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YALE DAILY NEWS MAGAZINE ydnmag@gmail.com

04

The Gist

monthly shorts

This hour never happened

06

photo essay

READING CLAY

small talk by BENJAMIN MUELLER

09

26

BETWEEN THE OBJECTS OF THE WORLD

08

Wheels of change small talk by EVE HOUGHTON

Tribute to Leslie Woodard

Isabel is already awake

16

observer by Hannah Sassoon

cover story by Jennifer Gersten

11

crit by YI-LING LIU

Moral Mondays

feature by WILL KRONICK

18

PROFILE BY DIANA SAVERIN

21

31

WE DONâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;T TALK ABOUT IT

Tip-toeing around the great firewall of China

NAMING BIRDS

fiction by NIMAL EAMES-SCOTT

Saving seeds

13

personal essay by VINCENT TOLENTINO

34

DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE Editors Sarah Maslin Joy Shan Managing Editors Abigail Carney Alec Joyner Photography Editor Henry Ehrenberg Design Editors Jennifer Lu Daniel Roza

Design Assistants Alex Cruz Carter Levin Marisa Lowe Amra Saric Copy Editors Adrian Chiem Ian Gonzalez Elizabeth Malchione Douglas Plume Editor in Chief Julia Zorthian Publisher Julie Leong

3

Th

REAL TALK with

TED CONOVER Pulitzer Prize finalist and celebrated undercover journalist whose recent article “The Way of All Flesh” was published in Harper’s Magazine

DESKSIDE WITH ALFRED

Excerpts from an October 29, 2013 Morse College Master’s Tea ON WORKING IN A SLAUGHTERHOUSE: “The last 15 minutes of a cow’s life are horrific, but they’re also really interesting.”

ON GOING UNDERCOVER: “I told Stan [his coworker in the industrial slaughterhouse] that I wanted to write about it. What was missing in his knowledge was that writing about it was the whole purpose.”

ON JOURNALISM AND SOCIAL JUSTICE: “I would love to be able to do what Upton Sinclair did, but when you’re on a line in a meat factory, you don’t feel like an agent of change.”

ON VEGANISM: “I wish I didn’t like meat, but I do… Also, I’m

FROM THE BEINECKE

by Caroline Sydney

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

not positive killing animals for food is a bad thing. ” ON CONCRETE REFORM HE HAS INSPIRED: “After I published Newjack [in which he worked as a guard at maximum security Sing Sing prison], an inmate wrote me this in a letter: ‘They cleaned the windows you said were dirty.’”

ON RIDING THE RAILS WITH HOBOES IN COLLEGE: “When it comes time to fall asleep, it’s scary.”

ON PEOPLE: “You can hang out with anybody as long as you don’t think too highly of yourself.”

c

e ris

p ter n .E ) S.S 1970 . kU a Tre (circ r a St

I

n this 1969 edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Surrealist hand of Salvador Dalí renders the world of Lewis Carroll into something even more strange and beautiful. Dalí opens each chapter with a drawing of Alice, her jump rope looping around the first letter of the first word. In the woodcut of the famous tea party scene, shown here, we see a clock that curiously resembles one from Dalí’s “The Persistence of Memory”. The storybook represents the marriage of two curious minds, and, turning each page, we can’t help but feel ourselves being lured down the psychedelic rabbit hole. The Mad Hatter would approve.

4 | Vol. XLI, No. 2 | November 2013

MAP OF THE MONTH

by Alison Mosier-Mills

W

ithin the folds of a collection of old maps on the seventh floor of Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library, tucked away behind dusty stacks of ancient volumes, the past and the present overlap. Literally.

The Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps were designed in London in 1867 to estimate fire insurance liability in British and American cities and towns. They detail outhouses, industrial buildings, water infrastructure, and the dimensions of streets and alleyways. Each map provides a snapshot of the historical moment in which it was produced. Updated every 20 years, the collection offers a wealth of information about city development over time. The 1886 map shown here was Sanborn’s first in New Haven. Like Google Maps today, it depicts Yale’s campus as the city’s center.

Collector’s Corner

he Gist

D E. GUY JR.

Computer (onscreen: Writing Center contest results) Oriental tea collection (for visitors)

Weddin g (Ithaca photo , NY 199 4)

C co offe llec e m tio ug no s( f 2 fro 0, m all a gif ts)

H

arry Vandusen ’14 collects bottle caps from craft beers, but he won’t keep a cap until he’s tasted the beer himself. A long-time fan of a good brew, Vandusen began building this collection last semester. The first cap was from a bottle of Miller-Lite (upper left corner), but today the corkboard hosts more obscure varieties. This summer, he and his dad sampled different brews together, finding interesting labels and splitting a large bottle between them. One cap reads “YOU’RE NOT WORTHY.” It topped a dark beer from the Arrogant Bastard Stone Brewery. Another one (“Do What’s Right”) was from a vanilla stout, brewed by the Maine Beer Company. Still, Vandusen said, when it comes to beer, he considers himself an amateur. But he can point out his favorite brews—the ones he tried with his dad.

HUMOR

by Alec Joyner

Advice on Travel in Mediterranean Cities from a Possibly Clairvoyant Man of Transgressive Personality

Yale Map Department

1. When in Barcelona, visit the famed Bo de B sandwich shop and, instead of pollo (chicken), order polla (penis) “by mistake.” The Catalonians behind the counter will find you cute and charming, and most likely will not actually serve you a genital sandwich.

