by Sid Holt
Trelawny’ girlfriend Zoë show up, too, and you can’ believe how the girl gorgeous, like girl you would’ve date in your day. And Trelawny stand up straight and tall like you never see him stand up. And him finally wearing clothes that fit properly. Still, you don’ want to admit you wonder what she can see in him. But maybe she see something you can’t.
The party go on late and man start in on the white rum and maybe you take down too much, because Trelawny start look ’pon you sideways. But the boy always look at you sideways, so you don’ know. In the kitchen, you start talk politics back home with Zoë, but Trelawny keep interrupt. Trelawny say Manley had the right idea, wanting to spread wealth to the poor people.
You tell him, Boy, is Manley mash up the country. Equal parts he and your CIA.
Then we should have stayed to defend it, the boy tell you, like he was there.
If we stayed, you wouldn’t be alive, you tell him, I can promise you that.
Then how come Zoë is here? he asks you. And him laugh. Her family stayed. They turned out fine. More than fine.
Zoë nod, but you can tell she’ uncomfortable.
You don’ wan’ say it, but ask her, Is how much bar your windows have? How much guard dog in your yard? You can walk down your street and feel safe?
She say, Me have car, me no need to walk nowhere, and she laugh, too.
You tell Trelawny, Pickney who grow up in a hellhole can’t know the difference.
Zoë start say, It have its problems, but—
Trelawny cut she off and say, I was just there and it’s better than this.
Better than what? you wan’ know.
This … second-class citizenship, him say. And you don’t know what rubbish the boy talking now.
What them teach you at school? you ask. Only self-pity?
Him say, You and Mom never should have left.
And that really make you vexed, so you say, Look here. Don’ tell me ’bout my business when you never lived through it. Talk ’bout Yankee business. No bother talk to me ’bout Jamaica. Don’t care what them showed you on vacation. You spend three week in JA and you think that make you more than tourist?
Him shrug and look ’round with him eyes low, like him embarrass, but you go on: Boy soft like you never could have make it. Boy who can’ take get him hands dirty. Your brother maybe, but you wouldn’t last a day. Soft boy like you would’ve dead long time. So just be grateful we left. Even if our leaving what make you turn out so … And you know you must stop talk, but you add the word you been thinking ever since him reach back a Miami, and long before him left … defective.
And you know from everyone face you take it too far. Trelawny won’t even look at you, but him head nod slow-slow. Uncle Michael looking at you disappointed and Shelly start carry she pickney away. You think him might need air, so you say, Trelawny, do me a favor, go take down some ackee for me, nuh, so I can make it for breakfast. And him nod still and you can’ be sure he even hear, but then him stand up and walk out back. Make sure it the open ackee only, you yell after him, because you can’ tell if the boy remember anything you taught him from him was a child.
You try smile with Zoë, but she look to the front door like she wondering how she can get home. You start get up and Uncle Michael say, You don’t have to give the boy such a hard time, you know. But him them already turn soft, so you no bother with the old man.
You go out to the patio and wonder why everyone is turned around in them chairs, peering off into the dark, but then you hear it: loud grunt and dull thud. And you see Trelawny’ silhouette under the ackee tree, all with ax in him hands. And him talking to himself now. And him swinging the ax.
And you start after him, but Delano grab your wrist and shake him head and hold you back. And is then you know it serious. And you think how Sanya’ right, you regret everything. And you wonder if it’s you must be defective since you ruin everyone.
And you know the boy ruin, because is same words him repeating like warped 45:
I’ll chop down your tree.
I’ll chop down your tree.
I’ll chop down your fucking tree.
Permissions
“Jerry’s Dirt,” by Jacob Baynham, originally published in the Georgia Review. Copyright © 2019 by Jacob Baynham. Reprinted by permission of Jacob Baynham.
“Can We Build a Better Women’s Prison?” by Keri Blakinger, originally published in the Washington Post Magazine. Copyright © 2019 by the Washington Post Magazine. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
“Tactile Art,” by John Lee Clark, originally published in Poetry. Copyright © 2019 by John Lee Clark. Reprinted by permission of John Lee Clark.
“False Witness,” by Pamela Colloff, originally published in the New York Times Magazine. Copyright © 2019 by the New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used under license.
“Under the Ackee Tree,” by Jonathan Escoffery, originally published in the Paris Review. Copyright © 2019 by the Paris Review. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
“Epidemic of Fear,” by Erika Fry, originally published in Fortune. Copyright © 2019 Fortune Media IP Corporation. Used with permission.
