OBEDIENCE: ACT I

after I lost sight of him, I ran for blocks. This image imprinted itself in my memory: His face flattened and split into tiny segments. I did not “cause a fuss,” I did not scream, I did not ask for help. Instead, I made myself an island, small and remote, glancing back through the slats of a staircase as I fled.

I first read Hélene Cixous’s 1975 essay “The Laugh of the Medusa” in an English class, and I immediately shared the PDF with my mom, my grandmother, and my sister. “Must read,” I texted. The essay proposes a feminine way of writing, overflowing with jouissance—pleasure, love, otherworldliness; to write ourselves, to write our body, and, therefore, to lay claim to a whole and embodied self. Her final sentence rings in my ears, like my own chant: “In one another, we will never be lacking.”

While rehearsing for the Thesis Festival this spring, I walked home every night with my three castmates. Our characters lived a century before us in a Catholic reformatory on the Lower East Side, where the play allowed their unhinged creativity and violent fantasies to unfold. Outside of their dormitory, they endured sexual abuse from their priest. When we finished rehearsal, we waited for each other to take off our skirts, collect our scripts, and return stray papers, overcoats, and plastic oranges to the prop cart. Like pallbearers in a funeral procession, we would roll the cart down the hall to the storage closet. Then we would set off into the night, forgetting our characters, walking down Broadway together.

On “perfect passivity” and what it means to be Guai.

BY STYVALIZH URIBE

In the middle of an hour-long seminar last semester, my phone started buzzing and wouldn’t stop. When I finally retrieved it, the screen displayed call after missed call from my mom. She had sent me a video of a man beating an elderly Asian man to death on the A train. Passengers did nothing but avert their gazes. From 2,000 miles away in our California home, she urged me not to go outside. Staying in was the only way to make sure I was safe, she told me. I had to be a 乖孩子 (guai hai zi), or an “obedient child,” for her. I couldn’t bring myself to continue watching as the man, with an uncanny resemblance to my own deceased grandpa, was slowly beaten to death on the screen in my hand. I turned my Zoom camera off and replied—hands shaking, vision blurred—“Okay.”

乖 (guai) has developed into its current form out of a collision between the old and the new, the traditional and the modern, and the East and the West. The word, often used to praise children, denotes obedience, docility, and conformity to accepted norms of behavior. An essay by race scholars Dolores de Manuel and Davis Racio suggests that, as Asian American children grow up, they negotiate a “triple bind”: they are “pressured to remain faithful to ancestral heritage, while at the same time admonished to assimilate and become fully American, but ultimately [find] that because of their Asian genes, many Americans will never give them full acceptance.” I know from my own experience that parents often strategically deploy 乖 in processes of their children’s “becoming” Chinese American. How is this distinctly Chinese cultural logic adapted for an American social context? In answering this question, I found myself reflecting on my own upbringing, and how being 乖 relates to a particular Asian American trope.

I stared out onto third-graders playing in the parking lot of my American school as their parents trailed behind them. I felt my mom tug at my hand and tighten her grasp. We had just moved from Taiwan, and both of us made sure to keep our distance from the many white families in our neighborhood. In Chinese, she said to me, “Look at them—running around and not

caring about the cars. Imagine if a stranger came along and stole them from their parents. Could you even imagine how devastated Mommy would be? Promise me that you’ll never be like them, that you’ll always be a 乖孩子.” The conversation ended with a pinkie swear in an American parking lot. · · · The “Asian” in “Asian American” is notoriously amorphous: It is constituted and made meaningful by the encounters between different strands of inherited values, each unique to specific cultural identities too often blanketed under the continental gesture of “Asian.” In accordance with the inherited notion of 乖, I grew to epitomize a cultural ideal. The rigor of my high school schedule—AP courses and college-level math—became the defining feature of my life. When school ended, I practiced Rachmaninoff’s “Prelude in g minor no. 5” and Liszt’s “Un Sospiro,” accomplishments my mother could brag about. Even seemingly meaningless activities, she held up as expectations towards excellence—like aimless laps in the pool, swimming from wall to wall. Rigorous swimming practice, like working hard at school and mastering an instrument, was something I could control. But no matter how hard I trained, I couldn’t control the effects of being the only Chinese person in a white crowd. I had been taught to be careful, but I wasn’t the only one: In that exposed and chlorinated atmosphere, I could tell my white peers had learned to be just as tentative and distant around me. · · · I wanted to skip swim practice and spend more time with my friends from Chinese school, even if only a few more hours, while we waited for our parents to pick us up. So I lied to my mom. I said that I had too much leftover homework to finish to go to practice, and that I had planned to study with my friends. When she discovered my transgression a few days later by talking to one of the teachers, I felt her chilling glare shoot all the way down my spine. My mother drove me to the police station and told me, as I quivered in the passenger seat, that she wanted to disown me. I was a liar, and therefore couldn’t possibly be the daughter she raised; I was no longer her 乖孩子 .

· · · 乖 has become a normalized part of my life and those of other Chinese Americans who strive to be well-behaved, obedient, deferential. The etymology of 乖, however, reveals a paradox. The character can also be used to denote “perversion, deviation and transgression.” In our recent conversation, University of Illinois linguist YiHan Zhou shared his fascination with the “anto-antonymic” properties of 乖. He explained that the word’s semantic contortions through time have been so drastic and varied that its current meaning completely opposes the original. What was once “deviate” became “cunning”, then “smart”, then finally “obedient,” 乖’s closest modern translation in English.

