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

The post “A Field of Finches Without Sight Still Singing” by Grace Cavalieri appeared first on The American Scholar.

The crowd erupts in cheers at the sight of a boy and girl, both age 13, who wave from a convertible. The boy wears a straw hat and a button-down shirt with a Peter Pan collar; the girl’s hair hangs in long braids underneath a bonnet that matches her ruffled dress.

They’re this year’s “Official Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher,” chosen from a pool of around 100 local seventh graders. The rigorous application process for the Tom and Becky Program, as it’s called, lasts six months and involves interviews, evaluations, and presentations in which the children demonstrate their knowledge of Twain’s works and the history of Hannibal. For the rest of the year, the selected pair will serve as tourism ambassadors, greeting visitors off riverboat cruises, strolling around the historic district and posing for pictures, and cutting ribbons around the community. “Growing up in Hannibal, that’s probably the most exciting thing you can do,” Ainsley Ahrens, who served as Becky in 2024–25, told me.

Hannibal is a company town, and the local industry is Mark Twain. Just about every location associated with his childhood has been developed into a potential source of revenue. The Mark Twain Boyhood Home, filled with memorabilia, is bordered by a whitewashed fence like the one made famous in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, in which Tom, a mischief-maker whose antics range from wickedly ingenious to borderline sociopathic, tricks his friends into doing a tedious chore for him by pretending it’s fun. There’s the Mark Twain Cave—where Clemens himself played as a child and which inspired the one where Tom is trapped for three days along with Becky, his sweetheart—now electrically lit and accessible to visitors on an hour-long guided tour. The list goes on: the Mark Twain Casino, Becky’s Old Fashioned Ice Cream Parlor & Emporium, Clemens General Store, and more. Even a bottled-water vending machine bears a quote from Twain: “High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.”

Twain is a complex figure: A child of slave owners, he married into an abolitionist family and ultimately wrote Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which is generally acknowledged as one of the greatest works of American literature, with a deeply antiracist message. At the same time, the book has been criticized and even banned for its frequent use of the n-word and perceived racial stereotyping. The runaway success of Percival Everett’s 2024 novel James, a retelling of the Huck Finn story from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved man who is Huck’s companion, shows that interest in Twain remains high even as contemporary readers increasingly acknowledge the ways in which his books inadequately represent the experience of Black people. “Part of the continuing fascination with Mark Twain is that he combines in his person both the best and the worst of our national culture,” Ron Chernow, the author of a new Twain biography, has said.

But you wouldn’t know it in Hannibal, where the perfume of manufactured nostalgia hangs heavy in the air. With their dogged focus on Tom Sawyer, a book that depicts an idealized version of Clemens’s childhood, the town’s cultural institutions avoid recognizing its history of slavery. “Mark Twain’s Hannibal is a palimpsest that yields diverse and often contradictory meanings,” Shelley Fisher Fishkin writes in Lighting Out for the Territory, her study of Twain and American culture. “It is also a microcosm of America itself—its promise and its potential, its guilt and its shame.”

Much of today’s Hannibal, like the Walmart just off the highway or the sports bar showing a Cardinals game on its big screen, would be alien to Mark Twain. But as a skilled and shameless promoter of his own work—he liked to advertise his lectures with lines like, “The trouble begins at eight o’clock”—he would recognize, and likely admire, the strenuous marketing around his own persona.

Hannibal’s main commercial area, which occupies just a few blocks along Main Street and Third Street, offers a mix of blatant tourist traps and businesses catering more to locals. Famous lines spoken by Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Jim, with images of the characters, are printed on banners that hang from street lamps. Tom’s quote is from the whitewashing episode: “Like it? Well, I don’t see why I oughtn’t to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?” Just up the hill, a giant root beer mug advertising the Mark Twain Dinette rotates during the restaurant’s opening hours.

It’s July 2, and I’m headed to Java Jive, which calls itself “the first coffee shop west of the Mississippi” (the river is a block away). The wall is plastered with photographs of past Toms and Beckys and a picture of the site as it was 50 years ago. Now the café occupies two long, narrow rooms painted peach and decorated with lava lamps and original artwork by local artists (for sale). There’s a huge menu of sugary drinks, as well as assorted tchotchkes that wouldn’t be out of place in my Brooklyn neighborhood: a desk sign featuring a Taylor Swift lyric, a sippy cup that reads, “I like big cups & I cannot lie.”

I’m here to meet Ellie Locke, who was the official Becky Thatcher in 2016–17 and just graduated from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. She’s working a summer job near the Lake of the Ozarks but is back in Hannibal for Tom Sawyer Days. “My dad is the youngest of nine, my mom is one of three, my grandpa was one of seven, and my grandmother one of seven or eight. And they’re all very close-knit still,” she explains over a lemonade.

Like all students in Hannibal, Locke was assigned The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in her seventh-grade English class. “Partly to learn about the story, but also for the history of Mark Twain,” she says. Her cousins had been participating in the Tom and Becky Program for years, and she always knew she wanted to be a part of it. At age three, when she was supposed to be napping, her parents discovered her in the living room giving a speech, as if she were trying out for Becky.

The speech is the first hurdle in the process. Each would-be Tom or Becky has to speak for five to 10 minutes to a group of judges, as well as the current year’s official couple, about why he or she would make a good ambassador for the town. Twenty-four semifinalists—12 girls and 12 boys—will spend the next few months studying for a test “on everything Mark Twain, Hannibal, tourism, the book,” Locke explains.

After the test and an interview to assess the contestants’ knowledge and people skills, the group is narrowed down to 10 finalists. “Which is when the costumes come into play,” Locke says. For the Toms, the costume is relatively simple: a button-down shirt, a pair of pants, moccasins, and a big straw hat. For the Beckys, it’s an elaborate affair that can cost well over $1,000.

“You start with your pantaloons,” Annie Webb, one of this year’s Becky finalists, tells me later that afternoon at Mark Twain Elementary School, where her mother, Katie, is the music teacher. A vivacious 13-year-old who attends Hannibal Middle School, Annie has long light brown hair and green eyes. Today she’s wearing a floral tank jumpsuit and earrings with Becky charms, but she has brought her entire Becky outfit to show me.

The ritual begins with a visit to the Hickory Stick, a fabric store in the center of town, where the proprietor helps each girl pick out material for her dress and then stows it away to prevent duplication. Annie’s is red with tiny white dots, accented with navy blue trim and yards of white lace. Atop the pantaloons comes a crinoline—“a pouffy layer that poufs everything up.” Next is an apron-style overskirt, which may be split at the back to reveal the layers of ruffles underneath. The outfit is topped off with a matching bonnet, parasol, and handbag. The entire getup is custom-made by a seamstress.

Each Tom and Becky carries a bag filled with items that represent moments from the book or aspects of their characters that they’ve invented. The kids, who must be in character at all times while performing, use the objects as props to help them tell stories. Annie carries an old-fashioned cup-and-ball game and a string with 99 buttons on it. The story goes that the boy who gives a girl her 100th button will be her true love. “I’m kind of hoping Tom might give me my 100th button,” she says, in character.

Are these modern girls ever frustrated by Becky’s secondary status to Tom? “In the books, you don’t really hear about Becky having anything in her bag,” admits Koryn Miller, a poised 16-year-old who was the official Becky in 2022–23. But they tend to see Becky’s blankness as an opportunity rather than a limitation. “It gave me room to create this character in my head of how I think she should have been brought to life,” Koryn says. “You get to really make her your own.”

Although one boy and one girl will be chosen as the official Tom and Becky, there are so many events requiring their presence that the eight other finalists will also be pressed into regular service over the course of the year. Though they always perform in pairs, the kids rotate: The official Tom might be matched with a Becky finalist, or vice versa. “Being a Tom, it’s always on the spot,” says Mason McIntyre, a garrulous teenager who was a Tom finalist in 2023–24.

I’m visiting him and his sister Malaina, an incoming Becky, at their grandparents’ home in a tony neighborhood high on a hill northwest of downtown. There’s a model of the Robert E. Lee riverboat on the table in front of us and an antique gramophone in the corner. Mason, who speaks very quickly with a heavy Southern accent, wants to quiz me on life in New York City. He’s most curious about the subway. “So you don’t drive anywhere? … That’s goofy.”

When I can get a word in edgewise, I ask Mason what he most enjoyed about being Tom. “If I can make someone smile, if I can get that smile upon them, that’ll be a positive of the day. Ladies especially say it was a highlight of their day,” he says cheerfully.

His sister, in a blue-flowered T-shirt, khaki shorts, and gold watch, is as cool and polished as Mason is exuberant. “There’s a lot of history in Hannibal because Mark Twain was a very big part of modern-day literature,” she says, speaking clearly and rather formally. “It’s a very homey place. We want people to feel welcome whenever they come to Hannibal.”

I ask both siblings what it’s like to be in character all the time. “They have this saying, ‘You’re never tired, you’re never hungry’—what was it?” Mason says. (He’s referring to the Tom and Becky Program’s unofficial motto: “Never hot, never tired, never thirsty, never hungry.”) “You can’t complain. It’s not that it’s a hassle. It’s very fun. Well, with the heat advisory …” The thermometer will reach the upper 80s every humid day of my visit to Hannibal.

It’s hard work for the parents, too. For each event, at least one parent must volunteer time driving and supervising the kids. For the official Tom and Becky, this is a major financial commitment: They visit Twain festivals in Calaveras County, California (site of the original jumping frog contest); Carson City, Nevada, where Sam Clemens and his brother Orion lived briefly; and Hartford, Connecticut, where Twain’s mansion has been turned into a museum. The kids’ travel is covered, but parents and other family members pay their own way.

The parents I speak to consider it a worthwhile investment. “It’s definitely an experience that will bring out some skill sets for him for the future,” says Koryn’s mother, Sarah, who runs Bark Twain, a pet-sitting company. And it’s good for the résumé, since local businesses like to hire former Toms and Beckys. “They’re always good kids, good in school, well-rounded,” Koryn says. “No human is perfect, but everyone that is a Tom and Becky tries their best.”

“A book a day keeps reality away,” reads a sampler in the window of Clemens General Store. This wasn’t Twain’s philosophy—in Huck Finn above all, he aimed to depict the realities of racism—but it could well be the town motto. Not only does Hannibal’s elevation of Tom Sawyer as an icon of American boyhood marginalize Huck, a more developed and ultimately more admirable figure, but it also deliberately obscures the difference between the author and his fictional creation. “I probably didn’t find out Tom Sawyer was not a real person until I was like 10,” says Preston Miller, Koryn’s brother and one of the incoming Toms.

Poking around the complex of small buildings that make up the Mark Twain Boyhood Home, I can understand why. The museum’s official line is that “Mark Twain transformed his memories into literature through the power of his creative imagination.” But over and over, it insists on identifying Sam Clemens the author with Tom Sawyer the character. “Here stood the board fence which Tom Sawyer persuaded his gang to pay him for the privilege of whitewashing,” a plaque outside informs the visitor. Inside, a sign points to a bedroom window from which “Tom Sawyer would jump” when sneaking out at night.

Among the Clemens family paraphernalia and nostalgic descriptions of Sam’s childhood antics is a single panel about enslaved people. In Clemens’s time, about a quarter of the residents of the county, or 2,800 people, were enslaved. Forty-four percent of white families owned slaves; others rented them. The museum does not mention that Sam at one point shared his childhood bedroom with an enslaved boy named Sandy, who slept on a pallet. He also spent time on his uncle’s farm in nearby Florida, Missouri, with an enslaved man named Daniel Quarles, who is believed to be one inspiration for Jim.

The Huckleberry Finn House, a small white hut inside the compound, is a re-creation of a home in which Tom Blankenship, a local urchin often said to be a model for Huck, once lived with his family. The exhibits treat cursorily some of the controversy around the novel, emphasizing Twain’s use of both humor and realism in telling the story. “Should it be banned?” the exhibit asks, and answers, “Decide for yourself. Read it.”

