The Best American Essays 2011

by Edwidge Danticat

  I’d like to thank my assistant, Kyle J. Giacomozzi, once again for all his help throughout every phase of this book, and I wish him well-deserved success as he now departs to pursue an MFA in nonfiction. As always, the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt staff did everything to bring so many moving parts together in so short a time, and I once again appreciate the efforts of Deanne Urmy, Nicole Angeloro, Liz Duvall, and Megan Wilson. Working on this volume with Edwidge Danticat was a delightful experience, and I believe the 2011 book represents one of the most diverse in the series, both in its range of writers and in its exciting array of themes and topics. Given the remarkable reach of her own fiction and nonfiction, this should come as no surprise.

  R. A.

  Introduction

  THROUGH RECENT EXPERIENCES with both birth and death, I have discovered that we enter and leave life as, among other things, words. Though we might later become daughters and sons, many of us start out as whispers or rumors before ending up with our names scrawled next to our parents’ on birth certificates. We also struggle to find, both throughout our lives and at the end, words to pin down how we see and talk about ourselves.

  When my brothers and I first learned, in the fall of 2004, that our father was dying, one of my brothers bravely asked him a question which led to my father narrating his life to us.

  “Pop, have you enjoyed your life?” my brother wanted to know.

  Stripped bare of any pretense and fully vulnerable, my father gifted us with his life experiences to do with as we pleased. We could use them, as such statements are often said to do, to inform, instruct, or inspire ourselves, or we could simply revel in them, or in the fact that he was even sharing them with us, then move on.

  Seven years later, we have still not moved on. I can’t say that I remember every single word my father uttered on his deathbed, but every story somehow feels like it’s still within reach.

  Such is the power of the stories we dare tell others about ourselves. They do inform, instruct, and inspire. They might even entertain, but they can also strip us totally bare, reducing (or expanding) the essence of everything we are to words.

  Having written both fiction and nonfiction, I sometimes have my choice of the shield that fiction offers, and perhaps bypassing it, when I do, leaves me feeling even more exposed. As most people who take on this task know, along with self-revelation often comes self-questioning of a kind that is perhaps more obvious in some essays than others. When we insert our “I” (our eye) to search deeper into someone, something, or ourselves, we are always risking a yawn or a slap, indifference or disdain. How do we even know that what interests or delights us, alarms or terrifies us, will invoke a raised eyebrow in someone else? Perhaps the craft, the art, in whatever form it takes, is our bridge. We are narrating, after all (as my father was), slivers of moments, fragments of lives, declaring our love and hatred, concerns, and ambivalence, outing our hidden selves, and hoping that what we say will make sense to others.

  The beauty of this series is that it reminds a handful of the many persistent and gifted practitioners of the various forms of this craft that they are being heard. Essayists, it seems, occasional or regular, are a bit more vulnerable these days, and as if the backlit screens of computers or smart phones were a metaphor for this, essays are now read under an even more glaring spotlight. This also forces us to push beyond certain boundaries, to be less formulaic and stereotypical, however that might manifest itself. But essentially we are guided in part by what Ralph Ellison in his groundbreaking essay “Little Man at Chehaw Station: The American Artist and His Audience” calls “art hunger,” and what he defines as our urgent desire to put faith in our ability to communicate with others both directly and symbolically.

  The Best American Essays 2010 guest editor, Christopher Hitchens, who is a contributor to this year’s edition, recently wrote a moving essay about what it means for a writer to have a “voice” when he has lost his ability to speak. “The most satisfying compliment a reader can pay is to tell me that he or she feels personally addressed,” he wrote in the June 2011 issue of the magazine Vanity Fair. I hope you feel, as I did, personally addressed by each of these essays.

  In the beginning, it is biblically said (not a flawless transition from Mr. Hitchens), was the word. And no matter where we are along the span of our existence, we are perhaps all searching for that word, the one that is sometimes conciliatory and sometimes contrarian, enlightening or disturbing, the one word that will launch us stumbling into a sea of other words, most of which we will discard and some of which we will keep, as we write ourselves anew.