Repetition over generations has altered and enhanced the public's understanding of 乖’s meaning. Various guai teachings permeate Asian social norms, each iteration imperceptibly changing to approach an ideal of “perfect” and passive behavior within children. And it’s not just children adults demand obedience of. Green bags of coconut-flavored Kuai Kuai (乖 乖) snacks are commonly placed on devices in research institute labs, taped to hospital respirators, and placed on printers and near computers, to ensure that these machines never break down. These snacks are said to possess some “magical power” that “bewitches wayward tech—whether disobedient desktop computers, intractable servers or ill-mannered ATMs,” according to a Taipei Times interviewee. Immersed in this environment awash with 乖 imagery, Chinese American children passively, and dare I say mechanically, continue to accept 乖 as a desirable, even magical, characteristic. Children are conditioned to perform merely the Generic Asian, reduced to automated behaviors that foster machine-like levels of obedience and animosity toward the wayward.

But at its heart, 乖 is situated within the family. In listening to my mother’s words and promising that I would always be her 乖孩子, I began to personify 乖 without fully understanding what it meant. Over time, 乖 came to signify a web of inherited expectations that I had internalized over the course of my upbringing: that I would conform to a specific social hierarchy, or, in Zhou’s words, “play a

role without causing fuss.”

Yahui Anita Huang, a scholar of Chinese linguistics in Columbia’s Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, researches commonly-invoked phrases—like 面子 (mien zi), or “reputation,” and 臉 (lian), or “face”—and their role in negotiating autonomy and filial responsibility. When I spoke with her, she quoted Lu Xun, a famous figure in Chinese literature: “面子是中國人的金錢光臨,” or, in English, “Our reputation [as Chinese people] is worth more than gold.” 乖 (guai) extends from this belief. To be 乖 is to embark on a continual project of preemptively saving face, to preserve one’s culturally invaluable reputation. Chinese

daughters, sons, and students learn to “add more 乖 to [our] portfolios,” as Huang said.

Zhou’s and Huang’s warnings, though they address distinctly Chinese behavioral practices, reminded me of the American model minority standard. Similarly pervasive, both anticipate and project obedience and self-restraint onto Asian people. Further, the standard of 乖, according to Zhou, has always been established by those higher up in the social hierarchy—typically parents and teachers. The white majority in America sets up the “ideal” expectation, and I am forced to play my role without fuss or complaint, as I have been taught. This performance of “guai” behavior problematizes our roles as Americans, as we remain mechanical pawns in a much larger social game. As a parenting style, Huang summarized 乖 in terms eerily similar to the model minority stereotype; in this framework, she said, adults choose to “emphasize and value obedience over independence, compliance over innovation.” This comes at the cost of exploration and self-expression: In both 乖 teaching and the model minority paradigm, “creativity is not really addressed.”

Asian American culture has not been handed down, unchanged, from parent to child; with each generation, practices are partly inherited, partly modified, and partly invented anew. Speaking to these researchers helped me remember that we young people are one such link in this chain, connecting the past with our future.

Illustration by Hazel Lu

乖 is both a set of aspirations to conform to Asian social obligations and familial expectations and a desirable adaptation in order for Asian Americans to effectively compete in mainstream society. Even as 乖 traditionally demands conformity to certain behavioral standards, its ambivalence opens up the possibility of negotiating these boundaries. With a formal, “original” character that denotes perversion and revolt, the disjunction of the “乖” allows behaviors that reinforce and behaviors that challenge prevailing social expectations to co-conspire. Interpreted this way, 乖 can infringe on the model minority discourse. For Asian Americans, eliminating these stereotypes promises long-awaited validation and belonging. It offers a glimpse of a different kind of being in American life, one that acknowledges race but abandons the confines of American expectations on Asian personalities— one in which we are seen neither as a threat nor nothing more than a 乖孩子. · · · The drive back home from the police station was silent. It isn’t easy to reconcile a seemingly predetermined identity. In that drive home, I decided that I was okay with losing the status of my mother’s 乖孩 子. Perhaps now, I could be more than just a 乖孩子. Perhaps I already was.

The Garden of Ede

BY EMILY BACH

Brimstone’s Anthropology museum was once the best of its kind. In 2017, Future Society named it a “a shining example of the power of human interface,” the magazine’s highest praise for a museum of its limited capacity. In a town of around 13,000 residents, the museum was the only tourist attraction for miles. Still, it rarely got attention beyond the county. Following the review, tourists from across the country flocked to the town, eager to witness what they assumed to be the exhibit of the century.

Chunks of dark wood dressed the walls, carefully whittled to form face-like structures. They hung unpainted and unfinished, a product of thinly veiled budgeting issues. Deer-hair eyebrows were the only interruption to the woodwork. Meant to illuminate the sculptures’ eyes, they kept the attention of onlookers, but contributed little else.

Ede, the collection’s lead sculptor, knew early on that the sculptures’ eyes would be the downfall of the project. Everything else could be formulized. Cheekbones chiseled into subtle parabolas. Lips carved into a diamond, refined into curves. Eyes were the only things missing from his equation for humanity.

About a month into carving, he began to look past this flaw, a trait that was uncommon in his work. Ede had been awarded the title of lead sculptor for his precision. A master craftsman, his work hung in museums from New York to Paris. But by 42, he’d grown tired of the perfectionism attached to the art world. He told himself that the faces weren’t intended to be flawless, just something for the living to mourn the dead.