2. When in Valencia during Las Fallas (the Festival of Fire), do not hesitate to accept the large box of firecrackers that a sullen, bored four-year-old girl will offer you at the beach. These will be freely accepted as payment by the old lady who runs the heladería on Carrer Salvador Abril. Then again, she’ll be out of the dulce de leche flavor, so you may as well set off your fireworks in broad daylight in the street — that is, you may as well do what everyone else will be doing, including the old lady

herself and the police.

3. When in Marseille, walk around the residential neighborhoods in the hills overlooking the sea while blasting “Seven Nation Army” by the White Stripes on repeat through your earbuds. You will feel like Euric, king of Visigoth kings, or maybe Zinedine Zidane in a World Cup championship match.

In either case, try to restrain the urge to head-butt passersby.

4. When in Nice, be nice.

5. When in Rome, go on a free city tour and take copious notes.

Come back the next day, lead the tour guide down the entrance hallway of the Keats-Shelley house, beat him to death with a souvenir centurion’s shield, and give the tour yourself. Charge five euros, four for children.

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 5

THE HOUR TH

T

ime we left to take photographs: 1:12 a.m.

Stroll through college courtyard. Dawdle outside Toadâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s. Grab a bite at G-Heav.

Cross the street at Broadway (watch for traffic).

See the lights on Old Campus. Daylight savings ends. Time we return: 1:07 a.m.

BY YALE DAILY NEWS MAGAZINE

HAT NEVER HAPPENED

WHEELS OF CHANGE

The evolution of the Farmington Canal

BY EVE HOUGHTON PHOTOGRAPHY BY JACOB GEIGER

T

hey say that when Gov. Oliver Wolcott Jr. officially broke ground on the Farmington Canal in 1825, the spade broke. An ill omen, the newspapers wrote. Today, on a pale October evening spent wandering down the Farmington Canal Trail, I can imagine the scene: the governor leaning sheepishly on his broken spade, the leading citizens of New Haven waving from a mock “canal boat” covered by a white awning and drawn by four horses.

The optimism of the investors that day was not unfounded. The canal was an engine of economic prosperity, they thought: in time, it would change the world. Investors imagined a vast waterway stretching 84 miles from New Haven to Northampton, Mass., facilitating trade across the state and offering a much-needed commercial route to northern New England. “Let us bind the Republic together with a perfect system of roads and canals,” said John Calhoun in an 1816 speech. “Let us conquer space.”

In 1826, the one-year-old canal project 8 | Vol. XLI, No. 2 | November 2013

that the Hartford Courant deemed “a little ditch” was already plagued by financial woes and internal squabbles.

Stock sold poorly. The Connecticut General Assembly was unsupportive.

Disaffected landowners were suspected of sabotaging the construction sites.

Though operational by the 1830s, the canal’s finances were careening towards disaster; in total, it was thought to have lost shareholders more than $1 million.

In the end, the death knell for the Farmington Canal was not financial calamity, recalcitrant lawmakers, or malicious landlords, but the coming of the railroad. The train was comparatively cheap, safe, and fast; the route from New Haven to Plainville cost just $186,000 to build, in contrast with the $1,089,425 sunk into the ill-fated canal project.

For the beleaguered investors of New Haven, the railroad was a blessed relief.

Barely a decade elapsed between the construction of the Farmington Canal and the ascension of the railroad as a dominant method of transportation in the United States.

In 1848, the last remnants of the canal were paved over with railroad track.

T

he Farmington Canal Trail is no longer a canal. Nor is it a railroad, although cargo trains ran down the so-called “Canal Line” from the mid-19th century until the 1980s, when commercial shipping dried up and the line fell into disrepair. The abandoned canal and rail line has been converted into a multi-use greenway, a transformation originated by the nonprofit Farmington Canal Rail-to-Trail Association. Today, along the path where barges and cargo trains once ran, one can find pedestrians like Anthony Chiorazzi, a professor at the Divinity School who I meet by the Prospect Street Bridge, and Eric Epstein, a New Haven resident taking his dog for an evening walk. “It’s great,” says Epstein. “I walk, I bike, I use [it] as a base to explore other trails.” Now that the 84mile route is almost entirely complete, one can cycle from New Haven all the way to Northampton, or use the downtown section around Science Park

small talk to commute within the Elm City.

“The Farmington Canal Trail was envisioned as part of an ‘urban Appalachian Trail’ of continuous, linear parks connecting cities and towns in the region,” wrote Mark Abraham ’04 in an email. Abraham is a board member of the Rail-to-Trail Association. “It is known that trails like these improve surrounding property values and are seen as a major community asset.”

According to Abraham, other benefits of the project include environmental conservation, reduced dependence on automobiles, and the creation of a communal recreational space for physical activity.

The Farmington Canal Trail Railto-Trail Association has affected a remarkable transformation. But, when walking down the trail, one can’t entirely escape the legacy of industrialization and post-industrialization, the decades

of abuse and neglect after the railroad fell fallow in the 1980s. Manicured lawns and orderly rows of trees give way to chain-link fences, sodden bags of dried leaves, and overgrown patches of grass.