Mark Schneider, a curator, tells me that the museum was last renovated nearly 30 years ago and that a new update is on the horizon, potentially to include a Mark Twain hologram. Perhaps it will replace the current mockup of a gigantic sculpture containing 28 figures from Twain’s works that was planned to commemorate Twain’s 100th anniversary in 1935 but was never built. Tom and Huck both appear twice, whereas Jim is relegated to the far right corner, kneeling and looking up at the King and the Duke, the two con men who will eventually turn him in. A line of Huck’s featured on the panels hung around town echoes in my head: “Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and a body ain’t got no business doing wrong when he ain’t ignorant and knows better.”

First thing in the morning on July 3, the 10 incoming Toms and Beckys line up on the east end of Main Street, behind a statue of Tom and Huck. They all have numbers attached to their chests so that the judges can easily tell them apart. The moms hover, adjusting the kids’ costumes and commiserating about how impractical it is that the girls have to wear white gloves. “I feel highly uncomfortable,” complains Tom #5, a small kid with very short hair and round glasses. One person sports a T-shirt bearing the slogan “Sawyer’s Painting Company.”

A photographer asks the girls to pose while twirling their parasols, but they’re standing too close together and the parasols keep colliding. Meanwhile, the Toms are getting restless. Tom #3, in a yellow shirt, shoots his slingshot at one of his fellow contestants.

After the photographs, it’s time for the kids to greet tourists under the blazing sun. The girls can wear ice packs under their costumes, but the boys have only their hats for protection. In pairs they start down the hill, fanning out onto Main Street. “Bye, Becky—good luck! See you at lunch!” Annie’s mom calls. Tom #1 tugs at the arm of Tom #3. “We have to wait for our Beckys!” he cautions.

One of the judges approaches Tom #1 and Becky #1 and asks for tourism advice. “I think you should start right here! The Mark Twain Boyhood Home is the main attraction in Hannibal,” chirps Becky #1. Tom #2 offers directions to the Mark Twain Cave and recommends purchasing a souvenir rat on a string from the gift shop. Becky #2 considerately offers a sweating judge her parasol. Tom #4 and Becky #4 are asked to move so that workers can weed the sidewalk in front of the whitewashing fence in preparation for tomorrow’s festivities. Meanwhile, Tom #5 and Becky #5 act out the engagement scene for another judge. He seems a little lackluster, but she’s into it.

Rereading the novel for the first time since my own childhood, I found this scene disquieting. At first Becky resists Tom, but he gradually breaks down her resolve. At one point, Twain tells us, Tom takes her “silence for consent” and whispers sweet nothings in her ear; when he tries to kiss her, she runs away and hides under a desk, but he tugs at her apron and hands until she gives in. “By and by she gave up, and let her hands drop; her face, all glowing with the struggle, came up and submitted.” (The kids hold out Tom’s hat and duck behind it so that it only appears as if they’re kissing.) During our conversations, I asked some of the Beckys whether they were troubled by the gender dynamics, but no one took the bait. Now, Becky #5 explains to the onlookers that “it was love at first sight, but she was playing hard to get.” They applaud and cheer.

Melissa Cummins, the program’s longtime director, ushers all five pairs onto the shady side of the street, where they wait hopefully for tourists to show up. Alas, it’s a sleepy Thursday morning, and the street is nearly empty. My nine-year-old daughter, whom I’ve brought along, steps in to fill the void. Tom #1 gives her a stick of candy, and she asks him what he likes to do for fun. “I love to swim and fish and play in the woods with my friends,” he says. “He finally caught a fish,” Becky #1 chimes in. “It was this big!” She pulls out an antique tape measure from her bag and measures about three inches. One of the judges, looking on, guffaws.

In front of Becky’s Old Fashioned Ice Cream Parlor, Tom #3 shows bugs to my daughter while Becky #4 rolls her eyes. I ask him about a piece of paper he’s holding, a picture of “Injun Joe”—another of the novel’s now-regretted stereotypes. “He’s wanted for murder,” Tom #3 says, his eyes glittering. “We’re out here fearing for our lives!” Becky #4 adds. Tom takes the opportunity to throw her under the bus. “Becky’s terrified of everything,” he says.

Planted in front of the Blue Daisy gift shop, Tom #2 and Becky #3, twirling nervously from side to side, try to engage with tourists, who smile and wave. “I wish I had a horse and buggy,” he says to her. “You would probably crash it,” she retorts.

One of the judges is John Maupin, a retired lawyer from St. Louis who was Tom himself in 1963. He and his Becky traveled to New York City to dedicate the Missouri pavilion of the World’s Fair, he tells me. Dressed in their costumes, they took the subway all the way from Grand Central Terminal to the fairgrounds in Queens. “We told people there were days we couldn’t go to school because buffalo herds surrounded our house. They believed it,” he says.

Becky #2 shows another judge the matches and collapsible cup she’s carrying in her bag: If she’s ever stranded in a cave again, she says, she’ll be able to collect water. These Beckys seem determined not to be caught unprepared; they certainly won’t need to depend on their Toms, who don’t seem equipped for survival in a cave. Tom #5 looks on forlornly—his Becky has disappeared. Meanwhile, Tom #2 enthusiastically demonstrates how to use a dead cat to drive away warts—another plot point in the book. “Spunk water, spunk water, swallow these warts,” he chants, hurling a stuffed cat by its tail. A father and daughter heading into the ice cream parlor look on. He was the official Tom in 2000, he tells the kids. “Do you ever miss it?” Tom #4 asks. “I loved meeting the boats with people from out of town,” he says wistfully.

Maupin is quizzing Tom #3 and Becky #3: “When the steamboats came here, what were they bringing?” The kids have no clue. “Coal?” Becky tries. Tom vamps, “If I hadn’t had to go to school, I could have seen.”

After an hour of this, the kids are starting to fade. “You’re all still out here?” asks an older woman with a panting pug, pausing to straighten Tom #2’s collar. “You’re lookin’ awful good,” she adds. Becky #3, whose family is planning a trip to New York, has been asking me for travel tips, but she snaps back into character when a woman walks by wearing a sun hat festooned with military pins. A substitute teacher in the local schools, she tells me that the whole town takes responsibility for Tom and Becky. “When I see them somewhere and I think their mom’s not paying attention, I say, ‘Becky, are you supposed to be here?’ ”

Megan Rapp, the executive director of the Mark Twain Museum, appears in a black-and-white print dress and a button that reads, “Peace Love Twain.” Behind her, the trolley goes by, tourists leaning out the windows. My daughter has Annie’s cup and ball and is trying determinedly to get the ball in the cup without hitting herself in the head. Maupin is talking to Becky #4 and Tom #5 about growing up in Hannibal. “Your friends from then will be your friends forever,” he says. “Everyone knew not only me but my parents and grandparents. You couldn’t get away with anything.”

Feeling woozy from the heat, I give in to my daughter’s pleas to check out Clemens General Store. The wares include old-time board games, puzzles, novelty salt and pepper shakers, a cookbook by Snoop Dogg and Earl “E-40” Stevens called Goon with the Spoon, and a cutting board that reads, “Don’t be afraid to cut the cheese.” “They have everything anyone could want,” my daughter says, awestruck. At the counter, before I can stop her, she eats most of the fudge samples, including a purple goo called “Huckleberry Haze.”

“People that like American literature … are some of our brightest people,” G. Faye Dant tells me. “But they go right over there to Huck Finn’s house and don’t walk across the street to Jim’s place. A lot of people don’t want to make that connection.”

We’re standing in the one-room museum Dant opened in 2013. Called “Jim’s Journey: The Huck Finn Freedom Center,” it chronicles Hannibal’s Black history, starting with the story of Daniel Quarles, the enslaved man whom the young Clemens got to know on his uncle’s farm. Through painstaking archival work, Dant has managed to trace Quarles’s story back to Virginia in the 1800s. “That’s a sketch that I came across,” she says, her speech deliberate but animated as she points to an image on the wall of enslaved people walking from Virginia to Tennessee. “And he would have done that very same thing.”

Tom #3 and Becky #3 may not have known what the steamboats that came to Hannibal were bringing, but one answer is enslaved people. Twain’s father, John Marshall Clemens, could be brutal to his slaves, including a woman named Jennie who once saved the young Sam Clemens from drowning. Once, after she pulled a whip out of his wife’s hands, John Marshall Clemens punished her by beating her. Twain later said of the enslaved children he and his friends played with, “We were comrades, and yet not comrades.”

Dant found a photograph in the Library of Congress, taken by the local photographer J. R. Shockley, of two enslaved boys on Main Street in Hannibal, steps from where we are standing. Dressed in ragged clothes, their feet bare, neither of them meets the camera’s gaze.

“Hannibal took the position that we don’t have to talk about slavery because we’re gentler, kinder,” Dant says. Still, even in Tom Sawyer, slavery is present. Tom uses the n-word blithely in conversation, and his Aunt Polly owns an enslaved boy named Jim (a different character from the grown man in Huck Finn).

In Hannibal, too, the traces of slavery are evident to those who look. The little stone building that houses Jim’s Journey was built by enslaved people in 1837. In its front yard stands a memorial wall Dant made out of bricks donated by a local resident who found them while renovating her property, which had originally belonged to an enslaver. On a few of the bricks, the handprints of the enslaved people who made them are still visible.

A fifth-generation Missourian, Dant and her husband are both direct descendants of enslaved people. When she was growing up in Hannibal, she says, the only public acknowledgment of a Black character in Twain’s writings was a metal plaque, dating from the 1930s, that supposedly marked the spot where “Huckleberry Finn and [n-word] Jim stopped for a few days on their way down the Mississippi.” (The slur is sometimes used incorrectly as part of the character’s name, though Twain never refers to him that way in the novel.) The marker was donated to Hannibal by George Mahan, the son of an enslaver who was then the president of the State Historical Society of Missouri. He also purchased and donated to the city the building that is now the Boyhood Home. “That gives you a sense for Hannibal,” Dant said in a recent podcast interview. “Most of the politicians, most of the businessmen, most of the people—white people, I’ll say that—in leadership roles, are descendants of enslavers.”

Dant’s museum is built on donations. One wall is nearly covered with pages from the 1927 Colored Directory, a listing of Black-owned businesses that helped Black people navigate segregated cities. Another is devoted to artifacts documenting the Quarles family: pictures, newspaper references, a passage from a slave narrative. The perfectly preserved Navy uniform of a Black veteran is part of a display commemorating Black members of the armed forces. Some of this material appears in Dant’s recently published book, Hannibal’s Invisibles.

Dant’s museum isn’t part of the official Mark Twain complex. “They acknowledge me now, but they don’t support this effort,” she says, telling me that some local business owners won’t let her put flyers in their windows. “I don’t know if they think it’ll scare off their customers or if they just don’t want to act like they’re supporting us,” she says. When she approached a former director of the Boyhood Home about including Jim’s Journey in his promotional materials, she says that he told her, “We’re not a Huck Finn kind of town. We’re a Tom and Becky town.”

“A few years ago, we had a biracial girl” as Becky, Dant says now. But otherwise, in a school district that averages about 80 percent white, virtually all of the Toms and Beckys are white. Only two of the current contestants have visited Dant’s museum. “I don’t do Tom and Becky,” she says. “I do Samuel Clemens.”

On the morning of the Fourth, every single person in the breakfast room at our motel is wearing the colors of the flag. A little girl has red, white, and blue ribbons wound through her braid and glitter that makes her hair and cheeks sparkle. My daughter looks at her own purple T-shirt self-consciously. “We look like we’re not from here,” she says.

I’m a little surprised that this is the first time she has noticed. We’re Jewish, and Hannibal’s culture, like that of most small towns in America, is relentlessly Christian. Some of the Tom and Becky contestants can easily rattle off their favorite Bible verses; crosses and T-shirts with Christian slogans are omnipresent in town. Meanwhile Hannibal’s former synagogue, a brick building with a stained-glass Jewish star and the Ten Commandments in Hebrew on its façade, was sold to the New Hope Gospel Center in the 1970s. The temple’s congregation merged with one across the river in Quincy, Illinois. The Quincy synagogue closed its doors in 2019; the nearest active congregation is now nearly 100 miles away, in Columbia, Missouri.