When the exhibit debuted, he didn’t even notice the eyes. Face after face draped the walls, carefully spaced no more and no less than 13 inches apart. There were 587 of them, the precise number of residents that the town had lost in the previous ten years. Accompanying each of them was a plaque containing only the artist’s name. Ede’s appeared 71 times.

Even though he’d finished his work on the collection, Ede visited the museum often. Locals afforded the project compliments like parents reminiscing as they flipped through their high school yearbooks. They spoke about drunken memories and awkwardly charming grocery store encounters over humble smiles. Their laughs were the living reward for Ede’s labor.

By the time the project was open to the public, Future Society’s review came as no surprise to Ede. Quickly, tourists reserved their reactions, waiting anxiously for faces that critics commended for their relatability. When they finally entered, most found a few to focus on. Some spoke about their family, others loved ones, others people they barely knew. The namelessness of the project made it that way—that anyone could find anyone in any one if they looked hard enough.

Ede grew to stay away from the museum after the review came out. He’d go once a week, typically on Thursdays, to remind him of the craft that he had since abandoned. Occasionally, he encountered a stray tourist family, but, for the most part, Thursdays were reserved for the locals. He’d watch mothers live the five stages of grief in seconds, anger flashing through vibrant eyes, arguably too alive. At times he questioned whether the project reopened wounds or healed them.

Scanning the faces, he’d forgotten which ones he’d created and to whom they belonged. He remembered only one, shortly named Kian. It stood in the fourth room, the one visited by the fewest, on the south wall’s third row. Ede had captured the curvatures of his forehead perfectly, weaving the lines of his skin into the lines of the wood with more precision than the others. There was nothing technically special about Kian, he was just the first, the last to lose his humanity.

On his weekly trips, Ede would visit Kian last, staring at him longest. He did it out of respect. His wall rarely interested viewers, and Kian, in particular, seemed more dead than alive to most. Ede didn’t understand what made some of the sculptures stand out against the others. Perhaps people just couldn’t see themselves in him, he thought. In some ways, he blamed

himself for his second death. He was, after all, the one that was supposed to keep him alive.

Ede’s weekly visits grew into a pattern over the following months, and as the hype from the review died down, he came to know the other regulars intimately. One lost her brother to lung cancer; another lost his son to a fire in their home. They carried tear-stained notes, like visitors at a graveyard, clearly created by hands that didn’t understand the weight of what they had lost. Ede understood the notes, but not their grief.

Another couple visited the museum regularly, but they were more interested in each other than the sculptures. The only other regular was the security guard, whose post became progressively less exciting as the months after the review dragged on. Where he used to be on high alert, he now sat on a quaint metal stool in the fourth room, keeping Kian company and stalking his ex-wife on Facebook.

On a Thursday four months after the review and six months after the opening, a brown-haired woman cautiously entered the museum. She carried herself like she was lost, but held onto enough familiarity to avoid looking like a tourist.

“I’m sorry, I was wondering if you could help me with something,” she whispered quietly, avoiding eye contact with the couple draped all over each other. They glared at her crassly, annoyed by her intrusion. She didn’t notice, though. Her eyes didn’t leave the walls.

“You’re just gonna have to find ’em yourself, they don’t have names here,” the man replied shortly. Without thinking, he returned to his partner, slurring through a series of lovey phrases he’d discovered on Google moments before.

The woman moved on quickly, this time sensing she wasn’t welcome around them. Instead, she traipsed through the rooms, scanning each wall with abnormal intent.

Ede watched her out of curiosity. It’d been weeks since he’d seen a newcomer, and their process fascinated him. They afforded each sculpture an extra glance of recognition, like an offering to the lost. The returners didn’t even look at the other faces anymore: They were only concerned with the one they recognized. He appreciated the people who gave each one a moment, even if it disappointed them.

When she entered the fourth room, the security guard flattened his uniform and met her eyes for a moment. Nobody had truly been there for days, so he didn’t have much of a reason to be on high alert. Ede trailed behind her, far enough that she wouldn’t notice him, but close enough that he could judge her reactions. Which ones impressed her, confused her, struck her? He wanted to experience the sculptures with her.

She scanned the north wall first, clearly searching for a single face, before moving to the east one. Once she reached the second row, her shoulders collapsed and eyes pressed shut. “No. Please, God. No,” she cried, with wandering and wrinkled hands reaching to a short, angular face in the middle of the wall. Her index finger shook as she braved her eyes open.

“Ma’am, please don’t touch the artwork,” the security guard said, unimpressed. Ede watched coldly as the woman inched away from the sculpture, desperate to trace the lines of that which she had lost in the dark wood. She stared into its eyes, searching for some sign of life or forgiveness. But as Ede anticipated months ago, they gave her nothing. This sculpture wasn’t his, so at least it wasn’t his fault, he thought.

“I never should’ve left,” she continued. Her voice wove around the words to avoid the consonants that were too difficult to pronounce, too unfinished to be spo-

Illustration by Maya Weed

ken into existence. “I should’ve stayed, I should’ve fought.” This time, tears hid in the wrinkles of her face.

“God, you’re so grown up, how’d you get so grown up?” she said in a cadence between laughing and weeping. “I’m so sorry, Kian,” she finished, before returning to watch the sculpture silently.

