The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017

by Sarah Vowell

  He gave a good speech that day, paying heed to Howard’s rituals, calling out its famous alumni, shouting out the university’s various dormitories, and urging young people to vote. (His usual riff on respectability politics was missing.) But I think he could have stood before that crowd, smiled, and said “Good luck,” and they would have loved him anyway. He was their champion, and this was evident in the smallest of things. The national anthem was played first, but then came the black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” As the lyrics rang out over the crowd, the students held up the black-power fist—a symbol of defiance before power. And yet here, in the face of a black man in his last year in power, it scanned not as a protest, but as a salute.

  Six months later the awful price of a black presidency would be known to those students, even as the country seemed determined not to acknowledge it. In the days after Donald Trump’s victory, there would be an insistence that something as “simple” as racism could not explain it. As if enslavement had nothing to do with global economics, or as if lynchings said nothing about the idea of women as property. As though the past 400 years could be reduced to the irrational resentment of full lips. No. Racism is never simple. And there was nothing simple about what was coming, or about Obama, the man who had unwittingly summoned this future into being.

  It was said that the Americans who’d supported Trump were victims of liberal condescension. The word racist would be dismissed as a profane slur put upon the common man, as opposed to an accurate description of actual men. “We simply don’t yet know how much racism or misogyny motivated Trump voters,” David Brooks would write in the New York Times.” If you were stuck in a jobless town, watching your friends OD on opiates, scrambling every month to pay the electric bill, and then along came a guy who seemed able to fix your problems and hear your voice, maybe you would stomach some ugliness, too.” This strikes me as perfectly logical. Indeed, it could apply just as well to Louis Farrakhan’s appeal to the black poor and working class. But whereas the followers of an Islamophobic white nationalist enjoy the sympathy that must always greet the salt of the earth, the followers of an anti-Semitic black nationalist endure the scorn that must ever greet the children of the enslaved.

  Much would be made of blue-collar voters in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan who’d pulled the lever for Obama in 2008 and 2012 and then for Trump in 2016. Surely these voters disproved racism as an explanatory force. It’s still not clear how many individual voters actually flipped. But the underlying presumption—that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama could be swapped in for each other—exhibited a problem. Clinton was a candidate who’d won one competitive political race in her life, whose political instincts were questioned by her own advisers, who took more than half a million dollars in speaking fees from an investment bank because it was “what they offered,” who proposed to bring back to the White House a former president dogged by allegations of rape and sexual harassment. Obama was a candidate who’d become only the third black senator in the modern era; who’d twice been elected president, each time flipping red and purple states; who’d run one of the most scandal-free administrations in recent memory. Imagine an African American facsimile of Hillary Clinton: She would never be the nominee of a major political party and likely would not be in national politics at all.

  Pointing to citizens who voted for both Obama and Trump does not disprove racism; it evinces it. To secure the White House, Obama needed to be a Harvard-trained lawyer with a decade of political experience and an incredible gift for speaking to cross sections of the country; Donald Trump needed only money and white bluster.

  In the week after the election, I was a mess. I had not seen my wife in two weeks. I was on deadline for this article. My son was struggling in school. The house was in disarray. I played Marvin Gaye endlessly—“When you left, you took all of me with you.” Friends began to darkly recall the ghosts of post-Reconstruction. The election of Donald Trump confirmed everything I knew of my country and none of what I could accept. The idea that America would follow its first black president with Donald Trump accorded with its history. I was shocked at my own shock. I had wanted Obama to be right.

  I still want Obama to be right. I still would like to fold myself into the dream. This will not be possible.

  By some cosmic coincidence, a week after the election I received a portion of my father’s FBI file. My father had grown up poor in Philadelphia. His father was struck dead on the street. His grandfather was crushed to death in a meatpacking plant. He’d served his country in Vietnam, gotten radicalized there, and joined the Black Panther Party, which brought him to the attention of J. Edgar Hoover. A memo written to the FBI director was “submitted aimed at discrediting WILLIAM PAUL COATES, Acting Captain of the BPP, Baltimore.” The memo proposed that a fake letter be sent to the Panthers’ cofounder Huey P. Newton. The fake letter accused my father of being an informant and concluded, “I want somethin done with this bootlikin facist pig nigger and I want it done now.” The words somethin done need little interpretation. The Panthers were eventually consumed by an internecine war instigated by the FBI, one in which being labeled a police informant was a death sentence.

  A few hours after I saw this file, I had my last conversation with the president. I asked him how his optimism was holding up, given Trump’s victory. He confessed to being surprised at the outcome but said that it was tough to “draw a grand theory from it, because there were some very unusual circumstances.” He pointed to both candidates’ high negatives, the media coverage, and a “dispirited” electorate. But he said that his general optimism about the shape of American history remained unchanged. “To be optimistic about the long-term trends of the United States doesn’t mean that everything is going to go in a smooth, direct, straight line,” he said. “It goes forward sometimes, sometimes it goes back, sometimes it goes sideways, sometimes it zigs and zags.”

