fast as we could. They had their gardener collect the fruit instead, and replaced the windshields as if they were changing a tablecloth. And that would be among the first of my object lessons in the ways of the very rich. Years later, and only when I learned of the deep poverty in Chiapas—the reason they had those walls topped with barbed wire—did I think to question I SPENT THE SUMMER 21 whether it was really just mangoes breaking their windshields—if mango season lasted as long as a summer. twelve students in Chiapas from my high school that summer, on what now seems like an odd program: we lived there with the Mexican students who lived with us during the year, but unlike them, we did not attend any classes. The summer itself was supposed to be a class. If my host family had not made me promise never to speak English, I don’t know what I would have learned. Our teacher came with us, as a chaperone, but he did not teach us. Whatever else he did there, he also accompanied us on intermittent group field trips to explore the mostly well-trodden ruins and to shop in places like the nearby San Cristóbal de las Casas, formerly the capital of Mexico, a quiet, sun-struck city, cheated out of the prosperity of being the capital. These trips were set apart for me by stretches of nameless, numberless days spent wandering the empty, luxurious house while the Gutiérrezes were either at school or at work. I was fascinated by my host father’s many toupees, which were kept on mannequin heads in his bedroom dressing room, and the life they suggested, entirely alien, of hair that was public and hair that was private. It was just one detail of many that I eagerly collected that summer, and if it seems I was snooping, I was. I was lost in the books I had brought with me, the Dune novels by Frank Herbert—the story of a young boy without playmates, suspected of being a messianic figure, and undergoing training in the ways of the Bene Gesserit, a secretive society of women with extraordinary powers, born in part through their obsessive observation of detail. The boy was the latest iteration of a series of heroes like this for me— Encyclopedia Brown, Sherlock Holmes, Batman—who went from being ordinary people to heroes through their ability to perceive the things others missed. I wanted to see if I too could obtain these powers through observation. And when I wasn’t reading those novels, I wrote my own stories, stories no one has seen to this day, about mutants with psychic powers who were running from a government that, of course, hoped to control them. X-Men fan fiction, essentially, before I knew what it was. It was my greatest dream to live out this kind of story, of power gained through either inborn abilities or persistence, and though I couldn’t have said this at the time, this dream coming true would have meant all of my struggles were worth it. I WAS ONE OF 22 The closest thing I had to a routine that summer was my time spent sitting with the cook, Panchita, in front of the kitchen television, chomping on the fried tortillas she served me, spread with some sort of light, fresh tomato sauce and sprinkled with white cheese. Together we watched El Maleficio, a telenovela about a wealthy family of witches living in Oaxaca and the various troubles they got into. I liked the look of that soap opera, those men and women who seemed straight out of Dallas or Falcon Crest all shouting at each other, casting spells, promising revenge, and lit by the cheesy special effects that made their already spectral appearance even more incredible. I couldn’t understand most of what was being said at first, having had just two years of high school Spanish before this. But about a month into my stay, while watching the show, I had the realization that I understood everything the witches were saying. The ads came on and I understood those also. The news came on and I understood that as well. It was as if the show had cast a spell on me. I had crossed over into fluency. I said something to that effect to Panchita, and she smiled and laughed, congratulating me. She herself spoke only a little more Spanish than me, she joked, and made me the treat of an extra tortilla that day. Ángel, snorted almost nightly at the unfairness of my program when he came home from summer school to find me tanned and reading. He was a tall, lanky seventeen-year-old with a sort of dreamy teenidol beauty gone slightly, if adorably, awry. He had large front teeth that were endearingly crooked, and he wore the tightest, thinnest jeans of anyone I knew, his hair cut in a Leif Garrett shag. At some point after arriving home from school, Miguel would begin getting ready for the evening, showering and dressing carefully for the disco. I found these preparations alien and thrilling—the application of cologne being nearly mystical to watch. And I watched it all. I felt sometimes like a camera, shocked when people noticed me. I was a little in love with him and his friends, young men of sixteen or seventeen, a year or two older than me, all beauties, and I wanted to know everything I could, as if, per the Dune novels, all of this detail might confer some greater mastery over the objects of my desire. There was a code to it all, it seemed, something underneath the smooth rhythm of the day and night, and that was what I wanted to crack. Miguel and I would meet up with his friends at the overlook of the town’s dump, a hillside where we parked and drank, tailgating with brandy and MY HOST BROTHER, MIGUEL 23 Coca-Cola, mixed into a sticky-sweet and satisfying drink for the hot summer nights, before they all went out to the discos. Drinking with these young men left me a little drowsy from the liquor, and a sensual sort of atmosphere took hold of my imagination, a sense that something was almost about to happen. These boys were all waiting for the girls, who took longer to get ready, and we drank as they dressed and made themselves up. I watched for the moment the girls would arrive, the way the group of boys at the overlook would change when they did. I already knew at this point that I was gay, and so I was forever looking for other signs of it in the landscape. What I was looking for was what seemed to vanish then. The girls arrived in their own cars, the headlights sweeping the scene where we stood, illuminated by them. Out they’d step, confident, glamorous in their makeup, their legs shining, lips flashing wet with lip gloss, their new manicures and pedicures giving off sparks in the night. The boys would growl hellos, smiling like cartoon wolves. Two of Miguel’s friends in particular held most of my attention. They seemed to be deeply in love with each other, in a kind of easy masculine protectorate that we all respected without quite acknowledging it. They