“Our Founding Ideals of Liberty and Equality Were False When They Were Written. Black Americans Fought to Make Them True.” by Nikole Hannah-Jones, originally published in the New York Times. Copyright © 2019 the New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used under license.
“We’ve Normalized Prison,” by Piper Kerman, originally published in the Washington Post Magazine. Copyright © 2019 by the Washington Post Magazine. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
“Las Marthas,” by Jordan Kisner, originally published in The Believer. Copyright © 2019 by Jordan Kisner. Reprinted by permission of Jordan Kisner.
“Fight the Ship,” by T. Christian Miller, Megan Rose, and Robert Faturechi, originally published in ProPublica. Copyright © 2019 by ProPublica. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
“Nothing Sacred,” by Ligaya Mishan, originally published in T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Copyright © 2019 by the New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
“An Assault on the Tongue,” by Ligaya Mishan, originally published in T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Copyright © 2019 by the New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
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“Unlike Any Other,” by Nick Paumgarten, originally published in the New Yorker. Copyright © 2019 by Nick Paumgarten. Reprinted by permission of Nick Paumgarten.
“India: Intimations of an Ending,” by Arundhati Roy, originally published in The Nation. Copyright © 2019 by Arundhati Roy. Reprinted by permission of Arundhati Roy.
“When Disability Is a Toxic Legacy,” by s.e. smith, originally published in Catapult. Copyright © 2019 by Catapult. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
“The Ugly Beautiful and Other Failings of Disability Representation,” by s.e. smith, originally published in Catapult. Copyright © 2019 by Catapult. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
“What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Mental Health and Medication,” by s.e. smith, originally published in Catapult. Copyright © 2019 by Catapult. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
“Kanye West’s Sunday Service Is Full of Longing and Self-Promotion,” by Jia Tolentino, originally published in the New Yorker. Copyright © 2019 by Jia Tolentino. Reprinted by permission of Jia Tolentino.
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“E. Jean Carroll’s Accusation Against Donald Trump, and the Raising, and Lowering, of the Bar,” by Jia Tolentino, originally published in the New Yorker
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“The Schoolteacher and the Genocide,” by Sarah Topol, originally published in the New York Times Magazine. Copyright © 2019 by Sarah Topol. Used by permission of the Wylie Agency LLC.
“Elizabeth Warren’s Classroom Strategy,” by Rebecca Traister, originally published in The Cut. Copyright © 2019 by Vox Media, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
Contributors
JACOB BAYNHAM is a freelance journalist and essayist. He has written about criminal justice for the Christian Science Monitor and about parenting for Outside, as well as reporting internationally for Newsweek, the San Francisco Chronicle, Slate, and other publications. He lives in Missoula, Montana, with his wife, Hilly McGahan, and their two boys.
KERI BLAKINGER is a reporter for the Marshall Project and a former criminal justice reporter for the Houston Chronicle.
JOHN LEE CLARK is the author of a collection of essays about his experiences as a DeafBlind writer called Where I Stand: On the Signing Community and My DeafBlind Experience (Handtype Press, 2014). He travels widely teaching Protactile, an emerging tactile language.
PAMELA COLLOFF is a senior reporter for ProPublica and a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine. She has been nominated for seven National Magazine Awards and won for Feature Writing in 2013 and Reporting in 2020. In 2014 the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University awarded her the Louis Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism.
JONATHAN ESCOFFERY’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Creative Nonfiction, Electric Literature, the Paris Review, Pleiades, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. His most recent honors include the 2020 Plimpton Prize for Fiction, a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a 2020 Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico grant. He has received awards and distinctions from the Best American Short Stories series, Aspen Words, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Kimbilio Fiction, Passages North, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Escoffery earned his MFA from the University of Minnesota and attends the University of Southern California’s Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature Program.
ROBERT FATURECHI is a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter for ProPublica. He was previously a reporter at the Los Angeles Times. His stories have resulted in congressional hearings, new legislation, federal indictments, resignations, and major reforms.