The parade won’t start until 10 a.m., but people are already starting to gather in Hannibal’s business district an hour beforehand. A few blocks up the hill from the tourist area, it’s shabbier, with numerous shuttered storefronts. Hannibal’s population peaked at roughly 22,000 in the 1930s and has been steadily trending downward ever since. But the town is thriving in comparison with others in the region. An English teacher I met tried to follow Huck and Jim’s journey down the Mississippi in her own kayak and discovered that most of the towns along the river were in ruins. In one, the only buildings open were a library and a church; in another, the entire main street had burned down. The Mark Twain industry, a pillar of Hannibal’s economy since the 1930s, is keeping the town alive.

We leave our rental car on a side street and join the crowds jostling for position by the post office, where the incoming Toms and Beckys have assembled in an old-fashioned trolley. Seeing their excitement, I am surprised to find myself choking up. I blow a kiss to Annie, but she doesn’t see me.

The vehicles go by: police cars, an antique Ford Bronco, decked-out Harleys. There’s a cancer charity and a unicyclist. Bleigh Construction Company, celebrating 75 years. Heartland Towing. Point Pest Control. Pageant winners: the 2025 Miss Hannibal and Miss Mark Twain, Mister Hannibal, Miss Marion County. A group called Build Our Country on Christ on a float made out of cardboard blocks decorated like Legos. A girl wearing a red, white, and blue T-shirt that reads, “Everybody in America Parties on My Birthday!” The Gracie Barra Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu team. Almost everyone is white. In a marching band playing “Three Cheers for the Red, White, and Blue,” I count three Black kids among more than 50 musicians.

As the parade wraps up, the onlookers start moving to “Central Park,” a plot of grass a few blocks away. Vendors are selling hot dogs, tie-dyed clothing, and a brand of barbecue sauce made with moonshine. All the seats close to the bandstand are already occupied by the families of the Toms and Beckys.

It’s Melissa Cummins’s last Tom and Becky ceremony as program director, and she’s so emotional, she can barely speak. “This is not just a Hannibal tradition. It is loved around the world,” she says. The woman next to me nods her head sympathetically. “She’s put her heart and soul into it. Those tears are real,” she says.

After the outgoing Toms and Beckys share favorite memories of their year, each of the incoming kids delivers a short speech. “My name is Becky Thatcher, but some of you may know me as Annie Webb,” begins Annie, nearly bubbling over with excitement. “I feel like I just stepped out of the papers of Mark Twain’s book,” Malaina says, “and let me tell you, it’s already been an adventure.” In addition to thanking their families, their teachers, and their seamstresses, several contestants offer gratitude to God: “Without him, none of this would be possible,” one of them says.

The judging is “based on what the kids know about Hannibal, about Mark Twain, how they interact with visitors,” Stacey Mueller, the incoming director of the program had told me earlier. “Looks have nothing to do with it. Tom and Becky are universal.” Finally, when I think I can’t stand the heat for a moment longer, Cummins taps Thatcher Johnson, the tallest and perhaps most conventionally handsome of the group, as the official Tom Sawyer. He circulates around the Beckys till he finds Malaina. When he kisses her cheek to designate her as official Becky, her mouth drops open in a perfect O of surprise and delight.

On July 5, our last day in Hannibal, we head over to the frog-jumping contest, which my daughter has been looking forward to all week. Inspired by “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” Twain’s most famous short story, kids “rent” a frog from a giant bucket of the amphibians (collected by the Boy Scouts), place it in the center of a bull’s-eye-shaped mat, and prod it till it jumps. The frogs get three tries to reach the outer circles.

The competition takes place around noon on yet another blindingly hot day, and the frogs need more encouragement than one would expect. Some try to escape, but most lie there pathetically, legs splayed, looking confused. “It’s too hot for this!” a dad complains as a cute blond boy around five tries unsuccessfully to get his frog to move.

Thatcher, newly anointed as Tom, is performing his official duties for the first time, with Annie as Becky. They give up on encouraging the little kids and stand in front of the cooling fan. Tom hands a piece of “pirate treasure” to a girl in a rainbow T-shirt. “Found it in a cave with my friend Huck,” he says, still in character.

A man I haven’t met before addresses me out of the blue. “How’re you liking Hannibal?” he asks without introducing himself. “Pretty different from New York?”

I respond with something noncommittal.

“Kinda gross,” he volunteers, gesturing at the scene around us.

I look around at the kids handling the frogs, which they don’t seem to find particularly gross. Frog 91 is currently on the lily pad. My daughter’s number is 118. All I can think about is how eager I am for her to take her turn so that we can find some shade.

An older man, maybe the grandfather of the kid with frog 91, yells, “Boo!” at the frog. It doesn’t move.

“Inhumane,” my interlocutor adds.

When he says that, something shifts.

My daughter, overhearing him, feels it too. “It’s frog torture,” she says slowly. “You’re scaring the frog to make it move.”

A tiny girl next to us in blue Crocs has her hand around the neck of a frog nearly the size of her arm. “That frog looks mad,” my daughter stage-whispers to me.

The little girl hears her. “I don’t want to,” she says to no one in particular.

There can be no doubt: This ritual is inhumane. Incredibly, my first reflex is to justify it. I don’t want my daughter to feel bad. It’s a Hannibal tradition, sponsored by the Boy Scouts, and what could be more wholesome? It must not be pleasant for the frogs, but maybe they aren’t really suffering. It lasts only a short time.

Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and a body ain’t got no business doing wrong when he ain’t ignorant and knows better.

It’s time for my daughter to select her frog. She gently places it on the mat, where it takes a few reluctant steps. We won’t be winning anything today. We say goodbye to Tom and Becky and head back to our car.

The post Twain Town, U.S.A. appeared first on The American Scholar.

I took the lake between my legs.
Eight mallard ducks fly over
to the angel’s skin.
The darkness lifts, imagine, in your lifetime.
And you learned to dance with pain

where the water collects around your heart,
where deep in the night I hear a voice
across the instrument panel of my life.
There you are—cased in clean bark you drift
beyond the maximum possible distance

where moorings fly, and suns cast a curious shadow.
And I understand that everything must go,
here on the drawing board.
It is true—I’ve always loved the daring ones.
Every morning I forget how it is.

The sources of this remarkable effort are (Charise tells us):

1. Maxine Kumin, “Morning Swim”
2. Raymond Carver, “Deschutes River”
3. Michael S. Harper, “The Black Angel”
4. Louise Glück, “The Undertaking”
5. William Pitt Root, “The House You Looked For”
6. Stephen Dunn, “To the Upright”
7. Charles Simic, “Butcher Shop”
8. Thomas Lux, “Five Men I Know”
9. Louise Glück, “The Undertaking”
10. Harold Bond, “The Way It Happens to You”
11. Mary Shumway, “River Road”
12. Tom Crawford, “everything must go”
13. Maxine Kumin, “The Nightmare Factory”
14. Alice Walker, “Once”
15. Charles Simic, “Poem”

One virtue of the cento as a form is the likelihood of unexpected juxtapositions, as in lines 7 and 8: “where deep in the night I hear a voice /across the instrument panel of my life.” Brava. The poem is a surprise and makes me want to reread it—always a good test of a poem’s quality.

Michael C. Rush weighs in with the most unusual title, “Scintillating Centomorph”:

Day dawns through a promiscuous succession
In a spirit of cruelty or retribution
In this last of meeting places,
A widening path, a question
Always fugitive and always,

As if it were necessary,
Anxious to express so many things,
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
Like the wind itself, that’s merely air:
We seek radiance in a gray hour.

If the knowledge were given you,
The wall filled with passionate graffiti
(Just the amount of detail is extraordinary),
Why should we not in reason ask why?
Today the mind is not part of the weather.

Michael’s rhetorical prowess is on display here, and the momentum he creates is impressive. The first sentence stretches beautifully across the first two stanzas, 10 lines in all.

These are Michael’s sources:

1. Octavio Paz, “Day”
2. Tom Disch, “Capital Punishment”
3. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”
4. Dorianne Laux, “On the Edge”
5. Antonio Machado, “Always Fugitive, Always Near”
6. Tomas Tranströmer, “From the Winter of 1947”
7. Rabindranath Tagore, “A Hundred Years Hence”
8. Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Dirge Without Music”
9. Amy Clampitt, “Syrinx”
10. Adam Zagajewski, “Poetry Searches for Radiance”
11. Stanley Kunitz, “King of the River”
12. Robert Desnos, “The Satyr”
13. Tom Disch, “D. W. Richmond Gives Directions to the Architect of His Tomb”
14. William Bronk, “The Questions”
15. Wallace Stevens, “A Clear Day and No Memories.”

I love the opening of Paul Michelsen’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Gaslight,” another extraordinary title:

If you are still alive when you read this,
I do not say this in order to wound
I just wanted to tell you
We shadowbox and double-cross
The one you saved, and saved, and saved

“See what they did to me.”
Abandoned too soon, set down with due care.
As Dorothy Parker once said to her boyfriend,
Oblivion is the only forgiveness.
I have forgotten how to sigh—

All those kots and koshkas mewing for moloko and getting none
(It’s your language. I’m just trying to use it.)
Remembered everything I had so long forgotten:
Everything just as it was in nineteen hundred and seventy-six.
Neither the actors nor the audience knew what was coming next.

The sources:

1. Saint Geraud, “Goodbye”
2. Henri Michaux, “I Am Writing to You from a Far-Off Country”
3. James Tate, “Intimidations of an Autobiography”
4. Sade, “Smooth Operator”
5. Gjertrud Schnackenberg, “A Monument in Utopia”
6. Marquis de Sade, Justine
7. Ian Curtis, “Atmosphere”
8. Cole Porter, “Just One of Those Things”
9. Jorge Luis Borges, “Fragments of an Apocryphal Evangelist”
10. Dorothy Parker, “The Danger of Writing Defiant Verse”
11. Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
12. Victor Borge, quoted in his obituary in The Boston Globe
13. Denise Levertov, “A Woman Meets an Old Lover”
14. Adélia Prado, “Invitational”
15. David Lehman, “Amnesia” for Tom Disch

It is a particular pleasure to watch a line from a Cole Porter song (“As Dorothy Parker once said to her boyfriend”) lead to a vatic forecast from Jorge Luis Borges (“Oblivion is the only forgiveness”). To include a line from Ms. Parker in a poem that mentions her is also a shrewd stroke. And how could I not respond joyfully to the conclusion?

In “Calm Before the Storm,” M.D. Skeen picks lines from Coleridge, Byron, Kipling and Longfellow to arrive at what I would characterize as a “wonderful concentrate of Romanticism”:

The star of the unconquered will, he rises in your breast,
Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen-
Serene, and resolute, and still, and calm, and self-possessed.
Those stars, that glide behind them or between,
On that green light that lingers in the west.

As one by one thy hopes depart, be resolute and calm.
Give the gale your sea worn sail in shadow of new skies.
O fear not in a world like this, and thou shalt know erelong,
You shall see old planets change and alien stars arise,
Know how sublime a thing it is to suffer and be strong.

Foretelling the coming-on of rain and squally blast,
The gull shall whistle in your wake, the blind wave break in fire,
And the slant night-shower driving loud and fast.
You shall fulfill God’s utmost will unknowing His desire-
The pall of a past world; and then again with curses cast!

Without specifying which lines came from which poem, M. D. names these four source poems: Coleridge’s “Dejection, an Ode,” Longfellow’s “The Light of Stars,” Kipling’s “The Voortrekker,” and Byron’s “Darkness.”

Borrowing from Wildred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Rachael Watson aims to capture the terrible crash of illusions felt by soldiers exposed to trench warfare in World War I. “Craiglockhart Hospital” is her title:

Soldiers are citizens of death’s grey land,
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Men who went out to battle, grim and glad.

Bugles sang, saddening the evening air,
Winging wildly across the white,
And the Bayonets’ long teeth grinned.

Three of the lines come from Sassoon; the other three from Owen. Rachael alternates between the two:

1. Sassoon’s “Dreamers”
2. Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est”
3. Sassoon’s “Survivors”
4. Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth”
5. Sassoon’s “Everyone Sang”
6. Owen’s “The Last Laugh”

For next time, let us take our point of departure from Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” which begins with the immortal lines, “Come live with me and be my love / and we will all the pleasures prove.” Marlowe’s was the most famous seduction, or invitation, poem of the Elizabethan era. Inspired by it, John Donne wrote “The Bait,” a variant that begins “Come live with me and be my love / and we will some new pleasures prove.” Sir Walter Raleigh wrote a brilliant counter-argument, “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd.”

