Merritt Turetsky is a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she runs the very boggy Ecosystem Analysis Lab

Go beyond the episode:

• Merritt Turetsky’s Bogland: The Secret World That Defies Death and Protects Life
• Check out the boggy beauty of Tierra del Fuego
• Peruse the Faddan More Psalter text (discovered in a bog)
• Behold the Hjortspring Boat (also discovered in a bog)
• And read about nine noteworthy bog bodies

Get mired in fictional boglands:

• Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, obviously, including its finest adaptation
• Graham Swift’s Waterland
• Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox
• Phillip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage
• Kasi Lemon’s Eve’s Bayou
• Paul Maslanski’s Sugar Hill
• Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride
• Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God
• Jack Arnold’s Creature from the Black Lagoon

Tune in every other week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.

Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora

Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!

The post For Peat’s Sake appeared first on The American Scholar.

As reading habits wane, we devotees of books rally to one another like the exiles on the train tracks in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Those noble book memorizers defied their dystopian darkness. “They weren’t at all certain that the things they carried in their heads might make every future dawn glow with a purer light,” Bradbury writes. Yet this “odd minority crying in the wilderness” saved books for the hoped-for readers to come. Since we fugitive readers are often in need of consolation, I’ll note that on the same day James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages was published, William Vollmann’s five-volume, 3,000-page novel A Table for Fortune was also released. We can meet on the train tracks to discuss it.

Many worried voices cry out in our own wilderness. This past summer, articles in Fortune and The Chronicle of Higher Education despaired of college students who can’t read long texts or finish a book, while The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch announced, “The End of Reading Is Here.” The subtitle of Marriott’s book darkens the “end” of reading as its “death.” Surely that’s premature and hyperbolic. But overstatement is prophecy’s mode, and there is plenty for prophets to be anxious about.

Marriott’s first task is to show us how much is lost when older modes of reading are displaced. His is a brief book that moves quickly from the rise of literacy as an elite practice that enabled the growth of civilizations, to the acceleration of text production following Gutenberg’s printing press, to the era of mass literacy which tracked the growth of modern democracies. One of Marriott’s core contentions is that democracies require literate populations—not simply because people need to be able to read voting ballots but because the act of reading provides the kind of deliberative, rational practice that complex societies require to self-govern. He acknowledges that the spread of books and newspapers in the past wasn’t all Federalist Papers and Oliver Twist, that “the age of print was also the age of Nostradamus, witch-hunts and supernatural fantasies,” but all in all, like the saucer that cools the tea, the culture of reading made society “a better and more rational place.”

Marriott believes that this age is already behind us. Here, he follows Neil Postman, whose now-classic Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) saw the transition from the era of the “typographic mind” to the era of electronic media, which has brought forth the “vast triviality” of cultural life. In this new screen-centered world, readers became viewers. Chapter breaks became detergent commercials. Postman told us we were wrong to have worried about George Orwell’s totalitarian dystopia. Instead, it was Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World that showed the ease with which we would simply give ourselves away to amusement and distraction. “Big Brother,” Postman quipped, “turns out to be Howdy Doody.”

While Marriott sees the later advent of the smartphone as the real death knell for reading, he helpfully documents the longer genealogy of screen enchantment. In addition to television broadly, he also explores the launch of 24-hour news with CNN and the invention of the remote control, which he dubs “the original addictive portable entertainment device.” Channel surfing taught our fingers how to scroll. Television itself marked the beginning of organizing our needs around a screen. It taught us to think of “entertainment not as a diversion but as a constant feature of our lives.”

Postman died before the iPhone arrived and before what Marriott calls (in a nod to Martin Amis, Saul Bellow, and Wyndham Lewis) “the moronic inferno of social media” could confirm his prophecies. With more landscape to survey, Marriott asserts that it’s all much worse than Postman imagined: “It is not just that twenty-first century society lacks seriousness, it also seems to be growing dangerously chaotic and irrational.” He goes on: “I believe that we may find ourselves facing a post-literate future that resembles the pre-literate past: mystical, tribal and autocratic.” In her Atlantic essay, Horowitch offered a similarly bleak framing: “The literate era will prove to be a brief interlude between the oral and digital ages.” When defenders of ruminative reading start pulling the alarms, perhaps it really does signify the end of something.

But we can’t scold ourselves away from our screens. We have to help convince each other that there is something better offscreen, that difficult habits and tasks are somehow preferable to easier rewards. This sounds calm enough on the page. To humble the confident moralist, Marriott quotes a Google whistleblower on the real conditions of the struggle: “You can try having self-control, but there are a thousand engineers on the other side of the screen working against you.”

Still, lapsed readers, young and old, will have to be convinced of the worth to be found in quiet hours spent with Moby-Dick or Middlemarch. They will have to glimpse a reverie and wisdom that simply cannot be attained through passive watching of a video or a scroll through AI summaries. They will need to sense that some rewards are deeper and better than others. Marriott quotes Gurwinder Bhogal’s observation that screens are offering “a kind of fast food for thought.” But if screens don’t nourish us, still they please us. Fast food is popular for a reason.

“We have everything we need to be happy,” the hero of Fahrenheit 451 observes, “but we aren’t happy.” Maybe that’s the ultimate lever to pull: the growing awareness that our devices are exhausting and eroding us. Maybe our own nausea will help turn us away from the misdirection of those Google engineers. At the end of his skeptical assessment of our milieu, Marriott’s portrayal of an emptiness is, paradoxically, a seam of light on the horizon: “The problem, we are discovering, is that to immerse yourself in nothing but distraction is not a recipe for a happy or meaningful life.” When we look up from our distractions, though, convinced of that emptiness, what will we decide to look to?

For most of The New Dark Ages, I thought I was holding on to more optimism than Marriott. Reading is not dead. It’s just shouted down for the moment by short-term noise and vertical videos. The remnant holds on. Marriott holds on, too. This book is a voice crying in the wilderness, telling us not just what we’re missing but why it matters. He concludes with this resonant affirmation:

In an age that has elevated entertainment almost to the status of the highest possible value, books, especially good books, remind us that there is more to life. … Ironically, it may turn out that the best argument for reading ever invented was the smartphone. The smartphone has not shown us that books are obsolete. It has shown us that books are irreplaceable.

The post Losing the Thread appeared first on The American Scholar.

1. Take all I love, from dolls to jewels to guns,
2. When I wink, my eyes see things as they are
3. To me, dear friend, you never can be old

Choosing option #1, Courtney Thrash submitted “Sunset on my Fortieth Birthday,” which she began to compose on that significant day:

Take all my loves, from words to jewels to suns
And place them in the hollow crescent moon
And let her hold the weight of all that’s done
For love. For love grows in her waxing womb.

Then take the looking glass, that sea of sin,
And hold it to her light-reflecting face
And let her feel the weight of lines too thin
To see. For aged eyes her light erase.

Take all I am, from word to womb to rune
And thresh it, watch it float from winnowed tine.
My mother’s mother bends—a sickled moon.
In truth, the spirit dies ere does the spine.

Away, dark soulless night and sky, away!
This gentle moon grows surer by the day.

This wonderful effort struck Emily as “both Shakespearean AND Keatsian!”—a major compliment. She “really liked the repetition of line 1, almost pantoum-like” and the “image of the moon, the sea, the looking-glass, the female shapes—all beautifully crafted.” I happily concur. The third stanza of Courtney’s poem exemplifies her skill. Consider the adjective “sickled” for “moon”; the alliterative linking of “word,” “womb,” “watch,” and “winnowed”; and the quatrain’s last line, which Michael C. Rush praised by saying that it “breaks me.” I add my appreciation for the repetition of “For love” in line four.

Emily chose the same opening line for her “Play Therapy” and manifested a similar adroitness in the rhyme pattern she followed:

Take all I love, from dolls to jewels to guns
(a gun in the doll-house toy box, the jewel
a sticky-backed dazzle fixed to a thumb)
and, from senseless chaos, dare help unspool
meaning for the children left without
a chair to hold them up, the ones holding
burning heat they can’t pass on. I, too, doubt
No manual exists for folding
death into stars and cranes. When the river
we all grew up loving rose in the night
to topple the known world, Jenga tower
come to life, we had no words, just a kite:
hot-glued popsicle sticks, origami
paper, a doll hanging on by a string.

Of this recollection of summer camp (I’m guessing), Courtney Thrash cited, as her favorite part, “No manual exists for folding death into stars and cranes,” while Michael C. Rush observed that Emily’s lines “consistently break­ on a word that seems benign or containable,” then follow with a line that undercuts the benignity.

Beth Dufford did something splendid with the second prompt option. Like Courtney, she rhymed her poem to good effect:

When I wink, my eyes see things as they are
and when they’re closed, asleep at night, they see
things as they aren’t—aloft in a car,
about to fall, thinking this is how we
die, but no, now I find myself in France
with my sixth-grade teacher Mr. Steep in
pukka beads and platform shoes, two-tone pants,
feathered hair, an image projected from
a far fold of my neocortex, stored,
sorted, and now playing, one night only,
at the Lonesome Bijou where I’ve endured—
and starred in—every show. My eyes slowly
wake to see things just as they are: no time
but now, nowhere but here. A simple rhyme.

Of this tribute to the imagination as a means to supplant reality, Michal C. Rush, Palevanilla, Anna Ojascastro Guzon, and I all applauded the lines that include the one-night-only showing “at the Lonesome Bijou” and the anagrammatic play of “stored” and “sorted,” strategically separated by a line break. Emily admired the imagery and asked whether Beth had thought of a title for the piece. I nominate “Lonesome Bijou.”

Option #3 elicited “Sami Takes a Seat” from Palevanilla:

To me, dear friend, you never can be
Old. At best a kind deceit designed
to please. At worst, a self-deceiving lie.