ERIKA FRY is a senior writer at Fortune, where she writes features and investigative pieces on healthcare and international business. Before joining Fortune in 2012, Erika worked as a writer and associate editor at Columbia Journalism Review and was an investigative reporter with the Bangkok Post from 2006 to 2010. A native of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Fry graduated from Dartmouth College and received an MA in political journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES is a domestic correspondent for the New York Times Magazine focusing on racial injustice. In 2020 she won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary for her essay in “The 1619 Project,” “Our Democracy’s Founding Ideals Were False When They Were Written. Black Americans Have Fought to Make Them True,” which traces the central role black Americans have played in the nation, including its vast material success and democracy itself. Hannah-Jones has written on federal failures to enforce the Fair Housing Act, the resegregation of American schools, and policing in America. Her extensive reporting in both print and radio on the ways segregation in housing and schools is maintained through official action and policy has earned the National Magazine Award, a Peabody Award, and a Polk Award. “The 1619 Project” won a News Leaders Association Award and received a special honor from the George Polk Awards. Nikole was also a finalist for a Scripps-Howard Award in Opinion and won a National Magazine Award. Hannah-Jones earned her bachelor’s in history and African American studies from the University of Notre Dame and her master’s in journalism and mass communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a cofounder of the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, housed at UNC Chapel Hill. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and very sassy daughter.
PIPER KERMAN is the author of the memoir Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison.
JORDAN KISNER is the author of the essay collection Thin Places, which was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in March 2020. She writes for The Atlantic, The Believer, n + 1, The Guardian, the New York Times Magazine, the Paris Review, and many others.
T. CHRISTIAN MILLER is a senior editor for ProPublica. He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Previously, he worked for the Los Angeles Times and the Tampa Bay Times. He is married, with three children.
LIGAYA MISHAN writes for the New York Times and T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Her essays have been selected for the Best American Magazine Writing and the Best American Food Writing anthologies, and her criticism has appeared in the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker. This year she was a finalist for a National Magazine Award and a James Beard Journalism Award. The daughter of a Filipino mother and a British father, she grew up in Honolulu.
NICK PAUMGARTEN is a staff writer at the New Yorker.
MEGAN ROSE, awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting with two colleagues, investigates criminal justice and the military for ProPublica. She has reported from two war zones, and her work has resulted in high-level staff changes, congressional inquiries, and several wrongfully convicted men clearing their records.
ARUNDHATI ROY is the author of two novels, The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Her collected nonfiction, My Seditious Heart, was published in 2018. Her new book, Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction., will be published in the fall. Her work has been translated into more than fifty languages. She lives in New Delhi.
S.E. SMITH is a Northern California–based writer who has appeared in Bitch, Catapult, Esquire, The Guardian, and Rolling Stone and numerous other fine publications.
JIA TOLENTINO is a staff writer at the New Yorker. Her first book, the essay collection Trick Mirror: Reflections in Self-Delusion, was published last year.
SARAH A. TOPOL is a writer at large for the New York Times Magazine. For over a decade, Topol has reported from more than two dozen countries in the Middle East, the former Soviet Union, and Africa. She won the 2012 Kurt Schork Award in International Journalism for her coverage of the civil war in Libya for GQ. Her story for the New York Times Magazine about Nigerian boys’ being abducted and forced to fight for Boko Haram received a citation from the Overseas Press Club for best international reporting on human rights. It was also a finalist for the 2018 Dart Awards for Excellence in Coverage of Trauma.
REBECCA TRAISTER is writer at large at New York. She writes a regular column for The Cut, as well as features and columns for the print magazine, covering women in politics, media, and culture. Traister was previously a senior editor at the New Republic and before that spent ten years at Salon. She is a contributor to Elle and has also written for Glamour, Marie Claire, The Nation, the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, and other publications. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018 and was awarded the 2018 National Magazine Award in Columns and Commentary for her writing on the #metoo reckoning and sexual harassment and the 2016 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism. She has won several Front Page Awards from the Newswomen’s Club of New York, as well as the 2012 Mirror Award for Best Commentary, Digital Media, from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School. She is the author of Good and Mad (Simon & Schuster, 2018), a New York Times best-seller, which was also selected as a Washington Post and People ten best books of 2018, as well as All the Single Ladies (Simon & Schuster, 2016), a New York Times best-seller and Notable Book of 2016, which was also named one of the best books of 2016 by the Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly, Library Journal, and NPR. Her first book, Big Girls Don’t Cry (Free Press, 2011), about women in the 2008 election, was a New York Times Notable
Book of 2010 and the winner of the Ernesta Drinker Ballard Book Prize. Traister lives in New York City.