  On January 12, 2010, I was home in Miami—as I am most days—trying to get a bit of writing done while looking after my two young daughters. If thirty-five tumultuous seconds had not rattled Haiti, the country of my birth, at 4:53 P.M., that day would probably have blended into all the others, except that my girls and I had been scheduled to take a photograph that afternoon.

  I did not want to take the photograph. I had grown photo-averse because of some baby weight that I just couldn’t seem to shake. My girls, however, were very excited. A friend had given them identical embroidered white dresses and they wanted to wear them. (At least the older one did; the one-year-old did not get a vote.) So off we went that afternoon to a photographer neighbor’s studio to get our picture taken.

  Of all the pictures we took, my favorite is one of my five-year-old leaning her head ever so gently on my shoulder as her younger sister tries to choke me by yanking the heavy necklace around my neck. When I look at that picture now, it further deepens for me the sadness of that day. Looking at our serene, half-smiling faces reminds me how much we instinctively trust the banality and predictability of daily life. Until something larger shatters our world.

  After the photo session, I drove to a supermarket in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood and picked up a few things for dinner. As soon as I cleared the checkout aisle, my cell phone began to ring, and from that moment on the lives of 10 million Haitians and others, and to a much lesser extent my own life, have never been the same. Losing two family members and countless friends who had no time for last words was the least of it. Watching hundreds of thousands of others continue to struggle to survive adds daily to the weight of those losses.

  “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” the novelist and essayist Joan Didion famously wrote. We also tell ourselves stories in order not to die. And at any moment these stories can change.

  In “Port-au-Prince: The Moment,” Mischa Berlinski recalls surviving the January 2010 earthquake. However, his essay, which poignantly and powerfully describes the height of disaster, echoes an instinct we might also display even as we attempt to capture the quietest, most predictable moments: our yearning to preserve our words. Berlinski was working on his novel when the earthquake struck. When his chair began to roll, his first thought was to press Control+S on his laptop keyboard and save his novel. He started leaving with his laptop, then went back and put it on the table, reasoning that the book would be safer inside than outside. Though we might disagree on some things—that, for example, “without the presence—and the guns—of the United Nations, the [Haitian] government would have been nothing but a band of refugees and exiles”—reading, like writing, is never a dispassionate act. Essays, in the end, are not monologues. Whether we are nodding our heads or shouting back or writing protest letters in response, the most compelling essays often demand a reaction, either instantly or much later, when the words have settled inside us, under our skin, within us.

  In “A Personal Essay by a Personal Essay,” Christy Vannoy writes, “I am a Personal Essay and I was born with a port wine stain and beaten by my mother.” Thankfully, essays like the twenty-four included in this collection are brilliant examples that the essay, port-wine-stained or otherwise, continues not only to survive but to thrive.

  EDWIDGE DANTICAT

  Buddy Ebsen

  Hilton Als

  FROM The Believer

 
; IT’S THE QUEERS who made me. Who sat with me in the automobile in the dead of night and measured the content of my character without even looking at my face. Who—in the same car—asked me to apply a little strawberry lip balm to my lips before the anxious kiss that was fraught because would it be for an eternity, benday dots making up the hearts and flowers? Who sat on the toilet seat, panties around her ankles, talking and talking, girl talk burrowing through the partially closed bathroom door, and, boy, was it something. Who listened to opera. Who imitated Jessye Norman’s locutions on and off the stage. Who made love in a Queens apartment and who wanted me to watch them making love while at least one of those so joined watched me, dressed, per that person’s instructions, in my now-dead aunt’s little-girl nightie. Who wore shoes with no socks in the dead of winter, intrepid, and then, before you knew it, was incapable of wiping his own ass—“gay cancer.” Who died in a fire in an apartment in Paris. Who gave me a Raymond Radiguet novel when I was barely older than Radiguet was when he died, at twenty, of typhoid. Who sat with me in his automobile and talked to me about faith—he sat in the front seat, I in the back—and I was looking at the folds in his scalp when cops surrounded the car with flashlights and guns: they said we looked suspicious; we were aware that we looked and felt like no one else.