  I thought of Hoover’s FBI, which harassed three generations of black activists, from Marcus Garvey’s black nationalists to Martin Luther King Jr.’s integrationists to Huey Newton’s Black Panthers, including my father. And I thought of the enormous power accrued to the presidency in the post–/11 era—the power to obtain American citizens’ phone records en masse, to access their emails, to detain them indefinitely. I asked the president whether it was all worth it. Whether this generation of black activists and their allies should be afraid.

  “Keep in mind that the capacity of the NSA, or other surveillance tools, are specifically prohibited from being applied to U.S. citizens or U.S. persons without specific evidence of links to terrorist activity or, you know, other foreign-related activity,” he said. “So, you know, I think this whole story line that somehow Big Brother has massively expanded and now that a new president is in place it’s this loaded gun ready to be used on domestic dissent is just not accurate.”

  He counseled vigilance, “because the possibility of abuse by government officials always exists. The issue is not going to be that there are new tools available; the issue is making sure that the incoming administration, like my administration, takes the constraints on how we deal with U.S. citizens and persons seriously.” This answer did not fill me with confidence. The next day, President-elect Trump offered Lieutenant General Michael Flynn the post of national-security adviser and picked Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama as his nominee for attorney general. Last February, Flynn tweeted, “Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL” and linked to a YouTube video that declared followers of Islam want “80 percent of humanity enslaved or exterminated.” Sessions had once been accused of calling a black lawyer “boy,” claiming that a white lawyer who represented black clients was a disgrace to his race, and joking that he thought the Ku Klux Klan “was okay until I found out they smoked pot.” I felt then that I knew what was coming—more Freddie Grays, more Rekia Boyds, more informants and undercover officers sent to infiltrate mosques.

  And I also knew that the man who could not countenance such a thing in hi
s America had been responsible for the only time in my life when I felt, as the first lady had once said, proud of my country, and I knew that it was his very lack of countenance, his incredible faith, his improbable trust in his countrymen, that had made that feeling possible. The feeling was that little black boy touching the president’s hair. It was watching Obama on the campaign trail, always expecting the worst and amazed that the worst never happened. It was how I’d felt seeing Barack and Michelle during the inauguration, the car slow-dragging down Pennsylvania Avenue, the crowd cheering, and then the two of them rising up out of the limo, rising up from fear, smiling, waving, defying despair, defying history, defying gravity.

  TOMMY PICO

  ■

  Excerpt from Nature Poem

  FROM Tin House

  oh, but you don’t look very Indian is a thing ppl feel comfortable

  saying to me on dates.

  What rhymes with, fuck off and die?

  It’s hard to look “like” something most people remember as a

  ghost, but I understand the allure of wanting to know—

  Knowledge, or its approximate artifice, is a kind of

  equilibrium when you feel like a flea in whiskey.

  I used to read a lot of perfect poems, now I read a lot of

  Garbage

  by A. R. Ammons

  the old mysteries avail themselves of technique.

  It’s disheartening

  to hear someone say there’s no magic left bc I love that Youtube

  of Amy Winehouse singing “Love is a Losing Game” at the

  Mercury Awards and yesterday I overheard that Brooklyn

  means “Broken Land”—there aren’t many earthquakes in the

  city, but there’s the fault line of my head that I’ll always live

  on.

  Pain is alienating, but blue breath breaking on a voice is the

  magic that makes ppl believe.

  What, I learn to ask, does an NDN person look like exactly?

  BENJAMIN NUGENT

  ■

  Hell

  FROM Vice

  It was peak foliage, horned red leaves adrift on the duck pond, two-hand touch in the stadium’s shadow, ripe-legged girls shivering in miniskirts under a harvest moon. It was the time of year for planning new debasements to perform on the pledges during Hell Week, the final test before their initiation. But we were short of ideas. Previous Gamma Phi upperclassmen had made their pledges do the elephant walk, in which they were marched through the house each holding the dick of the guy behind him, but we knew that that would no longer fly. It would be filmed on a phone and posted, drawing criticism. Previous upperclassmen had stripped the pledges to their underwear in the back of a van and dropped them off in what was thought to be gang territory in Springfield, but we considered that insensitive to the people who lived there. And the classic procedures—blindfolding the pledges and making them fellate cucumbers or eat bananas out of the toilet—had lost all power to surprise and deceive. The pledges had read online about any torment ever conceived by any pledgemaster. The exec board convened at its round plywood table, trying to think who might have some suggestions, when Glines, who was older than the rest of us, having taken time off after junior year to stretch rubber bands over the claws of lobsters and pay down his loans, mentioned a guy we’d never heard of: Michael Poumakis. When Glines was a pledge, Poumakis had been a house legend, spoken of in hushed tones by the seniors who remembered him. ROTC, hockey, rugby, Honors, Young Democrats, religious but still did something with girls in his room.