You might find a tunnel with scarred insides, or a no man’s land of yellow weeds. Many sections of the Farmington Canal Trail still display traces of the land’s past: feeder canals, retaining walls, industrial buildings. Perhaps the trail’s most important legacy remains the network of communities that sprung up along the route to support the small industries clustered around the canal and railroad, including the Newhallville neighborhood in New Haven.

E

vening. Color fades from the land as I walk, passing under bridges and through fields of tall grasses, past paved roads and playgrounds. The trail isn’t always beautiful, but to me

there is something comforting about the occasional imperfections in the landscape: as if for the first time in two centuries of industrial use and misuse, the land is finally free to grow in its own way, for community rather than commerce.

“The terrain is favorably formed for a great work of this kind …” These were the confident words of Benjamin Wright, the Erie Canal engineer brought to New Haven to assess the suitability of the land for the canal project. But as night falls, it occurs to me that this trail is no longer a failed project, a cautionary tale, a broken spade. If all land tells a story, the Farmington Canal Trail has more to tell than most. It has been a canal, a railroad, a forgotten scar of industry: and now an act and symbol of revitalization, a little green path winding its way across the state, leading straight to the heart of New Haven.

READING CLAY

BY BENJAMIN MUELLER PHOTOGRAPHY BY SARAH ECKINGER

I

gaze through glass at the clay relics: kings with sinewy calves and braided blue beards, plump women suggestively cupping their breasts, a recipe for pigeon stew written in cuneiform during Hammurabi’s reign (a-mu-ur-sa-na tu-pa-ra-as: split the pigeon). The curator, a salty Danish woman named Ulla Kasten who is dressed in purple from scarf to sandals, commands me to “study de captions,” and I oblige. But I didn’t come to this third-floor corner of Sterling Memorial Library, Yale’s vaunted Babylonian Collection, to read paper placards. I came because in the two years since I visited with a class, I haven’t stopped thinking about its clay cuneiform texts.

So when Ulla leaves for a moment to retrieve a file, I duck into the adjacent

room, a vault-like space labeled “Staff Only” whose towering chest of 288 drawers holds 40,000 clay tablets so heavy the floor is reinforced with steel rebar. These are the palm-sized surfaces on which writing was born.

Wedge-shaped symbols cover the clay like lovers’ engravings on a wooden signpost, sequences of words and sounds arranged without punctuation. A stray rectangular slab from J.P. Morgan’s library sits on a wooden ledge, waiting to be re-catalogued. I hesitate, listening for Ulla’s steps, and then run the pads of my fingers over its dry, dusty grooves.

Even today, we swear on bound bibles and kiss fallen siddurim, submitting to the superstition that books have spiritual worth. But these clay tablets hold an unusual grip on our imaginations. They

record what happened before the West decided the world was born. Thousands of years before Yahweh spoke to Noah, the Mesopotamian Anunna-gods unleashed a purification bath on earth’s clamorous children. Before Moses came Sargon, a baby emperor rescued from a basket in the Euphrates, a river that, unlike the Nile, actually was flanked by reeds. And before Pythagoras claimed his theorem, an anonymous Mesopotamian student living around 1800 B.C.E. used the same principle to measure a hypotenuse, immortalizing her sloppy math homework in clay. These texts rebalance a slanted history, mocking, as Ulla sometimes does, the sacred lie on which thousands of literature courses are built: “In the beginning, there were the Greeks…”

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 9

small talk The promise of a truer, older past has sent others on my pilgrimage.

Before Yale installed a security guard downstairs and Ulla alarmed her door, so-called “crackpots” sometimes burst into her office, desperate for a stage for their otherworldly theories. One man asked Ulla if she could see his third eye. She insisted he did not have one. Now barred from the building, they send fan mail, still hoping for a hint of recognition from Ulla and her colleagues, gatekeepers to the secrets of the ancient Near East. A polygamous prophet imprisoned in Palestine, Texas, recently sent them a garbled warning from God, only the latest in his series of doomsday predictions (“Do not mingle with Babylon of fallen order”).

Another inmate sent color-coded maps describing the lost tribes of Genesis; a numerologist insisted Moses was the Egyptian king Ramos; and two dog breeders, one from Colorado and the other from California, wrote separately to declare that their Great Pyrenees dogs were descended from ancient Sumer.

Ulla put the ladies in touch; now they discuss Sumerian canines with each other.

“We’re close to God,” Ulla says when I ask her why the collection attracts such quixotic stalkers. Her eyes smile mockingly; real scholars, of course, don’t deal in that foolishness. But I’m intrigued by these objects’ interaction with the heavens. Like Herodotus, who once wrote a fanciful history of prostitutes in Babylon without having visited, I can spin rumor into pompous speculation, even if I’ve only just arrived. So after immersing myself in the “crackpot file” over Ulla’s loud objections (“READ DE LABELS,” she demands), I offer Ulla a hypothesis: people chase her, as I did, because she and her colleagues are divine fact checkers, the only experts equipped to correct the myths of people’s youth.

“You give the stamp of approval,” I tell her. When writing was born, so was accountability, and Ulla is our translator, separating syllable from 10 | Vol. XLI, No. 2 | November 2013

symbol in an effort to retrace our secret past with certainty.

Ulla laughs kindly. “Forget about certainty. I mean, seriously,” she sighs.

