Lincoln Center Theater Review A publication of Lincoln Center Theater Fall 2019, Issue Number 74 Lincoln Center Theater Review Staff Alexis Gargagliano, Editor John Guare, Executive Editor Anne Cattaneo, Executive Editor Strick&Williams, Design David Leopold, Picture Editor Carol Anderson, Copy Editor The Vivian Beaumont Theater, Inc. Board of Directors Eric M. Mindich, Chairman Kewsong Lee, President Marlene Hess, Leonard Tow, and William D. Zabel Vice Chairmen Jonathan Z. Cohen, Chairman, Executive Committee Jane Lisman Katz, Treasurer John W. Rowe, Secretary André Bishop Producing Artistic Director Annette Tapert Allen Eric Kuhn Allison M. Blinken Betsy Kenny Lack James-Keith Brown Memrie M. Lewis H. Rodgin Cohen Ninah Lynne Ida Cole Phyllis Mailman Judy Gordon Cox Ellen R. Marram Ide Dangoor John Morning David DiDomenico Brooke Garber Neidich Shari Eberts Elyse Newhouse Curtland E. Fields Rusty O'Kelley Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Andrew J. Peck Cathy Barancik Graham Robert Pohly David J. Greenwald Katharine J. Rayner J. Tomilson Hill, Richard Ruben Chairman Emeritus Stephanie Shuman Judith Hiltz David F. Solomon Linda LeRoy Janklow, Tracey Travis Chairman Emeritus Mila Atmos Tuttle Raymond Joabar David Warren Mike Kriak Kaily Smith Westbrook Caryn Zucker John B. Beinecke, Chairman Emeritus, John S. Chalsty, Constance L. Clapp, Ellen Katz, Augustus K. Oliver, Victor H. Palmieri, Elihu Rose, Daryl Roth Honorary Trustees Hon. John V. Lindsay, Founding Chairman Bernard Gersten, Founding Executive Producer The Rosenthal Family Foundation— Jamie Rosenthal Wolf, David Wolf, Rick Rosenthal and Nancy Stephens, Directors— is the Lincoln Center Theater Review’s founding and sustaining donor. Our deepest appreciation for the support provided to the Lincoln Center Theater Review by the Christopher Lightfoot Walker Literary Fund at Lincoln Center Theater. To subscribe to the magazine, please go to the Lincoln Center Theater Review website—lctreview.org. Cover: From Bunker Hill Mine Series © Kyle Johnson Right: Idaho miners at work in the 1800s, courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration. Opposite page: Ash Tree Ring, by Erik Linton. © 2019 Lincoln Center Theater, a not-for-profit organization. All rights reserved.
Issue 74
Bring All of Yourself AN INTERVIEW WITH SAM HUNTER AND DAVIS McCALLUM 5
First Responders JOSH GARRETT-DAVIS 8
In a Land of Immigrants AN INTERVIEW WITH KAREN KOREMATSU AND KERMIT ROOSEVELT 11
How the West Was Spun RICHARD FORD 14
Whereas
LAYLI LONG SOLDIER 15
Another Trail of Breadcrumbs PEG QUINN 17
A Mayor in the West CHUCK TOOLEY 21
Bunker Hill Mine KYLE JOHNSON 22
A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
Greater Clements, the new play by Samuel D. Hunter, opens in a mine that has been shut down, and, as the story unfolds, we are taken far beneath the surface—into the heart of a small family and a town that has been unincorporated, but also deep into America itself. Sam Hunter is a MacArthur Fellowshipwinning playwright. His work—which includes A Bright New Boise, The Whale, Lewiston and Clarkson, and The Harvest, which LCT3 produced— is almost always inspired by his home state of Idaho, making him somewhat of a rarity in a business dominated by people writing about and for the coasts. Greater Clements exemplifies the quiet power and profound humanism of Hunter’s work as it delves into the crisis of small towns and examines our ideas about belonging, connection, and community. These are ideas we wanted to explore in this edition of the Lincoln Center Theater Review, along with an examination of the American West— as both a place and a concept. The historian and writer Josh Garrett-Davis writes about the myths and the history of growing up in the West; novelist Richard Ford debunks the whole concept of the myth itself; and Chuck Tooley, the former threeterm mayor of Billings, Montana, captures the beauty and complexity of a community in this part of the country. The poet Layli Long Soldier’s breathtaking poem folds together a mother’s tender care of her daughter’s skinned knee and an addressing of the long hurt Europeans have caused the Native American peoples and tribes. Another mother, Peg Quinn, has written a heartbreaking essay on discovering that her daughter is mentally ill. Our editors spoke with the activist Karen Korematsu and the historian and writer Kermit Roosevelt about the little-known history of the internment of Japanese and Japanese-Americans who were sent to this part of the country to live in camps during World War II. Hunter and Greater Clements director Davis McCallum spoke to us
about their long and ongoing collaboration, the formation of a playwright, and the West. The magazine opens and closes with hauntingly beautiful photographs of Idaho mining life by the remarkable contemporary photographer Kyle Johnson. The elegiac tone of Hunter’s play is naturalistic, but it also ventures into the realms of tragedy and mystery. Hunter told us that he was reading The Rings of Saturn, by the German writer W. G. Sebald, as he was revising the play. Sebald’s vision opens yet another door to this remarkable new play: I sensed quite clearly the earth's slow turning into the dark….The shadow of night is drawn like a black veil across the earth, and since almost all creatures, from one meridian to the next, lie down after the sun has set, so, he continues, one might, in following the setting sun, see on our globe nothing but prone bodies, row upon row, as if leveled by the scythe of Saturn—an endless graveyard for a humanity struck by falling sickness.
Alexis Gargagliano
Bring All of Yourself AN INTERVIEW with SAM HUNTER and DAVIS McCALLUM
Sam Hunter, the playwright of Greater Clements, and the show’s director Davis McCallum spoke with our co-executive editor Anne Cattaneo about their longtime collaboration, the particular freedom of creating plays set in Idaho, and how reading The Waste Land can change everything.
Left: From the Bunker Hill Mine Series © Kyle Johnson.
ANNE CATTANEO Sam, how did you come to be a playwright? SAM HUNTER I wrote my first play in high school; it kind of took me by surprise, because I originally thought that I wanted to be a musician. AC A rock musician? SH No, a classical musician. None of my aspirations are lucrative. I spent the majority of my middle- and high-school experience at a fundamentalist Christian school, and it was both fascinating and damaging. I was exposed to this worldview that included ideas like the earth is six thousand years old, the theory of relativity is false, etc. The preacher of the church would openly say that homosexuals should be exiled. So, as I became more aware of being gay, I was really at odds with that, and eventually I had to leave. One day my English teacher, who was the pastor’s wife, read excerpts from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land out loud to demonstrate how secular writing was garbage, but it hit me like a bus. I sought out the full text pretty immediately. I can’t say that I understood every part of it, but it awakened something in me and I started writing in secret. When I left that school in eleventh grade, and transferred to the public school, there was an English teacher named Crag Hill who is a poet, and he
became my mentor. I wrote reams of bad poetry for him. Then I wrote this really long play— and this was the good thing about being in a small town in Idaho. I went to the community theater and said, “Hey, can I have three hundred dollars to put up a play I wrote?” And they said, “Sure.” So I did this play that was about three hours long and got these very gracious local actors to do it. I had every intention of majoring in theater at the University of Idaho until somebody told me that Tony Kushner taught playwriting at N.Y.U. It turned out that he didn’t teach at N.Y.U., but I didn’t realize that when I applied. You could only submit twenty-five pages of material with your application—my play was something like a hundred and fifty pages long. (Laughter) So I wrote a very contained thirty-minute two-hander. It forced me to sit down and tell a simple human story. And, miraculously, I got in. DAVIS McCALLUM You skipped the Our Town part of the story, which I love. SH Oh, yes, that’s actually probably why I turned to playwriting. When I was a senior, in Crag’s English class we watched Our Town—that old movie version where Aaron Copland did the score. While watching, I remember thinking it was just ho-hum Americana, a museum piece. But then we got to that scene in the second act where the preacher gives that monologue during the wedding, and I thought, Wait a minute, what’s going on in this play? And then the third act slayed me, and I became obsessed. I was so shocked that a play that was so distant from me in time was so alive. I convinced the drama teacher to let me direct it. So we did this really weird, very, very fast and
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aggressive version of Our Town. And then I wrote that big, huge three-hour play. DM Sam’s skipping the part of the story where the actor playing the stage manager dropped out a week before the show. So in addition to directing— SH I played the stage manager. AC With a script in hand? SH No, I memorized it. I’m sure I butchered the hell out of it. (Laughter) AC How did you guys meet? DM The theater Page 73 holds an annual retreat where they invite writers to Yale for a few days in the summer. Just before the retreat they called to tell me there’d been some trouble with the housing and asked if it would be okay if I had a roommate.