Ede glanced at the face on the south wall, at Kian, then back at the sculpture sharing the woman’s gaze. Something about the foreignness of its face cut deeper than her loss, a fact that was reaffirmed each time she’d hold her eyes shut for seconds at a time, attempting to create an image of Kian in the structure of a stranger.

She remained shaking as she traced invisible lines in the air, imagining the creases in his nose and the softness of his eyebrow hairs. She moved slowly, with intention. Ede watched silently in the other corner of the room, both amazed and appalled by the pain that congregated in her fingertips.

Perhaps she’d realize the sculpture wasn’t Kian, Ede hoped. But he knew she wouldn’t as he watched the sculpture grow into her image of Kian, her jaw relaxing as she found a temporary but new sense of comfort in her ability to remember him.

He took a step closer, planning to tell her the truth. Misunderstanding, she stepped to the side. “Sorry to block your view,” she said, before ducking her face to wipe tears from her face. Ede didn’t say anything in return, but when she looked back at him again, he understood that it was his responsibility not to. Kian was already lost. The character of his memory was no longer Ede’s to determine.

Attempting to make her exit, the woman glanced over each sculpture, clearly hoping to leave without disturbing her onlookers. Ede took the woman’s place in front of the sculpture that she had deemed her own something: a son, brother, friend. Maybe a lover. Like an engineer, he held a mental blueprint of Kian’s face to the sculpture, noting its similarities. Structurally, the jaw and face structure were vastly different. The nose was lopsided to the right, cheekbones plumper than Kian’s. The only similarity they shared were their almond eye shapes. While Ede stood before the east wall, the woman’s eyes traced the south wall’s first and second row, leaving nothing to be remembered. She paused momentarily at the third one, an almost invisible quiver escaping her lips as she stared at Kian’s face. In no more than a second, she moved on almost hauntingly to finish the row. Turning to leave, she paused shortly and stared instead into Ede’s eyes.

“I hope you find peace,” she said. For no more than a moment, Ede and the woman’s eyes connected before both returned to the wood. In a flash, he saw it—the grief of losing something that almost but never was. It was real but not alive, raw but not recognized. He nodded in her direction, and she left. Ede moved to stand before Kian’s face.

He stayed longer that day, questioning if Kian was watching from afar, more heartbroken or healed. He wondered the same for the woman. The security guard studied Kian with him, somehow aware of the event that occurred before them. They grieved his loss together, or, at least, Ede wanted to believe they did.

That afternoon, Ede returned to the whittling room for the first time in months. Spiderwebs overwhelmed his metal tools and grief crowded a pile of abandoned wood. The table was rearranged by other sculptors, but his energy sunk deep into the floorboards, impossible to move. He stared at the blocks for a moment, wondering how many memories were destroyed by the pitfalls of his craft.

Taking a seat on his creaky metal stool, he began to carve. Sculptures for the lost, he remembered. Sculptures for the lost. He’d long forgotten the equations he swore by months ago. This time he crafted only from what he felt, disregarding the shape of parabolas and power of exponents. He drew the lines in his forehead, the ones only he could notice and only he could recreate. He wanted to deface the wall.

Today, Ede’s face is the only one in the museum to be accompanied by a blank plaque. The sculptures were to remain nameless, and his was no exception. When polished, his plaque’s reflection is one of many places where museum visitors can see themselves, but the only place they find their own eyes.

The Noblest Architecture

Michael Henry Adams has spent his life preserving Harlem’s Black vitality.

BY SAM NEEDLEMAN

Michael Henry Adams has lived since 2006— or maybe 2007; he can’t quite remember— on 129th Street and Convent Avenue. Before that, he lived on 138th and Amsterdam, in the apartment with the most sunlight he’s ever had. Before that, 122nd and Lenox. Before that, 122nd again, just west of Marcus Garvey Park. Before that, Hamilton Place. Before that, the Village— Hudson Street. Before that, 120th, and before that, 138th and Amsterdam again. Before that, Hamilton Terrace. Before that, a sublet on 147th and Broadway. Before that, 147th and Convent. Before that, the 37th floor of 500 Park Avenue, where he worked as the live-in cook for Larry and Klara Silverstein. Before that, “Queens—one of those first places you come to in Queens.” Before that, Riverside—wait, no. Before Queens was Fordham Road and Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, in the living room of an apartment owned by an estranged member of the Afghan royal family. Before that, 158th and Riverside, in the dining room of a subscriber to a gay men’s roommate service. Before that, a bedroom of another subscriber to a gay men’s roommate service on St. Nicholas near 145th. Before that, Hamilton Terrace again, with a friend named Kevin, in a very historic house.

Most of the buildings Adams has lived in are about twice as old as he is now. For a city that likes to thrust itself into the center of world history, that’s a low multiplier; if he had left Ohio for a historic quarter of Paris or Aleppo or Calcutta, the number might be higher. Still, he has found a life’s meaning in reminding his neighbors about the very interesting piles of bricks and stones that people on this island have tended to make, and about the very interesting ways that they have tended to live in them. This is especially true of Black people in Harlem, who made, in Adams’s words, the “most dynamic contribution to world culture” in American history with music that they composed and performed inside those piles. He insists that bricks and stones are worth keeping around not just because they make great houses and schools and churches and stores, but also because they enable people to make beautiful things, and are themselves quite beautiful to look at. Singularly so: New York City has no real aesthetic parallel in space or time. Certainly Harlem doesn’t. Nothing close.

