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New Yorker Fiction 2015

8/28/2015

A WRITER'S WIT
A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.
Robertson Davies
Born August 28, 1913

Deception Kills Slowly

Peter Funch | Eva Black

August 31, 2015, Jensen Beach, "The Apartment": Across the courtyard from Louise and Martin, a couple in their fifties, a Stockholm apartment, empty for eight months, finally receives an occupant, someone named Sara. ¶ Louise, the fact becomes apparent, has a problem with alcohol, consuming entire bottles in one sitting and attempting to conceal the glassy evidence from others. She believes, by reading the last name on the call box of the apartment that she may know the father of this new resident, Sara. ¶ Many years before Louise had an affair. "He was the second man she’d slept with. Martin still didn’t know about it." And the man’s unusual last name is the same as the new neighbor’s, Sara. One evening when Martin is out celebrating his retirement with colleagues, Louise, heavily plied with liquor, ventures across the way with a small gift of welcome for Sara. In her inebriated state Louise says entirely too much, and author Beach deftly ends the story, with Louise saying things like "Forgive me," words that might apply to the present situation, in which she breaks a plate in her own kitchen, but might also pertain to the much larger sin from her past. One senses Martin, who finds her in this condition, knows what her sin is and forgives her repeatedly each day. Beach’s new collection, Swallowed by the Cold, is forthcoming from Graywolf.
Photography by Peter Funch
Hand Lettering by Eva Black

READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!

Date of Original Post:
11/13/14 — Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
11/20/14 — "My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
11/27/14 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
12/04/14 — "Ghost Riders"
12/11/14 — "The Best Mud"
12/18/14 — "Handy to Some"
12/25/14 — "Blight"
01/01/15 — "A Gambler's Debt"
01/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
01/15/15 — "Men at Sea"
01/22/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
01/29/15 — "Engineer"
02/05/15 — "Snarked"
02/12/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
02/19/15 — "The Age I Am Now"
02/26/15 — "Bathed in Pink"

Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
03/12/15 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
03/26/15 — "The Best Mud"
04/02/15 — "Handy to Some"
04/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
04/16/15 — "Men at Sea"
04/23/15 — "My Long-Playing Records"
04/30/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
05/07/15 — "Snarked"
05/21/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
05/28/15 — "Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes. Watch for more podcasts!

Mississippi Martyr

8/25/2015

A WRITER'S WIT
One big vice in a man [sic] is apt to keep out a great many smaller ones.
Bret Harte
Born August 25, 1836

My Book World

Williams, Michael Vinson. Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas, 2011.

I turn fifteen on June 11, 1963, a day before NAACP field secretary for Mississippi, Medgar Wiley Evers, is assassinated by Byron De La Beckwith, in front of Evers’s own home in Jackson, Mississippi. If the item is mentioned in the local media where I live in Wichita, Kansas, I am probably oblivious to it. Yet Evers’s death seems to kick off a series of political assassinations that take place in the United States in the 1960s: John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy, and others. In spite of all its many charms—Motown, the Twist, the miniskirt, mod clothing, the Sexual Revolution—the decade is really a rather dark period.

Evers’s story, through the years, is one that echoes in my mind—as it is occasionally referenced on TV, in the news, or even a film—yet I never quite have the narrative of events straight, the motivation for such a heinous act. But after reading Mr. Williams’s book, I can never look at the 1960s in quite the same way. The life of Medgar Evers is a remarkable one, a life that is often overlooked in the larger scheme of things, for example, that Mississippi is the wealthiest state among all the southern states, up until the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, that its wealth and position are entirely dependent on the institution of slavery and that when it is abolished, the South, including illustrious Mississippi, descends into poverty.

Contrast that status with the Mississippi of today, which holds the dubious distinction of being one of the poorest states, with the poorest level of per capita spending on education. What a descent, and yet it helps to explain why, even a hundred years after the Civil War—that’s at least four generations—white Mississippians still hate Negroes in the 1960s, want to keep them suppressed. Yes, for those one hundred years, people with dark skin are still enslaved by draconian laws that keep them confined to their own schools, their own restaurants, their own libraries (if such exist), or their own sections of public places such as train stations or washrooms. And certain (not all) white Mississippians believe that to continue such segregation is not only all right but that it is somehow ordained by God. And furthermore, certain white Mississippians feel justified in using lynching to justify their rage over the stupidest kinds of slights imaginable: winking at a white woman, slapping a white boy, a fifty-cent debt.