When I rolled my suitcase into the apartment, there was Sam sitting at the far end of a long living room reading. I introduced myself and asked, “Oh, what are you reading?” He turned the book around and it was this huge book, the size of a dictionary, and it just said GENOCIDE on the front, in big block letters. (Laughter) And Sam said, “Well, I’m thinking about writing a play about genocide. That’s what I’m here to work on.” I remember thinking, Okay, good luck with that play. (Laughter) But then at the end of the week, in the upstairs room at the Yale Cabaret, the actors who were there for other projects got together and read thirty pages
Photo of Davis McCallum and Samuel Hunter © Jim Cox. From the original production of The Few at the Old Globe.
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of what would become Sam’s play Five Genocides. They read the pages totally cold. It was shocking and surprising and, indeed, about genocide. It had this tonal complexity that kind of knocked everybody out. AC Since then, has your collaboration been a monogamous relationship, or do you work with other directors? DM Lots of other great directors have directed plays of Sam’s. I also direct plays by other writers—living writers as well as classical plays. AC Because you have a summer life, Davis, with that guy from the sixteenth century. DM From Stratford-upon-Avon?
AC From Stratford-upon-Avon. DM Sometimes when I’m directing a Shakespeare play I actually feel a little lonely, in part because I don’t have a living writer as a collaborative partner. For example, I’m working on a production of Cymbeline right now. At the very top of the play, the stage directions say, “Enter the Queen, Imogen, and Posthumous.” I thought it would be a good idea if the Queen entered with Imogen but Posthumous would already be there. I heard this voice in my head saying, “Yes, you could do that. I mean, I think that could work, but I wrote it for them to enter together, because the line the Queen says wouldn’t be the first thing
she would say if they just walked into a space and found him there.” (Laughter) And then I realized that the voice wasn’t Shakespeare’s, it was Sam’s. I do think that central to the job of directing plays (whether the writer is living or not) is to divine what theatrical shape the writing itself is asking for. What makes the writing as expressive as it can possibly be? SH That’s what makes you such a good new-play director—your first love is Shakespeare, and you are so devoted to those texts in such a beautiful and fundamental way and you transfer some of that devotion to new plays. AC I have a theory that all playwrights have to find actors who somehow instinctively understand their world, understand their sensibility. What kind of actor do you look for? DM Well, the thing that distinguishes Sam’s plays most for me is that they are written with incredible courage and honesty, and that honesty has to be matched by the actors in performance. They have to be willing to bring all of themselves to a part. In the final callbacks for Lewiston/ Clarkston, I remember saying, “Look, the acting is going to be radically exposed. We’re doing this play in a tiny room for fifty-one people a night. You are going to be in the scene, and right next to the knees of audience members, and everyone is going to be lit. There’s nowhere to hide.” We were looking for actors who could bring to performances the kind of artistic bravery that we, as theater people, get to experience in the final runthroughs in the rehearsal hall. That’s what we wanted the audience to feel. Most of Sam’s plays are about the deep human longing to connect. The audience spends the whole play watching at least two people, often just two people, struggling to connect. And at the final, final moment they do. They don’t kind of or almost or pretty much connect; they definitively, resolutely do. They connect! Blackout. That’s the end of the play. And Greater Clements is about the potential for a connection that two characters never get to have. That puts it not just in a different emotional register but also in kind of a different genre. AC Sam, you called that genre tragedy.
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SH Yes. Davis is going to make fun of me when I say this (Laughs), because the other day we were talking about tragedy, and I was, like, “That’s why I keep going on and on about Hegel.” (Laughter) I said this with no self-awareness at all. But Hegel has this definition of tragedy, which I’m going to boil down for you in an overly simplistic way: the heart of tragedy is two noble forces that can’t coexist. AC And both are right? SH I think it is less about right and wrong—I suppose I am really using the word “noble” more in the sense that each force is legitimate, each is understandable and justifiable. But neither can exist without demolishing the other. Everybody in this play is trying to do the right thing for everybody else, but the sheer math of it leads to ruin. I think a lot of my plays are like two hands reaching out to each other, and, in the final moments, they just barely, desperately, connect by the tip of their fingers. But this play is about the millimeter distance between those fingertips just brushing away and losing one another. AC It’s interesting that your work is so specifically located, and located in a place that isn't Zip Code 10018. SH I’ve always been drawn to write about this part of the country. The second play that Davis and I worked on was called A Bright New Boise. It’s set in the break room of a big-box store, and even though it’s very specifically located and the location’s in the title, that break room could be anywhere in America. Then we did another play that was set in an Olive Garden restaurant in Pocatello. These are American spaces that are endlessly reproduced. AC Universal. SH Although Greater Clements is more specifically set in Idaho, it’s talking about mining and things that are true about small towns in pretty much every state in this country. And Clements isn’t even a real town, so it doesn’t have a direct correlative. AC Writing a play set in a place that’s so isolated gives the complete focus to the characters. It’s almost like their situation isn’t about their day job or their commute—it’s something very pure. SH Yes. I think that’s the gift of being
SAM HUNTER AND DAVIS McCALLUM
from a place like that. It would be very different if I was from Philadelphia and I was writing about Philadelphia, because all the people in the audience will have these preexisting ideas that they would use to fill in what’s going on outside the walls of the play. But, for most people who are walking into the theater here, Idaho is kind of a blank palette. There are very few preexisting ideas or prejudices or things they can assign to these characters. All they can do is engage with them in this neutral way. DM I agree. Maybe four or five years ago we were working on plays where we would design a set in a kind of shoebox
Most of Sam’s plays are about the deep human longing to connect. The audience spends the whole play watching at least two people, often just two people, struggling to connect. Davis McCallum
and get really meticulous, even obsessed, about things that audience members would never see—like the upstage side of a refrigerator—to try and create this highly detailed world in which we could observe these characters, even with the knowledge that the plays are not at their core naturalistic. But lately we’ve been trying to explore making a different kind of theater, where we’re putting the plays in the same room with the audience, as opposed to asking the audience to kind of peep in at these people in some other place. I’m very excited to work on this play in the Mitzi, because the audience really surrounds the play in that space. As opposed to a different kind of production where you’d be looking from a distance into this
multi-tiered dollhouse. Here it’s about everyone experiencing this play together. There’s another context for the play, which we’re trying to handle in the design—the mine. I’m interested in the way a mining town is different even from a small town, and a town where the mine is closed is such a specific location. There’s something about the unnaturalness of a human being in a tiny, compressed space a mile under the earth. I’m interested in the poetics of that space. SH That’s the reason I set the first scene of the play in the mine. I wanted it to feel like all of a sudden we’re all a mile under the earth, to feel that kind of claustrophobia and menace at the very top of the play. Davis, I haven’t told you this, but there was this moment when I was writing the play that I thought, Oh, I know what I’m writing about. I’m writing about our national anxiety right now. That’s what this play is. It wasn’t until a year after I’d finished writing the play that I realized: Oh, wait, it’s sort of about that, but I think, more fundamentally, it’s about parental anxiety. Because I’m a new parent. AC Wow. SH I have a nineteen-month-old. AC Oh, you are just beginning parental anxiety. SH Yes, and it’s wonderful, but there’s so much anxiety that I have about it. Both moment-to-moment anxiety, like, making sure she doesn’t hit her head or stick her fingers into an electrical socket, and anxiety about what her life in America is going to be when she’s eighty years old, in the year 2097. So that’s the foundation of the play for me, I think.