Adams’s devotion to Harlem is not inborn, but it’s just as resolute as you might think. He formed it by himself on the long journey to Manhattan from the middle of the country in the middle of the last century—Akron in 1956, where he learned to love buildings. His father was a high school teacher, a university professor, and an athletic coach, and his mother was a nurse; his four sisters were all younger. After he was rejected by colleges in Boston—the grand houses of the Back Bay tempted him—he stayed in the old Rubber Capital of the World for a decade of undergrad. He moved here in the summer of 1985, and two years later he enrolled in the Master’s in Historic Preservation program at Columbia. He didn’t graduate, largely because he struggled to find a thesis advisor with his interests and passions; only through a process of elimination did he land with the famed architectural historian Gwendolyn Wright. She found his academic writing too florid, “like Henry James.” Then he tried to make a living saving buildings, which proved difficult, as it usually does. But it was especially difficult for Adams, a gay Black man up against a white establishment intent on writing their white architectural histories to buttress their white ideologies.

Over the decades, Adams has worked as a curator’s assistant, a sales clerk, a “cook slash houseman,” a waiter at Miss Mamie’s Spoonbread Too, and the Community Cultural Associate for State

Senator Bill Perkins. But he’s best known as a historian and an activist. His publications include Harlem, Lost and Found and Style and Grace: African Americans at Home; gorgeous copies of both are available to pore over in Avery. He is now searching for a publisher for Homo Harlem, a book about queer life uptown in the twentieth century, and for his memoir, tentatively titled Mud Huts. His message and mission are crystal clear in the name of one of the many preservationist organizations he’s founded: Save Harlem Now.

I met Adams twice at the peak of early June’s heat wave, when Harlem’s streets were even quieter than their weekend morning norm. By noon, chic crowds started filling the outdoor sections of the restaurants he led me to for eggs benedict and coffee and bellinis. Adams is the sprawling neighborhood’s designated dandy; both days I spent with him, he donned a straw boater and a post-Memorial Day blazer. “We haven’t seen you in over 400 days!” the owner of the second restaurant declared as he set us at a prime table in the shade. Thelma Golden, the director of the Studio Museum and maybe New York’s most celebrated curator, walked by with her husband and said, “Hi, Michael!” Adams nodded, then paused for a minute before launching back into his story.

After hours of talking, I finally told Adams I had to go. “But we haven’t seen any buildings yet!” he cried, as if the autobiographical monologues on history, politics, and culture he’d just spent a weekend delivering were meant as an appetizer. I reminded him that he had been extremely late both days and, on the second, steered me away from the buildings and toward brunch just after we’d finally linked. We laughed. I assured him we’d meet again; hopefully, his buildings aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The Blue and White: Where do you shop?

Michael Henry Adams: For my socks, from African vendors on 125th Street that sell these socks for little girls for a dollar apiece. At Marshall's, and—what is that place? There’s some place that’s underground that’s another outlet store. And then occasionally, if you get tricked by seeing something at Brooks Brothers that’s on sale, I might go there. I got these shoes online. I once recklessly bought a hat from Brooks Brothers, but then I found out by getting a Brooks Brothers charge card, I could get this tremendous discount. So I did. But unfortunately, I’m very careless with my clothes and things.

B&W: Really? Have you always been that way?

MHA: I have been. I think it must have been a reaction against my father. He was very meticulous and had things that he’d had from the beginning of his college days at the end of his life. I used to wear them, and I think I ruined those, too.

When I was a kid, I would watch movies like Gone with the Wind or A Band of Angels or Saratoga Trunk, and I’d find myself identifying with the white people. Why did I do that? I guess because I wanted to be an heir, to be a part of the beauty, of the beautiful way of life, the clothes and the buildings.

B&W: And you had no examples of that aesthetic in Black life?

MHA: Well, I did to a certain degree. But I realized that the font of all that beauty and grace was devolved from the white society. Eventually, I came to see that whether it was Williamsburg or Oak Alley or some other grand plantation house, because of these places being linked to slavery, that I have some sort of responsibility to abjure them. So I transferred my affections, then, to English country houses. Ultimately, I came to realize that William Beckford was the richest man in England because of the West Indian sugar trade. I came to recognize a more profound truth: There is no beauty or attainment of any kind anywhere in the world, no mosque or temple or cathedral, that’s not rooted in misery and suffering and hell some kind of way, and that the Soviets have got it right—that you can’t destroy Czarist palaces because they, like plantation THE BLUE AND WHITE

houses, represent the blood, sweat, and tears of so many and therefore are transmuted into the cultural patrimony of us all. B&W: Why should buildings be preserved?

MHA: Because they are a tangible embodiment of what we as a society say we value, what matters. If one is in agreement with the proposition that Black lives matter, then it needs to be underscored by conceding that Black landmarks matter as much as white landmarks. If you have a situation where 80 percent of Greenwich Village is protected by landmarking, and only less than 10 percent of Manhattan above 110th Street is protected by landmarking, well then something clearly is wrong.

B&W: Is Harlem the most historically significant neighborhood in Manhattan?

MHA: Certainly for Black people. But, you know, New York is a place of momentous importance not just to Black people. Everything from the fashion industry to the movies to literature are all expressed by the architectural legacy of New York. But certainly, wherever you go in the world, Harlem is a place of international significance that’s immediately recognized.

B&W: Have you found that there’s a disjuncture between that significance and the way that people who live here treat it, especially people who are intent to preserve certain parts of the city and not others?