  When Poumakis graduated, Glines said, he accepted a Navy commission. He was Lieutenant Poumakis now; Glines showed us the alumni database entry on his laptop. He lived in Crystal City, Virginia, a day’s drive south.

  “If he’s an officer outside DC, guy’s probably been through Navy Hell Week,” Glines said. “That’s SEALs Team Six shit. That’s the state of the art. That, plus hazing in the Navy is probably harsher than anything we would ever come up with. They’re preparing you for war.”

  I was with Glines. A Navy guy would know how to take an assortment of pledges and put them through something so strenuous that it would bind them into brothers. They wouldn’t want to post a picture and get us all in trouble, because they’d be proud they got through it. They’d be proud to be one of us. That was Hell Week’s whole point.

  We composed the Facebook message as a group, with Glines’s laptop on the table between us. We thanked the lieutenant for his service. Regretting that we couldn’t provide travel money or accommodations, only Chef Bill’s chili, no doubt the same as it had been back in the day, we invited him up for a weekend. “Please consider helping us plan Hell Week this year,” we wrote. “We would be incredibly grateful to draw on the insights you have acquired in your military training as to how to make it an extreme experience for every pledge.” A response balloon with three dots appeared immediately in the blue window. “I would love to come.”

  We had seen full-body shots of him on Instagram, but he looked smaller in real life, stooped by eight hours at the wheel. Since the last picture, he’d grown a beard, and he petted the beard often, the way you would if your beard was new. He dressed like one of those hikers who strive always to be comfy: furry fleece hoodie, nubby fleece pants, canvas sneakers, moisture-repellant runner’s socks, all shades of dun and brown. He petted his upper arms the same way he petted the beard. He was on the cusp of old, about thirty. He kept his hoodie up over his head and walked with his hands thrust in the front pocket, like people our age.

  There was nothing about him that resembled the ads we’d seen for the Navy, buzz-cut sailors in starched whites, legs spread to shoulder width, hands clasped behind their backs on the deck of a carrier, links in the World’s Strongest Chain. But his handshake had soft strength. All six of us in exec board showed him around the house, though our presence was unnecessary. We followed, while Glines led the way, walking backward as he talked.

  Not much had changed in the house since Poumakis lived in it, so Glines didn’t have that much to announce, and Poumakis didn’t ask any questions. It was we who had questions for him. As we toured the Ping-Pong room, Glines finally asked, “So what’s it like, being an officer in the military?”

  Poumakis spoke in a high, quiet voice with his hood up. “The most important thing we do now,” he said, “is try to change people’s minds. Say, ‘Hey, we know it’s been hard in your country, we know you’ve been taught to view America as an enemy, but listen, we just want you on our side. We want you to help us create a world where people can vote, and there’s basic human rights, and some kind of economic opportunity for everyone. You don’t have to be like us, but please, join us.’”

  Poumakis touched things: the sage and gold Gamma Phi letters painted on the dining room wall; the wooden owl mascot, carved by a chainsaw artist at the Three-County Fair; the air rifles racked on the back porch; the little bedrooms carved from larger bedrooms and crammed with loft beds. When we reached the threshold of the president’s room, he touched the chin-up bar in the doorframe, said, “Yup, still here,” and lifted off the ground, legs limp and straight.

  Glines started to count Poumakis’s chin-ups out loud, and then the rest of us had to join in, or Glines’s love of Poumakis would be dramatically exposed. It was only fair; we were all a little gay for the soldier in our midst, and it would have been unbrotherly to let Glines stick out, like leaving an injured comrade behind. As soon as the group counting started—as soon as we all went, “Four, five” in chorus, like cadets—Poumakis dropped to the floor.

  Glines gave Poumakis a beer from the fridge and guided him to the black couch on the back porch. He sat beside him and said, “So level with us, dude. How real are the movies about Iraq and Afghanistan and everything? Is that what it’s like?”

  What Glines was trying to ask was, Have you been in the shit?

  Poumakis wore no particular expression. There was a slot in his beard that ope
ned and shut.

  “I thought Zero Dark Thirty was okay,” he said. “They showed it was a lot of people coordinating instead of one person doing everything. But they never showed anyone being funny, except for Chris Pratt at the end. I liked Chris Pratt because he’s funny. Still, when they were working in the office in Pakistan, none of them were ever funny. They were always serious. They were never like, ‘Okay, it’s eleven o’clock, who wants donuts?’”

  The sun had set over the decrepit unaffiliated green Victorian that backed up against our yard. Rumor had it that it was all high-school dropouts living off a grandma they kept in the attic. Their living-room lights came on, and then music, a dance remix of a song about being famous.

  “But was it typical,” Glines asked, “of how people go undercover and find terrorists, and take them?”

  What Glines meant was, Have you gone undercover? Have you killed?

  Poumakis picked at the label on his beer. “I wouldn’t say typical,” he said.

  “I want you to know,” said Glines, “that we’re your brothers. Whatever you say never leaves the porch.”