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First Responders by Josh Garrett-Davis
AN OLDER WOMAN from my home state of South Dakota told a story that stuck in my memory. She had always regarded her hometown as placid, upstanding, and perhaps she used the word “normal.” Later in life, she volunteered to be a 911 operator, since her town was too small to provide professional emergency services beyond a county sheriff. The calls shocked her. They pulled open the curtains on methamphetamine use, domestic violence, alcoholism, and other dramas. She learned about an expanse of hurt that had probably been there as long as the town had stood—maybe as old as the cottonwood and ash trees in sturdy “shelter belts” or windbreaks nearby. Politeness had shielded the hurt from view. She didn’t say whether the curtains, the discretion of first responders like herself, were good things. My own parents were both first responders of sorts: my mom a counselor and my dad a legalaid lawyer and public defender. They knew things about neighbors, community members, even my friends’ families, that they never leaked to me. They were also objects of some gossip and discretion, especially after their divorce in the mid-1980s and my mom’s subsequent relationship with a woman—leading, through a cascade of decisions, to her moving to Portland, Oregon, and me staying in South Dakota with a single dad most of the year from ages ten to eighteen. I silenced my urban summers (gay-pride parades, New Age church camp), but in retrospect it is clear that many first responders knew—some local pastors, teachers, lawyers. After graduating from high school, I quickly fled this place where I felt like a lonely outsider,
LINCOLN CENTER THEATER REVIEW
the only one with a secret. From afar, I have spent many years researching the histories and cultures of the Plains and the broader American West. I have felt drawn to dramas of the past—first to historical 911 calls, conflicts, and controversies, but increasingly to subtler incongruities, unexpected creations, and resilient survivals. A central story for American history is what some scholars call “settler colonialism,” what they used to call “the frontier”—the attempt by newcomers to erase and replace indigenous others. This has been a messy process, with an astounding array of both indigenous and settler peoples, and many unclear lines between or across those two simple labels. The stories are rich and seemingly bottomless. Now I work at a western-history museum that seeks to explore these dynamics, often in tension with popular fictions about the West. We often screen Westerns and try to place them in context with short introductory remarks. Not long ago we showed Oklahoma!, the 1955 film adaptation of the musical. It was stranger than I remembered from the classic Broadway songs and courtin’ story. One confusing element was a stilted, almost tortured regional dialect. It turned out that this writing had survived the translation from the 1930 play Green Grow the Lilacs, by Lynn Riggs, on which Oklahoma! was based. In his foreword to the play, Riggs wrote of striving to capture a “nostalgic glow” around his home state, which he had left as a young man. In his characters’ meticulous dialect, in Riggs’s reaching for something past, something stirs. When the original play’s matriarch, Aunt Eller, resists the arrest of her nephew by deputy federal marshals, she declares that the United States is “jist a furrin country to me,” with no rightful jurisdiction in Indian Territory. One of the deputies defends himself (“We hain’t furriners”) by asserting, “Why, I’m jist plumb full of Indian blood myself.” Lynn Riggs, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation living (as an adult writer) in exile in that “furrin country,” hinted here at the issues of tribal sovereignty and federal authority, blood and belonging, that can shape personal dramas in the middle of this continent. He also subtly excavated the effects of historical violence. Laurey, the lead character, at one point recounts, “In the Verdigree bottom the other day, a man found thirty-three arrowheads— thirty-three—whur they’d been a Indian battle.” The home Riggs yearned for became home after the Cherokee were forcibly removed less than a century earlier, and a vague violence haunted the landscape. Some prosperous Cherokee brought slaves with them on the Trail of Tears—individuals who were themselves descendants of indigenous
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African peoples uprooted by a similar system of land theft and labor that then displaced the Cherokee Nation from the southeastern United States to Indian Territory. Riggs was also gay, and at least one scholar of Native American literature, Craig Womack (Muscogee Creek/Cherokee), has suggested that Riggs, unable to grapple with the queer Cherokee experience, was forced to write in “coded statement.” Maybe Riggs’s sexuality underlay his nostalgia. Maybe, even in the classic musical adapted from the play, the faint shadow of a yearning, queer history of this continent passes by the homestead, noticeable enough to send some of us digging. I sometimes wonder, Whence this desire to dig up hidden or forgotten stories within an often horrifying historical landscape? What was the draw toward the arrowheads in Verdigree bottom (like the tarnish of verdigris itself on bright metal)? I hated history when it was taught as a litany of battles and dates, but I can’t resist it when it breaks my heart. Late to the scene by definition, the historian shares with the first responder an awareness of some tragedies curtained over in the mimeographed town-history booklets and the smalltown museums that dot the West. Great personal
GARRETT-DAVIS
and historical tragedies and survivals hide among the ranch tools and the black-and-white photographs. Depending on our motives and our relationship to the community, we choose a middle ground between tell-all and discretion. Today it seems that the polite small-town façade has cracked. (Of course, I’m a grown-up now and have access to gossip we keep from kids, and I’m also an outsider to small towns now, with only visiting knowledge of their everyday experiences.) Millions vie to be first responders online. For L.G.B.T.Q. westerners, southerners, or other small-town folks, the love that dared not speak is now out and spoken, if still lacking civil and labor rights. Brave souls speak out against racism and social phobias of difference louder than I ever did. Even lurid sex, drugs, violence—once shameful, now “normal” and even conservative-presidential— have stepped out of darkness, perhaps into the spotlight. Ultimate Fighting Championships, once semi-illegal, are now family entertainment. Neck tattoos are cool at church. People whose parents regarded Bill Clinton as a repellent sexual monster now display Donald Trump’s silhouette on their vehicle windows. I have scars from the false normalcy maintained by my home state’s myths about itself. For at least a decade after leaving home, I couldn’t speak publicly without a lingering fear or shame, and old reflexes still warp my behavior. I can’t believe I’m wondering this, but, nevertheless, I do wonder, For those who didn’t die of them, did those old curtains or façades have some value? It is both impossible and undesirable to go back in time, to shove people back into the closet, or to unweave the vast wired (and wireless) tapestry of information that connects us. Settler colonialism cannot truly be undone, no matter how much we decolonize. But Lynn Riggs’s possibly coded writing may not have reflected a political or an artistic failing so much as a recognition of the violence we unearth if we dig and dig. As an excavator myself, I hope that more stories are helpful in helping us to understand painful histories, but I also wonder whether I will know when it is best to sing a pretty song and leave the arrowheads in the ground. JOSH GARRETT-DAVIS is an associate curator at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, and a Ph.D. candidate in history at Princeton University. He is the author of Ghost Dances: Proving Up on the Great Plains (2012) and What Is a Western?: Region, Genre, Imagination (2019).
Poster for Green Grow the Lilacs courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York. Collection on Broadway Productions, F2019.41.14.
In a Land of Immigrants AN INTERVIEW with KAREN KOREMATSU and KERMIT ROOSEVELT
Hovering in the background of Greater Clements is the legacy of the internment of the Japanese and the JapaneseAmericans during World War II. To learn more about this history, our editor, Alexis Gargagliano, spoke to Karen Korematsu, the daughter of the civil-rights icon Fred Korematsu and the executive director of the Fred T. Korematsu Institute, and to Kermit Roosevelt, who teaches constitutional law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the author of Allegiance, an award-winning novel.