If writing is the birth of truth, it’s also an invitation to deceive. Standing on a glass-encased shelf near the chest of tablets is a foot-tall clay cylinder. The Babylonians used to design dedication nails, monuments meant to glorify kings through ornate inscriptions that were embedded into the wall of a newly built building. Later, they grew too large to be wedged in a building, and assumed a decorative pose. Kings eventually gave up the pretense and wrote inscriptions on thick cylinders instead. This one is written from King Nebuchadnezzar to himself, and Ulla offers me a rough translation: “I, Nebuchadnezzar, ruler of the four corners of the world, who beat the Persians—which he did not— and leveled this and conquered that, built this building.”

Across the room hangs a poster from 3,000 years later, celebrating Saddam Hussein’s rebuilding of Nebuchadnezzar’s palace in 1988.

“Babylon Invokes Past Glories on the Path of Jihad and Glorious Development,” it announces. Saddam’s military headdress is flatter and less ornate than Nebuchadnezzar’s, but the poster shows their profiles neatly aligned, two men not shy about revising their horrid stamp on history. Saddam included a dedication brick in the new building that is inscribed in Arabic and, like his ancient mentor’s, boasts of false conquests. Ulla reads out her rhythmic translation again: “I, Saddam Hussein, ruler of the four corners of the earth, who beat the Persians—which he also did not—and leveled this and conquered that, rebuilt this building.”

Ulla banishes me finally, still ruing the timeless temptation to make stuff up. “Nothing ever changes. People tell stories. That’s what they do,” she says. I gather my things and stop for a moment at a fractured tablet from The Epic of Gilgamesh, a story that describes the eponymous hero’s search for

immortality. A few large cracks cleave the tablet near the bottom, creating a triangular hole in the text that won’t ever be translated. In fact, only a quarter of the tablets Yale owns have been translated. One graduate student is preparing her dissertation on Sumerian color terms, one among many parts of the language not yet decoded. Far from a corrective on old stories, these tablets sow new ones, with gaps so vast anyone from crackpots to scholars might be induced to try adding a few words.

As I wander away from Gilgamesh, a hunched French researcher and Dominican priest named Marcel Sigrist sidles up to me, his eyes searching for an audience from beneath a mess of white hair. “Writing starts here,” he tells me, measuring his words.

He wears his glasses crooked, and two faded green shirts slip out from beneath his blue sweater. “And once you have writing, you have control — of history, of time.” He has more to say, but his friend, a professor at Yale and the renowned translator of Gilgamesh, has arrived for a meeting. “It’s the great professor,” Marcel gasps playfully, and as the man passes, Sigrist bows as if before an altar.

crit

Tip-toeing around the

Great Firewall of China

Censorship at the China Daily

BY YI-LING LIU ILLUSTRATION BY MADELEINE WITT

I

remember the first passage they deleted. A smattering of sentences in the middle of the second page, describing Wenceslas Square, Prague, as the site where thousands of Czech youth once shook their keys to celebrate the toppling of the Communist regime. It was a short passage — cushioned between two equally harmless paragraphs about the Old Town Square, and the Gothic architecture of Tyn Church — but a passage nevertheless. Deleted, removed, extracted cleanly as if plucked with a pair of metal tweezers. Censored.

Cen-sored. The word felt alien under my tongue, two syllables borrowed from some distant Orwellian dystopia. When I first started writing for the China Daily, as a sixteen-year-old wideeyed summer intern, still getting over the thrill of seeing my own name in print, I already knew what kind of newspaper it was: a state-run, highly controlled publication held firmly in the hands of the central government. As long as I was within the Great Firewall of the Mainland, I would never read about Tibet or Tiananmen or Taiwanese independence. As long as I was away from Hong Kong visiting my grandma in Beijing, I would not be able to check the number of likes on the adorable new profile picture of my friend and me on a tuk tuk. These were facts of life, and the Daily’s efforts to censor were hardly surprising. And yet, I’d never felt the censor’s hand press against my lips, draw a red line over my handcrafted words.

One loud voice told me to be indignant. This Yi-Ling, who reveled in the idea of freedom of expression, who admired Rushdie for his refusal to be silent, who showed up to the sweaty vigils every year calling for the vindication of June 4, 1989, told me to rip the Daily to shreds, to boycott it. I thought myself a writer; I loved the act of creation. These deletions, this kidnapping of my babies, was uncreation, anti-creation.

But, I didn’t wear indignation well, couldn’t muster the loud and passionate holler of protest. We were, after all, talking about yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 11

crit two skinny sentences plucked out of my Eastern Europe travelogue, not Charter 08, a manifesto demanding the elimination of single-party rule. Stick to the Hotpot columns (a lifestyle blog written by foreigners living in Beijing), the harmless humor, the nice topics like Shanghai’s Oxbridge applicants and Peking duck reviews. I listened to that voice, the mature tenor in the lowpitched part of Cat Steven’s “Father and Son.” Just relax, and take it easy, and don’t rock the boat.

I clambered down to the living room, laptop in hand, and showed the edits to my dad. He sighed, and shook his head.