That first night under cool fluorescent light
Harry tells me that he doesn’t see age.
He is very serious. But I know

he would never say I don’t see color
to a person of color. “Then you don’t
see me,” I say. He is very still,

his face a puzzle solving itself.
Later, we will see each other in our
poems—fragile, ageless. But for now

we are both relieved when another
student takes the seat between us.

The full poem wins us over as a corrective to the poetical idealization of its first sentence—much as Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 (“My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun”) acts as a corrective to the hyperbolic praises bestowed on his beloveds in other sonnets. The analogy of age to color is original and convincing, as is the dying fall with which the poem ends.

Anna Ojascastro Guzon’s “Seeing Things” is striking from start to finish:

When I wink I see things as they are
not as they could be or as they once were.
In those moments, I unlearn the science
that assigns names to things we observe.
Frog, cloud, fly, orange, raisin, grain of sand.
When I see things as they are, nothing is
clear. Pathologies have no source. Wars have
no start and assessments are dispersed
from airplanes flying low. The paper leaflets
float, haphazard and graceful, catching light
and turning in winds, like confetti or
fortune slips. Answers scatter and end
up between sewer grates or leaves of grass
on traveled roads or in human hands

I particularly admire the “unlearning” of science, the allusion to Whitman in the penultimate line, and the simile that enlivens this passage: “The paper leaflets / float, haphazard and graceful, catching light / and turning in winds, like confetti or / fortune slips.”

Finally, here is Amanda J. Bradley’s “Winking Black”:

When I wink, I see things as they are:
we sheep, sport in this most dangerous game,
fodder and clod, matter formed to tame
or blame us in sweet nothings snared from thin air,
devil’s playground without care, self-anointed
lords beyond shame for the delible, written in sacred pain.
Where to house the rage bourn through millennia?
And oh, the ghosting, the ghosting, the ghosts.
Surehanded where they should refrain,
patriarchal ethic reinscribing. Each wound, each stab
each bullet, each bomb, each rape—ritual or no,
arbitrary and evil, copper teeth of demons hosting
frayed threads of belief in the Good, certainly mad.
I fiddle through the whimpers casting Harrods plaid.

The title works beautifully, and the poet conveys her sense of “sacred pain” by asking, “Where to house the rage bourn through millennia?

I wish I had space enough to quote more of the sonnets that came in. My compliments to all.

For next month, let us lie. All poetry involves lying—by definition, a metaphor identifies an object or sensation as something it is not. And we lie not only when we exaggerate or employ “poetic license,” but also when we resort to fiction or invention. When we write or say ,“I will love you forever,” we may be speaking in good faith, but we are uttering a falsehood. Sometimes we lie to ourselves, and self-deception is a fertile subject for exploration. While we are familiar with white lies, we might consider lies of other colors.

I suggest that we write poems inspired by this subject. You might devote a poem to one big lie—or to an inventory of lies. For inspiration, I highly recommend reading “The Decay of Lying” by Oscar Wilde and Sir Walter Raleigh’s great poem “The Lie.”

Maximum: 15 lines. Deadline: three weeks from the time this post goes up.

The post At the Lonesome Bijou appeared first on The American Scholar.

In contrast, Iris is young at heart, with a desire to live and enjoy. Her dream, she tells Stanley, is room service for a day in a bustling Boston hotel. The joy, the comfort, the luxury! She practically laughs out loud, tilting her head back where the two of them sit together on a park bench. She must be imagining something really fine.

Stanley then tells her about a time he went to the Grand Canyon. He walked down to the bottom and stayed there for six days and nights. He slept in a bedroll. He saw no one and spoke to no one. It was the best time he ever had.

Iris replies, “Six days? It would drive me crazy.”

Stanley continues. “You don’t have to fight for anything or explain anything or dodge anything. You just feed the deer and watch the sun go down.”

That, in a nutshell, is peace for him: no one asking anything of him. No expectations.

I thought of a friend of mine, someone very different from Stanley, a guy who doesn’t seem to fret about anything or have any regrets, someone with peace of mind. His contentment, he says, comes from having no expectations. It makes sense: no expectations, so no disappointment. Anything can be a source of happiness. This doesn’t mean nothing is unpleasant or difficult for him. It means, I think, that he doesn’t ever gnash his teeth, ask Why oh why? or kick himself. He doesn’t torture himself or anyone else by thinking of the way it’s supposed to be.

His life has had its great sadnesses. A love affair ended after about a dozen years, not because love had frittered away but because love alone is not enough. He might think about that girlfriend, but he doesn’t regret her. Before that, after more than 20 years of happy marriage, he lost his wife to cancer. He had a 12-year-old son to raise alone. But he doesn’t dwell on his wife’s death either, or the difficult times while she was sick or after her death. It’s as if that all happened in a different life, he told me. I understood that his wife’s death in that life is no reason not to enjoy this life, now. A good book with a sad ending was over, and now he was in a good book that promised a happy ending.

So no self-recriminations, no guilt, no “if only” either. He doesn’t get angry; he just gets out of a situation when it isn’t to his liking. This is easy for him because he is as happy alone, doing his own thing, as he is in company, helping a friend. Enviably happy, I would say. His experience of the world is so contrary to Stanley’s experience that you think the two men might have absolutely nothing in common.

They do, though. They are both mechanically minded tinkerers. They both enjoy working on their own and don’t need constant encouragement or approval. Stanley turns out to be an inventor and my friend a fixer-upper, capable of all manner of restoration, from adding new rooms on a house to landscaping yards to rebuilding an engine. Stanley invents a cake-cooling machine; my friend fixes his gyrocopter. What need have they of an audience for their gadgets and inventions, their insights, their fixes? What need has a painter bent over the easel, coaxing into paint a surprising facet of the muse? The doing, the solving, the expressing—these would seem to be reward enough.

The Spanish say, Nunca es tarde si la dicha es buena, which means, It’s never too late if the outcome is good. “Never too late,” we might echo in English, but with the emphasis on timing (you still have time!) not outcome (it’s going to be worth it). Or we might say, “All’s well that ends well,” emphasizing the goal, not the journey. Stanley learns to read and write and is a successful businessman in the end, so all the suffering and uncertainty that came before is only—well, what is it?

It is the price we pay for a happy ending. And perhaps the happier the ending, the more it was worth.

I thought of another friend, a former boyfriend. His mother taught him that muchos pocos are better than pocos muchos—many small goods trump a few big ones. Be happier sooner and for longer with modest pleasures.

Which advice would I have offered Stanley, or anyone else in difficulties? Nunca es tarde or muchos pocos? For Stanley, learning to read and write was a trial. He grew frustrated and became fed up with his slow progress. I think most people are like that: impatient, more with themselves than with others. If only they could expect less. But unlike my friend, most people can’t. So if ambition, shame, or solitude keeps you from happiness, then yes, go seek what you need. It’s not too late to reshape a crooked life, to fix a flat, to straighten a warped wheel. Why, it’s never even too late to throw out the warped wheel and get a new one, to wipe the slate clean and start over.

Though it’s also perfectly fine to continue as before—to ride around on a bike with a warped wheel, to use a smudged slate. In graduate school an instructor asked us all where we’d like to be in 15 years. My answer was at a desk, writing, with a cat on my lap. It’s way past the year 2005, but here I am still, with a cat on my lap as I write. I got what I’d imagined I wanted. Actually, I got a lot more: I got everything else that goes with this particular cat and this particular piece of writing. Dare I say I got it all?

Not quite, not yet. Not until I’m able to give it all up, and still do as my friend of few expectations seems so able to do. He wouldn’t find a smudged slate a problem. He’d wonder why you’d expect a used slate to look like a clean one. Then he’d shrug, put on his glasses, roll up his sleeves, and get to work on another interesting project.

The post Supposed to Be appeared first on The American Scholar.

This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.

The post “To Lallie (Outside the British Museum)” by Amy Levy appeared first on The American Scholar.

Kym was at the beginning stages of what would be a formidable career as an art critic and a historian, one that has led her back to Yale as dean of the School of Art. Back then, her fascination with medieval art fascinated me. It was clear that she had the same passion for the bold colors on the works to which she introduced me as I felt for black type on the page. It was a passion that was bottomless.

We were the same age, but Kym seemed to have the kind of intellectual authority and creative boldness that I did not think I possessed. I thought she was courageous, mastering a body of work that had not even anticipated her very existence. I was excited by my chosen field of study—the Harlem Renaissance—but my own commitment felt a bit predictable compared with the scholarly adventure Kym had designed for herself.

I was also, at the time, suffering from deep ambivalence. Beneath my placid exterior roiled a true conundrum: I had fallen in love with a white man, and not just any white man but, very decidedly, the wrong white man. That man was Carl Van Vechten. As a champion of the Harlem Renaissance, Van Vechten helped further the careers of Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and many others, and his photographs of the movement’s artists were brilliant, vital, and enduring. But it was the publication of his 1926 novel Nigger Heaven—which depicted the lives of Harlem residents—that incurred the wrath of W. E. B. Du Bois and others, for both its title and its lurid content. By the time I was a graduate student, I had loved Van Vechten for years, but I still didn’t really want anyone to know how far I had truly fallen.

I thought Kym might have gone through a similar kind of struggle, or had entertained a similar kind of ambivalence when it came to medieval art. I wanted to know how she had answered the internal and external voices that might have urged her in another scholarly direction. I wanted to know where her courage came from.

What was it about medieval art, I asked her, that so compelled her?

“I love the blood,” she said, without missing a beat.

And that was it. A woman laying claim to her own imagination without apology. A woman in charge of her own curiosity. Liberation. Awareness. It was, for me, a eureka moment.

In a 1984 interview, when asked about the process of his “coming out” (a term that he did not use himself), James Baldwin said, “You have to go the way your blood beats.”

To have a passion is to have an identity. And the forging of any identity is almost always a bloody business.