weren’t what I thought of as macho per se, but they seemed manlier than I could ever be, and they kept very close to each other, always. Before the girls’ arrival, they would sit together, arms around each other, handsome and easy, and from where I sat I could feel everywhere their skin touched, as if the heat of it could be felt with my eyes. Sometimes, at the end of the night, one would lay his head on the other’s shoulder, and I would ache for the rest of the night from that sight. But on seeing the girls’ cars, they lifted off each other, as if what was there was not there. Everyone was friendly with me, but to my knowledge, no one was flirting with me. I was too young. I was not stylish. I did not have a gold chain. I did not have anything special about me, to my mind, except my eyes, which I was proud of, and which people often said were beautiful. And which I was using, sure that my dream of power was something they could make come true. I was probably a starer, to be honest. I was from Maine, with my ordinary sideparted brown hair cut in an ordinary way, jeans of an ordinary cut, ordinary polo shirts. Most of my notebooks have a doodle in them of a staring eye. Sometimes as I drew it, I was staring at myself. Sometimes I had the sense, as I finished the drawing, that I was staring back at me. I still draw these. The eye a perfect talisman for a boy who believed his watching both hid him and gave him power. 24 it had, in a sense, already happened. I felt at home in Mexico in a way I never had before. My new fluency in Spanish was part of it. I was the first of the twelve students in my high school group to accomplish this—undeniably the main purpose of being in Chiapas. I was also the only Asian, nonwhite student in the group. On field trips the other kids started asking me what “they” were saying, or they’d ask me to speak for them. The only exchanges the students had mastered were basic—¿Cuánto cuesta? How much does this cost?—and so I felt a tiny contempt whenever I conceded and helped them. As we were otherwise left on our own when the trips were not happening, I kept to myself as much as I could and never knew how the other Americans spent their time without me. Nick Stark was the only one of these students I sought out. He was, like all of them, hopelessly bad at pronunciation and with no memory for vocabulary, but I was friends with him mostly because I found him very handsome. He had become my best friend out of all the American students, by default. We often swam together in the afternoons, after my television show hour, at the Tuxtla country club’s outdoor pool, where our host families were both members, and in doing so, the sun had turned us completely brown, except for the space barely covered by our swimsuits. I went along with it because Nick never mocked me, and I enjoyed looking at him. When he took off his Speedo or put it on, his tan line flashed white in the changing room, so bright it was like a camera flash. Nick had dark hair and eyes like me, and looked, with his mouth closed, like many of the Mexican members of the club, most of them from European backgrounds, and so when we swam there, by and large we attracted little attention unless we spoke. But when Nick opened his mouth, he showed his giant white, straight American teeth, the product of perfectly attended orthodontist visits. Mine were also large and white, but a little crooked, like my mother’s teeth, and like theirs—not enough to get fixed but enough to assist me, along with my better accent, in passing. I had already noticed that the Mexicans here in Tuxtla were less obsessed with braces than we were back in America, even the rich ones I had met. Orthodontics, in the 1970s, was a very American obsession. And I had noticed what Nick would now point out to me: that I also looked Mexican. Or, really, it was a little more than that. “You’re going native,” he said to me one day as we changed after swimming. The smell of chlorine and rust hung in the cold green lockers of the country club, and I closed mine carefully, which dimmed the odor only slightly. I was pleased by him saying this and wanted more information, but also the pleasure of watching him change clothes distracted me. By now I was aware that I was attracted to him, and I had learned to modulate my attention to him so that it seemed like I was no more interested in his beauty than SOMETHING WAS HAPPENING, THOUGH 25 anything else around us. But that day, his penis swung up and down as he spoke, as if his vocal cords were strung to it, and was a rosy pink in the center of that blinding white border of skin between his beautifully brown top and bottom halves. He looked like a very sexy Neapolitan ice cream treat. He was waiting for me to turn and face him, holding out his navy swimsuit, waiting to step inside of it. “How exactly do you mean ‘native’?” I asked him. Nick struggled with this for a moment. I think he had hoped I’d know what he meant. “Uh, well, you know. You could, like, pretend to be Mexican. Your Spanish is really good. You sound Mexican.” “Yeah?” I sat down on the bench by the locker. Nick stood as if waiting to be released from this conversation in order to put on his suit. In retrospect, he may have been flirting with me also. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m sure you could convince anyone here. You could totally play Mexican.” His penis swung again, and now that I was seated, it was at my eye level. I looked up at his face so he wouldn’t notice me noticing it, but I could see it in and out of the edge of my vision, tantalizing. I asked more questions. “Are you bored yet? Isn’t it weird that we have no classes? Pablo’s a madman to have set the summer up this way.” Pablo was our Spanish teacher, Mr. Castellanos, whom we always referred to as Pablo. We never called him Mr. Castellanos. “No,” he said. “I’m having a blast.” This produced at least a few more swings. He finally put on his suit and smiled at me as he settled the drawstring inside, as if he’d accomplished something quite difficult. Then I stood and we went out to the pool. At dinner that night, I told my host family at last the news about my fluency, and they bragged to one another about how I was the best of the American students, and how proud of me they were. Each of the other Americans was brought up and dismissed as lesser than me. “Lo más bueno,” my host father said, pointing to me. Cela beamed as they congratulated themselves on their plan of not speaking to me in English, and confirmed that I sounded just like a Mexicano. As they said this, I saw a change come over their eyes, as if I had been revealed as one of their own. bewilderingly rich to me. Miguel’s youngest sister, for example, was away at a finishing school in Switzerland. His