Image of children in Japanese internment camp © Dorothea Lange / Restoration courtesy of Anchor Editions. Central Photographic File of the War Relocation Authority, National Archives Identifier 537476 / 210-G-C122.
ALEXIS GARGAGLIANO Could you tell me a little about the forces at play behind the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II? KERMIT ROOSEVELT The Pearl Harbor attack is December 7, 1941. But the push for removal doesn’t start immediately after that. What happened immediately was that the F.B.I. went into JapaneseAmerican communities and arrested virtually every male with a leadership position, some 5,500 people. And after that, according to Hoover, there was no security risk. Other people disagreed. And, as 1941 turns to 1942, they start agitating for removal. There were a bunch of different forces at work. On the one hand, with some military authorities there was a genuine, though racist and misguided, concern for national security. On the other hand, with some private organizations there was a pretty clearly naked, opportunistic desire to achieve economic advantage by eliminating competition. There were also avowedly racist organizations, like the Native Sons of the Golden West. These different forces all wanted to remove the Japanese and
the Japanese-Americans from the West Coast states. President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 (which was actually highly controversial within the federal government) was issued on February 19, 1942. It gave General John DeWitt, who led the Western Defense Command, the authority to exclude whomever he deemed necessary from the military zone that contained all of the coastal states. It did not say anything about race, but everyone knew this was about race. Some people tried to leave voluntarily, and a small number managed to. But there was very strong resistance among the internal states to the idea of allowing these refugees, or displaced people, to settle among them, which is shocking. One of the things that people said pretty consistently was: “We understand that most of these people are surely loyal, and we’re inflicting a terrible hardship on them, but war demands sacrifices.” But what sacrifices were other Americans willing to make in terms of welcoming these innocent, loyal Americans who were just doing what their government asked of them? The answer turned out to be no sacrifice at all; they were met with terrible hostility. In part because the response was so hostile and there was so much difficulty finding communities that were willing to accept Japanese-Americans, General DeWitt issued freeze orders, so people weren’t allowed to leave, except pursuant to his orders. Then he started removing them, typically with very little warning. Often people would be told, “You have forty-eight hours to report to this place; bring only what you can carry.”
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Anyone of Japanese ancestry living along the West Coast was ordered to report to the “assembly centers” (prisons), which were places like racetracks and fairgrounds, where they were supposed to be for only a short period of time, although sometimes they ended up staying there much longer, under very primitive conditions; later they were sent to the “relocation” concentration camps. In total, the government ended up incarcerating about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry. About one-third of these were immigrants who were still Japanese citizens—by law, they weren’t allowed to become American citizens. But twothirds of them were born in America and were thus birthright American citizens. The exclusion order was lifted on January 2, 1945—long after any supposed military justification would have expired—but the last camp didn’t close until 1946. AG What was it like when they arrived in the camps? KAREN KOREMATSU My grandparents were ordered to Tanforan Racetrack, in
. . . the F.B.I. went into Japanese-American communities and arrested virtually every male with a leadership position, some 5,500 people. And after that, according to Hoover, there was no security risk. Kermit Roosevelt
LINCOLN CENTER THEATER REVIEW
the San Francisco Bay Area. Basically, all the government did was whitewash the walls of the horse stalls. Several members of a family would be in a stall. You were given a flour-sack sleeve to fill with straw and iron cots for beds, and issued an Army blanket. Typically, there was a dirt floor, a lightbulb, and gaps in the walls, and it still smelled like manure. There was dysentery. They had to live like that for three or four months, until they were shipped off to one of the permanent Japanese concentration camps. All those were, were barracks. No central heating, no air-conditioning. You had a potbellied stove on either end. In many cases, the barracks were divided up with three to five families in them, and the demarcation was made by ropes that were strung across the way, with blankets hanging down. They weren’t built very well, and there would be gaps in the floorboards. If there was a sandstorm and you were in the mess halls, then the sand would blow up into your food, leaving it inedible. The latrines were all open. There was one for men and one for women, but no privacy with showers or toilets. People had to live like that for years. AG Who ran the camps? KK The ten Japanese-American concentration camps were operated under the War Relocation Authority, which was a government entity. AG What happened to the children? Were there schools in the camps? KK Approximately 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated and roughly one-third of the people in the camps were children under the age of eighteen. The parents wanted to continue the education of their children, and demanded that the War Relocation Authority create schools. Makeshift classrooms were created in the barracks. In many cases, the parents themselves would recruit teachers from the people who had been put in the camps, and in some cases they were able to hire outside teachers who would come into the camps to teach. The teachers who had friends who weren’t incarcerated would ask them to send materials. There were a lot of kids who graduated from high school behind barbed wire.
Kermit Roosevelt © Chris Crisman
One of the really macabre things in these schools was the extent to which there was this pretense of normalcy. The school would have high-school dances and baseball games, but it was all taking place inside a concentration camp. At the beginning of the school day, like in many schools, they would start out reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, talking about “liberty and justice for all.” They had Boy Scout troops and Girl Scout troops and baseball teams. One of the stories is that the camp in Gila River, Arizona, would bring in baseball teams to play against, but when the Gila River team made it to the finals they weren’t allowed out of the camp to go play in another state. AG Did these encounters ever inspire any of the local people to advocate for the people in the camps? Or befriend them? KR There is a sort of famous story about the friendship between Secretary Norman Mineta and Senator Alan Simpson. KK Right. They met in Heart Mountain, Wyoming. There was a Boy Scout troop in the camp there, and only one Scout troop from outside the camp would participate in a jamboree with them. At that jamboree Alan and Norman were assigned to be tent mates, and they’re still friends to this day. They’ve known each other since they were twelve or thirteen years old. Each year they go on an annual Heart Mountain pilgrimage. Their friendship has actually served the Japanese-Americans incredibly well. Senator Simpson was in Congress at the time of the redress and reparations movement and supported the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. AG Wow, that is amazing. Once all the camps were disbanded, what happened to the people? KK They were only given a bus ticket and twenty-five dollars. Most people didn’t want to go back to the West Coast, because they didn’t have anything there. They had lost their property, they had lost their possessions. People like my grandparents—my grandfather Korematsu was able to buy land in East Oakland, which was zoned as industrial, before the Alien Land Law took effect on August 10, 1913. After that, if you were an immigrant you couldn’t buy land. In a few cases, that’s
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What they all wanted to do was get beyond it. They had lost their dignity— you’re accused of looking like the enemy, so, therefore, the bombing of Pearl Harbor is your fault. That was the reaction to my face, growing up. Karen Korematsu
when some of the issei (the first generation of Japanese immigrants) would put any property into their son’s name, since they were American citizens. Fortunately, when my grandfather knew that they would be forced from their home, a Portuguese immigrant banker offered to look after the property and try to rent out the house. No one knew how long they’d be gone, or whether they were coming back. The oldest generation were the last to leave the camps. They were so afraid. But they did go back to the Oakland area, and my grandfather was able to take his land back, but everything had gone to rack and ruin. The flower nurseries and the greenhouses were all falling down. Pots were broken, plants stolen, and the house had been ransacked. But for most people, even if they had any kind of property, if they couldn’t pay their taxes they lost everything. Many of them didn’t have anything to go back to on the West Coast. My father didn’t think he’d ever come back to California. The only reason he did
Karen Korematsu © Claudia Katayanagi 2019, Biosphere Productions.