“I have had a lifelong obsession with blood, and I’m not the only one,” writes Lawrence Hill in the early pages of his 2013 collection of lectures, Blood: The Stuff of Life. “As both substance and symbol, blood reveals us, divides us, and unites us. We care about blood because it spills literally and figuratively into every significant corner of our lives.”

As a woman, as a religious person, as a survivor of a violent encounter with a knife, and as the mother of children who endured their fair share of skinned knees and bloody noses, I am also deeply and personally acquainted with blood, as both a reality and a symbol of something bigger than what is contained in the world we can see.

If the forging of identity is a messy, bloody business, so too is life itself, particularly its beginnings. We all come roaring out of somebody’s womb, making a terrible bloody mess in the process. My own emergence from the birth canal brought my mother’s body to the point of near-fatal distress. The ob-gyn in attendance posed to my father a choice worthy of King Solomon: Save the woman or save the child? “The woman,” my father, himself an ob-gyn, said, reportedly not missing a beat.

My father’s logic must have gone like this: I can make another one of those (meaning: me), but my wife is truly one of a kind.

I think my father would tell me this story—and he told it more than once—to remind me of how exceptional my mother was. He did it also, I think, to enforce in me a belief that my life should add up to something. After all, it had nearly cost him the life of someone he had loved long before I arrived. I grew up with the awareness that I should not waste my time here on Earth. A lot of blood had been spilled so that I could thrive.

My parents were both trained as medical professionals, and they didn’t believe in using cute euphemisms for bodily functions. In general, they were not ones to put much stock in the very human impulse to pretty up the messiness of life. They were not afraid of blood. They were also religious people, and they took their children to church every Sunday to drink the blood and eat the body of the emblem, or human being, we referred to as the living Christ—to consume all the words and symbols of our faith—and thereby confirm our devotion to the ideals that would go on to shape my dreams, fears, and life’s ambitions.

We drank the blood and ate the body in a small Nashville chapel that catered mostly to the students attending Fisk University and Meharry Medical College; my parents were graduates of both schools. All three institutions—chapel, university, and medical school—are within strolling distance of one another and of the Carl Van Vechten Art Gallery, which sits on the edge of the Fisk campus. The gallery was established in 1949, toward the end of Van Vechten’s long life, well after the celebrity and controversy that had made him a fixture in the world of culture had faded. Over the course of his career, Van Vechten had been a visionary in the arenas of literature, music, dance, and photography, both in the United States and abroad. But neither fame nor infamy is sustainable for most people. Van Vechten watched his star fade. Even though his ego suffered greatly in the process, he was never one to admit defeat. He doubled down on institution-building projects, such as the establishment of archives and galleries all over the country. It was a gesture of goodwill and a sincere and admirable expression of his commitment to artistic citizenship on the highest level. But such undertakings also ensured that his name would live on. He was as calculating as he was reckless, as altruistic as he was egotistical. In the end, he was a full human being, just like the rest of us. And yet, at institutions such as Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where Van Vechten’s extraordinary work is prominent, I have yet to hear his name spoken with anything other than embarrassment, except by me.

As a child growing up in Nashville in the 1970s and ’80s, I had no idea who Carl Van Vechten was. It is not impossible to imagine that my mother, a poet and student of Robert Hayden’s who graduated from Fisk in the late 1950s, literally crossed paths with him, a tall, odd-looking, white-haired white fellow with notoriously protruding front teeth. Why not? They both loved and respected the same things: Fisk University, art that stirred and disturbed, and Blackness.

Fisk carried in its very body the hopes and beliefs of its founders in the possibility of a “New Jerusalem,” to borrow a phrase from the same James Baldwin interview I referenced earlier, a sacred space steeped in the secular Protestant ethics of work, duty, and sacrifice as almost Romantic concepts. Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson played central roles, at various points, in the life of the campus. W. E. B. Du Bois received one of his two undergraduate degrees from Fisk (the other was from Harvard). My parents’ union looked to many like a Du Boisian ideal of service and fidelity to the race, and I grew up hearing his name repeated in my home the same way Catholic kids grow up hearing the names of certain saints.

The past reigned supreme in our house. It held faster to my parents’ imaginations than did the present or the future, which were both precarious and unknown, given that we lived in the belly of the beast: the slowly—and, in many cases, resentfully—desegregating American South. The strict and fatal line separating Black from white was eroding and intensifying at the same time. I was raised according to unwritten rules passed down through generations of ancestors who understood that in order to survive, Black people had to learn early to navigate white expectations.

If the present was in flux, the past was neither safe nor settled, and my parents told their stories over and over, each time refining or uncovering details that both enthralled and terrified me, their only daughter, who, as a result of her robust imagination, began to believe that her own destiny was wedged somewhere within the lines of their narratives. Regardless of their intentions, the lessons of my parents’ pasts composed the map of my future.

I grew up in the shadow of revolutions—more bloody business. First the Civil War, in whose ashes the dream of a university first gathered in the minds of the three men who started the Fisk School in 1865, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Later, several lunch-counter sit-ins and demonstrations, which turned Nashville on its back, were plotted out by classmates of my parents at Fisk. As a medical student, my father would tend to the burned flesh of students who had maintained perfect composure as they sat at lunch counters while enraged white people put out cigarettes on their skins. On Sundays, those same students would attend our church, where the priest and parishioners tended to their souls.

The never-ending project of radical racial renovation—a project steeped in robust disagreement—began with the New Negro Movement and has, to my mind, neither slowed nor ceased.

By the time I actually crossed the threshold of the Carl Van Vechten Art Gallery, I was a scholar, which is to say that I was an adult. Sort of. I remember the stiff and slightly uncomfortable suit I wore when I went to meet the curator and get a tour of the modest building. My second book featuring Van Vechten had recently come out, and I had been invited to testify, as a writer and a teacher, to the life of the man, to tell about the person whose name the gallery bore.

I had been in the Van Vechten game, at that point, for many years, so I was very familiar with the meaning behind the curious looks and lukewarm smiles that alighted on the faces of Black people—whether scholars, students, or readers—when they learned of the object of my fascination. Carl Van Vechten has long been the locus of trouble as much as pleasure in my life.

Years ago at Yale, I sat in a dining hall across from a dear friend who had seemed unusually irritated with me of late. When I asked him why, he confessed, “Out of all the people in the Harlem Renaissance for you to write about, why are you writing about that white man?”

I want to offer some context for this comment before I go any further. First, that friend is still dear to me; it was only a disagreement. In fact, we have revisited the exchange more than once over the years, always with new eyes and insights. Second, we were both college seniors at the time, making the long, final laps before we would be set free into the world. I was shoulders-deep into my senior essay, which concerned the dynamic between white patrons and Black artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Central to the story I was trying to tell was the 40-plus-year correspondence between Carl Van Vechten and Langston Hughes, which would become the topic of my first book.

Whenever I told people about this work, they always—to a person—assumed that the draw was Hughes. I understood why they made that assumption. With his pleasing appearance and sonorous literary style, Hughes has always been easy on the eyes and the ears. I am my mother’s child, however, and I am far more drawn to art that disturbs—especially art that provokes me at the very foundation of my beliefs.

I remember the peculiar cocktail of emotions that gathered in my chest when my college professor, while going over a list of options for paper topics, introduced us to the story of Carl Van Vechten and his relationship to the Harlem Renaissance. The title of his notorious 1926 novel jumped out and grabbed me by the throat. My parents never used the n-word, not even in the ironic way that Van Vechten claimed to use it, which is the way I had heard other Black people use it, in the correct company, in my tidy-seeming, proper-speaking Black Nashville world. As a girl, I had heard white people use that word only maliciously. But here was a white man from a long time ago who had used it in a title of a book! A book from the Harlem Renaissance, no less, the world from which I had already decided, at 20 years old, that I had myself somehow emerged. Who was this white man? And what did it all mean? The latter question is one that I am still trying to figure out.

But my friend had decided who that white man was and who that white man was not—both for him and for me, if I was to become the Race Woman my parents had raised me to be. In that moment, my friend certainly believed he had it all figured out. But as college students in the 1980s, we were steeped in identity wars whose contours and implications neither of us as yet fully appreciated. Only now, when we go back over who we were then, and what brought us to that moment in the dining hall, do we realize that we both thought we understood the world, ourselves, and each other in a way that we simply did not.

I respected my friend, so his words stayed with me. You should have seen us: two individuals whose faces bore the clear, unmistakable imprints of their multiple bloodlines and cultures of origin, trying desperately to negotiate the narrow boxes of identity that the world had created to simplify or deny—certainly not elucidate—the truly complex story of their lives. We were both trying valiantly to be Black with an uppercase B years before that capitalization became standard practice. And the kind of Blackness we were both trying to embody could not tolerate my growing love and admiration for Carl Van Vechten.

Have you ever tried to fall out of love? I tried, but I kept returning to Carl. Among other things, he helped me better understand both Fisk and Meharry—those living testimonies to Black excellence during the eras of segregation and beyond that shaped my parents’ experiences. He enabled me to view and approach the staggering explicit and implicit expectations enshrined in the halls of those institutions through the lens of his inimitable flair and irreverence. I owe him for this, and much more. I saw him as a gift in my life, and I did not want to give him up. What is a true gift? According to Lewis Hyde, it “is a thing we do not get by our own efforts. We cannot buy it; we cannot acquire it through an act of will. It is bestowed upon us.”

What Van Vechten gave me is the gift of being able to see my own life in a new way. I had been raised to see the history of Black people as a series of steady achievements; we were on a prolonged, and often interrupted, march toward greatness: the Du Boisian ideal. Into this noble procession Van Vechten smashed like a Mack truck, at least in my understanding of my own history. Into the sober drawing rooms where Black progress was debated in long, immaculate speeches, Van Vechten arrived in a top hat and sarong. He was quite the spectacle, and his own perspectives on race, art, and identity broadened my own.