older sister had also been to one, the same one. I’d never met a family with this tradition. I understood that Mr. Gutiérrez ran an import-export business, but THE GUTIÉRREZ FAMILY WERE 26 when I tried to imagine what that was, I could only picture bales of cash being unloaded off of enormous ships. They were the first family I ever knew to employ a houseboy. His name was Uriel, and he tended the garden in the courtyard, washed the three cars every other day, and picked the mangoes up off the ground, in addition to whatever he did out of my sight. Uriel worked shirtless in the heat, spraying the cars down, himself glazed by the water and the sweat, and in a way, of all the boys I was in love with that summer, he was chief among them. I had watched him for weeks from my window, too shy to approach him, too unsure of my Spanish, but now that I was fluent—such that I was—I went down at last and reintroduced myself. He had met me on my arrival but we hadn’t really spoken since, just the occasional smile and nod. He was shy too, and when he smiled it was as if we were in a movie and the soundtrack changed. He was deeply tanned from working in the sun all day. I knew his name was an angel’s name—an archangel, really. Which only made him glow more in my eyes. I was young enough, naïve enough, to imagine we could be friends, and I did eventually write a short story about a boy like me on a trip like this, the two of us in love. But this was a fantasy. I was learning there was a gulf between us that could not be as carelessly crossed by my learning Spanish. For all I was trying to vanish into the surroundings, I was still the American visitor, and he knew it well, whatever he also felt. He kept our interactions polite and ordinary. If he was aware of my crush on him, he did not let on. I did not yet understand how the class difference between us was, at the time, a greater barrier than the language. He had to be polite to me, no matter what he felt. I wished I had asked more questions. On the nights at the disco, or at home later, in my room, I often found myself thinking of Uriel. Did he sleep in the house also, and if not, where? Where did he go home to, and what was his life like? And, of course, what was he thinking about? Which was only a way of hoping he thought about me. remember best was the one to Palenque. At the time, it was an archeological site, according to our guide, still very remote, full of scorpions, and surrounded by what the guide said were cannibal tribes. For several hours our bus took countless hairpin turns through the mountains, and I remember the electric fear of feeling close to death as I looked out the bus window and down a cliff. All along the roads were crosses and candles marking where people had died in accidents. THE FIELD TRIP I 27 Palenque was a Mayan ruin in the center of the Mexican rainforest. This location, we learned, was thought to be strategic. The stones were the color of the white summer sky. We exited the bus, and I was in awe of the dense rainforest jungle as the guide led us into the single excavated temple cellar. There the other American students took pictures, the light bouncing off the plexiglass erected between us and the discoveries, an aurora of camera flash. “We know so little about the Maya,” I remember the guide kept saying, a litany of a kind. Palenque then was a sliver of what it is now, which is a sliver of what it once was—it is estimated that what we see of the ruin is just 10 percent of what is still there, buried in the jungle. It was, for me, both thrillingly new and ancient at the same time. I was young and impatient upon learning that the world had not, in fact, been completely charted yet. Why did we not yet know more about the Maya when they had been around for so long? The entire summer’s program seemed like an education conducted through gestalt experiences: take kids to a place where they don’t understand anything, and then take them on tours with other people who understand only a little more than they do. I was growing bored of these field trips, and I was still the only group member with any fluency. Being around the Americans, as I now thought of them, wore on me on that trip. Spanish, to me, was quieter, with a different tone and volume level, and their English rang in my head, discordant and forceful. On the trip back to Tuxtla, Nick was gluey with sleep, his head tipped over, lips apart. I sat next to him, awake with the thrill of being close to him, and the knowledge I had of his body from all of those hours of swimming. I wanted nothing more than to slip a kiss on his mouth right then, but it was only pure lust, not affection, and the imagined scene of it turned in my mind like a worry stone as we passed again along the road’s dangerous curves. It was a summer of wanting impossible things. then was puzzled by the lack of classes, but in truth the program was so effective it almost recommended itself as a method. I learned Spanish well enough to become fluent. The stories I was writing, which I did to entertain myself when I ran out of things to read, were their own kind of milestone, visible to me only much later: they were the first time I wrote for myself, for my own pleasure. There was something I wanted to feel, and I felt it only when I was writing. I think of this as one of the most important parts of my writer’s education—that when left alone with nothing else to read, I began to tell myself the stories I wanted to read. THE STUDENT I WAS 28 And there was the story I was living. Whatever I thought I was doing through my experiments in observation, I can see I was a boy losing himself as a way to find himself in the shapes of others. The classmates on this trip were kids I had grown up with since moving to town in the first grade. I longed to be rid of them, but also to be rid of me, or of the problem of me. This was not possible, but I tried. Here, then, is that summer’s last lesson. celebration at summer’s end were strenuous. A three-day party, the twenty-fifth wedding anniversary of my host family’s closest friends. I’ll call them the Márquez family. Guests were flying in from all over the world for the big event, and Cela, my host mother, would jump into spontaneous dances in front of me as she described it. She taught salsa and merengue, and now and then over the summer I would be drawn into dancing with her; I remember the delight in her eyes at the prospect of dancing. She had elegant legs, and her hips’ quick movement surprised me, which made her laugh. “Merengue, salsa, merengue, salsa,” she would chant, like a little girl asking to bake a cake, her hips shaking as she circled the dining room table, her heels ringing on the tile floor. Miguel always blushed, and at some point her husband would