KERMIT ROOSEVELT AND KAREN KOREMATSU
was because my grandmother Korematsu was not well. That’s why people went East, so they could get jobs. AG Did many of them stay in the places where they were? KK No. If they were in Topaz, Utah, which is where my family was, they might go to Salt Lake City, or east to Wisconsin or Minnesota. If they came back out here to the West Coast or Arizona, people lived in Buddhist temples and churches. They congregated together until they could get work, which was difficult, as there was still a lot of discrimination. They pooled their resources in order to recoup their lives. What they all wanted to do was get beyond it. They had lost their dignity— you’re accused of looking like the enemy, therefore, the bombing of Pearl Harbor is your fault. That was the reaction to my face, growing up. They just wanted to rebuild their lives, and they were spread out throughout the United States. A large group of people settled in Chicago. The Midwest was the most welcoming area of the United States to the Japanese-Americans. Detroit, Michigan, where my parents met and married, was considered the city of a thousand churches. There was a church on every single corner—Baptist, Methodist, Catholic, Jewish synagogues— not a Starbucks. The churches created international youth groups. My mother, who was born in South Carolina and was going to school in Detroit, met her first Japanese-American person at Woodward Avenue Presbyterian Church. Then her friend introduced my father to my mother. AG Karen, your father Fred Korematsu’s Supreme Court case was a major civil-rights milestone. He refused to enter the camps and was convicted of defying the government’s order; he appealed the case all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled against him during the war in 1944 but overturned the conviction in 1983. Could you speak to the significance of the overturning? KR Well, there was a whole bunch of legally interesting things about Fred’s case. One is that during the 1980s all of this information came out about government misconduct in the litigation, and
the extent to which the Department of Justice and the Solicitor General’s office misled the Supreme Court. . . . Because of that the conviction ended up being overturned. Although what people still tended to say was, though, was: “Well, this was based on the facts presented to the Supreme Court, and it’s unfortunate that this happened, but maybe the decision is legally right and it’s still good law.” In some ways, that wasn’t a totally bad thing, because the decision stood for two things. One thing was this principle that Justice Black announced at the beginning, which is that all writs curtailing the civil rights of a single racial group are immediately suspect. The other thing the case stood for—in the Supreme Court’s mind, at least—was the danger of paying too much deference to the government. Some of the Justices realized that the government had misled the Supreme Court. They thought, Well, the next time the government comes to us with these claims about the needs of national security maybe we won’t be so blindly accepting. That informed their decision in some of the post-9/11 cases. Karen can speak to this, because she filed an amicus brief in a case about the N.Y.P.D.’s surveillance of Muslims. KK Yes, there we were with the same type of Supreme Court case as my father’s, because it was still marginalizing a group of people. It’s not only racial profiling, as it was in 1942; now it’s racial profiling and religious profiling. My family felt the same way about Trump v. Hawaii. Certainly, we felt that Korematsu should be overruled, but we didn’t know that it would be done in this manner. Justice Roberts said that Trump v. Hawaii has nothing to do with Korematsu v. United States. Think about that. But, on the other hand, he said Korematsu was wrong, and we’re going to take the opportunity to overrule it. He overruled Korematsu, but he still marginalized Muslims and other ethnic groups that had been attacked, and he dishonored my father, all in one breath. All we did was replace one injustice with another.
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How the West Was Spun by Richard Ford
IN ONE WAY IT’S SIMPLE. The American West—however you frame it—is always and abundantly there. You can reach it by car and form your own private views, truths, and convictions about what it is and isn’t—its character, soul, essence, Zeitgeist. That’s, after all, how it got to be “the West” in the first place. People defined it as “West” for their own advantage—white people, mostly. Sort of like people did the Middle East. Imaginative writing, on the other hand, writing that advertises itself as “Western”—novels, poems, plays that purport to be about the western United States, or to have a western flavor, or to hold a microscope up to the West, or get at its heart’s truth, or do whatever . . . something to make us patrons, readers, and theatergoers experience its vital western-ness—that’s entirely different from the West you can visit and get your boots dusty in. The first West is made of actual mountains, prairies, great rivers, and a big sky. The other is just words. (Plays, of course, being more complicated, because actors are always mingling in the words’ business.) This is not new news, I realize. But from a writerly perspective it’s worthwhile to keep the two realms separate—the facts of nature (Edward Said called them), and artifice (the made-up stuff). For writers—I’m one of those—it’s freeing to remember that in your short story set in “Great Falls, Montana,” you can never get the facts of nature onto the page—words, being at best always approximate toward their subjects, never representing facts exactly as they are. Which is fine for
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me, the novelist, because malleable, multivalenced words offer so many other nice employments than just hopelessly striving for exactitude. I’m only speaking for myself here. To generalize is to be a fool, as in most things. But in forty-plus years of writing stories and novels nominally set in the American West—mostly in fictive Montana and fictive Saskatchewan—I’ve also spent a lot of time (it’s now called real time) actually living among these obdurate facts of nature. I’ve often been in the West’s great surrounds, passed through its towns and along its highways, seen which way the rivers run and what this and that mountain pass is called by the locals. It’s not that I get the West; I've just been there. And in trying to make my made-up “places” seem more like real life to my reader, I’ve opportunistically plucked up what I know of the West (at least, the words) and employed them as frames for what really interests me most—humans in love, humans failing at love, humans being parents, children passing out of childhood to whatever’s next—stuff that happens in the West but also happens everywhere else. I’m trying to write masterpieces, after all, using the West to seek the wider world. This, by the way, is a basic tenet of what, when I was in college, used to be called “realism” (as opposed to real). If I write “tree,” you’re meant to picture or think of a tree. Although, myself, being a word guy, I’m more inclined to think first of “tree” as an alluring four-letter noun, commencing with a satisfyingly hard, dental tuh sound, followed almost unnoticeably by the softly medial and murmuring uhr noise, which nicely sets us up for the shrill-but-not-too-shrill, just declamatory double e. After which we can all go on to picture a larch or a mountain ash or a spruce or a gum. Because I’m a man who is, as I just said, much more interested in what humans importantly do than where they do it, or in the highly doubtful causal effects a place might exert on complex human behavior, I demote settings, locales, and places to a minor role—as background—before which my characters and their actions play out supremely in the foreground. I do this by simply dedicating fewer words to those settings, and by not ascribing to settings special powers and influences that I don’t believe they possess. A realistic background just seems to make what my characters do more plausible, and thus makes my novel more likely to be read. Think of Toulouse-Lautrec painting stage scenery for the Folies Bergère. His paintings were gorgeous and people loved them, but they were secondary to the fancy dancers, who were closer to the audience in all ways.
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Bottom line. Mine are western stories, sure. Because that’s where they fictively take place. But the West—my West—is just a veneer. It’s stage scenery. If what I’d originally known was Iowa or Upstate New York or Connecticut, instead of Montana and Saskatchewan, I’d probably have set my stories and novels there, and that’s what they’d be. Middle western stories. Northern-tier stories. New England stories. You see what I mean. And here’s the final thing. In my ongoing, decades-long, possibly cavalier appropriations of the West—mostly just the lingo of its geography, its terrains, its architecture, weather, demographics, its sadly impoverished sense of humor, whatever it offers as I try to write masterpieces—I’ve never once thought that I was writing about the West, never imagined I was analyzing or unearthing or reporting the heart of anything truly western. Because I don’t believe and have never seen evidence that there is anything truly western about what we call the American West. There’s certainly no identifiable western character (ask your closest Native American), no essence, no unique culture, no pure or impure West, no genie spirit to distinguish it from the rest of the world—nothing, that is, that we humans haven’t ascribed to it for our
RICHARD FORD / LAYLI LONG SOLDIER
own purposes, usually exclusionary. Which seems worth saying, because the sooner we break down these “fences,” as Wallace Stegner called them, these spurious regional divides, the more quickly we’ll see how much we’re all more savingly alike than different. The best western writing understands this. The less good stuff—well, it just tries to make a virtue of a tired old lie. RICHARD FORD is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of the Bascombe novels and the New York Times best-selling Canada and Let Me Be Frank with You, and of the memoir Between Them. He is the author of the renowned shortstory collections Rock Springs and A Multitude of Sins. Ford is the 2016 recipient of the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature, in Spain, and lives in East Boothbay, Maine, with his wife, Kristina.