To know someone is to feel qualified to anticipate their positions on things. I am confident that Van Vechten would be frustrated by our current cultural climate. We call it being correct or progressive, but at its worst, our present cultural “reckoning” invites a new call to conformity. The criminal activity of some of our modern monsters is stuff for which there should be unending punishment. But compliance for its own sake is a bad habit that only Van Vechten could help me shed. The correction had to come out of left field. I used to be exclusively focused on the goals my parents had laid out for me. I had to be hit over the head by a tall, strange-looking fellow in a topcoat and tails. I spent years walking the line, but I no longer play the segregation game in any of my lives, and certainly not my creative life. Carl Van Vechten made being disobedient look like so much more fun.

I think it’s fairly safe to say that the archives and galleries that Van Vechten either established or enriched constitute an exceptional and truly fine legacy. His photographs betray the range of his curiosity and the depth of his awareness of the talent that flourished around him. It is not possible to tell a complete story of African-American life without including Van Vechten’s photographs—evidence of his own foresight and rightness when it came to recognizing talent. He’s the white drop in the black paint—to put my own spin on the story of Lucius Brockway in Invisible Man—that makes Blackness shine brighter.

I believe it’s very safe to say that his infamous 1926 novel is not among his greatest achievements. By the end of his life, even Van Vechten himself may have agreed. Still, the novel was the bestseller of the Harlem Renaissance, outdistancing even Claude McKay’s equally scandalous (according to Du Bois) novel Home to Harlem (1928). In the pre-internet age, when there was much less to talk about, everyone was talking about Van Vechten’s novel. Van Vechten loved being famous. The naked pleasure he took in being known sprang up alongside the panic that grew in him as he saw his fame turn quickly to infamy. When his novel was being denounced from pillar to post, he had dreams that he was being chased by Black people. “At 4 Langston Hughes appears & later Jim Harris with a list of questions regarding Nigger Heaven, as apparently he is being pestered by people who say I have betrayed the race! All this upsets me as much as usual,” he wrote in his daybook in September 1926. He slept badly that night and sought comfort from his wife at the time, Fania Marinoff: “Before dawn crept into Marinoff’s bed.” His distress generated vivid, violent dreams. “I go to bed about one & dream I am a Negro being chased in riots,” he recorded in one entry. Even good reviews and breathtaking sales could not cure his anxiety. “I dream I am a Negro & being pursued,” he wrote four days after the first set of bad dreams.

It’s fair to say that Van Vechten got what was coming to him. He ignored friends who told him he was making a mistake by using that title, that people would simply not understand. He argued with intimates, though he registered the pain he caused them in his notes to himself. When Van Vechten tried the title out on Countee Cullen, the author of Color and The Black Christ turned “white with hurt,” as Van Vechten wrote in his daybook.

Van Vechten was exceptionally stubborn, and he rejected the advice of his own father, who took him to task for his hubris. “If you are trying to help the race, as I am assured you are,” the elder Van Vechten wrote his son, “I think every word you write should be a respectful one toward the black.” But Van Vechten wouldn’t listen, so he wound up like Narcissus, obsessed with his own reflection.

He was perhaps most mortified by the reaction of Du Bois, who in his review for the Crisis called the novel “a blow in the face.” Du Bois expressed the view of many Black readers: Van Vechten had been invited into our home only to call us out of our name.

The intimate, domestic analogy—the home—must have pained Van Vechten, who spent most of the 1920s in and out of the parlors and dining rooms of various Black friends and acquaintances. The apartment on West 55th Street that Van Vechten shared with Marinoff was known as “the midtown office of the NAACP.” Parties were so important to Van Vechten that in his final novel, published in 1930 and fittingly titled Parties, he paid homage to their centrality in his life. But in 1920s America, social occasions provided more than just opportunities to drink gin out of someone else’s shoe. They gave Black and white people a rare chance to congregate as equals, even in New York, where color bars prevented such interactions. I don’t think the negative critiques of his novel would have penetrated—if Van Vechten would ever have appreciated the degree of injury his book caused—if he hadn’t been shut out of some of his favorite interior spaces as a result, such as the Smalls Paradise nightclub, which allowed him back in only after Zora Neale Hurston and Walter White helped smooth things over. And ultimately even Du Bois forgave him. He sat for Van Vechten’s camera. And in 1928, just two years after he urged his Crisis readers to throw Van Vechten’s novel down the sewer, he was inviting the author of that book to witness the wedding of his only daughter, Yolande. Ultimately, what had looked like a war between Du Bois and Van Vechten amounted only to a temporary disagreement.

Van Vechten learned his lesson. He never published another fictional word about Black people. And he triumphed in the end. Eternally stubborn, he continued to go the way his own blood beat, and he served the uplift of Blackness for the rest of his natural life and beyond, with his archives, photographs, scrapbooks, and diaries—and all the life lessons he left behind for someone like me to come along and learn from, and enjoy.

Recently, I have been happily engaged in an imagined, internal argument with Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, a 2023 nonfiction work that teeters between memoir and narrative. Early in the book, Dederer confesses that she “wished someone would invent an online calculator—the user would enter the name of an artist, whereupon the calculator would assess the heinousness of the crime versus the greatness of the art and spit out a verdict: you could or could not consume the work of this artist.”

The catalyst for Monsters is Dederer’s uncomfortable, unsettled imagined relationship with Roman Polanski; he’s the “monster” whose criminal behavior—the rape of a 13-year-old girl, to be exact—is something Dederer cannot reconcile with the clear genius of his creative vision. “I wasn’t supposed to love this work, or this man,” she writes in her opening paragraphs. “He was the object of boycotts and lawsuits and outrage.”

Polanski and Van Vechten are miles apart in many respects, and Van Vechten was not a criminal, although he did spend time in jail as a young man when he failed to pay alimony to his first wife, Anna Snyder. He was also an unapologetically gay man at a moment in history when homosexuality itself constituted a crime. For many years of his life, Van Vechten struggled with alcohol, and sometimes when he got drunk, he became violent with his beloved Fania Marinoff, his wife of 50 years, whom he referred to as “the most permanent influence” in his life. His diaries reveal the shame his bad behavior caused him. When he got drunk, he could be nasty, as he was during one evening with Hughes, Hurston, and others. “I get very drunk & abusive & finally pass out,” he recorded in a 1926 daybook entry. Sometimes when he became abusive with Marinoff, she would retreat to the house of a close friend for the night. Two months before Nigger Heaven was published, they got into a fight and Marinoff left, saying she was leaving him for good. He couldn’t sleep and paced the floor well into the night. “She says she is through forever,” he wrote in his daybook the next morning. “If she is, what is there in life for me?” They soon reconciled, and he was never violent with his wife again, although they continued to quarrel, often in public.

Choosing an offensive word for the title of your book is not illegal, but critics today continue to treat Van Vechten as a noxious element in the glorious, ongoing pageant of Black progress, a rude stain on an otherwise glittering moment of Black pride that they would prefer to remove. In a 2014 review of the latest Van Vechten biography, Lawrence Jackson calls Van Vechten a fickle, insincere schemer and likens him to a vampire. Most of the time, however, Van Vechten is just ignored.

I wonder how Van Vechten would fare in Dederer’s hands. And I am glad that the calculator that Dederer envisions does not exist. There is no formula for deciding whose art survives and whose does not—nor should there be. Van Vechten would certainly have been eliminated in the early rounds of the ongoing game of cancel culture. In many ways, he has suffered the same fate as others whose past misdeeds have come back to haunt them. But there must be distinctions made between outright pathological behavior and acts that, however harmful, are evidence only of arrogance, shortsightedness, or poor judgment.

When it comes to Van Vechten, I don’t pretend objectivity. To the contrary, I use the language of love on purpose. I love all the gifts that Van Vechten left behind for me to learn from, his triumphs as well as his failures, chronicled in black type on white paper, in the inimitable scrawl of his handwriting, and in the various bold and exotic colors he used for his signature in correspondence, and in his photographs. It’s all there: his mistakes, inconsistencies, fears, and fantasies. Having spent most of my adult life inside his, I have had the distinct privilege of watching how he changed and grew over time. He was a human being who lived a human life, which is always a messy business.

In Paths Toward a Clearing: Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic Inquiry, a book that has shaped my perspective on life, anthropologist Michael Jackson writes, “The problem with our intellectual endeavor to transcend the vicissitudes of lived experience is that it inclines us to believe there is a deep split within Being itself between a ‘higher’ conceptual realm where certitude may be found and an ‘inferior’ realm of the sensory, bodily, material, and practical life which is intrinsically unstable and uncertain.” For certain people, life is an enterprise of the mind alone, not of the body, the emotions—feelings. What’s wrong with feelings? Dederer tells on herself when she confesses that she once “rejected the word ‘feelings,’ with its weakness and its vagueness and its, its womanliness.”

But it is wrong to suppose that, in Jackson’s words, “knowing is a kind of outside beholding rather than a matter of participation in the ongoing drama of the world.”

I contend, along with Jackson, Van Vechten, and many others, that the glory of human life lies in the mess that we create or that is created for us—“the ongoing drama of the world.” Instead of ignoring, sidestepping, or simplifying the mess, taming the wildness, or muting the color, let us embrace the vicissitudes and find joy and meaning in the messiness.

In other words, let us all love the blood.

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“I hope that our votes still matter in November.”

That was my dad, back in May, when I was in my home state of South Carolina on a reporting trip. The General Assembly was preparing to hold a special legislative session to determine whether the state’s lone heavily Black congressional district—a seat held by Representative Jim Clyburn since 1993—ought to be dismantled. In the end, lawmakers decided against redrawing the map, with one Republican warning that eroding the district could have an unintended consequence: fueling Black voter turnout in the November midterm elections.