raise his hands and reach for his wife’s waist. She gave me a few lessons, insisting I would have to dance at the party. The day of the party, we arrived at the Márquez house to find a white Jaguar parked in the driveway, a red bow on top. It was so clearly the señor’s present to the señora that it needed no explanation: Mr. Márquez owned a luxury car dealership in town. I arrived with Miguel, and we were greeted by his friend Javier, the son of the celebrating couple. Javier wore a dry expression on his face, one I now know is common to those children who parent their parents. His mother chose that moment to come outside, and her diamond ring, the biggest I’d ever seen, flashed as she covered her mouth and screamed in joy. It was the sort of ring you could use to signal for help if you were ever lost on a desert island. ¿Qué onda? Miguel and Javier said to each other, and I said it too, the greeting the boys all used with one another, and as I did so, Miguel gave me a sidelong glance and a smile. You’re ready, he said. You’re ready. Javier’s eyes glinted as Miguel set out the terms: I was to try to fool their friends, who had come in from Oaxaca, into thinking I was Mexican. And if I succeeded, I would win a case of beer. Javier laughed. Yes, he said, you could be mestizo. THE PREPARATIONS FOR THE 29 I knew what this word meant as soon as I heard it. Mixed. I think of it as a Mexican word, a word for the Americas—the secret self of the whole continent, north and south. And to me, it felt like the word for what I was. In the United States, if I said I was mixed, it meant too many things I didn’t feel. Mixed feelings were confusing feelings, and I didn’t feel confused except as to why it was so hard for everyone to understand that I existed. Living this way felt like discovering your shoe was nailed to the floor, but only one of them, so that you paced, always, a circle of possibility, defined by the limited imaginations of others. I stared at Javier with love. His round head, his bowl-cut black hair, his sly little smile. He led us through the house to the friends in question. They were a brother and sister, blond-haired, green-eyed, pure Spanish Mexican, as Miguel explained. They looked more American than I did. I don’t remember their names, but we shook hands, were introduced, and began speaking. I invented a past in Tijuana. Close to America but not quite. I don’t remember the conversations that followed over the next three days. I remember only the way my accent stood up to scrutiny. They suspected nothing. When Miguel finally revealed the truth, their laughter and genuine astonishment were my real prize. Miguel and I took the case of beer and drank it with the boys, all of them there at the party also, and that was that. I may have had one beer. For those days, “Alejandro from Tijuana” was real and happy. He was like me but more at ease in the world. Lighter. He didn’t spend his days waiting to be caught out for not being whoever someone else thought he was, though that was sincerely the condition of the bet; it had nothing like the stakes of the life I lived back in the States. In Maine, my background—half white, half Korean—was constantly made to seem alien, or exotic, or somehow inhuman. In Mexico, I was only mestizo, ordinary at first glance. When people looked at me, they saw me, and they didn’t stare at me as if at an object, the way my fellow American classmates did, all of whom were white and from the same small town in Maine. After I won my bet with Miguel, the summer seemed to go away, the trip ending in a week’s stay with my family in Mexico City, where, after a summer spent eating everything from fresh fruit to street tacos in Tuxtla, I finally got sick. I could only lie in bed, wishing that we’d skipped Mexico City, that we’d left the country before this had happened. This last evidence of my American constitution was a final reminder, not just that I was leaving, but that I was not from there. I really was only an impostor. I would never have this life. No life but the one I had. America now the exile of me. 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 IMMORALITY ACT, 1927 To prohibit illicit carnal intercourse between Europeans and natives and other acts in relation thereto. B E IT ENACTED by the King’s Most Excellent Majesty, the Senate and the House of Assembly of the Union of South Africa, as follows:— 1. Any European male who has illicit carnal intercourse with a native female, and any native male who has illicit carnal intercourse with a European female… shall be guilty of an offence and liable on conviction to imprisonment for a period not exceeding five years. 2. Any native female who permits any European male to have illicit carnal intercourse with her and any European female who permits any native male to have illicit carnal intercourse with her shall be guilty of an offence and liable on conviction to imprisonment for a period not exceeding four years…. 43 T he genius of apartheid was convincing people who were the overwhelming majority to turn on each other. Apart hate, is what it was. You separate people into groups and make them hate one another so you can run them all. At the time, black South Africans outnumbered white South Africans nearly five to one, yet we were divided into different tribes with different languages: Zulu, Xhosa, Tswana, Sotho, Venda, Ndebele, Tsonga, Pedi, and more. Long before apartheid existed these tribal factions clashed and warred with one another. Then white rule used that animosity to divide and conquer. All nonwhites were systematically classified into various groups and subgroups. Then these groups were given differing levels of rights and privileges in order to keep them at odds. Perhaps the starkest of these divisions was between South Africa’s two dominant groups, the Zulu and the Xhosa. The Zulu man is known as the warrior. He is proud. He puts his head down and fights. When the colonial armies invaded, the Zulu charged into battle with nothing but spears and shields against men with guns. The Zulu were slaughtered by the thousands, but they never stopped fighting. The Xhosa, on the other hand, pride themselves on being the thinkers. My mother is Xhosa. Nelson Mandela was Xhosa. The Xhosa waged a long war against the white man as well, but after experiencing the futility of battle against a better-armed foe, many Xhosa chiefs took a more nimble approach. “These white people are here whether we like it or not,” they said. “Let’s see what tools they possess that can be useful to us. Instead of being resistant to English, let’s learn English. We’ll understand what the white man is saying, and we can force him to negotiate with us.” The Zulu went to war with the white man. The Xhosa played chess with the white man. For a long time neither was particularly successful, and each blamed the other for a problem neither had created. Bitterness festered. For decades those feelings were held in check by a common enemy. Then apartheid fell, Mandela walked free, and black South Africa went to war with itself. 