“Let it go Yi-Ling. There’s no point in provoking their attention.” There was a complacency in his voice; the kind of fatigue that comes from having 50 years of China experience under your belt; from weathering the tumult of the Cultural Revolution (he was yanked out of high school at 15 to till crops in the bitter cold of the northern countryside); from living through a failed political coup, two mass student protests, Nixon’s landmark handshake with Mao in 1972, the abrupt opening of China to the West and rapid economic growth. My dad knew what chaos was, and so when Deng Xiaoping introduced stability in the ’90s, he cherished it. “You are here now, I am here now, with a college degree, a career, and a family because I have benefited from a stable China. Yeah, sure. It’s not perfect. But you have to sit back, and let things get better slowly, and on its own.”

Loud or soft, active or passive, challenge the establishment or go with the system? Follow the path of those like Liu Xiaobo, activist, poet, and Nobel Peace Prize winner who actively championed democratic reforms and now sits behind bars in his threadbare cotton pajamas, writing lonely letters to his wife? Or follow those who went in the opposite direction — editors who have compiled glossaries of sensitive words, artists who have mastered the art of filtering, writers who ‘castrate’ their works. “I am a proactive eunuch,” Murong Xuecun says, “and I castrate myself even before the surgeon raises 12 | Vol. XLI, No. 2 | November 2013

his scalpel.”

I understood the soft voice. There are messy and intangible historical forces at work — a dynastic past followed by a Communist revolution, deeply rooted xenophobia paired with an opening up of the country to the West — that not even scholars who have written thick volumes of research and theses and antitheses, let alone a wide-eyed high school student, could ever fully grasp.

My lone and feeble act of protest would not only be inconsequential, it would be uninformed and naïve. And yet, how could I be comfortable, living in Hong Kong, reaping the benefits of a colonial legal system and a free press, kicking back with a cup of hot chocolate in one hand, my censored article and troubled conscience in the other, waiting passively for change?

I admired the loud voice, yearned for the certainty of the young protesters who filled the squares of Wenceslas and Tiananmen and Tahir, desired the conviction of every martyr who has written, published, painted, sat-in, protested, barricaded, testified, selfimmolated in the name of an ideal.

But I have neither the certainty nor conviction. I am too impressionable, too easily swayed by the rhetoric and passion with which other people present their ideas; my beliefs are not strong and clear-cut enough to pursue a pure and unadulterated agenda of boat-rocking.

And so I waffled somewhere in between. While working as an intern at the weekly World Insight Channel for CCTV in Beijing, I encountered the same impasse. We were having roundtable discussions with the team on what news we would air that Saturday.

Knowing that my efforts would be futile, I didn’t call attention to dissident activity in Xinjiang, but requested coverage on the Tunisian protests. The following summer I returned to Mainland China again, this time, working with Sony Pictures to put together the screenplay of a film that would make Chinese history accessible to a younger, hipper, and more international audience. While weaving the story together, a Night in

the Museum-esque family comedy set in the Forbidden City, I tried to balance moviegoing entertainment with my own subtle criticisms of the increasing amorality, corruption, and materialism prevalent in modern Chinese society.

I’d waffle, always seeking compromise, always scouting for opportunities that would allow me to gain a nuanced understanding of modern China — a country I have grown to love like a troubled teenage daughter.

This daughter, she frustrates me.

When I read the news, all I can see is her faults: reports of soaring API levels, police brutality, exiled activists, land seizures, nationalism gone awry after a petty dispute over the Diaoyu Islands.

And yet, it is her blood that flows in my veins, it is her language that I have spoken all my life. I could complain about her for hours on end — stop being paranoid, stick to the rule of law, quit being so defensive — and yet it irks me when others criticize her. She is multi-faceted, convoluted, and full of contradictions. To me, she is not so much a nation as a character, rich with personality and difficult to comprehend.

For my next assignment, I was working on an article on literary ties between Hong Kong and the Mainland.

I had interviewed the editors of a literary journal in Hong Kong and wanted to send the article to the Daily. The draft was done and ready to be sent, except for one passage at the end of the article: “Our idea of publishing the China Issue in June 2011 — is of course a deliberate choice,” Tammy Lai-Ming, the editor of Cha Literary Journal, stated.

“We wanted the issue to coincide with the twenty-second anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre. We cannot think of a more appropriate time of the year for us to reflect on the state of our nation.”

My cursor grazed over the send button. I’ll poke the system, prod her.

I won’t succumb to her or indulge her.

I’ll understand her flaws, her workings, and her nuances, so that one day I can challenge and repair her from within. I’ll rock the boat gently, one little shove at a time. Article sent.

BETWEEN THE OBJECTS OF THE WORLD VINCENT TOLENTINO

M

id-September. The Litchfield Turnpike is taking me north, past the last overpasses and traffic lights of the suburban world. North, to Bethany. Up here, there are no sidewalks, no curbs. Without its concrete frills, “the road” is just a slab of asphalt in the woods, a sludgy, petrified thing, so unlike the forest floor beneath it. I try not to think about this because everything else is Arcadian goodness — hills and farms and pastures, ponds.

The forest is edged with fern. Moss sticks to the trees, whose trunks are colossal. I remember that the bronze for the Colossus came from the weapons of Rhodes’ would-be conquerors. The people of Rhodes, so pleased with their victory, so rich with bronze, had a wild vision: a statue of Helios that would pierce the heavens. The road, I guess, is fine. It’s brought me here and shown me this. The wonders of the ancient world were man-made, after all.