This was hardly the first time Black South Carolinians worried about the sanctity of the ballot box because of the state’s actions. Not long after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law, South Carolina—a founding member of the Confederacy—challenged provisions requiring states with histories of racial discrimination to change their behavior. The Supreme Court rejected the challenge. Still, the battle has flashed and flared ever since, with the high court in April striking a massive blow to the law long considered the crown jewel of the civil rights movement.

Michael G. Miller and Kevin T. Morris document this history in their incisive, meticulous, and timely new book, An American Problem: How the Country Built—and the Supreme Court Broke—the Voting Rights Act. Across nearly 400 pages, Miller, a political scientist at Barnard College, and Morris, a senior research fellow and voting policy scholar at the New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice, refuse to leave the country’s past sealed away in amber. Rather, they reanimate the people and political maneuvering behind one of the 20th century’s most consequential pieces of legislation, making a seemingly distant history vibrate again with urgency.

As Miller and Morris chart, galvanizing public support for Black voting rights was a master class in political organizing. One Sunday night in March 1965, 50 million Americans tuned in to ABC to watch the television premiere of Judgment at Nuremberg, a drama about the legal trials of Nazi war criminals. But the programming was interrupted by footage from the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, of police bludgeoning civil rights activists. “The juxtaposition of the film’s Nazi war criminals against American officials clubbing peaceful protesters was especially jarring,” the authors write. The fierce rage crackling among the public created the kind of momentum Johnson knew that he must harness. Just eight days after “Bloody Sunday,” he addressed more than 70 million Americans, laying before Congress a stirring case for protecting Black voting rights that became known as the “American Promise” speech.

By the beginning of August, the Voting Rights Act was the law of the land.

Episodes like this imbue An American Problem with color and energy. Miller and Morris are adroit storytellers, weaving together decades of history, political science, and legal scholarship without allowing the impressive sweep of their analysis to drain life from the people who shaped it. They rigorously examine what had to happen—and, more precisely, how people had to act—to transform Black voting rights from a mere demand into federal law.

Miller and Morris are both social scientists, and their training shines in the figures and tables that give empirical weight to their inquiry without slowing down the book’s propulsive narrative. One notable example is a time series showing the consequences of 2013’s landmark Shelby County v. Holder decision, which defanged the Voting Rights Act’s requirement that certain states and jurisdictions receive federal “preclearance” before changing their voting laws. (You could think of this as South Carolina, almost half a century later, finally getting what it wanted.) Miller and Morris show that the racial turnout gap, which had shrunk following the civil rights movement, ballooned in some areas in the wake of Shelby County. Other examinations combine existing research—such as a report from the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights observing widespread polling-place closures after Shelby County—with the authors’ own analysis of voter-file data from every state, allowing them to test whether racial discrimination had evaporated as the Supreme Court claimed that it had.

Only once did I quibble with Miller and Morris. In the epilogue, they consider state voting rights acts, enacted by about a dozen states so far, which restore some of the protections eroded at the federal level. They doubt that these laws will do much to “stem the retrogressive tide,” particularly since states such as Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas are unlikely to adopt them. Though I agree that state voting rights acts are no silver bullet, years of reporting on these efforts have taught me that even bills with no hope of becoming law can be vital mobilizing tools, offering, as one attorney recently told me, a means to “educate and engage and empower voters.”

But, again, a quibble. For anyone who wants to understand the long and ongoing fight for federal voting rights protections—and the equally long and ongoing fight to undermine them—An American Problem is indispensable. Miller and Morris’s definitive text makes plain why, more than six decades after the Voting Rights Act became law, my dad’s concern sounds not only reasonable, but frighteningly prudent.

The post Battle for the Ballot Box appeared first on The American Scholar.

My mother typically has at least three books going. At the table during that month of September, when she was visiting me in La Pola, she was reading Dr. Fulford’s Touch of Life. By her bed she had another, The Forest Unseen. Old Filth was one she’d recently finished. Why so many? She is interested in everything, including, recently, in childhood. But not as an ideal time or an exciting time or a crucial developmental time but as a new time—a new experience for her. Having long ago forgotten what childhood was like for her, she was rediscovering its delights, first-hand. And so she is reading children’s literature, too. She was reading aloud to me one of her discoveries: Kate DiCamillo.

My mother says that old age is wonderful. She sometimes means “It’s a wonder!” and sometimes simply that wonderful things abound. She also speaks of the difficulties and indignities. Here in Spain, though adjusting to a different household, a new schedule, new sights on the street, and the strange sounds of Spanish around her, she has been glowing rather more than frowning. That might be due, in part, to the delectable goodies she has enjoyed from the bakeries, but it’s also a result of her own exuberant enthusiasm. “Old age really is a second childhood,” she has announced more than once. Eager, excited by what is new, captivated by sights and sounds—all of that, true of children, is also true of my mother. It’s never too late to learn, she says, citing her own evolving insights about how to be in the world.

I have watched the eight-year-old granddaughter of one friend at close hand, and more recently the year-old son of another. The girl is practically blasé about her discoveries and the little boy intrigued. But my mother—she’s delighted. Delighted with the world’s functioning and with her own as she hurries to keep up. “I’m taking my shower now,” I said, and my mother gave me a perplexed look that soon passed. Reenacting her mental process for me, she said, “Shower? Without running first? Oh—race tomorrow, no running today. Shower now.”

One afternoon, from down in the park near the tracks where we had taken my dog Toby on a walk, she spotted on the ridge above us the cell phone tower that stands near my house, and she pointed it out. It seemed very far away and yet remarkably present, sticking up into the clouds. We commented on a thing’s being big yet small, distant yet not.

“What do you think a bird would think, seeing a landmark so far off?” I asked. Would it think how far it had to fly to get home, or would it sail on without a qualm? Neither of us hazarded a guess. I thought of Christina Rossetti’s poem “A Birthday,” quoted in DiCamillo’s novel. In the poem, the speaker seems as thrilled as a child might be by the approach of a birthday. Her heart is gladder than a singing bird, an apple tree, or a rainbow shell. That is my mother’s heart. A singing bird. Happy at many perfect things, at some strange, and even at a few disappointing ones. But happy to view them all, happy to sail above, teetering on the turns, to flutter down, squawking and fussing, until, with a hop, she takes to the air again. No old bird could do better.

The post Red Bird, Bluebird, Old Bird, You Bird appeared first on The American Scholar.

This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.

The post “Mummy of a Lady Named Jemutesonekh” by Thomas James appeared first on The American Scholar.

Freeman begins each work with salvaged textiles, which she’s been collecting for more than 30 years. After printing a photo-collage onto fabric (she favors silk), she pieces the fabric together with a sewing machine that completes 1,000 stitches per minute, which happens “so rapidly, it will destroy the silk as the new stitches are going in, or push the elements away to kind of expand and distort the original image and change it,” she says. “It’s a process of deconstruction and construction at the same time.” This distortion is intended to reflect the way our memories bend and warp over time, as well. “When we recall a memory, we’re actually degrading it a little bit,” Freeman says. “We rewrite it in our mind. So this process is starting with a real image from life, and then adding to it—creating more space and depth around it—and then subsequently turning it into something else based on the memory.” Each of Freeman’s pieces takes more than 100 hours to complete, between the layers and layers of hand embroidery and sewing machine work. “The thing I want to impart is: Working with your hands, bringing something into the world from nothing, is so important,” she says. There’s a “greater sense of immediacy to nurture these skills and encourage people to take part in these skills. If you have a creative and imaginative mind, which everybody does, you can make something from nothing, and that’s where the magic lies. Pushing a button on a computer is not quite the same thing as bringing something to life with your own two hands.”

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Carl Elliott teaches philosophy and bioethics at the University of Minnesota. His most recent book is The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No.

Go beyond the episode:

• Read Carl Elliott’s essay “Welcome to the Bioemporium” 
• And its inspiration: Willard Gaylin’s “Harvesting the Dead” from 1974
• For a real tangent, check out work by the founder of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists

Tune in every other week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.

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Philadelphia’s Quakers had started brooding about slavery in 1688, seven years after William Penn founded the colony of Pennsylvania. A group of Friends in nearby Germantown had issued a remonstrance that made its way to the Quakers’ highest colonial authority. “We are,” the Germantown Friends declared, “against the traffic of men-body … To bring men hither, or rob and sell them against their will, we stand against.”

The remonstrance went nowhere, with the matter deemed too “weighty” and complex. The fact was that too many Quakers, including a large percentage of their leaders in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, owned slaves. Some even dealt in the business of buying and selling enslaved people. Quakers believed that all people had the spirit of God within them, women as well as men, Black people and white, American Indians—the Inner Light didn’t differentiate. But though Black people might have been considered equal to whites spiritually, that didn’t mean they were equal otherwise. And here Quakers shared the common prejudices of their time.

The perception of Black inferiority was understandable enough. In the mid-18th century, the 13 colonies had a quarter of a million enslaved people, 20 percent of the overall population. Though conditions varied, almost all lived hard, distressed lives that were physically, emotionally, and mentally exhausting. Kept illiterate, they had no access to the advantages white people enjoyed: education, rights, control over their persons and their labor, the common customs of individual, family, social, and civil life. Husbands and wives were often cruelly separated from each other, and children from their parents. Oppressed by these dehumanizing circumstances, they were perceived by the white world as incapable and contemptible. Imagine, said Benezet’s friend and fellow abolitionist John Woolman, if free people suffered the same circumstances: “[Would] we be less abject than they are?” But the idea of a humanity shared by Black and white people was to most an alien concept, absurd on its face.