44 W hen I was growing up we used to get American TV shows rebroadcast on our stations: Doogie Howser, M.D.; Murder, She Wrote; Rescue 911 with William Shatner. Most of them were dubbed into African languages. ALF was in Afrikaans. Transformers was in Sotho. But if you wanted to watch them in English, the original American audio would be simulcast on the radio. You could mute your TV and listen to that. Watching those shows, I realized that whenever black people were on-screen speaking in African languages, they felt familiar to me. They sounded like they were supposed to sound. Then I’d listen to them in simulcast on the radio, and they would all have black American accents. My perception of them changed. They didn’t feel familiar. They felt like foreigners. Language brings with it an identity and a culture, or at least the perception of it. A shared language says “We’re the same.” A language barrier says “We’re different.” The architects of apartheid understood this. Part of the effort to divide black people was to make sure we were separated not just physically but by language as well. In the Bantu schools, children were only taught in their home language. Zulu kids learned in Zulu. Tswana kids learned in Tswana. Because of this, we’d fall into the trap the government had set for us and fight among ourselves, believing that we were different. The great thing about language is that you can just as easily use it to do the opposite: convince people that they are the same. Racism teaches us that we are different because of the color of our skin. But because racism is stupid, it’s easily tricked. If you’re racist and you meet someone who doesn’t look like you, the fact that he can’t speak like you reinforces your racist preconceptions: He’s different, less intelligent. A brilliant scientist can come over the border from Mexico to live in America, but if he speaks in broken English, people say, “Eh, I don’t trust this guy.” “But he’s a scientist.” “In Mexican science, maybe. I don’t trust him.” However, if the person who doesn’t look like you speaks like you, your brain short-circuits because your racism program has none of those instructions in the code. “Wait, wait,” your mind says, “the racism code says if he doesn’t look like me he isn’t like me, but the language code says if he speaks like me he…is like me? Something is off here. I can’t figure this out.” 45 CHAMELEON One afternoon I was playing with my cousins. I was a doctor and they were my patients. I was operating on my cousin Bulelwa’s ear with a set of matches when I accidentally perforated her eardrum. All hell broke loose. My grandmother came running in from the kitchen. “Kwenzeka ntoni?!” “What’s happening?!” There was blood coming out of my cousin’s head. We were all crying. My grandmother patched up Bulelwa’s ear and made sure to stop the bleeding. But we kept crying. Because clearly we’d done something we were not supposed to do, and we knew we were going to be punished. My grandmother finished up with Bulelwa’s ear and whipped out a belt and she beat the shit out of Bulelwa. Then she beat the shit out of Mlungisi, too. She didn’t touch me. Later that night my mother came home from work. She found my cousin with a bandage over her ear and my gran crying at the kitchen table. “What’s going on?” my mom said. “Oh, Nombuyiselo,” she said. “Trevor is so naughty. He’s the naughtiest child I’ve ever come across in my life.” “Then you should hit him.” “I can’t hit him.” “Why not?” “Because I don’t know how to hit a white child,” she said. “A black child, I understand. A black child, you hit them and they stay black. Trevor, when you hit him he turns blue and green and yellow and red. 46 I’ve never seen those colors before. I’m scared I’m going to break him. I don’t want to kill a white person. I’m so afraid. I’m not going to touch him.” And she never did. My grandmother treated me like I was white. My grandfather did, too, only he was even more extreme. He called me “Mastah.” In the car, he insisted on driving me as if he were my chauffeur. “Mastah must always sit in the backseat.” I never challenged him on it. What was I going to say? “I believe your perception of race is flawed, Grandfather.” No. I was five. I sat in the back. There were so many perks to being “white” in a black family, I can’t even front. I was having a great time. My own family basically did what the American justice system does: I was given more lenient treatment than the black kids. Misbehavior that my cousins would have been punished for, I was given a warning and let off. And I was way naughtier than either of my cousins. It wasn’t even close. If something got broken or if someone was stealing granny’s cookies, it was me. I was trouble. My mom was the only force I truly feared. She believed if you spare the rod, you spoil the child. But everyone else said, “No, he’s different,” and they gave me a pass. Growing up the way I did, I learned how easy it is for white people to get comfortable with a system that awards them all the perks. I knew my cousins were getting beaten for things that I’d done, but I wasn’t interested in changing my grandmother’s perspective, because that would mean I’d get beaten, too. Why would I do that? So that I’d feel better? Being beaten didn’t make me feel better. I had a choice. I could champion racial justice in our home, or I could enjoy granny’s cookies. I went with the cookies. — At that point I didn’t think of the special treatment as having to do with color. I thought of it as having to do with Trevor. It wasn’t, “Trevor doesn’t get beaten because Trevor is white.” It was, “Trevor doesn’t get beaten because Trevor is Trevor.” Trevor can’t go outside. Trevor can’t walk without supervision. It’s because I’m me; that’s why this is happening. I had no other points of reference. There were no other mixed kids around so that I could say, “Oh, this happens to us.” Nearly one million people lived in Soweto. Ninety-nine point nine 47 percent of them were black—and then there was me. I was famous in my neighborhood just because of the color of my skin. I was so unique people would give directions using me as a landmark. “The house on Makhalima Street. At the corner you’ll see a light-skinned boy. Take a right there.” Whenever the kids in the street saw me they’d yell, “Indoda yomlungu!” “The white man!” Some of them would run away. Others would call out to their parents to come look. Others would run up and try to touch me to see if I was real. It