Imagine your family trying to move about your daily life—school, work, church, social intercourse—and always being afraid you might offend or displease someone with white skin. You’re often told you don’t belong in this line, this room, this particular place, and often, in spite of certain signs—Coloreds Only—you’re not always sure, until someone with no uncertainty informs you, either by way of verbal abuse or physical, sometimes violent, actions. This is the kind of society that Medgar Evers is attempting to change in his work as NAACP field agent. Several times in his life, Evers could leave the state of Mississippi for attractive job offers in more enlightened spots in the country, but he loves his home state, its geography, its people, so very much that he chooses to stay and fight.

Unlike MLK, Evers is not necessarily swayed by the use of peaceful means. He keeps a revolver in the glove box of his car, as he often travels late at night, arriving home in the dark after having attempted, somewhere else in Mississippi, to help others negotiate the filthy waters of prejudice and desegregation. Evers speaks out, both verbally and in print. His assassination does not happen out of the blue. Prior to this event, he narrowly escapes being hit by a police car. His household receives threatening phone calls. For a time he does accept or ask for protection, and for a time he receives it. But finally, Evers realizes he can never be free to do what he needs to do for the African-Americans of Mississippi if he must constantly have body guards surrounding him, and besides, it becomes too expensive of a proposition and he begins to eschew the offers.

And you may be thinking, All this is old ground, covered a thousand times in the past. Why don’t we just move on and forget about it?

If that’s what you think, consider these passages from forty-year-old writer Ta-Nehisi Coates’ article in The Atlantic’s September issue, in which the author addresses his son in light of his own fears:

“And yet I am still afraid. I feel the fear most acutely whenever you leave me. But I was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal. When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid” (85).

And Coates’s fear is not only present in Baltimore where he grows up, but in the North, when he visits a grandmother:

“I felt the fear in the visits to my Nana’s home in Philadelphia. You never knew her. I barely knew her, but what I remember is her hard manner, her rough voice. And I knew that my father’s father was dead and that my Uncle Oscar was dead and that my Uncle David was dead and that each of these instances was unnatural. And I saw it in my own father, who loves you, who counsels you, who slipped me money to care for you. My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that is exactly what was happening all around us. Everyone had lost a child, somehow, to the streets, to jail, to drugs, to guns. It was said that these lost girls were sweet as honey and would not hurt a fly. It was said that these lost boys had just received a GED and had begun to turn their lives around. And now they were gone, and their legacy was a great fear” (85).

For many African-Americans the fear that Mississippians internalize in the 1960s rages on unabated, stoked by trigger-happy police, by photo ID laws that have more to do with white skin still asserting control over black skin than voter fraud. The real fraud may be that white power continues to rage over black lives, that many of us don’t realize it, think it’s all in the past. Mr. Williams’s biography, Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr, helps us to see that there is still much change that must occur before we are a truly free country. Williams’s research is painstakingly thorough, and his insight into Evers’s life and the 1960s is crystal clear.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2015

New Yorker Fiction 2015

8/21/2015

A WRITER'S WIT
I am one of the endangered species: people who still write in meter and rime.
X. J. Kennedy
Born August 21, 1929

Sister, Sister

Gibson | Goldberg

August 24, 2015, Alice McDermott , "These Short, Dark Days": When thirty-two-year-old Jim, a sacked Brooklyn Rapid Transit trainman of the early twentieth-century, sends his pregnant wife Annie out into the bitter cold of a February day, to run an errand, he gases himself in their small “railroad” apartment. ¶ Later, Sister St. Savior, sixty-four, with a full bladder, on her way back to her convent from a day of “collecting alms” in the vestibule of Woolworth’s, sees the commotion of what looks like an apartment fire. She fights her way through a crowd, and denizens of the building assume she’s been summoned after the explosion. When she is informed of the dead man’s intent, the man’s young widow now fears that he will be barred from being buried in the Catholic cemetery:

“Your man fell asleep,” Sister St. Savior whispered now. “The flame went out. It was a wet and unfortunate day.” She paused to make sure the girl had heard. “He belongs in Calvary,” she said. “You paid for the plot, didn’t you?” The girl nodded slowly. “Well, that’s where he’ll go.”

