SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2013 • T HE BULLETIN F S
Aut or unravels his amily's mystery "After Visiting Friends:
A Son's Story"
MARGARET WRINKLE'S 'WASH'
s irrin aeo save,mas er • Book charts the uneasy beginnings of slavery in theAmerican South "Wash" by Margaret Wrinkle (Atlantic Monthly Press, $25)
by Michael Hainey
(Scribner,299 pgs., $26) By Dan Cryer Newsday
For a child, what can be more painful than the death of aparent? Thus shattered, one's sense of security and stabilitymay take years to recover. Even so, there's a permanent hole where love once was, a wound that never heals. For Michael Hainey, deputy editor of GQ, that blow came in 1970, when he was just 6. His father, Bob, 35, never returned home from his latenight job as an editor at the Chicago Sun-Times. His mother, Barbara, was left to raise Mike and his older brother, Chris, by herself. Twelve years later, just before Michael started journalism school at Northwestern University, his father's alma mater, he began to wonder what really happened on the night his father died. The confusing obits he found in Chicago's papers raisedmore questions than they answered. Did Bob Hainey die of a heart attack, as one reported, or a stroke, according to another? Did he die outside his office or far away? Did he die alone or "after visiting friends"? Thus began an investigation that Hainey took up in earnest only in the past decade. "After Visiting Friends," his memoircum-mystery, swings back and forth between past and present in recounting his childhood, relationships with his mother and other family members, and, most telling, his dogged efforts to understand the facts and context of his father's death. Unmasking the truth may be journalism's touchstone, but when it involves loved ones, Hainey cautions, we "raise our dead at our own peril." S ince boyhood, h e w a s haunted by the "fear of upsetting my mother, of even uttering my father's name." The result? Bob Hainey's disappearance felt like the whitingout of a purged Soviet leader in a Cold War-era photo, or the announcement of a soldier being MIA in the Vietnam War, "missing in action" but perhaps not really dead. Absence made the father loom ever larger in the son's consciousness. Barbara Hainey, a no-nonsense, unsentimental woman, created and solidified this paradox. Not only did she not want to talk about her late husband, but she resisted inquiries by quoting her favorite line from "The Godfather." Michael Corleone, a rebel in his youth, slowly and surely accommodates to Mafia ruthlessness. "Don't ask me about my business," he warns his wife. Likewise for Barbara, not knowing the details of her husband's death proved a useful shield against sorrow. Like C o rleone, H a iney's
tion around their enslaved descendants. Spanning the years before the A m e rican R e volution By Gina Webb to the mid-1800s, the story The Atlanta Journalunfolds in a f luid sweep of Constitution time and history through the M argaret W r i n kle, a beautifully imagined interior filmmaker an d s eventh- monologues of a handful of generation Southerner, had narrators: Richardson, Wash a lmost nothing to go on and Wash's lover Pallas, a slave when she decided to inves- doctor. Framing these first-pertigate a rumor that one of son narratives is a third-person her ancestors was involved account that pans out to afford in slave breeding. When a wider perspective. her research yielded little more than another rumor, Resilient souls Autonomy is an art, practiced "Wash" unfolds l i k e Wrinkle decided to fill in a every day. the blanks with her debut dreamy, impressionistic landAlthough dialogue between novel, "Wash." She's done scape that, despite dates flag- Wash and Richardson never an amazing job. Never has ging the sections, requires the takes place, the counterpoint of a fictionalized window into reader to pay attention or risk their observations and memothe relationship between getting lost. Wrinkle covers a ries creates a conversation that as you keep your mind's eye slave and master opened lot of ground, both historically blursthe boundaries between good and strong, you can use onto such believable ter- and emotionally, exploring a who is free and who is en- the words to open a thing back ritory — th e m i nds and time when the breaking-in pe- slaved. Is it Wash, who strug- out to how it really was. Just hearts of two men and a riod of American slavery was gles to remain himself in the like tracks. A cluster of pads, woman who grapple with still under way, when rebel- face of his dehumanizing ob- tipped with the points of claws, a troubled, lifelong alliance lions echoed from Haiti and ligations? Or is it Richardson, can summon up the whole on a plantation in Tennes- the "sugar islands" and King