But here are these trees, these living colossi. I know that

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 13

personal essay no one’s responsible, but I wonder if some nameless hand decided, centuries ago, that war machines were fine material — Rhodes can keep its melted spears — but the organic stuff of soil and air is more triumphant still, and stronger? An earthquake shook the Colossus down. Its material has disintegrated. Not so with the woods of Bethany.

Somewhere amid this artful wildness, a house belonged to Manson H. Whitlock, typewriter genius. These were his trees. This was his daily drive. Down into the world to work, then back up to his mountain.

I left my typewriter with Whitlock months ago. Now, it’ll never be fixed.

Whitlock has died.

I pull up to the house on Sperry Road at 4:30. The man I’m meeting — Whitlock’s son — is standing outside with his wife. They must be in their early sixties. He wears a gray henley tucked into his pants, she a navy blue “NHFD” t-shirt. In dark jeans and a jacket, I feel citified, alien.

An old golden retriever trots down to meet me. “She doesn’t bite!” the woman calls, following. I see the man step into the house. I bend to greet the dog because this seems like the polite thing to do. She weaves between my pant legs, leaving white hairs behind.

What’s her name, I ask. Paris, the woman says, and did I have trouble finding them? No, no trouble at all, I say.

The pleasantries sound subdued in our voices. It occurs to me that silence is a better solace to the grieving. We say no more. She turns and walks back toward the house. Paris and I follow.

The man emerges holding a black typewriter case.

“You’re Vincent?” he says.

“Yes, that’s me.”

“Just want to be sure I’m giving you the right one.”

14 | Vol. XLI, No. 2 | November 2013

He hands me the case, and I realize this is the end of our transaction. I offer to shake his hand. He hesitates.

I look at his lean face, his kind gray eyes, and I see the resemblance. I see that he’s neat and sturdily built, so much like his father. But he also looks worn out. He looks somehow vulnerable. Powerless to prevent what he knows is coming: “I’m sorry for your loss.” I hear myself say it.

He and his wife nod. “Thank you,” they say. And as though there were a chill, or the sun had dipped below a ridge, they turn to take their dog inside, and let me drive away.

I open the trunk but change my mind. I lay the typewriter in the passenger seat, which seems more correct.

T

he last time I saw this typewriter case was a frigid morning my junior year. I was walking up York Street with one hand in a coat pocket and the other around its leather handle. That must’ve been a common sight once: an undergrad on York Street with a typewriter in hand.

But in the year 2012, I felt ridiculous, even mischievous. I’d been calling the shop for weeks, and finally the man was in — in until noon, he said. I told him I’d hurry.

I marched up the office building steps next to Ashley’s Ice Cream and turned. The sign by the door read WHITLOCK TYPEWRITER SHOP. I knocked and entered. The hermetic seal broke. I found a narrow room lined with shelves of tagged typewriters and cases like mine. I know there wasn’t smoke, but in my recollection the air seems hazy and intricate. Everywhere there were stacks of little cardboard boxes whose package design was decades old, the reds and blues faded. Type-balls, typeslugs, bars, rollers, ribbons, platens.

On one shelf, there was a bust of

Mark Twain. And at the far end of the room, in the glow of a single halogen lamp, the old man — Mr. Whitlock himself — was standing at a desk.

I strode forward and said I had a typewriter I’d just purchased — “a Remington Rand Series One, I think.” I’d looked it up. “Model One, the noiseless Remington…” the man said, quietly, to himself. The 1930s “noiseless,” he was right. I’d read that when it was released, customers would hit the keys too hard because they were unused to the silence of the mechanism.

Whitlock looked at the case in my hand and said nothing more, so I laid it on the table and threw the metal latches open. The machine’s black enameled surfaces stared up at me. A sleek, beautiful Remington portable.

I’d bought it at an antique shop for $60, its exact retail price in 1938. All the keys worked, but the carriage wouldn’t advance. I turned it around for the man to see.

“I wonder if it’s worth repairing.

They told me all the parts were here.”

I stood back and awaited a diagnosis.

He adjusted his glasses, which were large, with rounded frames. They seemed to magnify his gray eyes.

He was mostly bald, and the skin about his cheeks was crinkled and sunken. But for 95 … This was what 95 looked like? I thought to myself.

This man could have been 70. It was a marvel that he worked in a tweed suit, sweater, and tie, a wonder that he worked standing.

“Did you toy with this?” he said, holding up a quarter-sized metal reel.

“No, sir, I didn’t.” The truth was that I hadn’t. My roommate had. He peered at me through those orb-like frames. They say you shouldn’t lie to doctors.

He said it wouldn’t be easy. It was missing half the machinery. He would take it and see what he could do. I wrote my name and phone number in his ledger.

personal essay “Tolentino?” he said. I nodded.

“I’ll ring you.”

I

was midway through typing this sentence:

Mercury with his winged feet, light and airborne, astute, agile, adaptable, free and easy, established the relationships of the gods among themselves and those between the gods and men, between universal laws and individual destinies, between the forces of nature and the forms of culture, — when the phone rang. The sentence was from Italo Calvino. The caller was from Manhattan, Kansas. “Manhattan, Kansas?” I said to Rachel. I was ready to let it ring out, but she said, calmly, “Pick it up” — inarguable logic.