MHA: In New York, ambivalence for preservation is a given. But is New York unique? No. Wherever you go, be it Venice or Newport or New York, there are a certain number of people who are perfectly sanguine about the idea of killing the goose that lays the golden egg. If you concede that one of the things that is foremost in making this place viable and profitable is tourism, all these places are all too happy to bring in cruise ships and to build waterfront hotels that block the waterfront, and build more and more luxury condos, which are unsustainable in terms of the environment and unsustainable in terms of preserving an authentic atmosphere that people will want to experience. And so at some point, which these people generally feel will be sometime after their demise, people will stop coming here. But the short-term gain is just too irresistible.

B&W: Do you ever think about what your life would have been like if you hadn't come here?

MHA: Well, you know, there are still libraries. So I would have found a way. And I might have even been happier, in terms of the greater physical comfort I might have been able to have living in Akron or Cleveland, and I certainly hope I would have become even better known as a big fish from a smaller pond. But on the other hand, with every passing year, I realize that it would have been impossible. I mean, the last time I was home, I was down on the campus of the University of Akron, where I was an undergraduate. There was a young white man walking down a street—there was hardly anyone on the street, on the sidewalk—he was walking down the street and he had a big rifle in his hands. And that’s legal in Akron. Why? Why?

My whole preservation evolution came about because as a kid, one of the things we would do when I was a child is my father would take us out for a ride. We’d just go driving around the different neighborhoods and just look! As a young kid, I would see neighborhoods I thought were beautiful and that had wonderful old houses, and then I would notice that some wonderful 19thcentury house was being torn down and being told that it was going to become a parking lot or a supermarket. There was this one house that was not so far from our house which sat on a hill and had big columns. And I remember when it was on the front page of the paper that it was being demolished. I could read. And I remember it said it had pink marble columns, and I knew what marble was because my great-grandmother had these tables in her living room that had vein marble tiles. So the whole notion of pink marble just seemed so exotic and incredible. And it was being demolished! I remember talking to my father about it, and this kind of thing continued getting worse and worse.

When I was near the end of my college career— which took an enormous amount of time, like 10

Illustration by Samia Menon

years or something—there was a house that had been built by this man who was the grandson of the founder of Akron. His house had become the United Fund, and because I had been the president of Red Cross Youth and we had done a letter folding thing there one time, I knew this house, and I knew it was largely intact. Even though the exterior was covered in aluminum siding and the front porch had been taken off, the interiors were all intact, wonderful. So the United Way decided they were going to tear down this building. I couldn’t believe it. And the city had this armory building that was built just prior to the First World War, and they were going to tear that down. And they did—they tore them both down. So that prompted me to write this guest editorial to the Akron paper. At the end, I invited people to join together and start a group that would be concerned with Akron’s preservation, called Progress Through Preservation. It got started, and I quickly learned the pain of how you can start something, but because people are almost always going to be inclined to be more conservative and unconfrontational than I am, they would try to push you aside so they can create a more decorous group, which, from their perspective, will be more effective because it won’t be beating up on people all the time. So I got swept aside.

B&W: What was New York like when you came here?

MHA: It’s very funny, you know. I’d seen an article in the National Geographic about Harlem that included a photograph of Mrs. Hoyt and her entertaining guests at dinner in her house on Hamilton Terrace with a maid—that’s the woman who had Aunt Len’s Doll and Toy Museum, the first job I had. Then, there was also an article that came out in Ebony magazine called “Where the Black Middle Class Lives,” and it showed people on Hamilton Terrace. Ironically, the first place that I lived in New York was then Hamilton Terrace, and the shock for me was that both articles seemed to suggest that some neo-Harlem Renaissance was in effect.

So I was rather surprised when I got here and I went to places like Strivers’ Row and realized that some of the houses there were still rooming houses. Harlem seemed to me by no means some place on the upswing. In fact, my very first visit to Harlem was an accident. I had come here in whatever year it was that the song “I’m Coming Out” was brand new, and I was going to go to church at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. And instead of getting off at 125th Street on the local train, I got off on the next stop, which put me on this street, behind the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. What’s very funny is that many of the apartments and the buildings here were vacant, and in preparation for a visit from Richard Nixon, who was coming here to campaign for Black votes … they didn’t want him to see Harlem as too run down, so they put these decals on the windows of vacant apartments that showed Venetian

blinds or curtains or sometimes a flowerpot with a geranium, or sometimes a cat, even, so that if you were riding by the motorcade, you might think, Ah! What a cheery place. A true Potemkin village. So when I got off the train, I was looking around and I saw these buildings with ... all sorts of architectural embellishment, and I thought, Oh, this is neat. They told me Harlem was a slum. At that point, still, I had this blind spot. It seemed inconceivable that one could have noble architecture in a slum, and I continued to have this until I noticed those decals, and all of a sudden the sight of the decals on that Sunday morning gave me the idea that this was indeed a kind of menacing place that I should make a hasty retreat from. So I did, and went to St. John the Divine.

B&W: “White Harlem.” Is that a phrase you use to refer to pre-1920s Harlem, and is it a phrase you use to refer to present-day Harlem as well?