The nun, Sister St. Savior, employs a quirky but humane theology of her own, as she attempts to cover up or rewrite the young husband’s death. She is accustomed to rendering aid to the helpless, mostly women, and Jim’s poor widow is no exception. Sister, praying to God, does not take lightly her empathic impulse toward breaking the Church’s rules in order to comfort others:

She would get him buried in Calvary if only because the Church wanted him out, and she, who had spent her life in service to the Church, wanted him in. “Hold it against the good I’ve done,” she prayed. “We’ll sort it out when I see You.”

Indeed, Sister St. Savior realizes that, for her compassion, she will mostly likely exact a price—one way or another. The author’s novel, Someone, was published last October.
Photograph, Ralph Gibson
Illustration, Carin Goldberg

New Yorker Fiction 2015

8/10/2015

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A WRITER'S WIT
. . . it is a very risky thing for anyone to go about proclaiming the truth simply because he finds himself in possession of concrete documentary proofs or on the evidence of his own eyes, which is always over- estimated.
Jorge Amado
Born August 10, 1912

Still Spinning Yarns of Gold

Zohar Lazar

August 10 & 17, 2015, Michael Cunningham, "Little Man": In this retelling of a Brothers Grimm tale, a two-hundred-year-old gnome agrees to spin straw into gold for the miller’s daughter because if he doesn’t the king will slay her. ¶ The gnome, with the help of his Aunt Farfalee, does manage to spin a room filled with straw into gold two consecutive evenings, and each time the maid gives the gnome a humble piece of her jewelry. On the third night of spinning, in which the maid spins more gold than ever, she has nothing to offer him, but he asks for the soon-to-be queen’s first-born child. When she demurs, he strikes a deal with her: if, upon the child’s birth, she can guess the gnome’s name within three days, she will not have to sacrifice her son (try explaining that to the king). When the moment arrives this author’s rendering of the tale is surprising for several reasons. ¶ Cunningham, because of his multifarious talents, can do no wrong, and so saves this modern retelling, rather plumps it up, in a satisfying manner that lesser writers could not. His collection, A Wild Swan: and Other Tales, which contains this narrative, will be released in November.
Illustration by Zohar Lazar

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New Yorker Fiction 2015

8/2/2015

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A WRITER'S WIT
What is the use of speech? Silence
          were fitter:
      Lest we should still be wishing
          things unsaid.
Ernest Dowson
Born August 2, 1867

Tales of East and West

Carson Ellis

August 3, 2015, Heinz Insu Fenkl, "Five Arrows": Insu, a Korean boy, listens to a story told by his Big Uncle who, because of a gangrenous foot, is banished, fated by the family to live out his days across the river. ¶ Big Uncle tells Insu a wandering tale based on a dream that, to Big Uncle, is more real than his life—so much so he’s willing to sacrifice his foot for a beautiful woman’s love. Insu, in turn, tells Big Uncle the legend of Robin Hood, and Big Uncle is so impressed with the narrative that he adopts Robin’s request of being buried at the point where his arrow shoots into the earth. The story ends quietly, dreamlike, as Insu swims in a rather impressionistic manner across the river—giving the reader a satisfying blend of Eastern and Western folklore. Fenkl is the author of Cathay and is working on a novel, Skull Water.
Carson Ellis, Illustrator.

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New Yorker Fiction 2015

Deception Kills Slowly

Mississippi Martyr

My Book World

New Yorker Fiction 2015

Sister, Sister

New Yorker Fiction 2015

Still Spinning Yarns of Gold

New Yorker Fiction 2015

Tales of East and West

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