  It’s the queers who made me. Who didn’t get married and who said to one woman, “I don’t hang with that many other women,” even though or perhaps because she herself was a woman. Who walked with me along the West Side piers in 1980s Manhattan, one summer afternoon, and said, apropos of the black kids vogueing, talking, getting dressed up around us, “I got it; it’s a whole style.” Who bought me a pair of saddle shoes and polished them while sitting at my desk, not looking up as I watched his hands work the leather. Who knew that the actor who played the Ghost of Christmas Past in the George C. Scott version of A Christmas Carol was an erotic draw for me as a child—or maybe it was the character’s big beneficence. Who watched me watching Buddy Ebsen dancing with little Shirley Temple in a thirties movie called Captain January while singing “The Codfish Ball,” Buddy Ebsen in a black jumper, moving his hands like a Negro dancer, arabesques informed by thought, his ass in the air, all on a wharf—and I have loved wharfs and docks, without ever wearing black jumpers, ever since.

  It’s the queers who made me. Who talked to me about Joe Brainard’s I Remember, even though I kept forgetting to read it. Who keep after me to read I Remember, though perhaps my reluctance has to do with Brainard’s association with Frank O’Hara, who was one queer who didn’t make me, so interested was he in being a status-quo pet, the kind of desire that leads a fag to project his own self-loathing onto any other queer who gets into the room—How dare you. What are you doing here? But the late great poet-editor Barbara Epstein—who loved many queers and who could always love more—was friendly with Brainard and O’Hara, and perhaps the Barbara who still lives in my mind will eventually change my mind about all that, because she always could.

  It’s the queers who made me. Who introduced me to Edwin Denby’s writings, and George Balanchine’s “Serenade,” and got me writing for Ballet Review. Who wore red suspenders and a Trotsky button; I had never met anyone who dressed so stylishly who wasn’t black or Jewish. Who, even though I was “alone,” watched me as I danced to Cindy Wilson singing “Give Me Back My Man” in the basement of a house that my mother shared with her sister in Atlanta. Who took me to Paris. Who let me share his bed in Paris. Who told my mother that I would be okay, and I hope she believed him. Who was delighted to include one of my sisters in a night out—she wore a pink prom dress and did the Electric Slide, surrounded by gay boys, and fuck knows if she cared or saw the difference between herself and them—and he stood by my side as I watched my sister dance in her pink prom dress, and then he asked what I was thinking about, and I said, “I’m just remembering why I’m gay.”

  It’s the queers who made me. Who laughed with me in the pool in Lipari. Who kicked me under the table when I had allotted too much care for someone who would never experience love as suchness. Who sat with me in the cinema at Barnard College as Black Orpheus played, his bespectacled eyes glued to the screen as I weighed his whiteness against the characters’ blackness and then my own. Who squatted down in the bathtub and scrubbed my legs and then my back and then the rest of my body the evening of the day we would start to know each other for the rest of our lives. Who lay with me in the bed in Los Angeles, white sheets over our young legs sprinkled with barely there hair. Who coaxed me back to life at the farmers’ market later the same day, and I have the pictures to prove it. Who laughed when I said “What’s J.Lo doing in the hospital?” as he stood near his bed dying of AIDS, his beautiful Panamanian hair—a mixture of African, Spanish, and Indian textures—no longer held back by the white bandanna I loved. Who gave me Michael Warner’s The Trouble with Normal, and let me find much in it that was familiar and emotionally accurate, including the author’s use of the word moralism, to describe the people who divide the world into “us” and “them,” and who brutalize the queer in themselves and others to gain a foothold on a moralish perch.