whose grasping for empire and wolf." see during the first half of George's whip hand was only the 19th century. decades behind us. Gen. James Richardson, T he slaves w e m eet i n I I "Wash" form a cabal of spiritua 70-year-old veteran of ) the Revolutionary War, is ally resilient souls. In addition drowning in debt, desper- to Wash's mother, Mena, there ate to save his plantation is Rufus, a blacksmith once and businesses in Mem- considered a sacred figure in phis. An u rgent demand h is homeland, and two I b o for slave labor in the newly (Nigerian) warriors. Their oldmintedterritories of Arkan- world beliefs offset their cira sas and Louisiana offers cumstances. Theyknow howto I I , I I • I Richardson a c onvenient hold back their "African," bury I I "get out of jail free" card: mojos in the walls of their masI I He puts one of his slaves, ters' homes, keep talismans ~ Form 1040 EZ.............$79.95 ~ the eponymous Wash, out and shrines and heal each othI I Form 1040slsch3 El Jc.. $1 39 95 to stud on a weekly basis. er with herbs and touch. They The money pours in. By protect themselves by reading Additionalform feesmayapply. 1823, when the book opens, their owners' moods and carvg Priceincludes State and Federal Returng Wash, now 27, has been ing out a space for themselves. Richardson's "traveling neCall 541.771-2631 gro" for five years, fatherWeekly Arts 8r ing children all over the Email tax@cwc-llp.com I + 4, • Entertainment county. His master, who Inside Mti i a f LZBK fought for freedom from the British and spent years x* TheBulletin in chains as a POW, is uneasy with the arrangement but rationalizes it as no difwww.cwc-llp.com ferent than another of his Caldwell, Walley,& Caldwell LLP enterprises — horse breeding — and prides himself SENDVOUR OUESTIONS FOR THESE TAX PROFESSIONALS TO: on keeping Wash's "fine" unbroken strain in the mix. The Bulletin, P.O. B0X 6020, Bend, OR 97708 or email: T he first o f h i s f a m nclose©bendbulletin.com ily to be born in America, My question is: Wash grew up v i r t ually f ree, raised on a N o r t h Carolina barrier island by 1000's Of Ads Every Day his mother, Mena, a "saltwater" slave and spiritual adept, trained by West AfBSSl 1C S rican shamans. Her teachings form the basis for the book's underlying themes: the importance of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. When Wash describes Mena's rituals — "Said she was laying her staples inside the pantry of my spirit" — he could be describing THE NQNPROFIT W rinkle's n ovel, w h e re AssocIATION OF countless variations on this ORECON theme evoke a murmurous chorus of v i l lage elders, Kari Chisholm, President, Mandate Media chanting a ring of protec-
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voice is clipped, laconic. Sentence fragments and s hort scenes intensify the urgency of the narrative: "In the weeks after he is dead, I sit on my mother's bed and watch as she and her brother work their way through my father's closet. Whatever suits my uncle wants, he hands to my mother and she stuffs them in her Glad bag. Black. Huge. The kind you use to get rid of the dead leaves." This is the tough-guy Chicago reporter, hewing to the facts, unwilling to smooth over the rough spots. At times, the author also indulges in fictional scenarios, imagining his father courting his mother before their wedding or out drinking with the boys after closing down the paper for the night. Not always persuasive, they are, nonetheless, testimony to his desperate need to get closer to the enigma of his father. While in r eporting mode, Hainey t r a cks d o w n hi s father's newspaper buddies scattered over the map. He learns about Bob as a skinny high school senior nicknamed "Bones," not only voted Most Likely to Succeed but also Best Dancer. He discovers a father who was an irreverent newsroom wit and master of the art of headline writing. He hears about a long-gone age when collusion between Chicago's cops and reporters was commonplace. He's less successful at goad-
ing Bob Hainey's aging pals into truth-telling. With one, he's met with this hostile stonewall: "I don't think you have a right to know the truth ... Guys stick together." Hainey's forays into the pastbeyond Chicago to Bob's hometown of McCook, Neb., to San Francisco and a small town in Ohio — begin to seem like stations of a cross increasingly hard to bear. Is it all worth the pain, he wonders? Yet he plods on, determined to know. He's a journalist, after all. Since this book unravels a mystery, it wouldn't do to reveal its conclusions. I will say, however, that it moves with the pace ofa thriller,that it's both tenderhearted and tough. Michael Hainey is blessed with his father's writing chops, his mother's steely resolve and his own, hard-won wisdom.