“I’m calling for Vincent Tolentino?”

The voice on the other line was a young woman’s.

I said yes, and asked who it was.

“This is Melanie Whitlock, Manson Whitlock’s granddaughter.”

She paused. “I’m calling to inform you that he’s passed away.”

I said, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

Rachel looked up from her book.

“He had some typewriters that were left in his shop,” she said. “We’ve been calling the owners to see if they wanted them back.” She explained that they’d moved the typewriters to Whitlock’s home in Bethany, and that her uncle — Bill Whitlock — was there if I’d like to pick mine up. I said I would. She left me his telephone number and the address.

“It says here in his notes that he wasn’t able to fix yours,” she said, her voice tapering.

“Yes, that’s right,” I assured her. “He called me a while ago to tell me, I just haven’t been able to come in.”

“All right. I didn’t want you to be disappointed.”

I thanked her for the call and apologized, again.

It was ages since Whitlock had

called. His message was brief: I’m sorry, I’m unable to repair your typewriter. Please come by at your convenience to retrieve it.

That was two or three weeks after I’d dropped it off. I tried to reach him for months. I would call Friday mornings, the only time he worked, but I was always too late. Nobody answered. I tracked down a supposed cell number, and no one answered that either. The one time I got him, he said there was a storm in the forecast and he wouldn’t risk the drive. Snow began to fall, the blizzard eventually came, and I gave up.

In the spring, I purchased a new, working typewriter — a black 1940s Smith-Corona Sterling. For months, it sat dormant in my room, my excitement for it lost amid midterms and papers. Summer came and I ordered a new ribbon. Autumn neared and I learned how to change it. By the middle of September, I was clacking away, revising an essay, typing Calvino’s sentence, when the call came from Kansas. I rang Bill Whitlock the next morning and arranged to meet him in Bethany that afternoon.

Eventually, I finished typing the sentence: — between the objects of the world and all thinking subjects.

A

nd so I’m sitting here now with two typewriters: one whose clacks and zhoops and dings are the music carrying me through this sentence, and one whose silence is unambiguous, permanent. Maybe the Remington’s silence, even its physical absence, was the necessary prelude to the Smith-Corona, which I now love.

In a way, the broken typewriter has become a sad and beautiful memento.

A master failed here. Or, to be precise: The world no longer had the parts he needed.

It’s eerie that Calvino’s sentence

about Mercury, the herald, should have been at hand when Melanie Whitlock called. It’s eerie that I should have been sitting at a typewriter at all.

But the more I pay attention to these things — the year-long rhythms, the sympathies and likenesses — the less accidental it seems. We tend toward co-incidence. So Mercury would have me believe. His so-called syntony — his participation in the world, his interconnection — is the stuff of good art.

Calvino also offers Vulcan, “a god who does not roam the heavens but lurks at the bottom of craters, shut up in his smithy” — a god whose intense, prolonged concentration Calvino calls focalization. What should flash to mind but Whitlock’s planetary spectacles? Whitlock worked for eight decades in the glow of his halogen lamp. His work predates the Empire State Building (that Colossus of steel and glass). If Vulcan has “the rhythmic beat of his hammer,” Whitlock has the countless rhythmic taps on his hundred thousand platens.

There are the practical reasons I’ve wanted a typewriter: it slows the writing process, it encourages retyping, it eliminates the distractions of the Internet, and so on. All fine, and all true. But the simpler reality is that my hands miss having an instrument.

They miss the vibrations of the Grieg piano concerto, the Bach partitas, the music they used to love playing. The instrument is the practice room, and the instrument is the concert hall.

The typewriter is much the same.

We toil at the keys, but we dream of a beautiful lightness.

I use a typewriter because I miss the physical demands of keeping a music alive. This must be why I mourn Whitlock. With no manuscript to his name, with no statue to commemorate him, who will remember him but the users of his instruments? His death is the luthier’s death. His death is the death of a skill.

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 15

“And then like a flash of summer lightning she sprang over the seat and settled herself in the back.”

– from “Ask the Gentleman”

I

n writing workshops, we sometimes refer to a writer’s “move” — a decision made to advance the progress of a story.

Some of the best moves are often unexpected yet arise organically from the characters and situations the author has been cultivating. The reader’s reaction might be “Wow … but of course!”

In “Ask the Gentleman,” Fan — a light-skinned black woman — is being driven to Richmond from an unnamed Southern state by her dark-skinned boyfriend, Sam. Fan will then take a train to New York, to pursue a career as a pianist. Sam feels abandoned; he wishes Fan would stay home and marry him.

He is a tinderbox, and a spark is approaching in the form of a white sheriff pulling them over for speeding. Sam is prepared to take out his rage — pent up from years

“THE SUN W

A tribute

of racism, exacerbated by his fear of losing Fan to the white world — by snapping the sheriff ’s neck, damn the consequences, because “she was worth it.”

But, as the sheriff reaches the car, Woodard makes the move: “And then like a flash of summer lightning she sprang over the seat and settled herself in the back.”

By jumping to the back seat, Fan has transformed the tableau: now the sheriff sees a white woman with a black chauffeur. “Is there a problem?” Fan asks the sheriff, who apologizes and sends them on their way. Fan’s act — Woodard’s move — has saved the day while also bringing into relief — in “a flash” — a complex societal issue.