Marlowe’s strategy was not to persuade by logic (as in Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” which I wrote about here) but to list the pleasures that a union of bodies, minds, and souls would provide. I suggest reading the four poems mentioned here. Then, writing a poem that begins, “Come live with me and be my love,” how would you proceed? How sincere, or ironic, would you be? Would you employ the carpe diem (“seize the day”) argument? Would you use the opportunity to overcome an obstacle in the relationship—or to accompany a present on the beloved’s birthday?

See what you can do in four four-line stanzas. Deadline: 10 days after this post appears. Thanks, everyone!

The post “Come Live with Me and Be My Love” appeared first on The American Scholar.

In the middle of this open, windy region is the town of Medina de Rioseco. Even the name—town of the dry river—suggests heat, dust, and sun. Lying about halfway between the cities of León and Valladolid, it is a handy stopping place to buy bread on our way to a footrace farther east or south. The next day, it is a good spot for a break on the three-hour drive back to Asturias. But the first time we stopped, it was much more: It was a discovery, and I was bewitched. “Where is this?” I wondered, as if we’d come to a new, unknown region, a place apart, a different land.

We parked at the gates of an old convent and walked up the hill, past the big open plaza, and soon we were in a narrow porticoed street, where we walked past ancient buildings with pillars supporting sagging beams in the covered walkway. The pillars were a mix of old wooden columns and stone ones, all different, all astonishing in their size and bulk and age. Thinking about the effort required to smooth the tree trunks and sculpt the stone, then transport and erect the pillars, made them all the more remarkable.

A student of architecture and art would have a field day in Medina de Rioseco. The convent and church of San José, founded in 1598 (Herrerian style); the even older church of Santa María de Mediavilla, begun around 1490 (Gothic with Baroque touches); the oldest church in town, San Francisco, with parts dating from the late 1400s (late Gothic) and housing a collection of sacred art; and the church of Santiago Apóstol, begun in 1533 and built over a century and a half (a mishmash of styles). Then the crumbling façades of the houses showing the traditional construction of adobe bricks set within a timber framework. This was history—not in a book or a yearly celebration of an ancient custom, but history at your shoulder, casting shadows in the street where you walked.

This ancient porticoed street is effectively pedestrian. It is called calle Román Martín until it becomes calle Lázaro Alonso, but the common name is la Rúa. Some souvenir shops and several bakeries operate along it, and at least a dozen bars. Near the western end, at the widening mouth of the street where it spills into the newer part of town, the bars had placed tables on the cobblestones, and on that winter Sunday the area was thronged with townspeople out buying bread or having a drink and a tapa. The Rúa was a wind tunnel, and the air was cold. No sun shone into that street. But people filled the tables anyway, or they leaned against a window ledge. It was a happy throng, laughing, talking loudly, greeting each other or taking leave. We chose a bar, entered, and slipped between the customers to find a spot at the barra, where we ordered a coffee.

While we stood there, a change came. The bar began to empty out. It was fast becoming the lunch hour, and the tables that had stood full when we arrived were patchy with people. We left, too. Outside we found a deserted street instead of the party in full swing. Where had everyone gone? They had sunk back into the crevices of their town, like water receding.

We started back to the car the way we had come, in the dry bed of the ancient street. From that deep channel, I got an occasional glimpse of a church spire, a tall tower, or a bell glinting above as I passed between the rows of columns, some literally made from trees, some resembling trunks. I laid a hand on the cold wood and then on the colder stone of the pillars. Old, yes, with nicks and cracks and gouges from the centuries, but not weak or withered. These enormous pillars were like exposed roots, anchoring the buildings to a dry gully and the town to the broad landscape. We drifted on.

The post Medina de Rioseco appeared first on The American Scholar.

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

The post “Sure on This Shining Night”  by James Agee appeared first on The American Scholar.

Not so very long ago, getting from here to there involved the awkward origami of unfolding a large paper map in the confines of a car, or depending on the kindness of strangers. Only in the past two decades have we shifted our allegiance to the electronic maps easily accessible in our dashboard or pocket. But our confidence in maps, our belief that they mean only to serve us, has always been somewhat naïve. In his classic How to Lie with Maps, the geographer Mark Monmonier explained how maps and their makers have, intentionally or unintentionally, led us astray, whether from the distortions of their projections, from their biases or ignorance (“Here Be Dragons”), or in a desire to favor some information and obscure other information for one purpose or another. Some degree of favoritism is unavoidable: As Denis Wood argues in The Power of Maps, every map is defined by what it omits.

Given our near-universal reliance on apps like Google Maps and Waze for driving, Uber and Lyft for being driven, and AllTrails and Gaia for navigating any land left unroaded, now is the time for an explanation of both what makes digital maps possible and why our trust in them should be something less than absolute.

Katherine Dunn’s Little Blue Dot offers a concise, popular history of the development of a technology that has become deeply integrated into nearly all aspects of our lives. Beyond its civilian functions, GPS has become critical to freight rail networks, international shipping, financial trading, filmmaking, seismic activity monitoring, the U.S. power grid, and of course warfare, adding drama to the discussion. Dunn provides a warning about how vulnerable GPS is and, by extension, how vulnerable we are.

GPS—just one of several global navigation satellite systems (GNSS)—is an outgrowth of the use of radio waves as a tool for military aviation, which allowed Germany to bomb Great Britain in darkened skies during World War II. The desire to destroy targets more precisely is directly responsible for our ability to track our morning run in real time.

The story Dunn tells covers some familiar ground—Marconi’s work on wireless radio transmission, the race between the Soviet Union and the United States to launch a satellite, the failures of precision bombing throughout the Vietnam war—and reminds us of some not-so-distant milestones, including the first production-line car with GPS navigation (Mazda’s Eunos Cosmo, unveiled in 1989), the first GPS-guided cruise missile deployed (1991), and the debut of Google Maps (2005), which catapulted to popularity on the iPhone.

Dunn focuses much of her story on people, from Wernher von Braun and Fred Whipple to Bradford Parkinson and Roger Easton, the latter two having each been credited as the “inventor” of GPS. Rather than take sides, Dunn makes clear that GPS was developed, improved, promoted, and implemented by scores of people. She takes particular interest in lesser-sung heroes like Charlie Mary Noble, namesake of Fort Worth’s Noble Planetarium, a high school math teacher who became legendary for her promotion of astronomy; Gladys West, the Black mathematician who worked to improve the accuracy of missile trajectories by studying variations in Earth’s gravitational field; and Maria Berlinska, a Ukrainian woman who cofounded a free training school for drone pilots in 2015.

Ultimately, the true focus of Little Blue Dot is where things stand now. Although we might appreciate being able to track our luggage or dog with an AirTag, we are understandably wary of being trackable whenever our phone is in our pocket or purse. More ominously, in the less than two decades since so many of us became dependent on GPS, any number of individuals, governments, and criminal networks have been working to undermine it. Some of the most compelling passages in the book are about how GPS has necessitated an ever more precise measurement of time, and about “spoofing”: co-opting a GPS signal and replacing it with false information.

Early on, the U.S. government restricted the use of the most accurate GPS data—after all, it was developed for military purposes—and offered a degraded version to the public. That changed in 2000, not only making readily available locations more accurate but also making the location of an object accurate to within 40 billionths of a second. The GPS signal on a smartphone is, under optimal conditions, accurate to within roughly 16 feet; high-accuracy GNSS can pinpoint a location within two inches.

Spoofing can change the perception of both where something is and when it has passed that location. Dunn describes a 2012 experiment in which a spoofed signal caused a drone’s autopilot to “correct” its course and plunge toward the ground, and another in 2013, when a spoofed signal effectively took over control of a yacht. But those experiments pale compared with the spoofing of navigational signals in Russia, which has led cabs and ships astray and, Dunn writes, allowed Vladimir Putin’s government to protect him from drone attacks; the creation of an electromagnetic “Iron Dome” around all of Israel; and the spoofing in today’s news that allows a ship to disguise its identity, origin, and location in the Strait of Hormuz.

Spoofing and signal jamming have become commonplace in areas of conflict and can also be used to disrupt mobile phone signals. In response to the threat, the U.S. Naval Academy is once again requiring celestial navigation as a core competency, land-based radar towers have been installed, and pilots are being trained, as before, to fly by sight. But the possibility of large-scale interference remains. Some experts say China’s BeiDou satellites have the ability to jam or spoof navigation systems anywhere in the world, even as they offer an advance in two-way communication.

So there it is, yet another double-edged sword—one whose edges are likely to become only sharper as it is wielded in the near future.

The post Where Are We? appeared first on The American Scholar.

Jennie Durant is a writer, researcher, and author whose work explores why bees and other pollinators are declining, and what it will take to build a more just and sustainable food system.

Go beyond the episode:

• Jennie Durant’s Bitter Honey: Big Ag’s Threat to Bees and the Fight to Save Them
• It’s not too late to celebrate Pollinator Week!
• Learn to identify some of the 4,000-odd bee species in North America
• Save the Beltsville Bee Lab!

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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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 The Industrial Revolution of Bees appeared first on The American Scholar.

Not how I imagined meeting my playwright: I emerge from the stall, and there she is. Standing in front of the mirror, she applies makeup, then catches my eye in the reflection. We break into grins.

Oana?

Amanda?

Playwright, meet translator, in the most private public space of a building you love: the bathroom of a theater.

2.

I had flown from New York to Paris a few days before, still tweaked with jet lag as I watched the cooling gray skies from the daybed in my cousin’s apartment. The week before I arrived, Oana had flown from Cluj-Napoca, Romania, for rehearsals at Théâtre Ouvert with her French creative team and translator. They were working on a staged reading of the French version of Scenes from the Life of the Family Stuck, a play I had translated with my father from Romanian into English several years prior.

I had already been planning a trip to the City of Light to meet my cousin and see some theater, and when Oana told me she would be there as well for her workshop, I felt even more motivated to visit. I loved the thought of two Romanian writers meeting up in Paris, where so many Romanian literati and artists found inspiration amid the avenues, gardens, and cemeteries. The works of sculptor Constantin Brâncuși, dramatist Eugène Ionesco, philosopher Emil Cioran, artist Lena Constante, and more floated through my mind, and I felt a swell of pride in myself and Oana, two women theatermakers with our southeastern European roots in this city.

3.

I find my pride turned upside down, the whole situation uproariously funny, as Oana snaps a photo of us in the mirror. We laugh, and I wash my hands. “Translator and playwright in a bathroom” sounds like the setup for a literary groaner. But somehow the casualness of the space makes sense. My romanticized notions come back to earth as I think of the spaces where translation has entered into my life: the stage, the kitchen table, now the bathroom. Tender, messy, vulnerable places.

Happening upon Oana so informally, I feel as if I am running into a classmate, a neighbor, a cousin. Someone not ordinarily on another continent, separated by an ocean, mediated by screens and emails. If history and politics had taken another turn, closeness could have coalesced through physical proximity and culture. Instead, we found each other through drama, translation, and a longing for something just out of our grasp.

One last look in the mirror, and we walk back into the theater lobby.

4.

My parents met in Bucharest in the ’70s, two free spirits in the spheres of travel and politics. My mother worked as a press attaché for the Philippine embassy in Romania, and my father as a guide for the national department of tourism. One of the photos I have of them from this era, a glossy black-and-white, shows them seated on an armchair and couch in a lamp-lit, wood-paneled room decorated with framed landscape paintings of large trees. Dressed in business attire with legs crossed and absorbed in their own activities, my father reads a magazine, my mother takes notes. (Scholars—or nerds—through and through.) They married in Bucharest in 1980, and as the Ceaușescu regime took a darker turn, they fled to the States shortly after and made their home in Washington, D.C., and then Virginia, where they had first my brother and then me.