LAYLI LONG SOLDIER is the author of Whereas, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Layli Long Soldier, excerpts from Whereas, page 66 Copyright © 2017 by Layli Long Soldier. Reprinted with the permission of the Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.
WHEREAS LAYLI LONG SOLDIER WHEREAS my eyes land on the shoreline of “the arrival of Europeans in North America opened a new chapter in the history of Native Peoples.” Because in others, I hate the act of laughing when hurt injured or in cases of danger. That bitter hiding. My daughter picks up new habits from friends. She’d been running, tripped, slid on knees and palms onto asphalt. They carried her into the kitchen, she just fell, she’s bleeding! Deep red streams down her arms and legs, trails on white tile. I looked at her face. A smile quivered her. A laugh, a nervous. Doing as her friends do, she braved new behavior, feigned a grin—I couldn’t name it but I could spot it. Stop, my girl. If you’re hurting, cry. Like that. She let it out, a flood from living room to bathroom. Then a soft water pour I washed carefully light touch clean cotton to bandage. I faced her I reminded, In our home in our family we are ourselves, real feelings. Be true. Yet I’m serious when I say I laugh reading the phrase, “opened a new chapter.” I can’t help my body. I shake. The realization that it took this phrase to show. My daughter’s quiver isn’t new— but a deep practice very old she’s watching me;
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PEG QUINN
I’M BAKING DATE-NUT BREAD for my daughter’s three boyfriends. She’s sleeping with two of them; the other has vowed to keep their relationship platonic. Perverted? Irresponsible? Crazy? Once upon a time, I’d have thought so. Actually, even I am shocked by the adjustments I’ve made in order to simply survive each day since my daughter was diagnosed with mental illness. I wouldn’t have considered myself naïve. I was thirty-four when Bebe was born and had learned some tough lessons about life and given some thought to how I’d been raised. I intended to do better and was so awash in waves of love and joy and thankfulness when I first held Bebe in my arms that I knew I would sacrifice anything, anytime, for the privilege of being her mom. Currently, I’m the art specialist at an elementary school. It’s been two years and one day since I grabbed the dinner I’d packed from the teachers’ lounge and fairly trotted to my car. It was four o’clock on a Friday. I’d be eating as I drove to Cal State Fullerton. Bebe, a junior there after two years at our local community college, would be singing a solo in a choir concert. I wouldn’t miss it. Under perfect conditions I faced a two-hour drive, but it was Friday, and I’d be heading into L.A.’s rush hour. The concert began at 8 p.m., so I thought I had some wiggle room. Within ten minutes, traffic was crawling, bumper to bumper. Four hours later, I tore into the concert hall a wreck but was told that I had five minutes before Bebe’s solo in the final song of the evening. I met her and her boyfriend in the parking lot afterward, chatted for a few minutes, then got
back into the car and drove home. The freeway was wide open, a full moon beaming as I reveled in the utter beauty of my daughter’s powerful voice, the success she was enjoying, and her exciting future, not knowing I’d just heard the grand finale of a dream I’d been living. Saturday night at 9:30 p.m., Bebe’s younger brother Owen, pleasantly exhausted from a middleschool camping trip, was already asleep. The phone rang. I lifted the receiver, and, as if the phone were a horrendous explosion, our lives disappeared. Through the gurgling wet sounds, all I recognized was a muffled “Mommy.” “Bebe?” I listened to her sobbing. “Sweetie— what’s wrong?” I mentally shuffled through a deck of possibilities: car accident, romantic breakup, dropping out of school, self-righteous roommates? She tried again but broke down. Fear had me by the throat. “Honey, take a deep breath. Listen to me. Take a deep breath, then tell me what’s going on.” “I don’t know what’s happening. I hear voices. They want me to do something, but I don’t know what.” Then, in a whisper, “They want me to hurt myself.” I wanted to grab her as our world blew away, but we were separated by 160 miles, with only this thin line holding us together. The monsters responsible were allowing her a phone call, but I was afraid to speak, afraid of the language of monsters and how I might upset them. Intuition said to keep her talking, but what could I say? Should I leave her brother alone and start driving? “Have you—have you hurt yourself?” I had no idea what “hurting herself” might mean. “Where are your roommates?” “No! No! Nobody’s here! It doesn’t matter!” she snapped. Then her tone changed. “I’m scared. I think they’re in the room, in the corner of the ceiling.” She was panting. “They want me to kill myself.” With that, I didn’t want to be a mom anymore. This called for judgment, wisdom, and a form of courage I didn’t possess. Couldn’t imagine. This was the moment we crossed the divide from twenty years of taken-for-granted mother-daughter conversation to my pretending that I knew what I was doing. Starting now and for many dark months to come, I would present order amid chaos. I would create the calm eye of the storm, a mechanism born of pure, simple desperation. She needed help, but I didn’t want to create a spectacle of police sirens, flashing lights, and a crowd of curious gawkers, so I chanced a question. “What would you think if I called the suicide
Adam Jeppesen, Work No. 129 (T), mixed media, 2018. Photo: David Stjernholm.
Image © Photographer Name
Another Trail of Breadcrumbs by Peg Quinn
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hotline—maybe they can help—and then I’ll call you back?” Sobbing, she agreed. I lowered the receiver, knowing I might never hear from her again. Knowing I’d possibly abandoned her to the voices in the corner; knowing she might kill herself while I was on the phone. I searched for the number of the suicide hotline with the deliberation of a sniper. I could feel this or I could function—but I couldn’t do both. So with an eerie calm I found the number, placed the call, and arranged a connection between a counselor and Bebe. Then I waited. A lamp was above my desk. The house rested in a deep, dark quiet. I felt nothing. I sat on the sofa and stared at the floor across the room. Forty-seven minutes passed before the phone rang and Bebe, sounding weary but calm, assured me that the counselor had helped. She’d promised to go to Student Health to talk to a psychologist in the morning. “Do you want me to come get you?” (How serious could this be if one phone call had calmed her down? Was this the stress of finals? Exhaustion? Complications from being away at school for the first time? If she could hold on until the holidays, she’d have a month at home to relax. I’d lie religiously to make her seem whole.) “No, it’s okay, Mom. I really want to go to sleep.” Monday, Bebe called me at work, confused.
Adam Jeppesen, Work No. 30, cyanotype on linen, 2017.
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The school psychologist wanted her hospitalized. I sped home, leaving a trail of voice mail for anyone I could think of who might be able to explain what was happening. Finally, a call came from the psychologist. Bebe was suicidal and needed to be watched, she said. A psychiatric hospital was the best place for her. Jesus. I appreciated her concern. I did. And her involvement. But I thought twenty years as Bebe’s mother trumped her one hour of analysis. Bebe sounded fine. I suspected the psychologist of overreacting but assured her that I’d connect Bebe with a psychiatrist. For the next five months, we patched and pasted Bebe’s life together even as it continued to crumble. She’d phone, furious with her roommates, demanding that I find her another place. This kind of drama was new to her personality, so, trusting the judgment of the Bebe I knew, I assumed there were serious problems that needed to be addressed. The next day, through work and after-school sports with Owen, I was mentally scrambling, trying to figure out what to do. Then Bebe called, laughing, talking about the fun she’d had playing UNO with her roommates. Slightly confused, I dropped her request for new living arrangements from my to-do list. But there were many mounting variations on these radical swings in her behavior. I was a little irritated at the stress she was creating for me but thought that maybe this often happened when a child stretched her wings in search of independence. Six weeks before the end of the semester, Bebe’s psychiatrist phoned. Bebe was curled up on the floor of his office. He was going to have her committed. I contacted her father, who agreed to drive down and get her. The three of us sat speechless in the emergency room at the local hospital, watching people with dog bites, broken bones, and minor burns from barbecues come and go. Tears alternately ran down Bebe’s face and mine until 3 a.m., when she was admitted to the psych ward. Like an animal being led to slaughter, she was systematically stripped of belts and shoestrings and searched for any objects she might use to end her own life. I tried to open the blinds, only to discover that there were no cords. Across her breakfast menu in red letters was printed “PLASTIC UTENSILS ONLY.” They actually thought my daughter, my little Bebe Jean—competitive swimmer, jazz alto, choir soprano, lover of cats and drawing and journals and books and movies and the Hanson Brothers and Dave Matthews Band—was going to kill herself.