  It’s the queers who made me. Who introduced me to a number of straight girls who, at first, thought that being queer was synonymous with being bitchy, and who, after meeting me and becoming friends, kept waiting and waiting for me to be a bitchy queen, largely because they wanted me to put down their female friends, and to hate other women as they themselves hated other women, not to mention themselves, despite their feminist agitprop; after all, I was a queen, and that’s what queens did, right, along with getting sodomized, just like them, right—queens were the handmaidens to all that female self-hatred, right? And who then realized that I didn’t hate women and so began to join forces with other women to level criticism at me.

  It’s the queers who made me. Who said: Women and queers get in the way of your feminism and gay rights. Who listened as I sat, hurt and confused, describing the postfeminist or postqueer monologue that had been addressed to me by some of the above women and queers, who not only attacked my queer body directly—you’re too fat, you’re too black, the horror, the horror!—but delighted in hearing about queers flinging the same kind of pimp slime on one another, not to mention joining forces with their girlfriends of both sexes to establish within their marginalized groups the kind of hierarchy straight white men presumably judge them by, but not always, not really. Who asked, “Why do you spend so much time thinking about women and queers?” And who didn’t hear me when I said, “But aren’t we born of her? Didn’t we queer her body being born?”

  It’s the queers who made me. Who introduced me to the performer Justin Bond, whose various characters, sometimes cracked by insecurity, eaglets in a society of buzzards, are defined by their indomitability in an invulnerable world. Who told me about the twelve-year-old girl who had been raised with love and acceptance of queerness in adults, in a landscape where she could play without imprisoning herself in self-contempt, and who could talk to her mother about what female bodies meant to her (everything), which was a way of further loving her mother, the greatest romance she had ever known, and who gave me, indirectly, my full queer self, the desire to say “I” once again.

  It’s my queerness that made me. And in it there is a memory of Jackie Curtis. She’s walking up Bank Street, away from the river, a low orange sun behind her like the ultimate stage set. It’s my queer self that goes up to Jackie Curtis—whom I have seen only in pictures and films; I am in my twenties—and it is he who says, “Oh, Miss Curtis, you’re amazing,” and she says, in front of the setting sun, completely stoned but attentive, a performer to her queer bones, snapping to in the light of attention and love, “Oh, you must come to my show!” as she digs into her big hippie bag to dig out a flier, excited by the possibility of people seeing her for who she is, even in makeup.

  Port-au-Prince: The Moment

  Mischa Berlinski

  FROM The New York Review of Books


  MY CHAIR WAS ON CASTERS and began to roll. A large earthquake starts as a small earthquake. I saved my novel: Control+S. The horizon swayed at an angle. I had time to think many things—that’s how long the quake lasted. I thought that I should stand under the lintel of the doorway. I took my laptop and started to leave. Then, unsteady on my feet, I wondered whether the laptop wouldn’t be safer where it was. I put it back on the table. I went outside.

  The office was a bungalow in a residential complex owned by a man who had made his fortune in powdered sugar. His wife had planted an elaborate garden of hanging and potted vases; they were falling or had fallen. The quake was a series of rolling waves, each sharper than the one before. I expected them to stop but they didn’t. The visual effect was precisely that of the grainy videos that would later be shown on television, as of somebody shaking a camera sharply. It was tremendously loud—like huge stones grinding; I am not sure now if the sound was produced by the movement of the earth or by the simultaneous collapse of so many buildings.

  I was alone on the sugar magnate’s flowery terrace. I dropped to one knee, not shaken to the ground, but unbalanced, as if I had spun around in circles too many times. It did not occur to me for a second that I might die. I was panting heavily. A fissure in the earth opened up in the concrete beside me, perhaps a foot wide, a foot deep, and at least thirty feet long. The earthquake seemed to last an immensely long time, seemed to gain in power always, and when it was over the movement of the earth did not subside or taper down: it simply stopped. For five seconds or perhaps longer, the world was perfectly still and immensely quiet. Then the screaming began.