My father avoided speaking Romanian—or rather, avoided speaking to Romanians—when he first arrived. Too much trauma from communism, too much distrust of a surveillance state that forced family members and neighbors to report on one another. English was a new start, not to mention the language that he and my mother shared. Two kinds of accented American English filled our house, peppered with phrases from four Philippine languages and the occasional Romanian word. Not until I was 14, when a friend told me he liked my mother’s accent, did I realize that my parents sounded different from the people around us.

5.

“Translators like to say, we discover our authors,” writes translator and novelist Anton Hur. “But maybe we’re wrong. Maybe the books choose us.”

I find this to be also true of the theater, for both translators and playwrights—the plays choose us. Writing dialogue is not unlike tuning a radio, finding the clearest frequency amid static, music, other voices. Ultimately, playwriting is an exercise in listening.

As a theater translator, I find myself sifting through plays as if through photographs, waiting for a familiar face or location to jump out at me. I skim the scripts written in the language of my father, looking for words that pop, characters that excite, stories that I might have written if I had grown up in Romania. In this case, translating is an exercise in looking.

6.

This is how I found Oana’s play—or rather, how it found me. In 2022, about a year into my literary translation practice, I was perusing an online Romanian library looking for poetry, short stories, and—mostly—plays.

In this way, I found my first Romanian play, Brancusi v. United States by Tatiana Niculescu, and I became hungry for more voices, especially from living women playwrights. Reading and translating their dialogue became a way to understand myself as a woman of Romanian descent and what themes and details we had in common, whether it was writing satirically about international modern art or observing how children cradled farm animals.

During the quiet days between Christmas and New Year’s, I scrolled through a collection of plays from the Cluj Reactor Drama 5, a residency for Romanian playwrights. I paused when I saw Oana’s script, noticing the modular format, the short scenes scattered like snapshots. The long and loose sentences, indented phrases. The playwright’s name, Oana, formatted and repeating as a character name, signaling to me the writer’s predilection for self-reflection and doubling. The words for father— tată, tata, tatăl—scattered like familiar fingerprints across the page.

I imagine that the play saw me, too, a woman in the diaspora looking for her roots. Despite not being fluent in Romanian, I could feel the play calling me.

7.

A week into the new year, I found Oana’s email and asked her whether the English-language rights to her play were available. She emailed back within a few days with enthusiasm and a private link to the scanned archival photos that had inspired her, adding that my message had brought her “unexpected joy.” I turned this phrase over like a gem, delighted that translation could open up this emotion, not only for her but also for me.

8.

When Oana was in a Cluj flea market in 2016, she bought a box of old film negatives. Cleaned and developed, the black-and-white images depicted the daily life of an anonymous Romanian family and its travels throughout Eastern Europe. Gradually, she began to imagine and write stories around these mysterious people and places. She created a book, an installation, and eventually a play—Scene din viaţa familiei Stuck, an experimental work containing 49 short scenes and vignettes.

She named the family “Stuck” (pronounced shtook) and created characters from the photos: mothers, sons, relatives, as well as neighbors, colleagues, and passersby on the street. She imagined the father figure of this family—Janus Stuck—based on one portrait in particular. In it, a bespectacled man reads in a tent, while holding something in his mouth: a leaf, a small flower, a matchstick—too hard to make out from the photograph.

Oana, the playwright, records these observations as a monologue spoken by Oana, the character, in the fourth vignette of the play:

I returned to this image time and time again. I don’t know who this man is, and I didn’t have any intention of finding out. I am afraid that facing reality would destroy the embroidery I keep stitching around this family.

In this portrait, though, there’s something that speaks about him in a loud voice. I named him, playfully, Janus Stuck.

So, who is Janus Stuck?

9.

The online repository that Oana sent me contained 26 folders, each labeled “film” with a corresponding number. Inside each folder were a dozen or so photos. Ruins of cathedrals. Trees laden with snow. A woman in a bathing suit with sunglasses pushed up on her forehead, looking down and away from the camera, presumably at a book, while she sunbathes at the beach. The metal crescent moon atop a mosque. (I recognized this place as Constanţa near the Black Sea, for like hundreds of other tourists, I have stood in this same position and taken this same photo.) A little boy, maybe eight years old, wearing a white beard, a pointed hat, and the festive fur-trimmed robes of Moș Crăciun—Santa Claus—standing inside a carpeted room next to the skeleton of a tinseled tree, tabletop games strewn about his feet. The same woman from the beach, now propping her head on her hand, a flash of light interfering with the camera and covering her chest as her gaze, deep in concentration, drifts away from the photographer.

10.

One of my favorite parts of the play occurs before any scenes begin, with a stage direction that my father and I translated as: In a potential staging, one can use all the scenes or just some of them. Their order may be modified.

I think of most plays as blueprints for a production, but with this stage direction, I imagine this play as a blueprint cut into a hundred pieces that can be reassembled in thousands of ways for wildly different outcomes. It mirrors my fixations around translation, how there can be multiple choices for a single word, phrase, or sentence, but ultimately, a translator must make a decision and proceed. But that doesn’t prevent future translators from making different choices, like a director developing a vision for a new production of a familiar play.

The dizzying array of choices also echoes my feelings around diaspora and immigration, how speaking a language, falling in love, leaving a home, applying for citizenship, all could go down thousands of paths, but somehow, only one version of a life exists.

11.

The first vignette in the script begins with an audio recording of the mother of Janus Stuck reminiscing about a camping trip they took when he was five years old. In later vignettes, other characters—acquaintances, neighbors, coworkers—speak about Janus’s temperament, with Character Oana occasionally asking them questions. Anonymous characters drift in, narrating dreamlike episodes of moving through empty houses, collecting objects, ruminating on love and death among family members.

12.

As Oana and I emailed each other, I learned that she named Janus Stuck as a play on the phrase io nu știu, Romanian for “I don’t know.” I also like the English meaning of stuck, as if the family is waiting for something or someone, and the pronunciation of Stuck. I roll the word around in my mouth, enjoying the hard K that comes out. I know that my translation with my dad might read as too close to the Romanian, a little less fluid than how an American might say things, but I want these non-English sounds and grammatical structures to be in the text. They remind me of hearing Romanian as a child.

13.

Janus also comes from the Roman god of doors, gates, passageways, paths, transitions, beginnings, and endings. Depicted with two heads facing in opposite directions, the deity also lends his name to the month of January. Is he coming or going? Maybe both at once.

14.

Scene 40 is where I fell in love with the play. Janus describes driving his laboring wife to the hospital for the birth of their second child on a snowy day. At the end of his reminiscence, Character Oana shares a similar memory of her own birth, to which Janus responds: If you don’t mind me asking, who are you?

As in Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, the theatrical character turns on the theatermaker, asking questions and sharing his own story (but of course, one written for him by the playwright). As Janus and Character Oana converse, with the former asking the latter to leave him alone, yet still sharing details about his fictional background, it’s a moment of recursive madness. The madness turns tender when Oana asks Janus to be her father, comic when he immediately replies, No.

Despite their back and forth, he eventually advises her to go her own way in life:

I don’t know your father, but I am sure that he, like me, is an ordinary man, like all our peers. Same lack of power, same weakness, same bastards. The ground is sliding under our feet and we try to stay upright as best we can.

As my dad and I translated these lines, I wondered how many times he had felt that the ground was sliding out from under him.

15.

Translating with my father has two potential origin stories.

In 2017, I moved with my husband and young children to Los Angeles for a graduate degree in playwriting. I began drafting Lena Passes By, a diasporic fable about a Filipina-Romanian-American superhero who travels to Bucharest to find a magical ingredient to cure her ailing Romanian father. Despite her supernatural talents, Lena herself does not speak Romanian until she eats an enchanted bowl of mămăligă, a polenta-like dish, offered by trickster cousins. Suddenly, she is as fluent as if she had always lived around Romanians. Her transformation is represented by the cousins’ speech, which at first is Romanian, then accented English, and finally American English for the remainder of the play.

When I first started this play, I would write the characters’ dialogue in English, then ask my father to translate the relevant scenes into Romanian. With great patience, he would sound out the words over the phone and describe the letters to me, which I would repeat back, asking whether he meant a with a hat (a-circumflex, â), a with a cup (a-breve, ă ) or i with a hat (i-circumflex, î ). Or he would Anglicize the orthography, turning ţ into tz, or ș into sh. I would ask, t with a tail? s with a tail? I wanted to see the diacritics on the page, to see these markings that reminded me of letters and books from my childhood home.

Later, I would ask Romanian friends living in Romania to check the dialogue, trading bilingual conversational lessons over Zoom for the work done. When Lena Passes By had its first staged reading in May 2020 as a culmination of my degree, it was performed virtually because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Though the thrill of live theater felt subdued, and Zoom’s features at the time limited simultaneous speaking (so we had to adjust the play’s choral and chanting effects), I took heart in the fact that not only did the actors speak their bilingual dialogue beautifully, but my father, across the country in Virginia, was also watching online.

When I asked him later what he thought, he said he didn’t quite get it but was happy to hear my voice.

16.

My second translation origin story begins in 2021, when my interest in literary translation was sparked by an introductory online class for which participants did not need to be fluent in the language they were translating but could simply have a working knowledge of it. At this point, I’d had two major changes in my Romanian American cultural experience.

First, motivated to write the characters for Lena Passes By, I had improved my own language skills by taking a summer school session of Romanian. Second, because of the pandemic, my father had moved from Virginia to Los Angeles to live with us.

The online instructor asked us to translate an excerpt from a popular fiction piece (originally written in English) into the language of our choice. As I looked at the Romanian words that encapsulated the familiar story, all the As with hats and cups, all the Ts and Ss with tails, I was surprised by how much Romanian I remembered. I next translated a poem from a Romanian children’s book into English and took the first draft to my father. No longer having to call or email, I crossed the living room and knocked on his bedroom door.

I was expecting a few notes on words or phrases, but he got up, walked to the kitchen table, and put on his glasses. He sat down, picked up the paper, and began to read aloud. As he switched between Romanian and English, I started taking notes, correcting my mistakes, and including variations on phrases in the margins. I asked him about the next sentence, and the next.

Over the next few days, we continued to meet at the kitchen table until I had English drafts of all the poems in that book.

17.

When I am translating a Romanian text with my dad, I feel as if I am in rehearsal. This act of translation is not the game of improv that Romanian conversation is. I am not so much put on the spot, heart racing, nervous system alert, tongue sore after an hour of conversation in a new but familiar language, one whose sounds my mouth and teeth cannot quite shape despite what my ears detect. I resort to gestures and smiles, laughter and Rominglish, streaked with the pain of not knowing this language yet eager with the desire to be understood.

No, as a translator, I can backtrack, experiment, slow down, take my time. As in rehearsal, the fun and discovery come from repetition and variation on a moment. I’m still in relation with another person but mediating through their written words, fixed by the marks on the page and meandering around those letters. As in rehearsal, my different choices will lead to a different performance. I am an actor, uncovering multiple meanings and choosing one. I am a director, taking those choices and shaping them into a vision for an audience. And my father becomes my scene partner, volleying the words back and forth until we find the ones that satisfy us.

18.

I introduce Oana and my cousin in the Théâtre Ouvert lobby. My cousin is also Romanian, but her parents settled in Paris while she was a child, in the early ’80s, around the same time my parents left for the United States. I consider her as French as I am American.

Sometimes I wonder how my life would be different if my parents shared French instead of English. Would they have remained in Europe, or gone to Canada? Would I see my cousin more than once every few years? Would I have been able to learn Romanian more easily, having already learned a Romance language?

I don’t understand French, but I still expect to understand this performance. Even if the language is different, its heart is the same.

19.

My father, fluent in Romanian, is not necessarily fluent in the language of the stage. When we translate, he sometimes reads the Romanian to himself, then translates aloud into English. Occasionally he stops, furrows his brow, and repeats the sentence as a question. I usually respond, No, I get it—I get it. I see what a director can do.

I might close my eyes. Behind the language, I can see the movement onstage. The empty space, now filled with shadow and light.

Oana’s play is particularly abstract. In Scene 27, we come to a melee of characters, with the stage direction setting the scene: Fragments of eavesdropping you might want to share with someone else—

One character speaks loudly on the phone: Pista died. Pista died … Pista, man, died … Died. Died! Meghalt. Died, man … died!