This common street-level prejudice was part and parcel of a larger construct, one that provided an intellectual framework that oriented scientists, philosophers, theologians, and humanists, a presupposition that inhabited the minds of the era’s great thinkers and ordinary people alike. This principle, the so-called Great Chain of Being, provided a way of organizing the plenitude of nature—minerals, plants, and animals, including humankind—into a scale according to complexity, reasoning ability, and other criteria. The races of man fit into this continuum as well, best illustrated by Carl Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae, in which the great taxonomist placed white Europeans at the top of the hierarchy and Black people at the bottom.

The Great Chain of Being as an organizing principle had its origins in Plato and Aristotle, but it was in the 18th century, as the intellectual historian A. O. Lovejoy explained, that the concept attained its widest diffusion and acceptance, as influential during that period as the theory of evolution would be after Darwin. This most fundamental scientific theory of its time nurtured a jaundiced perception of Black people, both enslaved and free, and the power and extent of this distorted perception were deep and lasting. Although slavery itself was age-old, the New World association of Africans with the institution gave it a racial identification it didn’t previously have. With its steps of gradation, the Great Chain of Being provided a rationale for keeping Black people in perpetual servitude.

Given the universal perception of Black inferiority, it is perhaps not surprising that the idea of educating Black slaves was seen as both futile and dangerous. In the southern sections of the country, laws with significant penalties prohibited teaching the enslaved. In South Carolina, the fine for doing so was £100 “current money.” In other southern colonies anyone, white or Black, who dared teach enslaved individuals could be fined, imprisoned, or whipped. Educating Black people was considered a clear and present danger, especially in the aftermath of South Carolina’s Stono Rebellion of 1739, in which a literate enslaved man led a group that killed owners of a local store, seized weapons and powder, and marched toward Spanish Florida, killing more than 20 whites and setting fire to plantations along the way.

Into this world stepped Anthony Benezet. Born in 1713 into a Huguenot family that had escaped France when he was two years old, Benezet moved with his family to England and subsequently to Pennsylvania, where both he and his father joined the Philadelphia Society of Friends. Benezet was what we might today call a late bloomer, unable to settle on work until he was 26, when he found a job as a teacher and discovered his vocation. He had fallen into his career in the classroom by chance: An opening had presented itself, and in need of a job, he took it. “In the first instance,” one of his friends wrote, he “commenced teaching for a subsistence.” But he soon discovered a talent for teaching and then a passion for it. As a schoolmaster in Philadelphia’s Quaker school system, he was known for his innovations in curricula and for his gentle manner with students. “If I have any service at all in creation,” he wrote to a friend, “it is in the education of children.”

In 1750, at the age of 37—well into middle age by the standards of the time—Benezet created a small explosion in the world of education. He began teaching Black children in his home at night, fully understanding what a controversial thing he was doing but never imagining the consequences for both himself and society.

We do not know what specifically led him to take this action. We do know that Benezet had Black friends, an unusual circumstance then. And we know that he spent considerable time talking with Black people who worked along Philadelphia’s bustling Delaware River waterfront. It was there, too, that he saw Black children, some accompanying their mothers or fathers, some themselves bound to masters, others running through the streets unattended, none of them able to read, write, or do sums. We can easily imagine how Benezet would have been moved with compassion toward them, leading him to establish what in a short time came to be known simply as Benezet’s School. It was the first school for Black children anywhere in the American colonies.

The classroom where he taught was most likely in the downstairs living area of the home he shared with his wife, Joyce. The residence itself was one of Philadelphia’s early brick houses, two stories, well built but, like its Quaker owners, modest. His students were free and enslaved, both Black and “mulatto.” Later he opened his classroom doors to adults as well. During the 1750s, while teaching white students at Philadelphia’s Penn Charter School, he persuaded the Quakers to open a girls’ school, arguably the first American day school for girls. Teaching Black and white students the same curriculum at the same time allowed Benezet a singular perspective. Judging his Black students’ progress, Benezet reported,

I can with truth and sincerity declare, that I have found amongst the negroes as great variety of talents, as among the like number of whites, and I am bold to assert that the notion entertained by some, that the blacks are inferior in their capacities, is a vulgar prejudice, founded on the pride or ignorance of their lordly masters, who have kept their slaves at such a distance as to be unable to form a right judgment of them.

Benezet carried on his home night school for 20 years. Then in 1770, he persuaded the Quakers to establish an “Africans’ School” as part of the Friends’ public-private school network. The success of his night school provided the necessary evidence: The alert, curious, receptive students demonstrated that the idea of Black schooling was not a lost cause. At least so far as the Society of Friends was concerned, Benezet had proved that Black people were intellectually as well as spiritually on the same plane as their white contemporaries, equal members of the same, single human family. In terms of the general beliefs of the time, Benezet’s home school and the Quaker Africans’ School were breakthroughs.

Both schools ended up playing an important role in Philadelphia’s Black community. Absalom Jones, cofounder of the Free African Society and leading architect of the African Church of Philadelphia, learned to read and write at Benezet’s night school and would later comment on the importance of the mathematical instruction he received there. James Forten, a Black sailmaker whose business acumen made him one of Philadelphia’s wealthiest citizens, attended the Africans’ School. Forten’s father, who taught him sailmaking, may well have been a student at Benezet’s home school. Jones and Forten were leading abolitionists; Forten was an important supporter of William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator. Along with Richard Allen, they were at the center of organizing and giving shape to Philadelphia’s African American community and its emerging institutions. It’s a reasonable assumption that Jones, Forten, and many of their fellow students were stimulated toward accomplishment by educational environments that recognized their humanity and potential, a rarity in colonial America.

Benezet maintained his close ties with the Africans’ School until his death in 1784. As his health deteriorated and he began to anticipate the end of life, Benezet reaffirmed his earlier conclusions about Black intelligence and potential. As he wrote, he’d had the opportunity for many years of knowing the temper and genius of the numerous Africans under his tutelage.

When he died, he left the bulk of his estate to the school (after providing for his wife). The first line of his will read, “Be it remembered that I, Anthony Benezet, a teacher of the free school for the black people of Philadelphia …”  For all that he had done in his life, this is how he regarded himself.

Benezet’s biographers have noted his school, but they have failed to convey its historical significance. Instead, almost all commentators have concentrated on the immense influence of his antislavery writings, which did so much to end the transatlantic slave trade. Yet a close reading of those texts illuminates how Benezet’s experiences with Black students gave his antislavery discourse its galvanizing force. What he found among his students, namely that they were full human beings, not only spiritually but also in terms of talent, intellect, and temperament, directly informed his understanding of the slave trade—“this enormous evil,” he called it, “this prodigious iniquity.”

We can safely assume that Benezet was appalled by the institution of slavery before he launched his night school. But until then, he had neither written nor spoken much about it. Only in 1750, the year he opened the school, did he begin talking about slavery, insistently and publicly, “lifting up his voice on behalf of an oppressed and wretched portion of his fellow beings,” as his early biographer Roberts Vaux put it. It took Benezet a while to get his thoughts in order, but once he did, he began to write.

His first publication came in 1754: An Epistle of Caution and Advice Concerning the Buying and Keeping of Slaves, which was presented to the Philadelphia Quaker monthly meeting, then to other monthly and quarterly meetings, and finally to the senior Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. An Epistle was an exhortation to the writer’s fellow Quakers, urging them to live up to their faith as Christians, to their sense of plain justice, and to their feelings as human beings. They should avoid in any manner “the practice of making slaves of our fellow creatures.” He invoked Christ’s command, the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It was the first time the Quaker overseers had allowed that fundamental Christian maxim to be published, given how awkwardly it reflected on slaveholding Friends. Benezet also invoked Exodus: He that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death. Not that any nonviolent Quaker would ever put anyone to death. But Benezet wanted his readers to understand the utter depths of the practice of buying, selling, and owning human beings. “We entreat you in the bowels of gospel love,” he wrote. Do not “keep them in bondage.”

An Epistle was the first antislavery remonstrance the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting ever adopted, but the practical effect was somewhere between modest and nil: The Society of Friends issued no order to free slaves and imposed no penalties for owning them. Quaker slaveholders contended that abolishing slavery would “give uneasiness to many brethren,” that it would create disunity, and that the matter was one perhaps best left to God. After all, “the Lord in time to come might open a way of deliverance for these people.” Over the years, the Quaker community evolved on the issue; by the end of the 1750s, most Quakers condemned slavery. But still there was no formal prohibition, and many Friends who owned slaves were simply not motivated to give them up. The enslaved people had cost good money, worked well, and—at least from the Quakers’ perspective—were often treated decently.  Given those circumstances, Benezet’s appeal to Christian love, fairness, and justice had little of the desired effect.

His next tract, Observations on the Enslaving, Importing, and Purchasing of Negroes (1759), took another approach. Like the epistle, Observations was addressed to Benezet’s Quaker religious community, but it also initiated what became an ongoing endeavor that grew from his experience at his night school: to enlarge the understanding of Black people as equal human beings.

Observations is an essay on the Golden Rule that unpacks the saying beyond its obvious meaning in order to bring out its underlying theme. The text of the Golden Rule provides a precept for moral behavior. The subtext on which the precept rests is the assertion of reciprocity or “mutuality.” Benezet’s exegesis of “that divine Rule” brings together we and they: “To do unto all Men, as we would they should do unto us.” The two sides, ourselves and others—in this context, white and Black—are linked in a relation of reciprocal morality. The two races exist, writes Benezet, on the same moral level. In this regard, Observations marks the ongoing expansion of a mind wholly engrossed by the great moral issue of his time: what we would call racism, although the word itself wouldn’t be coined for another 150 years. In opening his Black school, Benezet had recognized that African Americans had the same talents and intelligence as whites. Now his recognition of Black intelligence had taken him beyond the question of educability, to a deeper level of conviction about the essential sameness of the races.