was pandemonium. What I didn’t understand at the time was that the other kids genuinely had no clue what a white person was. Black kids in the township didn’t leave the township. Few people had televisions. They’d seen the white police roll through, but they’d never dealt with a white person face-to-face, ever. I’d go to funerals and I’d walk in and the bereaved would look up and see me and they’d stop crying. They’d start whispering. Then they’d wave and say, “Oh!” like they were more shocked by me walking in than by the death of their loved ones. I think people felt like the dead person was more important because a white person had come to the funeral. After a funeral, the mourners all go to the house of the surviving family to eat. A hundred people might show up, and you’ve got to feed them. Usually you get a cow and slaughter it and your neighbors come over and help you cook. Neighbors and acquaintances eat outside in the yard and in the street, and the family eats indoors. Every funeral I ever went to, I ate indoors. It didn’t matter if we knew the deceased or not. The family would see me and invite me in. “Awunakuvumela umntana womlungu ame ngaphandle. Yiza naye apha ngaphakathi,” they’d say. “You can’t let the white child stand outside. Bring him in here.” As a kid I understood that people were different colors, but in my head white and black and brown were like types of chocolate. Dad was the white chocolate, mom was the dark chocolate, and I was the milk chocolate. But we were all just chocolate. I didn’t know any of it had anything to do with “race.” I didn’t know what race was. My mother never referred to my dad as white or to me as mixed. So when the other kids in Soweto called me “white,” even though I was light brown, I just thought they had their colors mixed up, like they hadn’t learned them properly. “Ah, yes, my friend. You’ve confused aqua with turquoise. I can see how you made that mistake. You’re not the first.” 48 I soon learned that the quickest way to bridge the race gap was through language. Soweto was a melting pot: families from different tribes and homelands. Most kids in the township spoke only their home language, but I learned several languages because I grew up in a house where there was no option but to learn them. My mom made sure English was the first language I spoke. If you’re black in South Africa, speaking English is the one thing that can give you a leg up. English is the language of money. English comprehension is equated with intelligence. If you’re looking for a job, English is the difference between getting the job or staying unemployed. If you’re standing in the dock, English is the difference between getting off with a fine or going to prison. After English, Xhosa was what we spoke around the house. When my mother was angry she’d fall back on her home language. As a naughty child, I was well versed in Xhosa threats. They were the first phrases I picked up, mostly for my own safety—phrases like “Ndiza kubetha entloko.” “I’ll knock you upside the head.” Or “Sidenge ndini somntwana.” “You idiot of a child.” It’s a very passionate language. Outside of that, my mother picked up different languages here and there. She learned Zulu because it’s similar to Xhosa. She spoke German because of my father. She spoke Afrikaans because it is useful to know the language of your oppressor. Sotho she learned in the streets. Living with my mom, I saw how she used language to cross boundaries, handle situations, navigate the world. We were in a shop once, and the shopkeeper, right in front of us, turned to his security guard and said, in Afrikaans, “Volg daai swartes, netnou steel hulle iets.” “Follow those blacks in case they steal something.” My mother turned around and said, in beautiful, fluent Afrikaans, “Hoekom volg jy nie daai swartes sodat jy hulle kan help kry waarna hulle soek nie?” “Why don’t you follow these blacks so you can help them find what they’re looking for?” “Ag, jammer!” he said, apologizing in Afrikaans. Then—and this was the funny thing—he didn’t apologize for being racist; he merely apologized for aiming his racism at us. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” he said. “I thought you were like the other blacks. You know how they love to steal.” I learned to use language like my mother did. I would simulcast— give you the program in your own tongue. I’d get suspicious looks from 49 people just walking down the street. “Where are you from?” they’d ask. I’d reply in whatever language they’d addressed me in, using the same accent that they used. There would be a brief moment of confusion, and then the suspicious look would disappear. “Oh, okay. I thought you were a stranger. We’re good then.” It became a tool that served me my whole life. One day as a young man I was walking down the street, and a group of Zulu guys was walking behind me, closing in on me, and I could hear them talking to one another about how they were going to mug me. “Asibambe le autie yomlungu. Phuma ngapha mina ngizoqhamuka ngemuva kwakhe.” “Let’s get this white guy. You go to his left, and I’ll come up behind him.” I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t run, so I just spun around real quick and said, “Kodwa bafwethu yingani singavele sibambe umuntu inkunzi? Asenzeni. Mina ngikulindele.” “Yo, guys, why don’t we just mug someone together? I’m ready. Let’s do it.” They looked shocked for a moment, and then they started laughing. “Oh, sorry, dude. We thought you were something else. We weren’t trying to take anything from you. We were trying to steal from white people. Have a good day, man.” They were ready to do me violent harm, until they felt we were part of the same tribe, and then we were cool. That, and so many other smaller incidents in my life, made me realize that language, even more than color, defines who you are to people. I became a chameleon. My color didn’t change, but I could change your perception of my color. If you spoke to me in Zulu, I replied to you in Zulu. If you spoke to me in Tswana, I replied to you in Tswana. Maybe I didn’t look like you, but if I spoke like you, I was you. — As apartheid was coming to an end, South Africa’s elite private schools started accepting children of all colors. My mother’s company offered bursaries, scholarships, for underprivileged families, and she managed to get me into Maryvale College, an expensive private Catholic school. Classes taught by nuns. Mass on Fridays. The whole bit. I started preschool there when I was three, primary school when I was five. In my class we had all kinds of kids. Black kids, white kids, Indian kids, colored kids. Most of the white kids were pretty well off. Every child 50 of color pretty much wasn’t. But because of scholarships we all sat at the same