It’s very absurdist, my dad says, his voice wrapped in a doubtful chuckle, as if he is not sure what he just said or how it builds the story. Despite my dad’s hesitation about the play’s logic, I can hear and see how actors would inflect their voices, play with a phone prop, gesture wildly, or commit to stillness. I can imagine how a director would offer different guidance based on the feeling or mood he or she might want from the scene.

I write down the English words, which are ultimately traces of emotion for an actor to follow, to make decisions for breath and sound.

20.

My early memories of my father’s native language summon up liminal spaces—cars, hallways—and unseen listeners. Invisible scene partners, offstage characters.

As a child, buckled in the back seat of our red Toyota, I heard Romanian swear words in conjunction with a jolt—my father hitting the brakes to avoid an oncoming car. The language was instinctual, fiery, a weapon against stupidity or a defense against impending danger.

In another memory, I lingered in the hallway outside my parents’ bedroom while my father spoke on the black cordless phone to his mother. We all referred to her as “Granny,” and she lived back in Bucharest. This time the language was soft, explanatory, somehow wounded but also hopeful. I would hear my name and my brother’s rolled into their conversation.

Granny spoke Romanian, French, and scant English. When my father would hand the phone to me, I would try out a tentative, Ce faci? followed by many mhmms and I love you. Te iubesc? Love you …

But also in this sea of conversation was my name, slightly varied. A small suffix to make it diminutive, loved. Amanduța.

Though Amanda speaks English, she still has a Romanian name. She exists in another version.

21.

In his essay “The Strangeness of the Theater Translator,” William Gregory writes that among the fields of translation, theater “is the least well-defined, most misunderstood, and, dare I say, marginal of translation specializations,” with these practitioners asserting and redefining themselves in three communities: theater, academia, and literary translation.

Because of my diasporas—my parents from different continents and races, speaking different languages—it’s precisely within these margins and multiple communities that I feel myself thriving. Yes, a minority. Yes, in need of constant redefinition because if anything, theater workers are shapeshifters. We are accustomed to altering the emptiness of the stage and adapting to our bodies’ needs in the moment, how a gesture in a performance on one night might change because of a broken prop or surprised timing. No matter how many times we repeat something, it becomes new because the moment is new.

And translators are shapeshifters. We move words back and forth, we consider different versions, alternative visions. What do we want to prioritize in our translation? Lyricism, rhyme, meaning, emotion? (Which emotion?) What shape will we shift our translation into?

22.

Once, I acted as Oana. At a translation conference in 2024, I chose an excerpt of Scene 40—the scene where Oana asks Janus to be her father—for a public reading. A friend and fellow translator read for Janus, and I took on the Oana persona.

The playwright who translated the play was now also the actor who was playing the character of the playwright who wrote the original play. Look at that last sentence—full of play. Roles like nesting dolls, playwright-translator-actor-character vibrating around a persistent core, the desire of a woman (me? Oana?) to understand her father, to tap into the mystery of family and embrace it.

In a photo of that reading, my black T-shirt is partially blocked by my arm, but it reads, NOI HOTĂRÂM CE POVESTE NE SPUNEM.

We decide what story we tell ourselves.

23.

When I worked with a theater company in Los Angeles to mount a staged reading of Oana’s play in 2024, we rehearsed in a community darkroom. Cameras and photography equipment spilled from the boxes around us. We were a team of seven: myself, the director, and five actors, including a Romanian actress originally from Bucharest and a mixed Filipina actress reading the role of Character Oana.

Now in our rehearsal space, I felt less like a translator making decisions about words and sentences and more like a dramaturg. I provided cultural and historical background and the occasional pronunciation note. The Romanian actress in our group would also fill in gaps, providing context (such as how people in Romania today celebrate certain holidays) and an alternative sound to my American-accented Romanian.

Our script-in-hand performance took place on a bare auditorium stage. As usual with standard American staged readings, there were no props, no additional sound effects or lights. Sitting in five chairs in a line, the actors propped their binder scripts on the black music stands before them. I didn’t take my father to that reading. Those days, he had too much trouble staying seated for long, his arthritic knees and joints the culprit.

But I did bring my daughter. Eight years old, she curled up in the seat next to me in the auditorium and whispered, You and Tata Ursu translated this?

Yes, I said. And now the actors will share it with us.

24.

In Paris, I note the differences in how the French team has arranged the rehearsal room. Tables and chairs form a semicircle. Props—cassettes, boxes, and an audiotape player—sit on a table. This performance brings the technology from the script onto the stage, making the story feel more archival and material, emphasizing the vintage machines that captured moments from my parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

As the play starts, I hear the mother of Janus Stuck, her words spoken not through a live actor, as in my version of the American staged reading, but instead through the audiotape—a recording as the playwright intended, frothy with static. In my memory, I hear my grandmother’s voice on the telephone. Romanian, French, or English: What lies behind the sound is a persistent desire, a dialogue between separated family members.

25.

I can’t quite follow the French, but I know this play so intimately that I can perceive the through line among the vignettes. When we arrive at Scene 40, in which Oana asks Janus to be her father, I find myself surprised. I cannot help but compare it with the LA version, where the actress chose to portray American Character Oana as vulnerable, pleading, hesitant, thinking that she could be rejected at any moment. In this version, French Character Oana bravely asks Janus to be her father—inviting him to the role as if it would be an honor. She need not implore or petition.

I wonder whether I missed something in the Romanian, or whether the French translation just happens to be more confident. Or perhaps the director simply envisioned a more self-assured Oana, either from the text or this specific actor.

As a theatergoer, I am happy that the actor committed to the choice and followed through in creating a character who is unwaveringly sure of her invitation. As a translator, I am curious. As an American in the Romanian diaspora, I wonder what that kind of confident, playful relationship with a father would look like.

26.

As my father navigates elderhood, I find myself navigating my own journey as a daughter also turning into a caretaker. I add his medical appointments to my calendar. I serve him the same food as I do the kids. Occasionally, I lecture him about watching too much YouTube on his phone, but I pipe down if I hear that it is Romanian language news. I know that he is reconnecting with his homeland in the ways available to him.

Translation becomes a place where we can have the kind of confident, playful relationship that I see in the French version of Oana’s play. This translator relationship shifts our other bonds and ties. The script becomes a place to discover Romanian in a new light, and our identities of father and daughter move to the background, clearing space for new identities to emerge, such as scene partner and detective, with words as clues for our characters’ own identities.

Take the word meghalt in the abstract Scene 27. My father did not know its meaning but guessed that it was Hungarian. I searched for it online, and we discovered that it meant “died,” a semantic repetition of the original Romanian word and our English version. But now, I suggested, this could mean that the character—or the person to whom the character was speaking—was Hungarian, or at least spoke that language. My father, born and raised in Bucharest, then suggested that other words had Hungarian (and subsequently, Transylvanian) connotations, making it easier for us to understand names like Pista and exclamations like fain (“great!” or “cool!”).

In another instance, we looked through the photos in the online archive in hopes they would help us better understand the play. Staring at one monochromatic image, we noticed Cyrillic letters on a university building. My father, required to take Russian under communism, knew the alphabet and began to translate. I Googled the letters, and we found that the university is in Bulgaria.

I marvel that my father contains so much language.

27.

Even though my father is far away as I watch this French performance of Oana’s play, I am pleased that my cousin can be with me. My cousin, who actually knew our grandmother in person, who could speak to her in Romanian. My cousin, who also studies drama. I feel sober joy that the absence of my father is filled by the gracious presence of my cousin. I sense that this play is traveling not only through cultures, countries, and languages, but also through generations. And somehow, through my family.

I write notes in a little white notebook, and I notice my cousin is doing the same on a piece of paper. Later, she will hand me the notes, written in French and blue ink, promising to translate them into English later.

28.

As my cousin and I leave the theater and step into the lamplit evening, we bid Oana goodbye and walk to the Métro, discussing the play. Days later, Oana and I will meet again, this time outside the Théâtre de la Concorde after a matinee. It will be raining, as it does in Paris in autumn, and I will have forgotten my umbrella, but I will bow my head and pull my black rain jacket over myself.

Oana and I will walk to a touristy bistro, the only place open during this sleepy hour between lunch and dinner. We will order crème brûlée and wine, talk about theater and our writing projects, and say how happy we are to have finally met.

In this moment, I will feel that I am part of the Stuck family. I, too, have imagined the possible futures, journeys, and languages of this family and mine through playwriting and translating. The world of Romania, which I knew most directly through my father instead of a larger cultural milieu, has become more nuanced and textured. Every play I translate with my father will continue to widen the aperture of what I know about his old home. Oana’s play in particular has transformed a world of communism, trauma, and escape into a place of dreams, poetry, and the recovery of one’s family. Together, my father and I have made blueprints for more homes.

Somehow, this little family—whether through photos, drama, or translation—travels on.

The post Found in Translation appeared first on The American Scholar.

Besides unpredictable spelling, a ton of irregular verbs, and the innumerable phrasal verbs to get a handle on, my students must master the natural but not so obvious pairings of particular words. Collocations, they are called. Every language has them, but in your own language, it doesn’t seem you are doing anything special when you mention your mother tongue, not your mother language. You may think you have simply united two ordinary words, but linguists say otherwise: Collocations are habitual word pairings, favored by native speakers, who use them instinctively. Until students too can use collocations, their English might be correct, but it will not sound natural.

So how does a student learn these collocations? There are no grammatical rules to guide you, only your ear. “It doesn’t sound right,” I might say to the student who describes last week’s wind as a heavy wind.

“Is it wrong?”

“No, not exactly. But we just wouldn’t say that.”

Nobody pushes me to explain why, though a few students over the years have shown frustration instead of stoically accepting the slow route of accumulating exposure. They want the fast route of memorizing rules. But there is no fast track to English proficiency.

I feel bad anyway for having no better explanation. I mean, saying, You just have to know seems like shutting a door in their faces. Fumble around, I’m essentially saying, until you become enlightened. And good luck with that.

One day in one of my classes, however, I realized that I had a way to ease my burden, and she was sitting right in front of me. It was Silvia, pale and quiet, with long wavy dark hair and a round face, pretty without the least show of effort or exuberance. She was the youngest of the three students and had an infallible ear. She, I thought, could be my alternative authority. So when her classmate says strong rain, I turn to Silvia. “Is that how you would say it?”

Silvia makes a face to express her discomfort and shakes her head slowly, regretfully. I prompt her. “What would you say instead?”

“Maybe heavy rain?” she suggests in her tentative way. I smile in triumph.

In my 12 years of teaching at this academy, I have met no one with better instincts. As her English develops—not getting better, just wider and deeper—and my English grows a little sluggish, I find I sometimes turn to her not to substitute for me but to inform me when I am in doubt. If Silvia would say it, it’s okay. If she gives me an alternative, her word is the better one. I trust her ear even more than my own.

The only student to rival her, from several years before Silvia appeared, was also named Silvia. What is it about the name, I wondered. “Who was that terrific student?” someone might ask. “You must mean Silvia,” I’ll be able to say with total confidence. And some longing. The Seekers, in their 1964 hit “I’ll Never Find Another You,” sang of knowing the impossibility of ever finding a replacement for the beloved. “I’ll never find another you,” sings Judith Durham, and I could have told the first Silvia the same thing. To my surprise, I did find another Silvia—Silvia 2. What are the chances of finding yet another Silvia?

In the 1972 hit “Sylvia’s Mother,” by Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show, the mother of a girl named Sylvia intercepts a call from a boyfriend desperate to speak to the girl he loves. But Silvia is on a different path now, headed into a new life, marrying a new fellow. “Don’t say something to make her start crying again,” the mother warns. No need for the warning, really, because the mother doesn’t let them talk. So it goes—find your Silvia and then lose your Silvia. Happens all the time. But I still want to know—how often do you have the luck to find two Silvias? Where did they come from? Must be the mothers. Silvia’s mothers. Practically a collocation.

The post Silvia’s Mother appeared first on The American Scholar.

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

The post “Hope” by Lisel Mueller appeared first on The American Scholar.