Observations was without precedent not only in thought but also in rhetoric. The tract included vivid portraits of the murder, kidnapping, plunder, and carnage that accompanied the slave trade. Benezet found material for these descriptions in various travel narratives that by this time had become available. Europeans who had lived in Africa for years and had been intimately involved in the slave trade described the blood-drenched warfare that accompanied the gathering of slaves. They wrote about the capture of children (“carried in sacks”), the slave marts where humans were bought and sold “like beasts,” and other hair-raising cruelties.

No one before Benezet had ever presented such vivid descriptions as an antislavery argument. Benezet—according to one modern commentator, David L. Crosby—virtually invented this rhetorical style, which set him apart from earlier antislavery polemicists. It’s not hard to imagine the effect these word pictures must have had on nonviolent Quakers, never previously exposed to the naked ferocity that marked chattel slavery.

The scenes of horror Benezet described in Observations gripped people’s imaginations. His next work, A Short Account of That Part of Africa Inhabited by Negroes (1762), intensified the effect. He had previously stated that Black people possessed intelligence, talent, temperament, character, and morality, just as white people did. But these characteristics were difficult to see in a population as oppressed as America’s enslaved Africans. What was needed was an understanding of what the lives of Black people were like before the degradation of slavery was forced upon them. Such an understanding, however, was impossible in America. Benezet needed to look abroad.

As it turned out, the same writers who had described slavery’s brutality in Africa had also spent years with Africans who lived ordinary lives under normal circumstances. These writers provided rich documentation of such encounters as well. “Africans are,” wrote Willem Bosman, Dutch chief merchant for the Gold Coast, “generally friendly with strangers, of a mild conversation, courteous, affable, and easy to overcome with reason. In conversation they discover a great quickness of parts and understanding.” “They are,” wrote William Smith, another European who had lived in Africa for many years, “civil, good-natured people, industrious to the last degree.” Andre Brüe, the French governor for Senegal, saw them that way, too. Africans, he wrote, were “generally good-natured and civil, and may be brought to anything by fair and soft means. If you make them presents they will recompense you double. If you want anything of them and ask it they seldom deny it, even though they had occasion for it themselves. But to treat them harshly or think to gain anything of them by force is to dispute with the moon.”

From these unimpeachable witnesses, Benezet wrote, “it will appear that the Negroes are generally a sensible, humane, and sociable people, and that their capacity is as good and as capable of improvement as that of the whites.” Benezet had been making this case in one way or another since the early 1750s, but for white people who had encountered Black people only as illiterate, subservient laborers and viewed them as dull, slothful, and dissolute, the idea that they were in truth sensible, humane, sociable beings must have been more than a little disorienting.

A Short Account moves from one innovative argument to another. It demonstrates that Blacks and whites are “by nature upon an equality,” as Benezet put it. But in this book, he reached beyond the insular world of Quakerdom and, for that matter, Christianity. Benezet was not a man of the Enlightenment, but he lived in the heart of the Enlightenment era, with its expanded definitions of humanity and humankind’s capabilities. In A Short Account, he appeals to the secular world by incorporating the ideas of three Enlightenment thinkers—James Foster, George Wallace, and Francis Hutcheson—who inveighed against slavery as a fundamental violation of natural and legal rights. In so doing, Benezet broadened his audience and provided himself with an extra dimension of firepower at a time when Enlightenment thought was striking lightning in the minds of men and the principles of democratic political theory, espoused by Locke and Montesquieu, were gathering adherents in Europe and the American colonies. Each of the Enlightenment figures Benezet now brought into the fray insisted that according to natural law, an individual’s self belongs exclusively to that person and cannot be alienated—not by kings, not by governments, not by other persons. Liberty is essentially inherent in personhood; so for Black people, so for white people, so for all people.

By the time of A Short Account, Benezet’s tracts had already had a disruptive effect on opinion in Pennsylvania. His friend Benjamin Rush (George Washington’s surgeon general) wrote to a British colleague, “Anthony Benezet stood alone a few years ago, in opposing Negro slavery in Philadelphia; and now three quarters of the province, as well as the city, cry out against it.” By this time, his books were also having consequences in other, unexpected places.

Abolitionism in England was not much of a public topic until a government bureaucrat named Granville Sharp took up the cause of Jonathan Strong, an enslaved man who was about to be sold off into the West Indies, and by chance came across a copy of A Short Account in a bookstore. Benezet’s book gave him much of the information he needed to shape his legal arguments, which won the day, and Strong was freed by London’s lord mayor. The case awakened the English public to slavery and slave trade issues and made Sharp a public figure.

Seven years later, Sharp—who by this time had become England’s leading abolitionist—brought another case against a slaveholder who wanted to sell his property to a West Indian buyer. This, the James Somerset case, was heard by England’s chief justice, Lord Mansfield. The Jonathan Strong case had been decided on narrow grounds. Strong had been freed, but the decision didn’t pertain to anyone but him. The James Somerset case, however, had potentially widespread consequences for slavery itself.

As the opposing lawyers were preparing to present their case, Sharp received several copies of Benezet’s recently published magnum opus, Some Historical Account of Guinea. Sharp in turn gave copies to Lord Mansfield, to First Lord of the Treasury Lord North, and to the solicitors who would be arguing the case for him.

Some Historical Account provided Sharp and his solicitors with in-depth information unavailable elsewhere. It made them experts on Black slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. No doubt it stoked their emotions about the cause they were representing. In the end, Mansfield’s verdict did not free all of England’s 15,000 enslaved people, as Sharp had hoped. But it did establish that England had no laws pertaining to slavery and that a person who brought an enslaved individual into the country could not sell that person. Over the years, Sharp and Benezet became close allies. As abolitionist sentiment in England grew, Sharp became chairman of London’s Abolition Committee, which had been initiated by the Society of Friends, itself heavily influenced by Benezet.

Another Benezet ally was John Wesley, founder and leader of the increasingly broad and influential Methodist movement. Wesley had been against slavery for years, but it had never featured significantly in his sermons or writings. But Some Historical Account struck him with such force that he would confront slavery head-on for the rest of his days.

Benezet’s work moved Wesley to compose his own antislavery book, Thoughts Upon Slavery, in which he not only used Benezet’s ideas and information but also copied whole sections of Benezet’s text outright. Benezet was only too happy to have Wesley’s work made public, and he himself republished Thoughts Upon Slavery with his own extensive notes. Wesley’s preaching and writing against slavery riveted huge audiences. “Do you never feel another’s pain?” Wesley asked the slave ship captains and plantation owners. “Have you no sympathy? No sense of human woe? No pity for the miserable? When you saw the flowing eyes, the heaving breasts, or the bleeding sides and tortured limbs of your fellow creatures, was you a stone or a brute? Did you look on them with the eyes of a tiger?”

Benezet’s circle of comrades and supporters grew to include, in addition to Sharp and Wesley: Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Rush, Abbe Raynal, Marquis de Condorcet, and Black abolitionists Quobna Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, James Forten, and Absalom Jones. But none was as consequential as Thomas Clarkson.

Clarkson was a 24-year-old divinity student at Cambridge University when he won the Junior Latin Essay prize. A year later, he entered the competition for the senior prize, which required an essay on the topic, “Is it lawful to enslave others against their will?” Knowing little about slavery, Clarkson was at a loss until he came across Benezet’s Some Historical Account, the same book that had moved Wesley so profoundly. “In this precious book,” Clarkson wrote, “I found almost all I wanted.” Benezet’s book, he said later, “was instrumental, beyond any other book ever before published, in disseminating a proper knowledge and detestation of this trade.” Clarkson ended up winning the senior prize as well.

Clarkson’s entry in “an innocent contest for literary honor” continued to have a profound influence on his thought. On his way to London after giving a reading in Cambridge, he was so troubled by Benezet’s exposition of slavery’s horrors that he got down from his horse and sat “disconsolate on the turf by the roadside. … Here a thought came into my mind, that if the contents of the Essay were true it was time some person should see these calamities to their end.”

After a period of soul searching, Clarkson gave up his clerical aspirations and devoted himself to the campaign against slavery. He first associated himself with the London Abolition Committee and then succeeded in pulling the reform parliamentarian William Wilberforce into the struggle. Wilberforce was one of the most forceful speakers in Parliament, and in 1789, he entered his first bill to prohibit the slave trade. The shipping interests and sugar industry fought back with all their immense wealth and political power. It took the antislavery forces 19 years—until 1808—before the opposition finally crumbled and Great Britain prohibited the slave trade. In that time, Clarkson served as Wilberforce’s chief adviser, public relations person, and researcher, as well as the orchestrator of the massive petition drives that fueled Wilberforce’s campaign.

Benezet died 24 years before the antislave trade bill passed. But for decades, his spirit continued to influence the great debate. Wilberforce used some of Benezet’s arguments and, as historian Maurice Jackson has shown, even some of Benezet’s language. “No good effort is ever lost,” Clarkson wrote. “For if he, who makes the virtuous attempt, should be prevented by death from succeeding in it, can he not speak, though in his tomb? Will not his works still breathe his sentiments upon it?”

Slavery itself was abolished in England in 1833. In America, abolition took a longer, rougher road. But Benezet had been there at the start, and he had lit a fire under that movement as well, beginning in 1750, when he first opened his home to students of color.

Benezet left few obvious traces of his interior life. He kept no journal, no diary. He rarely talked about himself. But in his essays and books, we can trace the evolution of a mind that started in the room where for 20 years he taught Philadelphia’s African and mixed-race children. For all the vast influence of his antislavery efforts, the idea of Black and white equality may well be Benezet’s most profound and enduring contribution to the American democratic enterprise.

The post A Teacher and a Friend appeared first on The American Scholar.

But I almost did.