table. We wore the same maroon blazers, the same gray slacks and skirts. We had the same books. We had the same teachers. There was no racial separation. Every clique was racially mixed. Kids still got teased and bullied, but it was over usual kid stuff: being fat or being skinny, being tall or being short, being smart or being dumb. I don’t remember anybody being teased about their race. I didn’t learn to put limits on what I was supposed to like or not like. I had a wide berth to explore myself. I had crushes on white girls. I had crushes on black girls. Nobody asked me what I was. I was Trevor. It was a wonderful experience to have, but the downside was that it sheltered me from reality. Maryvale was an oasis that kept me from the truth, a comfortable place where I could avoid making a tough decision. But the real world doesn’t go away. Racism exists. People are getting hurt, and just because it’s not happening to you doesn’t mean it’s not happening. And at some point, you have to choose. Black or white. Pick a side. You can try to hide from it. You can say, “Oh, I don’t pick sides,” but at some point life will force you to pick a side. At the end of grade six I left Maryvale to go to H. A. Jack Primary, a government school. I had to take an aptitude test before I started, and, based on the results of the test, the school counselor told me, “You’re going to be in the smart classes, the A classes.” I showed up for the first day of school and went to my classroom. Of the thirty or so kids in my class, almost all of them were white. There was one Indian kid, maybe one or two black kids, and me. Then recess came. We went out on the playground, and black kids were everywhere. It was an ocean of black, like someone had opened a tap and all the black had come pouring out. I was like, Where were they all hiding? The white kids I’d met that morning, they went in one direction, the black kids went in another direction, and I was left standing in the middle, totally confused. Were we going to meet up later on? I did not understand what was happening. I was eleven years old, and it was like I was seeing my country for the first time. In the townships you don’t see segregation, because everyone is black. In the white world, any time my mother took me to a white church, we were the only black people there, and my mom didn’t separate herself 51 from anyone. She didn’t care. She’d go right up and sit with the white people. And at Maryvale, the kids were mixed up and hanging out together. Before that day, I had never seen people being together and yet not together, occupying the same space yet choosing not to associate with each other in any way. In an instant I could see, I could feel, how the boundaries were drawn. Groups moved in color patterns across the yard, up the stairs, down the hall. It was insane. I looked over at the white kids I’d met that morning. Ten minutes earlier I’d thought I was at a school where they were a majority. Now I realized how few of them there actually were compared to everyone else. I stood there awkwardly by myself in this no-man’s-land in the middle of the playground. Luckily, I was rescued by the Indian kid from my class, a guy named Theesan Pillay. Theesan was one of the few Indian kids in school, so he’d noticed me, another obvious outsider, right away. He ran over to introduce himself. “Hello, fellow anomaly! You’re in my class. Who are you? What’s your story?” We started talking and hit it off. He took me under his wing, the Artful Dodger to my bewildered Oliver. Through our conversation it came up that I spoke several African languages, and Theesan thought a colored kid speaking black languages was the most amazing trick. He brought me over to a group of black kids. “Say something,” he told them, “and he’ll show you he understands you.” One kid said something in Zulu, and I replied to him in Zulu. Everyone cheered. Another kid said something in Xhosa, and I replied to him in Xhosa. Everyone cheered. For the rest of recess Theesan took me around to different black kids on the playground. “Show them your trick. Do your language thing.” The black kids were fascinated. In South Africa back then, it wasn’t common to find a white person or a colored person who spoke African languages; during apartheid white people were always taught that those languages were beneath them. So the fact that I did speak African languages immediately endeared me to the black kids. “How come you speak our languages?” they asked. “Because I’m black,” I said, “like you.” “You’re not black.” “Yes, I am.” “No, you’re not. Have you not seen yourself?” 52 They were confused at first. Because of my color, they thought I was a colored person, but speaking the same languages meant that I belonged to their tribe. It just took them a moment to figure it out. It took me a moment, too. At some point I turned to one of them and said, “Hey, how come I don’t see you guys in any of my classes?” It turned out they were in the B classes, which also happened to be the black classes. That same afternoon, I went back to the A classes, and by the end of the day I realized that they weren’t for me. Suddenly, I knew who my people were, and I wanted to be with them. I went to see the school counselor. “I’d like to switch over,” I told her. “I’d like to go to the B classes.” She was confused. “Oh, no,” she said. “I don’t think you want to do that.” “Why not?” “Because those kids are…you know.” “No, I don’t know. What do you mean?” “Look,” she said, “you’re a smart kid. You don’t want to be in that class.” “But aren’t the classes the same? English is English. Math is math.” “Yeah, but that class is…those kids are gonna hold you back. You want to be in the smart class.” “But surely there must be some smart kids in the B class.” “No, there aren’t.” “But all my friends are there.” “You don’t want to be friends with those kids.” “Yes, I do.” We went back and forth. Finally she gave me a stern warning. “You do realize the effect this will have on your future? You do understand what you’re giving up? This will impact the opportunities you’ll have open to you for the rest of your life.” “I’ll take that chance.” I moved to the B classes with the black kids. I decided I’d rather be held back with people I liked than move ahead with people I didn’t know. Being at H. A. Jack made me realize I was black. Before that recess 53 I’d never had to choose, but when I was forced to choose, I chose black. The world saw me as colored, but I didn’t spend my life looking at myself. I spent my life looking at other people. I saw myself as the people around me, and the people around me were black. My cousins are black, my mom is black, my gran is black. I grew up black. Because I had a white father, because I’d been in white Sunday school, I