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Someone at the desk informed us that insurance companies generally covered a three-day stay, so she’d be home by the weekend. Heavily medicated, she was released two weeks later with instructions to seek psychiatric counseling and a brochure on local mental-health organizations—but no diagnosis. She moved back home. She slept. Somehow, she developed a network of friends she’d met in the psych ward. I felt that I was living with a stranger, a young woman whose moral and ethical compass had lost its stabilizing direction. Her emotional highs were punctuated by exhilarating, trivial passions, reckless ideas, and friends so oddly pierced and tattooed that I was afraid when they were in my home. I was afraid to have them around Owen. I felt guilty, judging them by their appearance. She went goth: colored her hair, lips, and nails black; tried to conjure up some cleavage; bought
I would create the calm eye of the storm, a mechanism born of pure, simple desperation.
ridiculous boots that came up to her knees, with multiple buckles running up each side; started the process of dreadlocks; wore fingerless, rainbowpatterned gloves to her elbows, even though it was summer. When we walked downtown together, everyone stared. I wanted to run. But trying to be conversational, wanting to portray a sense of normalcy, I asked, “Why the gloves?” She peeled one back. “To hide the razor cuts.” This person was not my daughter. I never knew who she would be from one moment to the next and couldn’t have managed without my bulwark of denial. I did not want to be this person’s mom. But what were my options? My daughter was gone, vanished, but there had been no funeral, no ritual of support to mark the loss before moving toward recovery. I bounced hard between fear and emptiness. Yesterday I took Bebe to the Social Security office to apply for Supplemental Security Income. I should have taken her months ago, but this was the first time I’d had the emotional strength to walk up to an entry-level government clerk
PEG QUINN
without emotion (or a baseball bat) and ask if my daughter—diagnosed with mental illness, living at home, medicated and overweight—qualified. The petite young clerk glanced up at Bebe’s dyed-black dreadlocks (which seemed particularly dreadful), nodded, and set up an interview for the following week. While this was just one of many responsibilities before me, it was the first appalling step in what felt like an admission that this nightmare was true. I felt revulsion—as if we’d been randomly persecuted, then sentenced to life without the possibility of being anything but feared, avoided, and mocked. I enrolled in a twelve-week class called Parentto-Parent, organized by a mental-health association. It was run by two women who had children with mental illnesses, and everyone around the table was asked to explain why he or she was there. A couple I knew fairly well from my kids’ elementary-school days were sitting together. They had donated a great deal of time, money, and talent to the school. Their son was Bebe’s first boyfriend when the kids were in fourth grade. During Owen’s sixth-grade graduation ceremony, the mom had whispered in my ear, “I think I have a crush on your son!” They seemed a perfect Baptist family, so I assumed they had a problematic niece or nephew who had motivated them to come to the meeting. When it was their turn to speak, the wife stared at the edge of the table while the husband explained that their middle daughter had been hospitalized three times for attempted suicide and was living at a facility in Nevada. I knew nothing about mental illness, but here I was among perfectly normal, successful, attractive, intelligent people, and each one of their stories broke my heart. Each psychiatrist we visited offered a different diagnosis. I’d watch these men in their three-piece suits while disbelieving that Bebe would open up to them about group sex, drugs, or rock concerts. I was right. She never wanted to return, so we continued shopping. One day, we walked into the office of a smiling guy dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, with pictures of the Buddha on the wall. His sense of humor gave me hope, and Bebe settled in, seeing him once or twice a week, depending on how she was feeling. He suggested that she had borderline personality disorder (BPD). Earlier today, as we shopped for baking ingredients, Bebe and I talked about mental illness— specifically, hers—and her male relationships. Rather, I shopped while she talked, much the way I’d written the grocery list at home, sorting through the cupboard as she talked.
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In the spice aisle, she described her relationships with the date-nut-bread recipients. Mark knew her well but was depressing to be around. Ken, the platonic friend, was adorable but caught up in the drug culture. Then, there was Clark, to whom she couldn’t entirely open up. For example, she said, “I can’t tell him about the night Ed and Ken and I stayed up all night cutting each other. It was so psychotic, and Clark couldn’t handle it.” With this, the store spun sideways for a few seconds and I wanted to throw up. But my emotions were a luxury we couldn’t afford. So I mentally congratulated myself on how well I masked my reaction and carried on the conversation, agreeing that there are some things so out of the ordinary that people with less experience might be shocked or burdened or threatened by the information. We had to consider what we’re willing to reveal about ourselves, I told Bebe. I added that some of her problems existed because she’s young. Ten years from now, everything would seem easier. Including relationships with men. But who was I kidding? Currently in a manic phase, Bebe is obsessed with Renaissance music. She sings in two city college choirs and reads music theory and history for fun. She’ll join a church choir over winter break in order to keep singing. These are wonderfully constructive interests, but I’m concerned for her passion, given the eventual comedown from her elated state—the dropping out, the withdrawing, the disappointment. Again. The suicide rate for BPD is high. The victim, unable to cope with the manic-depression cycle and the inability to make the kind of social and emotional progress that gives life meaning and value, ends the torment. We passed a young man I vaguely recognized from Bebe’s elementary-school days. He, too, was with his mother, passionately explaining states of transcendental awareness as she read the back of a box. I hurried past, trying to find similarities in our travels. I dread the awkward, superficial conversation with near-strangers as they look at Bebe, unable to mask their shock. Her once athletic body is now doughy, the new glasses awry, the darting eyes too bright, the hair dull and tortured. Trying not to feel suicidal myself, I held up my end of our conversation, telling her that I’d read about the early use of pharmaceuticals and how patients would stop taking them because they missed the manic high. They were willing to risk depression rather than exist in a chemically induced numbness. Bebe nodded enthusiastically. She knew. She’s philosophically opposed to the medications
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she takes and worries that the side effects, which impair her weight, vision, memory, and concentration, will prevent her from getting a degree and a job. She gets frustrated when she has to justify their use to her friends. I nodded back. Everyone seems to agree that current medications are less than ideal, but, for now, they’re the best science has to offer. Privately, I fear the consequences should she decide to go off hers. On the elevator ride down from the Social Security office, she asked if we’d ridden the elevator up. Yes, remember this brushed stainless steel? I rubbed the wall I’d admired. “You know, if I were undermedicated or overmedicated,” she said, laughing, “that pattern would start moving!” I looked away and choked on tears. In line at the store, we talk about last week’s concerts, how there was an afterparty at the director’s house but she didn’t go, doesn’t feel she fits in, isn’t sure they want her around. Mostly, she’s self-conscious about being much younger than many of the other singers. Then she gives a thoughtful critique of the vocal relationships she has with the other first sopranos. I’m confused about why she can’t apply the same kind of reasoning to her boyfriends. How fortunate for Bebe to have such talent and to be well enough, for now, to share it. What a godsend that the director, who knew her before her breakdown, continues to value her contribution. As we leave the store, Bebe tells me that she has a favorite quote relative to her illness, though she doesn’t know who said it: “Those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.” I reciprocate with a favorite of mine, by Carl Jung: “Life is an experiment in consciousness that most people fail.” I toss out the dross. I sniff out the poetry in the experience of daily living. I feel gratitude for the intense experience of trying to stay balanced, though trembling, on the tightrope of life. Realizing that I can’t control my circumstances moves me to ask what practical contributions I can make through the attitudes I express and the values I hold. This awareness helps keep me in the moment and leads to growth and, perhaps, a kind of experiment in consciousness that I don’t want to fail. It’s something I think about while baking bread for the boyfriends. PEG QUINN’S poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, and twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She paints murals and theatrical sets and teaches art at a private elementary school. A version of this essay was first published by Creative Nonfiction Foundation / In Fact Books.