I was stepping away from the bar, where I had ordered a glass of water and a glass of Mont Gravet, to return to the small round table and my waiting mother. The bar, in an alcove just inside the restaurant entrance, was already crowded, stools all occupied, and the bartender was making drinks for her customers plus the guests in the dining room. She was half-frazzled. I could tell it might be a while. She said she would set the drinks on the counter when ready. Not a problem—our table was three steps away. The dining room proper was on one side, beyond two great arches, and on the other side was the host table, where guests would wait to be seated. Reservations were recommended, and we had one—for the next evening. That first night we were merely scoping out the place.

“Oh, sorry,” I said as I almost bumped into a pleasant-looking man leaving the dining room. He had become aware of me stepping into his path before I saw him, and had already made some pleasant apology. He was more formally dressed than most of the guests, and thinner too, more alert. He let me pass, then went on.

People were drifting through the foyer, having a look around, deciding what to do. A couple of them put me in mind of large, ponderous instruments, like a double bass, and others seemed slow and sonorous, trombone-like. The man I’d almost collided with would be a banjo—versatile, quick. Within a minute of passing by our table, he had surreptitiously reappeared to ask if we had everything we needed. Not some nimble guest weaving between the wait staff after all, but Johnny, the manager of the crew. We’d ordered our drinks at the bar, I explained, and were waiting. “Oh, very good,” he said, encouragingly. Then went to check on our order.

With Johnny on it, we did not wait long, and soon he brought our drinks and inquired if we would have an appetizer. Why yes, we said, and pointed at a couple of items on the menu. “Which would you recommend?”

Johnny seemed to want nothing more than to find the perfect fit for us, and when we told him that a friend had spoken very highly of the signature black bean and corn soup, he added his recommendation. The soup plus fried calamari made our evening meal. Both were delicious.

“Will we see you tomorrow?” we asked on leaving, and Johnny said we would. And we did. The following evening, he led us to a booth at the far end with a view of the entire restaurant. Among other sights was Johnny, moving up, moving down, seating guests, and checking on them. He was speedy without hurry, attentive and affable but not fawning. So who was this guy? We kept eyes and ears open, observing.

On our way out, we stopped to say goodbye. And we learned that Johnny had earlier worked at La Posada on the front-of-house team until he left for the Oregon Coast with his family. Several years later, when the Turquoise Room put out a call for a new manager, he answered it. We’d met him on his first night back. He had two girls, 13 and 11. They were still in Oregon with his wife but would come in a few weeks. “In time to start the new school year?” I asked.

No. The school year in Oregon ended late and in Winslow it started in early August. The girls would hardly get a vacation at all. That would be a pity, thought Johnny and his wife, and local school officials agreed. Let the kids enjoy their summer. They wouldn’t miss anything in the first couple of weeks.

“Do they want to come?”

Oh yes, Johnny answered. He and his wife had been nervous about telling them, but the girls were looking forward to it.

My own big move from one state to another occurred the summer I was nine years old, between third and fourth grades, going from Illinois to Durango, Colorado. I would be leaving a flat, windy land for one of mountains and rivers. Freight trains rumbled across town in Illinois, but in Durango, my brother told me, there was a narrow-gauge train with a boiler and a smokestack and a plume of smoke floating above as it chugged out of town and up into the mountains. At a store in town called The Treasure Tunnel, you could buy polished gems that came from the river, he said. He had gone on the scouting trip with my father and seen the trains, the store, the river, and the swinging bridge over the water. I had been in an ecstasy of anticipation. What about Johnny’s daughters, I wondered—what might entice them about dry, flat Winslow, Arizona, and the dozens and dozens of freight trains passing through each day, going somewhere else? I asked Johnny.

He smiled. Just as he surely does all night at the questions and whims of customers. “They asked if they could have a dog. We said, ‘Sure! Two dogs if you want!’”

In mid-August in Winslow, the sky starts to get light around 5:30 a.m. Sitting by the tracks in a hotel Adirondack chair, I watched the trains go by. On one I counted 95 cars, three engines, and one caboose. “Freight train, freight train,” I hummed, “running so fast.” Nothing fast about these trains, just steady. “Freight train, freight train.” Peter, Paul, and Mary sang the version I knew. Not likely the girls would know that old song. Would they know even The Eagles and “Take It Easy?” If not, they would soon learn. Would Johnny know my train song? If not, I bet he’d know another. With another train, bound for somewhere.

The post Where Are You Bound? appeared first on The American Scholar.

This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.

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Even in the celebrity-mad 1970s and ’80s, the global mononym club was minuscule. Cher. Diana. Madonna. Pelé. Sting. And Carlos, the terrorist who captured an entire 1975 conference of oil ministers. He’d originally wanted to kidnap a bin Laden family member for big cash—preferably the 17-year-old Osama—but backers such as Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi chose Plan B. Carlos led a six-man team into OPEC’s Vienna headquarters, killed three people, made the Austrian government broadcast statements on Palestinian rights, then forced 33 hostages onto a DC-9. Mission complete, he vanished. Escapes were his trademark, like shooting victims at close range and leaving his face uncovered. As journalist Joby Warrick writes, “Maximum exposure was the point.”

For two decades, Carlos the Jackal, the anti–James Bond, was the planet’s most-wanted fugitive. His motivations and character have remained fugitive as well, despite a half-century pile-up of documentaries, biographies, biopics, miniseries, and scholarly studies. To Warrick, he remains “indisputably, the most famous of the international terrorists who took up arms in the 1970s … an avatar for a newly emerging form of state-sponsored terrorism.”

As national-security correspondent for The Washington Post, Warrick has spent 30 years on the conflict beat, covering weapons proliferation, the terror industry, and Middle Eastern politics. His Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction, and his new book, The Jackal, is the other half of a dark diptych. Long-form journalism at this level is sometimes a topic nobly worked up for the occasion—John McPhee on Alaska, say—or else the product of deep experience, as in this stellar biography, which Warrick constructs with a bricklayer’s confidence, scene on well-paced scene, sternly avoiding side trips and fact dumps.

Also, you can’t beat the material. The Jackal, born Ilich Ramírez Sánchez in Venezuela, was raised in bourgeois comfort by an aristocratic mother and a leftist lawyer father, was sent to school in London—“snide little blighter,” one instructor recalled—and then majored in debauchery at a Moscow university. At 20, he headed for Lebanon, a plump, entitled volunteer who baffled Popular Front insurgents with his flashes of charm, comically robust ego (“The whole world will hear of me!”), and firm career plan. Classical communism was too rigid, too dull. He wanted to be the Che Guevara of the Palestinians. A professional revolutionary. A star. “Bullets are real here,” the Beirut recruiter warned Sánchez.

He owes his full nom de guerre to a Guardian reporter who happened to notice a copy of Frederick Forsyth’s assassination chiller The Day of the Jackal in an abandoned safe house used by Carlos. Probably he never read it, but the core conceit—a ruthless, elusive free-
booter—was catnip to assignment editors worldwide. Tabloids and TV marketed Carlos the Jackal as a glamorous antihero who soon commuted between the headlines and the fiction shelves, notably as the model for the master killer in Robert Ludlum’s Bourne spy stories. The real Carlos, as Warrick amply documents, was a vicious incompetent who believed his own press clippings, sulking when rewards for his capture were set too low. But by anatomizing both the postmodern myth and the punk gunsel, Warrick creates a nonfiction novel in the mode of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, minus the whoppers.

The age of the Jackal is fading, but his one big idea—and the teenager he failed to kill in 1975—led to 9/11, and the reverberations persist. Carlos saw that a new techno-wonder, the global satellite TV feed, made terrorism into show biz. The channels of the day were full of masked men performing the unthinkable—the takeover of the Munich Olympics, the kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst—but the dashing lone superterrorist was the role of a lifetime, especially when broadcast live. Bombings, kidnappings, raids, hijackings: The Jackal’s fame bloomed along with his body count until French intelligence and law enforcement, together with the CIA, managed, in 1994, to seize him in the Sudan. (He was in Khartoum for surgery to correct a low sperm count.)

Warrick clarifies this bloody picaresque by foregrounding the members of the Jackal’s crew, making them human as well as heinous, from Carlos’s chief associates to his wives and girlfriends, his Palestinian colleagues and their Arab allies, Jordanian leaders and advisers, and some truly scary German accomplices. Warrick’s command of the Jackal’s quicksand world yields a first-rate criminal biography, gliding from Aden to Algiers as Sánchez ascends from commando to terror boss, and gruesome tension turns to giddy relief when law enforcement finally prevails, just a few years too late for the guillotine. The French courts imposed three life sentences instead.

Warrick’s acknowledgments and notes are a master class in the reporting and sourcing of nonfiction, not least the KGB thumbs-down on young Sánchez (“appalling record as a student”). But no obituary closes this transnational paper chase. Carlos, vague and shuffling at 76, is alive at the high-security prison of Poissy, in the Paris suburbs. Warrick ends the book with a rare face-to-face interview. Prisoner 11939 is unrepentant. He has only one regret: not punishing his betrayers.

“I should have killed a few more people,” he grumbles. “I killed eighty-three people by my own hand. Another thousand were killed on my orders. … Good food, good music, pretty girls, clean girls. I always had a good life, all my life.”

That cold blank core, that motiveless malignity, has kept the field of Jackal studies evergreen, for Carlos’s real attack was not on institutions but on rationality. Why does a spoiled schoolboy turn monstrous? Warrick’s tenacity pulls at least the who, the where, and the how from history’s shadows: “While he claimed to be a revolutionary, Carlos was, at his core, a criminal narcissist. He killed seemingly without feeling, often wantonly. His cruelty toward his targets—and occasionally, his allies—issued from a brain that also craved celebrity and insisted on living a life of luxury and dissolution.”

Ilich Ramírez Sánchez did follow at least one lodestar principle, instilled by his Marxist father and honored lifelong: never, ever drink Coca-Cola. The Jackal, it seems, had three rules. Kill without pity. Lay off the imperialist sugar water. And always know where the cameras are.

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