Moreno divides his work into two categories: caprichos—which include more classic still lifes and cheeky depictions of squirrels eating pizza—and history paintings, which often take him a year to complete and reflect a myriad of art-history source material. The exhibition at Dallas Contemporary combines both, showcasing Moreno’s talent for juxtaposing lighter, goofier subject matter with meditations on the past, present, and future of Latino culture. His speculative painting Family Vacation, for example, reimagines what would have happened if “a Pan-American civilization had conquered Florence,” he says. The subjects are “just on a family vacation; their private jet is designed with Colombian gold, they’re picnicking on a Peruvian War tunic, she’s wearing a dress she bought in Mexico. And then you see these Mayan and Aztec pyramids in the back that are taller than the Duomo, because when the Spanish would conquer, they would always try to build taller than the preexisting buildings.” Moreno doesn’t want to paint didactic “propaganda,” and admits his narratives “are a little nebulous.” But more important to him is his art’s broad appeal: The works unite five-year-old kids, who get especially excited about the squirrel paintings, with academics who enjoy poring over Moreno’s layers of visual allusions. It has been a dream come true for “people to venture into my brain,” he says. “I feel very privileged to have that.”

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“There’s been a heap of Juneteenths before this one and I’ll tell
you there’ll be a heap more before we’re truly free. Yes! But keep
to the rhythm, just keep to the rhythm and keep to the way.”
—Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth

Juneteenth is a word that glows with wonder. Literally, it names a day in African-American and American history: June 19, 1865. You would never know that without closing your eyes and diving into the past. On that day, the ship carrying Union Army Major General Gordon Granger anchored in Galveston Harbor. He disembarked and spoke to a large crowd of predominantly African-American men, women, and children still held in slavery in Texas more than two months after the April 9, 1865 surrender of the Confederate States of America at Appomattox.

Texas was remote from the battles of the Civil War, and Texans were the last Americans to hear of abolition. Because cotton needed picking, the plantation owners who had kept their slaves in the dark about the Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Lincoln on January 1, 1863, also kept silent about the unconditional abolition of slavery mandated by the 13th amendment, passed by Congress on January 31, 1865. Texas was a long way from Washington, and slave owners saw no reason to acknowledge black freedom any time soon.

But the slaves in and around Galveston had heard enough whispers to know something big was up. When Granger’s 2,000 Union soldiers spread the word that the general would speak to all Texans, free and slave alike, the slaves answered the call, ignoring their masters’ orders to stay away. And so, with his soldiers present along with thousands of Texans, black and white, slave and free, Granger read the order that “in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” The federal order stipulated “an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves,” and stipulated further that “the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired laborer.”

The order concluded with a series of admonitions and prohibitions aimed at the former slaves. “The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”

That’s the public record, those the official words of June 19, 1865. There is a quality of stern foreboding as well as sobriety about these words. The contagious joy of Juneteenth is nowhere in the language.

Juneteenth is not there, and its spirit is also missing. For Juneteenth is private, informal, intimate. Juneteenth is culture. Juneteenth was and is the storytelling, myth, and language of African-American tradition that transformed that particular day into a singular day, and gave all Americans who wanted it the soul of Juneteenth.

Juneteenth was then and remains now poetry.

As the late Michael S. Harper begins his great poem, “Here Where Coltrane Is”:

Soul and race
are private dominions,
memories and modal
songs …

On that first Juneteenth 155 years ago and every Juneteenth since, freed men, women, and children, and later their descendants, go off on their own to absorb the indelible grief of slavery, of “many thousand gone,” as the sorrow song has it, and celebrate and begin to shape the freedom that is theirs and yet to be theirs. I do not imagine them deciding immediately to give the day a name of their choosing or doing so in definite, deliberate, conscious fashion. I imagine these joyous human beings each pinched his or her self and then each other, telling different and similar stories of how it felt to be free. Surely Michael Harper was right that “soul and race” belong to private space, and on Juneteenth the new space the former slaves shared with one another became a unique dominion in America.

Although Juneteenth was an elision of June and 19th, I do not believe the inspired word came about methodically, through a sorting out. First there had to be hand clapping and foot stomping, dancing and singing, eating and drinking and hugging with lots of shouts of free and freedom in different keys until the rhythm expressed feelings in common. According to Ernest J. Gaines’s Miss Jane Pittman, “This what the people was singing: ‘We free, we free, we free / We free, we free, we free … / Oh, Lordy, we free.’ ” In the beginning was the word, and that word, Juneteenth, is a single utterance of African-American vernacular, improvised in the crucible of slavery, suffered and survived by individuals who were (and are) also a people. It is a word simultaneously true to the past, present, and future.

A hundred years after Juneteenth took hold as the sacred, spoken word of a free people, Ralph Waldo Ellison, author of Invisible Man and proud descendant of slaves on both sides of his family, published in the Quarterly Review of Literature  “Juneteenth,” a magnificent chapter from his novel in progress. In the piece, Reverend Alonzo Hickman improvises a rich vernacular sermon on Juneteenth night to a congregation of 5,000 souls assembled outdoors in Georgia a decade or two into the 20th century. Boldly, Ellison summons the sermon from the memory of Senator Adam Sunraider, formerly called Bliss. Reverend Hickman had long ago literally midwifed Bliss into the world, and named him. After his white mother deserts the baby, Hickman, helped by the women of his congregation, raises Bliss, and makes him into a boy preacher who plays a central role in the call-and-response of Hickman’s preaching. Later, on the cusp of adolescence, young Bliss runs away.

Later still, Bliss, now self-named Adam Sunraider, becomes a race-baiting senator from a New England state. Gravely wounded by an assassin’s bullet on the floor of the Senate, Bliss/Sunraider spots Hickman in the gallery and demands that Hickman and only Hickman be brought to his intensive care room in the hospital. There the grown man experiences again the love he had for the Reverend Hickman long ago: “Ah yes, yes, I loved him. Everyone did, deep down. Like a great, kindly daddy bear along the streets, my hand lost in his huge paw … The true father, but black, black.” The dying senator remembers vividly the Juneteenth sermon in which Hickman uses Ezekiel’s dream of Dry Bones to telescope the story of African Americans from their capture in Africa through the middle passage to show slavery as a time when the souls of the slaves “were dead, Lord, dead! Except … ” for a single nerve from every part of the body, especially “from our heart.” In America, as slaves “we had received a new song in a new land and been resurrected by the Word and Will of God.”

Subtly, the time of Hickman’s sermon shifts from slavery to the partial freedom proclaimed by Juneteenth and its aftermath, where freedom is part truth, part illusion. As Hickman tells it, rhythm stands for the force of personality and culture that makes black Americans complete as individuals and a people even as they “keep inching along like an old inchworm” toward freedom.

In Hickman’s, and Ellison’s, words: “There’s been a heap of Juneteenths before this one and I tell you there’ll be a heap more before we’re truly free! Yes! But keep to the rhythm, just keep to the rhythm and keep to the way. … Time will come round when we’ll have to be their eyes; time will swing and turn back around.”

Ellison (and Hickman) had it right: “there’ll be a heap more before we’re truly free.” The we is all of us, not only African Americans, but all of the American people, every individual one of us.

In the fraught present moment of the 2020 Juneteenth celebration, one fitting expression of the timely timelessness that accompanies becoming “truly free” would be for the 45th president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, to ask the Congress of the United States to declare Juneteenth a permanent national holiday.

The post “A Heap of Juneteenths” appeared first on The American Scholar.

Portis was a newspaperman by trade, starting off at the Arkansas Gazette, moving to the Memphis Commercial Appeal, and becoming, in the early 1960s, part of the legendary stable of feature journalists (Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Jimmy Breslin) at the New York Herald Tribune, before going on to head the Herald Tribune’s London bureau. In his reporting on the early days of the civil rights movement—reports that are classics of understatement—Portis uses references to cars as a tongue-in-cheek way of summing up dubious characters. At the end of a Ku Klux Klan rally in Birmingham, he writes, “Everyone drifted away and the grand dragon of Mississippi disappeared grandly into the Southern night, his car engine hitting on about three cylinders.”

“An Auto Odyssey Through Darkest Baja,” published in the Home magazine of the Los Angeles Times in 1967, is an automotive adventure that begins with Portis’s search for just the right vehicle for the trip, which he finds on a used-car lot in Santa Monica: “It was a rat-colored 1952 half-ton Studebaker pickup. Just the thing. It had character and looked eager to please.” Because the pickup sports a diamond-shaped ornament on its tailgate, Portis and his companion Andy decide to call it, “in our humorous way,” “the Diamondback Rattler.” Rumbling along more than 1,000 miles of rutted, sandy, head-rattling Baja California roads, the Studebaker truck becomes as much a character as Portis and Andy. From the opening chapter of Portis’s first novel, Norwood, published in 1966, we learn not only that the eponymous main character is a Korean War veteran who has hopes of becoming a country music star on the Louisiana Hayride, where Hank Williams got his start, but also that he “had bought a 1947 Fleetline Chevrolet with dirt dobber nests in the heater and radio for fifty dollars. He put in some rings and ground the valves and got it in fair running shape.”

The first couple of sentences of Portis’s third novel, The Dog of the South, tell us, “My wife Norma had run off with Guy Dupree and I was waiting around for the credit card billings to come in so I could see where they had gone.” Ray Midge is upset that Dupree has absconded with his “good raincoat and a shotgun and perhaps some other articles” and that he was “cruising the deserts of Mexico in my Ford Torino with my wife and my credit cards and his black-tongued dog.” But what really gets Midge’s goat is that in place of the Torino, Dupree has left behind his 1963 Buick Special, “a compact car, a rusty little piece of basic transportation with a V-6 engine.” I used to drive a Buick Special of that vintage myself, so I can sympathize. “That car had 74,000 miles on it and the speedometer cable was broken. There was a hole in the floor on the driver’s side and when I drove over something white the flash between my feet made me jump.”

Portis likes to tell his stories in the voice of first-person narrators. Some of these characters, like Midge, are delightfully full of themselves and comically self-deluded. In The Dog of the South, we get some insight into the conflicts of his marriage from Midge’s obsession with the tape he has made of a lecture by one Dr. Buddy Casey, a history professor at Ole Miss, concerning the Siege of Vicksburg. Portis, like some of his characters, came from one of the last generations of southern men to have real knowledge of the Civil War. But few men carried their interest in military history to such extremes as Midge:

I liked to play [the tape] in the morning while I was shaving. I also played it sometimes in the car when Norma and I went for drives. It was one of those performances—“bravura” is the word for it—that never become stale. Dr. Bud made the thing come alive. With nothing more than his knuckles and the resonating sideboards of his desk he could give you caissons crossing a plank bridge, and with his dentures and inflated cheeks and moist thick lips he could give you a mortar barrage in the distance and rattling anchor chains and lapping water and hissing fuses and neighing horses. … I say I “had” the tape. It disappeared suddenly and Norma denied that she had thrown it away. After making a few inquiries and turning the apartment upside down I let the matter drop. That was my way.

Much less has been written about Portis’s native state than most of the other 10 states of the old Confederacy. When you cross the Mississippi River into Arkansas, you feel you have left the Deep South and entered an in-between region bordering on the Southwest. You start to see people wearing cowboy hats and boots, farms being called ranches, oil beginning to rival cotton as a way of making money. Roy Blount Jr., comparing Portis to another southern-born novelist who was drawn to the West, has commented that the Arkansan “could be Cormac McCarthy if he wanted to, but he’d rather be funny.” Portis was born in a small town just outside El Dorado, Arkansas, a city of some 17,000 inhabitants that struck it rich during the oil boom of the 1920s. A friend of mine hailed from nearby Smackover, a name he explained as being derived from the town’s location “smack over the river” from El Dorado. But Portis was a scholar of history; he contended the name was “an Arkansas rendering of ‘chemin couvert,’ covered path, or road” from the days when this territory belonged to France before the Louisiana Purchase. Who knew?