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A Mayor in the West by Chuck Tooley
AS A YOUNG VIETNAM VETERAN at loose ends, I stopped in Montana, where my family goes back four generations. Red Lodge, our ancestral home, is cradled in the magnificent Beartooth Mountains at an elevation of 5,555 feet. My grandfather— dentist, politician, postmaster, bon vivant—and my loving grandmother raised four children in Red Lodge, the Bedford Falls of the Rockies. Dad, their youngest, joined millions of Americans in uniform after Pearl Harbor. Postwar, his C.I.A. career took us to the Middle East and the Far East. Mom and Dad had retired to Billings when I came to visit. A city of 63,000 at the time, Billings evoked a 1950s town. Folks were friendly, hardworking, patriotic, and comfortable where they were. That was exactly what I wanted. I was twenty-six, and I was suddenly home. I started a new career in sales and marketing, then my own communication business, and became active in the community. As a business owner, I saw the decline of our central city, as a result of unimaginative local government and inadequate tax revenue for addressing critical issues. I felt called to leadership, and served two terms on the city council, starting in 1988. In 1993 Jews, African-Americans, Native Americans, L.G.B.T.Q. citizens, and others were targeted with printed materials, property damage, and crosses burned on lawns—always at night and always in anonymity, except for the flyers that proclaimed “Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.” The people of Billings united, showing solidarity by displaying thousands of menorahs at homes and
CHUCK TOOLEY
businesses all over town. This contributed to a new sense of pride in Billings and spawned a national anti-hate movement, Not in Our Town. Soon afterward, I was elected mayor and served for three terms, retiring undefeated in 2006. During this time, my co-workers and I brought people together to solve problems and enjoyed enthusiastic support for well-laid plans. From 1997 through 2005, we welcomed a hundred new businesses to our downtown area, along with $60 million of investment, while also creating a Human Relations Commission and a Board of Ethics. Since retiring as mayor, I have continued working on solutions for our communities. Small communities in Montana can face daunting challenges. Even in a state where agriculture is the No. 1 industry, for instance, food deserts abound. Businesses move away and jobs are lost, but ag operations will remain as long as there is a demand for their crops and the land can continue to produce. Upcoming generations might be willing to take over and work the land, but they’re not always able to afford the market price for the spread when Mom and Dad decide to retire. For decades, Montana has ranked at or near the top of all states for the number of military veterans per capita. Veteran populations are apt to be more conservative than the general population, so changes that affect their way of life might be taken as a threat to their survival. Service-connected P.T.S.D. and chronic physical issues continue without abatement. V.A. clinics are seeing more and more new patients with these conditions. Montana has seven Indian reservations, more than Idaho and Wyoming put together. The Crow Reservation is only five miles from Billings. Larger than Puerto Rico, it is a foreign nation with its own language, culture, and a tradition of welcoming visitors. Sadly, it continues to be plagued by poverty, drug use, and violence. The state ranks at or near the top for suicides per capita in the country. We know that the spirit of the West is created by the spirit of all the individuals who live here, and we know that declining communities experience a sense of hopelessness. But much of Montana is not hopeless. I found the town of Yaak, for example, which hides out in northwestern Montana, in the tall timber where folks can deliberately disappear. Meanwhile, Alzada (pop. 29) is surrounded by the wide-open spaces of southeastern Montana. Alzada’s Stoneville Saloon (“Stop by for Topless Tuesday!”) looks like an old Western. Seven hundred and thirty-five miles apart, these communities share Montana values: a strong work ethic,
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neighborliness, and a penchant for celebrating life’s victories. Yaak and Alzada aren’t subject to the risks that exist in other Montana towns. They produce lumber and food, things that are always in demand. Weather and construction cycles bring periodic instability, but as long as there are humans they will need food and shelter. Still, there are fewer places to do business locally, fewer jobs available, and fewer kids in schools. Schools have been the heart of Montana towns for generations, and you can feel it when you attend a statewide high-school tournament. But fewer students means fewer state dollars, and local communities don’t have the resources to compensate. School districts will merge as populations decrease, and the loss of a high school can diminish a sense of local identity. Small towns have learned to repurpose themselves. Red Lodge (pop. 2,286) was prospering from coal mining when the population was 5,000, in 1911. The Depression forced mines to close, and bootlegging dollars became important. Illegal Red Lodge hooch was sold as far away as Chicago and San Francisco. During the Depression, as the Beartooth Highway stretched across the mountains into Yellowstone Park, construction work provided jobs. The wondrous highway brought more travelers through Red Lodge. The town expanded tourism, and entrepreneurs developed a thriving skiing industry. Shelby, Montana, also transformed itself. In 1960, the population was 4,017. By 1970, it had declined to 3,111 and hovered there. But in the 1980s harmonic convergence blessed Shelby. Young residents who had left for college and career found spouses, started families, and returned home to enjoy Montana’s quality of life. In five years, Shelby saw a hundred people return. They invested in their community by running for the school board, the city council, the county commission. They made plans for the future. Larry Bonderud, a returned native and the city’s longtime mayor, says that Shelby realized it had to diversify the economy and recognized that transportation was the new opportunity. City officials created a Port Authority, revived an Amtrak station, and built a truck/train transfer facility that handles $6 billion in products from Canada each year. They facilitated the development of a new hotel, casino, R.V. park, and convenience store that employ more than a hundred residents. Two additional hotels came with increased transportation activity.
Right: From the Bunker Hill Mine Series © Kyle Johnson Back cover: From the Bunker Hill Mine Series © Kyle Johnson
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The city won the bid for a new private prison that provides $120 million in payroll and pays $400,000 in taxes annually. The municipality invested in water development, helped attract new wind farms worth $1 billion, and grew a health center that employs 140 people. Shelby and Canada now share a border station that houses F.B.I., T.S.A., Homeland Security, Border Patrol, and similar Canadian agency personnel. In Billings, a once ramshackle, litter-strewn entrance to the city was transformed through private-public partnerships and community will. Infrastructure improvements, such as sidewalks, lighting, and landscaping, along with tax-increment financing, inspired entrepreneurs and civic leaders. The South Side neighborhood, long in decline, now has new restaurants, a hotel, a nursing home, a chamber of commerce, a visitors center, a publichealth clinic, government buildings, even a large, state-of-the-art skate park. The neighborhood exhibits pride and community spirit. And hope. That entrance to Billings now features mature plantings, tall trees, and an appealing streetscape. I helped plant those trees many years ago, and just the other day I enjoyed driving through their shade. Someday soon I’ll go back and sit for a while. CHUCK TOOLEY, the longest-serving mayor of Billings, Montana, was in the leadership of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, served as the president of the Montana League of Cities and Towns, the director of the Urban Institute (MSUBillings), a director of the Big Sky Economic Development Authority, and a board member of international N.G.O.s, including the Population Institute. He chairs the Wheeler Center for Public Policy and is a trustee of Rocky Mountain College. Chuck speaks widely on such topics as citizenship, leadership, and building community.
BUNKER HILL MINE KYLE JOHNSON Photographer Kyle Johnson brings his gift for capturing people to this series on the Bunker Hill Mine of northern Idaho, in which he captures the essence of a place. The photographs that open and close the magazine document the effects the closure of the mines have had on the town and, while they are largely absent from these photographs, also on the people.
Lincoln Center Theater Review Vivian Beaumont Theater, Inc. 150 West 65 Street New York, New York 10023
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