got along with the white kids, but I didn’t belong with the white kids. I wasn’t a part of their tribe. But the black kids embraced me. “Come along,” they said. “You’re rolling with us.” With the black kids, I wasn’t constantly trying to be. With the black kids, I just was. 54 B efore apartheid, any black South African who received a formal education was likely taught by European missionaries, foreign enthusiasts eager to Christianize and Westernize the natives. In the mission schools, black people learned English, European literature, medicine, the law. It’s no coincidence that nearly every major black leader of the anti-apartheid movement, from Nelson Mandela to Steve Biko, was educated by the missionaries—a knowledgeable man is a free man, or at least a man who longs for freedom. The only way to make apartheid work, therefore, was to cripple the black mind. Under apartheid, the government built what became known as Bantu schools. Bantu schools taught no science, no history, no civics. They taught metrics and agriculture: how to count potatoes, how to pave roads, chop wood, till the soil. “It does not serve the Bantu to learn history and science because he is primitive,” the government said. “This will only mislead him, showing him pastures in which he is not allowed to graze.” To their credit, they were simply being honest. Why educate a slave? Why teach someone Latin when his only purpose is to dig holes in the ground? Mission schools were told to conform to the new curriculum or shut down. Most of them shut down, and black children were forced into crowded classrooms in dilapidated schools, often with teachers who were barely literate themselves. Our parents and grandparents were taught with little singsong lessons, the way you’d teach a preschooler shapes and colors. My grandfather used to sing the songs and laugh about how silly they were. Two times two is four. Three times two is six. La la la la la. We’re talking about fully grown teenagers being taught this way, for generations. What happened with education in South Africa, with the mission schools and the Bantu schools, offers a neat comparison of the two groups of whites who oppressed us, the British and the Afrikaners. The difference between British racism and Afrikaner racism was that at least the British gave the natives something to aspire to. If they could learn to speak correct English and dress in proper clothes, if they could Anglicize and civilize themselves, one day they might be welcome in society. The Afrikaners never gave us that option. British racism said, “If the monkey can walk like a man and talk like a man, then perhaps he is a man.” Afrikaner racism said, “Why give a book to a monkey?” 55 THE SECOND GIRL My mother used to tell me, “I chose to have you because I wanted something to love and something that would love me unconditionally in return.” I was a product of her search for belonging. She never felt like she belonged anywhere. She didn’t belong to her mother, didn’t belong to her father, didn’t belong with her siblings. She grew up with nothing and wanted something to call her own. My grandparents’ marriage was an unhappy one. They met and married in Sophiatown, but one year later the army came in and drove them out. The government seized their home and bulldozed the whole area to build a fancy, new white suburb, Triomf. Triumph. Along with tens of thousands of other black people, my grandparents were forcibly relocated to Soweto, to a neighborhood called the Meadowlands. They divorced not long after that, and my grandmother moved to Orlando with my mom, my aunt, and my uncle. My mom was the problem child, a tomboy, stubborn, defiant. My gran had no idea how to raise her. Whatever love they had was lost in the constant fighting that went on between them. But my mom adored her father, the charming, charismatic Temperance. She went gallivanting with him on his manic misadventures. She’d tag along when he’d go drinking in the shebeens. All she wanted in life was to please him and be with him. She was always being swatted away by his girlfriends, who didn’t like having a reminder of his first marriage hanging around, but that only made her want to be with him all the more. When my mother was nine years old, she told my gran that she didn’t 56 want to live with her anymore. She wanted to live with her father. “If that’s what you want,” Gran said, “then go.” Temperance came to pick my mom up, and she happily bounded up into his car, ready to go and be with the man she loved. But instead of taking her to live with him in the Meadowlands, without even telling her why, he packed her off and sent her to live with his sister in the Xhosa homeland, Transkei—he didn’t want her, either. My mom was the middle child. Her sister was the eldest and firstborn. Her brother was the only son, bearer of the family name. They both stayed in Soweto, were both raised and cared for by their parents. But my mom was unwanted. She was the second girl. The only place she would have less value would be China. My mother didn’t see her family again for twelve years. She lived in a hut with fourteen cousins—fourteen children from fourteen different mothers and fathers. All the husbands and uncles had gone off to the cities to find work, and the children who weren’t wanted, or whom no one could afford to feed, had been sent back to the homeland to live on this aunt’s farm. The homelands were, ostensibly, the original homes of South Africa’s tribes, sovereign and semi-sovereign “nations” where black people would be “free.” Of course, this was a lie. For starters, despite the fact that black people made up over 80 percent of South Africa’s population, the territory allocated for the homelands was about 13 percent of the country’s land. There was no running water, no electricity. People lived in huts. Where South Africa’s white countryside was lush and irrigated and green, the black lands were overpopulated and overgrazed, the soil depleted and eroding. Other than the menial wages sent home from the cities, families scraped by with little beyond subsistence-level farming. My mother’s aunt hadn’t taken her in out of charity. She was there to work. “I was one of the cows,” my mother would later say, “one of the oxen.” She and her cousins were up at half past four, plowing fields and herding animals before the sun baked the soil as hard as cement and made it too hot to be anywhere but in the shade. For dinner there might be one chicken to feed fourteen children. My mom would have to fight with the bigger kids to get a handful of meat or a sip of the gravy or even a bone from which to suck out some marrow. 57 And that’s when there was food for dinner at all. When there wasn’t, she�...
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