MHA: [Laughter] Well, I hope not. We are going to see! This is the year when the census data comes out. I suspect that Harlem is still over 50% Black. What people don’t appreciate is there’s been a tremendous amount of white disappointment vis-à-vis Harlem. People will buy an apartment or rent an apartment or buy a house, and their eager real estate brokers will say to them, “Oh! The noise, the trash, isn’t that terrible. But don’t worry, this block already has five white homeowners, and soon the Blacks will be gone.” And they’re not—or not sufficiently. So they sell up and move on. And then there are others, like, say, Don Lemon and his boyfriend, who simply think, Well, this was fun, this was off-beat, but we can do better. And they’re gone. Marcia Gay Harden: Poof! Gone.

B&W: When you go to Columbia, there is a kind of existential—maybe not guilt, maybe guilt— but, at the very least, concern that the institution you’re paying for a degree is destroying, at least in part, this neighborhood.

MHA: They’re definitely a part of it. And there are white people perfectly happy to help them in the name of supposedly helping Harlem. When I first came here … I was protesting against the demolition of the Audubon Ballroom and Theatre to build Columbia’s biotechnological research lab. That was … where Malcolm X was killed. One would not do that in terms of the Ford’s Theatre or the Dallas Book Depository or the Lorraine Motel, as a fitting monument to Lincoln or Kennedy or King. Today … there could be no more startling indictment than to see that this all could have been saved, that even now there are parking lots and undistinguished buildings where [Columbia’s lab] might have been more reasonably built. When you have the place where Malcolm X was killed and you just let it go for a parking lot, that is a pretty lame situation.

Look at someone like A’Lelia Bundles, Madam Walker’s great-great-granddaughter. She’s on the Columbia board. Columbia tells her, “Oh, there’s not going to be any displacement in terms of our expansion.” Well, that’s a joke. She can try to tell herself that all she wants to, but it’s not true, it’s not so. But she doesn’t want to believe it is, for good reason. I mean, she’d have to question her whole involvement with it. And she will say, “Oh, well, you know, thanks to my presence, I’ve managed to get an A’Lelia Bundles scholarship that helps people.” How many Black people will be able to take advantage of that? I don’t know. But is the tradeoff worth it? I don’t know that, either.

Was the exchange of Seneca Village worth Central Park, that all New Yorkers have benefitted from? Doubling my despair that people are so exercised about Seneca Village—which, like it or not, it’s gone, it’s gone forever, there’s nothing you can do to bring it back—is the fact that whether you’re talking about Tremé or Washington, D.C., or parts of Philadelphia or Harlem, all these places are Seneca Village. All of these places were richer by far, culturally and economically, than Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And although it is a bloodless evisceration, it is just as thorough and long-lasting as what happened at Greenwood, and happening in the same way, with the participation of government making it easy for people to rape and pillage and steal what had been prosperous, eminent Black communities. So where is that outrage? That’s the outrage that I have.

In Which Our Hero Attempts a Zero-Waste Lifestyle

BY MAYA WEED

Verily Veritas had always run a tight ship. It was a trait he had inherited from his father, Vergil Verily Veritas IV. Protective of the fleeting minutes of youth, he had taught young Verily the virtues of rigorous routines. As numerous late-night journal entries on customized packs of ivory-toned, looseleaf parchment paper indicate, both the form and the content of Verily’s inner monologues rivaled the pampered efficiency of cut-throat investment banker Patrick Bateman. Today, however, Verily would insist that his similarities with Bateman ceased at their penchant for precision. To prove so, he would point to the modest lifestyle he had recently adopted, which contrasted starkly with the character’s rabid, late-80s materialism.

“I say, what do your chums think of you when they see this flotsam?” V.V.V. IV had inquired on a stuffy summer afternoon last week. (He was uptown for … Verily did not know what.) He pointed to the mini waste bins at the foot of the bed, overflowing with Synergy Kombucha bottle carcasses that, Verily remembered with shame, had taken just three days to accumulate.

“Ch—chums?”

“Chums! Am I correct that the lot of them are constipated environmentalists? I thought your generation bonded over your inevitable climate refugeeism. What do they have to say about you, then, about all this … waste?” His eyebrow cocked on that final word.

Waste …

Verily reflected on his indulgent tendencies in that moment, tendencies that often got him into trouble with his “chums.” And now, with his father. The clutter of his living quarters began to clutter his otherwise empty brain. He plunged into fits of melancholy, pondering the harm that his minuscule life had caused in the cosmic opera of the planet.

The following nights, whenever Verily turned off his antique lamps, his towers of personal possessions mutated into shadowy, grotesque goblins in every corner of his dorm room. But Verily was no David Bowie. He was not powerful enough to tame this goblin horde fit to fill at least three blue bins. They haunted his dreams, joined by the jeering chorus of single-use items in his waste buckets (such as his daily disposable monocle wipes and mini-tubes of artisanal shaving cream imported from Milan).

Verily recoiled in disgust at all this stuff. Not only did his amassing of trash and trinkets serve as evidence of his unsustainable consumerism, but, more importantly, it disrupted the feng shui of his treasured Hartley single. He decided it was time to, once again, ramp up the rigor of his routine.

A chronic sufferer of compulsive article reading, Verily spent the next thirteen hours of a beautiful summer’s day poring over countless online blogs that outlined the best practices to live a life of zero waste. Quickly, he realized that to pare down his output, he needed to first embark on a purchasing spree.

“Want to Reduce Your Waste to Zero? Well, it won’t happen overnight,” one title read.

“Do you know who my father is?” Verily scoffed. “Watch me.”

He stood in front of his warped mirror, feet planted like Wonder Woman: “For the good of Earth.” He patted himself on the back.