'We Live inWater' haspersonal touch ets" and last year's barn-burning movie-biz epic "Beautiful Ruins," he has also published many short stories, now collected in "We Live in Water." Though they don't lack for W a l t er's familiar wry wit, the s t o r ies are sadder than the n o v els, and ultimately more
status refuse to line up with the ideals he once cherished? "The Revolution had opened a window and he, like many of his fellow soldiers, had hoped slavery would slip right out of it. It wasn't only a new country they'd wanted, it was a new world. But that window had closed and slavery had strengthened instead, doubling its grip on all of them." At the end of this luminous book, Pallas, who reads the ledger in which Richardson keeps track of Wash's offspring, marvels at how the combined stories, oral and written, of slave and master might one day come together. One thinks of the best literature of the South and "Wash" itself when she says, "Yes, the writing does shrink it all down, but how in the world could everything fit otherwise? As long
ist who employs fresh-faced kids to collect "donations for Greenpeace," ha ha. "This was all a diversion from my real By Marion Winik business, running bud down Newsday from BC," he explains. "The Usually treated as the runt key was my car. I had to be the of the fiction litter, the short youngest man in America in story is having a turn on top. a loaded gray 2006 Buick LuThe y ear b e gan personal. zerne.Cops could pullme over '--,--- . Walt e r i s a k ind of blazing a spliff, coke spoon with The New York Times' annunciation up my nose, syringe hanging . William Kennedy of of George Saunders' from my tied-off arm, dead ' the Northwest, trainnew collection, "Tenth ing his eye on the for- hooker in the passenger seat of December," as "The lorn locales and hard- and still just tell me to ease off Best Book You'll Read . -~ luck losers rolled over the gas and have a nice day." - by t h e A me r i can This Year." In its wake, If drug jokes aren't your ' Saunders appeared on economy on its way thing, the c ollection offers "The Colbert Report" down. "On any giv- other flavors of gritty wit, into explain why people en day in Spokane, cluding a story about zombies would waste their time on an W a s hington, there are more called "Don't Eat Cat." Black eight-page slice of narrative a d ul t men per capita riding humor is what we expect from when they could read a novel c h i l dren's BMX bikes than in Jess Walter. What is differand learn how it all turned out. a n y other city in the world," ent is that the stories give us a "America likes big," protest- e x p lains "Statistical Abstract sense of the writer's heart we ed Colbert. for My H o metown of S po- haven't gotten from the parade Perhaps A me r i c a is k ane , Washington," ostensibly of bright novels. reconsidering. produced by a chronically unThere are things a short Prolific novelist Jess Wal- e m p loyed man who lives near story can't do, like give us ter has already shown amaz- a w omen's shelter. a full-blown fictional world ing range — so much that it's Oth e r s tories feature cous- into which we lose ourselves hard to categorize him. While i n s of this narrator — a home- for hours on end. But what it producingabodyof workthat l e s s man raising cash to buy can do — a lot — is provide includes the political mystery a H a r r y Potter book for his impressive displays of writing "Citizen Vince," the 9/11 thrill- s o n in foster care, two tweak- craftsmanship. er "The Zero," the social satire ers trying to pawn an obsoSee, Mr. Colbert? Small is "The Financial Lives of the Po- l ete big-screen TV, a con art- beautiful, too.
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DATE February 27, 2013
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The merger of communications and fundraising
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