No other novelist captures the modern American attraction to unsupported fringe beliefs, crackpot schemes, and cults and renders it with such mordant glee as Portis. One of my favorite purveyors of this sort of hogwash is Dr. Reo Symes, owner of the broken-down school bus from which Portis’s third novel takes its title: “ ‘The Dog of the South’ … was painted in black on one side, but not by a sign painter with a straight-edge and a steady hand. The big childish letters sprawled at different angles and dribbled at the bottom.” Symes is a man with a dubious past: “He said he had had very little trouble with the law in recent years, although he had been arrested twice in California: once for disturbing divine service, and again for impersonating a naval officer.” Symes’s mother owns some property in Louisiana, and he has some ideas about how to develop it:

How about a theme park? Jefferson Davis Land. It’s not far from the old Davis plantation. Listen to this. I would dress up like Davis in a frock coat and greet the tourists as they stepped off the ferry. I would glower at them like old Davis with his cloudy eye and the children would cry and clutch their mothers’ hands.

But real estate development is not Symes’s only area of interest. He also has ideas about literature. As they drive into Mexico together in the Buick Special, Midge describes his interest in Civil War history to Symes. “I have more than four hundred volumes of military history in my apartment,” he says. “All told, I have sixty-six lineal feet of books.”

“All right, now listen to me,” says Symes. “Throw that trash out the window. Every bit of it.” He pulls a little yellow book out of his bag. “Throw all that dead stuff out the window and put this on your shelf. Put it by your bed.”

The book is With Wings as Eagles, a manual for salesmen by one John Selmer Dix, M.A. “Dr. Symes turned through the pages. ‘Dix wrote this book forty years ago and it’s still just as fresh as the morning dew. Well, why shouldn’t it be? The truth never dies.’ ” When Midge mentions that Shakespeare is reputed to be the greatest writer who ever lived, Symes replies, “Dix puts William Shakespeare in the shithouse.”

Before turning his comic genius to characters like Symes and to a New Age cult called Gnomonism, the subject of his fourth novel, Masters of Atlantis, Portis published his masterpiece, True Grit (1968), the book most people know him for, and with good reason. Set largely in the 1870s, the novel contains nothing automotive—its action occurs back in the day when horsepower was literal. True Grit’s main character and narrator is young Mattie Ross, whose father has been murdered by one of his hired hands. Mattie is nothing if not precocious: Even though she is only 14, she has a head for numbers and keeps the books for her father’s prosperous cotton farm. The self-assurance of her voice establishes her, in the book’s opening lines, as someone who is going to hold our attention:

People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then. … I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas.

“I know many fine people live in Fort Smith,” she continues, “and they have one of the nation’s most modern waterworks but it does not look like it belongs in Arkansas to me.” Her narrative is peppered with citations from scripture and old-fashioned expressions one seldom hears anymore. In 1959 Portis published a charming feature called “Remember?” in the Arkansas Gazette, celebrating the many regionalisms of southern speech that even back then were going out of style: adjectives like “tacky,” “much obliged” as a way of saying thank you, and that curious locution, “right smart,” as in, “You can catch a right smart of catfish in that lake if you have the right bait.” He also invokes the kind of prayers offered up on social occasions like church picnics, or “dinner on the grounds,” which used to be a common feature of life in the rural South. “There were Presbyterians, Methodists and a sprinkling of Baptists at these get-togethers we attended,” Portis writes, “and when it came time to eat, the honor of returning thanks usually fell to the windiest old man there.”

Young Mattie herself is a devout Presbyterian with high standards of personal behavior, but when it comes to choosing a marshal to journey over into Indian Territory and hunt down her father’s killer, Christian principles and social niceties play no role whatsoever in her choice among the several men recommended by the local sheriff. “The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn,” the sheriff says. “He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don’t enter into his thinking. He loves to pull a cork.”

Unhesitatingly, Mattie asks the sheriff, “Where can I find this Rooster?”

The partnership between these two makes for one of the great stories in American fiction. A self-confident adolescent who is just as comfortable bargaining for a horse or discussing the market price of cotton as quoting scripture teams up with an over-the-hill marshal whose past is just as iffy as his current reputation. In the late war, he served with two of the most notorious guerrilla chieftains on the southern side. As Colonel Stonehill, the livery stable owner, tells Mattie, “Report has it that he rode by the light of the moon with Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson. I would not trust him too much.” William Clarke Quantrill was among Arkansas’s most notorious figures, his gang launching the criminal careers of Frank and Jesse James, teenagers during the Civil War. Quantrill’s last words to a man he had shot five times and left for dead: “Tell old God that the last man you saw on earth was Quantrill.”

Rooster Cogburn was portrayed by John Wayne in the 1969 Hal Wallis production and by Jeff Bridges in the 2010 Coen Brothers film. John Wayne, of course, always plays John Wayne; Bridges comes a little closer to portraying Cogburn’s meanness and lack of sentimentality. The supporting cast assembled by the Coen brothers is choice—Dakin Matthews, for example, plays Colonel Stonehill to comic perfection. Fortunate not only in having been turned into two memorable movies, True Grit has also been fortunate in having Donna Tartt, the Mississippi novelist, as an advocate. She narrates the audiobook and becomes Mattie. It’s the perfect thing to listen to on a long western road trip. In her introduction to the Bloomsbury edition of the novel, Tartt nicely sums up Cogburn as he appears in the book and in the movie:

The Rooster of the novel is somewhat younger, in his late forties: a fat, one-eyed character with walrus mustaches, unwashed, malarial, drunk much of the time. … Mattie runs Rooster to ground in his squalid rented room at the back of a Chinese grocery store (“Men will live like billy goats if they are let alone,” she remarks, disapprovingly) and he’s happy enough to take Mattie’s money to ride out after her father’s killer.

The duo of Mattie and Rooster quickly becomes a trio when Rooster agrees to let a vainglorious Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf (pronounced La Beef), who is also on Chaney’s trail for a murder he committed in the Lone Star State, join the hunt. “Get crossways of me, LaBoeuf,” Rooster tells the ranger, “and you will think a thousand of brick has fell on you. You will wisht you had been at the Alamo with Travis.” LaBoeuf doesn’t want Mattie going along with them into the Indian Nation: “Run along home, little britches,” he derides her, “your mama wants you.” But Mattie is having none of it: “ ‘Run home yourself,’ said I. ‘Nobody asked you to come up here wearing your big spurs.’ ”

A crucial moment in the story occurs when, after the girl has swum her pony, Little Blackie, across a raging river swollen with winter rain to catch up with Cogburn and the ranger, LaBoeuf pulls Mattie off Little Blackie, takes her over his knee, and starts whipping her with a switch. Bursting out in tears of humiliation and rage, Mattie says to Rooster, “ ‘Are you going to let him do this?’ He dropped his cigarette to the ground and said, ‘No, I don’t believe I will. Put your switch away, LaBoeuf. She has got the best of us.’ ” When the ranger refuses to stop, Cogburn “pulled his cedar-handled revolver and cocked it with his thumb and threw down on LaBoeuf. He said, ‘It will be the biggest mistake you ever made, you Texas brush-popper.’ ”

Tartt makes the point that True Grit “begins where chivalry meets the frontier—where the old Confederacy starts to merge and shade away into the Wild West.” For all his slovenliness, shady background, and questionable methods, Rooster Cogburn, if not what Mattie or anyone else would call a gentleman, is certainly a man in whom chivalry has not quite died.

Every country has its own myths of origin and national character. We don’t expect our poets and fiction writers, our songwriters and moviemakers simply to tell stories, as vital as narratives are to us. We look to them to establish myths of national identity and create exemplars of these myths, as Whitman does when he sings of the open road in Song of Myself; to ratify and expand those myths, as Kerouac does in On the Road; to challenge and question myths like the idea of the self-made man, as Fitzgerald does in The Great Gatsby. You’d search far and wide before you found a better yarn than the adventures of Mattie Ross and Rooster Cogburn, in which, as Mattie puts it, “I avenged Frank Ross’s blood over in the Choctaw Nation when snow was on the ground.” But storytelling is far from all that Portis is up to. After fairly demolishing any notion of chivalry that readers of an earlier generation might have associated with the Confederacy and undercutting Rooster’s credentials as a Wild West hero, the overweight, hard-drinking, bounty-hunting marshal emerges as a kind of chivalric hero after all—not through any mythic identity, but simply because of who he shows himself to be when the chips are down: a man with true grit.

Portis is one of our great and quintessentially American writers because, like Hemingway, he never abandoned his journalistic sensibilities. His ability to see things as they are is bracing. There is something of the investigative reporter’s determination to discover the truth in the sure-handedness with which Portis gleefully ridicules the gimcrack “secret brotherhood” of Gnomonism in Masters of Atlantis, and how he takes down the grandiose delusions of characters like Symes in The Dog of the South. It’s as if Portis can never quite get over the capacity we have for self-delusion. Americans’ readiness to believe something like Q-Anon wouldn’t have surprised him in the slightest. It’s no accident that Jimmy Burns, the narrator and protagonist of Portis’s last novel, Gringos, is not some mythical road warrior like Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty but a shade-tree mechanic scraping out a living in Mexico. In Portis’s treatment of the West, there’s some truth in Roy Blount Jr.’s statement, quoted earlier, that the author “could be Cormac McCarthy if he wanted to, but he’d rather be funny.” I would amend that judgment slightly and say that he’d not only rather be funny, he’d also rather base his stories on actuality than follow the siren songs of myth. A humorist by temperament, he knew instinctively that, as Charlie Chaplin knew in making The Great Dictator and as Saturday Night Live knows in lampooning our current president, laughter is a powerful weapon in dealing with the folly of those who think they have all the answers.

The post On the Trail with an Arkansas Traveler appeared first on The American Scholar.

In addition to the sports center, one high school and two primary schools are on the block, and at two o’clock, when school lets out, the sidewalks are crowded with parents and children, and the street is full of cars, several always double-parked with drivers waiting inside. I had carefully maneuvered my car through the commotion, but around the corner, the sidewalk was empty, the street too. The older man, though he was on the edge of all that busy activity, was apart from it—as if he were in a different overlay on the grid of the town—not School Bustle but instead The Elderly Among Us.

I idled at the crosswalk, giving him plenty of time to cross. Suppose a car had come careening around the corner, as cars all over the world, not just in Spain, often do? This fellow would have been unable to jump out of the way. He could no more run than I could fly: We would both end up flat on our faces, should we try.

Watching him, however, I had the impression he never would have to run. His role wasn’t to avoid collisions with cars but just to be the moving obstacle that a car—mine in particular—would have to avoid. Not even an obstacle—more like a glitch in the progression. My slightly confused notion as I continued on my way was that the man wasn’t even engineered to be aware of cars. Rather than a real man, he was a facsimile. Buildings on the corners, signposts, a bench, a child darting into the street, a pigeon—these too were all pieces in the townscape to be eyed warily as I approached and then passed them. Behind me, they all evaporated, like dew on grass as the sun passes overhead. Yes, they glimmered, they glinted, then they were gone. That was my strange thought, as if they had all been set in place with a tiny nudge as I approached and tripped the switch. Needing to swerve wouldn’t be a close call but a trap avoided, part of the game, with points to be earned.

As I successfully glided by each bit of scenery or potential trouble, I became confident. And yet, was I really in charge? More than anything else, the situation suggested to me a toy train set, several engines on the tracks, and a little boy on his knees running them with his remote control, speeding us along, slowing us down occasionally in a moment of unlikely prudence before thrusting up the speed lever.

In the roundabout I slipped into my slot, then veered off onto my road. And thus it went, all the way to work, successfully advancing from one challenge to another, school zone to downtown to outskirts to highway to Gijón to the language school.

What a strange experience. And all triggered by the older man, moving heavily, focused on his cane and the crosswalk, on attaining the far side, stepping onto the sidewalk before I pressed the gas pedal to continue. Strangest of all was not the vision of the children and the older man as elements set in motion just in time to meet me on my course through town. That was strange enough. Really strange was seeing myself also as just another element in the game—hardly real and, though the point-of-view character in this round, not guaranteed a place in future games. Not even within The Elderly Among Us.

How did this strange reverie end? It too evaporated—about four minutes into my first class, when I ran into reality.

The post The Elderly Among Us appeared first on The American Scholar.

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

The post “Days of 1964” by James Merrill appeared first on The American Scholar.