Verily grasped his leather satchel and faced the world he wished to save.

The smoldering heat of the New York City streets

only fueled the fire of his mission. Exhaust fumes, tumbleweeds of plastic bags, and styrofoam cups danced around his thoughts like cartoonish, ghostly specters. He turned to his list to sharpen his focus. Items included but were not limited to:

1. A Hiking Backpack

If only, Verily dreamed.

3. Vermicomposting

Verily would donate his current backpack to the University’s pantry. He selected a hiking bag for its ability to hold any number of reusable tupperware containers—to store waste that may require unique disposal methods only available at specified locations. This way, if he ordered a meal while out on the town, he could utilize his own serving supplies and transport leftovers while still leaving enough room for his tender and swollen self-worth. This item truly led Verily into unfamiliar territory. Determined, he ventured downtown to the Lower East Side Ecology Center to acquire packs of red wiggler worms destined to decompose his detritus. He considered how he should address these worms. They would be living and dining with him, after all. Verily prided himself on his social etiquette.

2. Mason jars

Verily had a Pinterest account (as we all do). He was aware of the fashionably rustic social points he could score with the deployment of mason jars. He always balked at going full hipster, if he could use the term unironically outside of the millennial population—but he desired a scruffiness to his edges that, to his chagrin, did not compliment his bone structure.

Verily nevertheless tingled while picturing this potential version of himself: Verily the Crunchy, the kids would say. He imagined ordering an iced matcha latté under the warm lighting of Butler’s Blue Java Café, offering up his mason jar and handmade grass straw to the barista as peers gazed in awe at his earthy aura. They would then tap his shoulder and remark something akin to “Kudos to you, my friend.” “Why thank you, my chum,” he would humbly nod.

He knew he could not possibly christen every wriggler, but as he visited Hungarian on his journey back to campus, jar at the ready, a working list of names whirred in his mind. His new backpack carried the rest of his eco-conscious collection. Lawrence Holloway, Theodore K. Wickham, Mitchem Pilsner Jr., Vlad the Rad, Chad, Conrad Galahad— Verily felt a tap on his shoulder through his Brooks Brothers polo. Is it happening?? Is now my moment to shine? He held his breath in anticipation of praise. Of kudos. Carefully readjusting the angle of his body Illustration by Vanessa Mendoza

so as not to shove any queuers with his backpack, he locked eyes with the tapper.

“Ah.”

Laude Lacuna. Verily’s freshman roommate.

“Dear Verily,” Laude smirked.

Verily felt a chilled draft wisp through the air whenever he conversed with Laude, even on a balmy day in June. He grew to suspect, unkind as it may be, that Laude’s soul was lacking—as in, he lacked one. He was a bit of a shapeshifter, see. The two had gotten along in their roommate honeymoon era, but Verily soon felt as though Laude fed on his very lifeblood for survival. Along with his wardrobe, Laude’s vocal cadence and choice of conversational diction cloned Verily’s carefully cultivated persona (a family effort not so easily eclipsed). It frankly freaked him out beyond measure. Ever since, Laude had periodically selected new subjects of social imitation. Who was the real Laude Lacuna? Verily wondered if anyone would ever know. This month, he appeared to be Joseph Greenwell.

Channeling the bow-tied Vice President for Student Affairs, Laude eyed Verily’s hiking gear. “Looking to stay connected to nature while in Morningside Heights? Well, at 4:30 on Tuesday there will be an informational Zoom panel on—”

“No, no, in fact, I—”

“Reach out if you have any questions! Another event …”

Laude’s eyes pierced straight through him as he droned on in email jargon.

Verily began to better understand Patrick Bateman. He questioned the choices that brought him to this juncture, his aspiration to live a life of zero waste. He was showing promise. If only he could gather his wits alongside his new gizmos and follow through. Alas, here he was, wasting time waiting for coffee with Laude Lacuna— Wait. I’m wasting time, Verily realized. The most precious commodity of all! If this was the life he was to choose, he would have to fully submerge himself in the mire.

He suddenly felt every tick of the second hand tock in his heirloom watch. How many lives could have been saved from climate crises in the minutes he stood in line with Laude, or in the hours he had spent deliberating over the healthiest-looking worm bag in the Lower East Side Ecology Center? My God. It was then that Verily vowed: No more squandered seconds. No more transcendental meditation Tuesdays or Faulkner recitation Fridays. No more filet mignon Mondays. No more.

“My apologies, but there’s no time to waste!” Verily triumphed aloud.

He suddenly broke out of the queue and trotted away, leaving Laude preaching to a column of air.

If Verily could’ve swung his satchel around his backpack and clicked his heels together like a Newsie, he would’ve, for never before did he feel so ready to carpe the diem. Inspired nonetheless, he started to run (yes, run) along Amsterdam all the way back to Hartley, only stopping to snatch scraps of litter in his path. Speed-cleaning demon, that’s what I am, Verily mused. I am the Crunchy Climate Cleaner, and I will earn the kudos of every soon-to-be-chum of mine on campus, you bet your bottom dollar, father—

Back in his room, as carefully as he could at warpspeed, Verily unloaded his backpack and began setting up the vermicomposting station. He broke the seal on the worm container like he was performing a cesarean section and delivered the wrigglers into their new world.

“Greetings, fellow crusaders,” Verily welcomed them. He allowed his heart rate to slow ever so slightly. “Let’s get crunchin’.”

f

Postcard by Aeja Rosette