Alan Ziegler is a writer and professor at Columbia University.

“In the last minutes of the last hour of the day of the summer solstice as Miss Plinx Stillwell was lounging in her backyard, a herd of pegasus flew over.”

– from “The Tale of the Pegasus”

T

hese opening words of Dean’s looks at the stars and thinks about spellbinding story hit my how their light is traveling from so inner child like the first warm far away that “by the time we see it, breeze of spring. Their sense of we are actually seeing yesterday.” wonder and magic gracefully carries Like Miss Stillwell, I find myself the comfort of the familiar and the looking into the night, “at the promise of the unknown. smallest speck of silver blue light in When I first met Dean, I asked the sky,” and imagining the light of her about Miss Stillwell and the yesterday still traveling across the pegasus. She told me the idea for the cosmos. Like the herd of pegasus, it is story came in the form of just those difficult to believe in, but, if only for opening words — “a herd of pegasus the comfort of a possibility, I would flew over.” And then nothing. She part with worlds to see it. It has been said that the pegasus and that hint a comfort to know that somewhere, of magic stayed with her for years, amidst twinkling silver and blue, a running in her mind without being light shines with that moment of a committed to paper. writer suddenly inspired, dreaming I am always moved by that opening of a moonlit herd of horses flying line, just as Dean Woodard was. But overhead. there is a later passage that now has, for me, a new significance. Turning Daniel Arias is a junior in Calhoun her gaze skyward, Miss Stillwell College at Yale University.

16 | Vol. XLI, No. 2 | November 2013

Leslie Woodard, dean of Calhoun College and a professor she was still in her prime as a writer, an educator, and a li far removed from her earlier career as a professional danc tragedy to the thousands of people in the Yale community imagination, and sagacity. In her honor and memory, th those people to comment on a favorite passage in The Silv

“I recognized the music of lovemaking at on rhythms, the crescendos and decrescendos, and appasionata of the piece are always pret parents’ etudes. And because apartment bu had heard my upstairs neighbor, his creaky m his Stravinsky-like dissonance. My mother ha

T

he shimmering imagery of Leslie Woodard’s language in this selection is enough to justify my choice of it here. But why this passage really resonates for me is that it illustrates one of the rarest writing gifts, which Leslie had in abundance: the ability to get inside, so thoroughly, the sensibility of a young person — here Jasper, who is 14 — while at the same time communicating that sensibility from an adult

perspective. gift of hers, a to why she ju understood fears and app grasped, so w for them, of f What Leslie not so much u first encount coming-of-ag a coming moment. An

WAS GONE”

e to the writing of Leslie Woodard

He sat on the edge of the bed and looked out of the window.

The sun was gone, but a full moon rose behind the hill to take its place.

He saw a herd of horses in a field. They started to run with the engine, playfully racing the train. One horse broke away from the others. Fine and elegant as living sculpture, it galloped down the hill, faster and faster, power building in its hind legs. The porter thought for sure it would leap the fence, but it did not. It stopped suddenly and completely, staring at the passing train. Then it turned and capered back to rejoin the herd. The horse knew it could leap the fence anytime it liked, and that knowledge made the field acceptable.”

– from “The Race”

I Illustration by Annelisa Leinbach

r of English, died on Oct. 14. Only 53 years old, inchpin of the Calhoun community, and was not cer. Her passing came as a shock and a profound and beyond who had come to know her warmth, he Yale Daily News Magazine asked several of ver Crescent, her 2006 collection of short stories.

n this depiction of two worlds, world.” Leslie and I watched Centares we feel the radiance and joy and roll around in the grass and spring cockiness of freedom — and the back up again. We watched him prance despair of being lonely and stuck. I and graze. If you only know animals chose this passage because of its through zoos and circuses, you know vividness, its objective correlatives; nothing of this freedom. This was but I also chose it for personal reasons: innately beautiful and peaceful and Leslie’s love for her sensitive and right. Leslie brushed Centares and intelligent horse, Centares.

Leslie cared for him in every detail and put once invited me to visit the stables him through his elegant dressage paces. where she kept Centares, a huge, shiny They worked together as one, horse brown, gorgeous champion … Being and rider, and won many ribbons with Centares, I thought of that tiny together. I cannot help thinking now poem by D.H. Lawrence, “The White that noble Centares is waiting and Horse”: “The youth walks up to the waiting for Leslie to come. white horse, to put its halter on / and the horse looks at him in silence. / Emily Fragos is a poet and professor at They are so silent they are in another Columbia University.

nce, for no matter who composes it, the essential , the adagios, andantes, allegrettos, the ad libitum tty much the same. Many a morning I had heard my uildings are most hospitable to musical acoustics, I mattress, the high heels of his hookers on the plaster, ated that man.”

– from “The Backs of the Playing Cards”

(And I think this as a writer, also goes ust “got” youngsters, so many of their prehensions, and also well, the importance, feeling safe). e was after here was using the adolescent’s tering of sex as a ge moment but as into consciousness nd coming into that

consciousness, both of oneself and of the adult world, what this character Jasper begins to do, in this story, is to learn something exquisite and rare, even for many grownups — that wisdom is born out of understanding. And that understanding, really, is the first step to empathy and compassion, and ultimately to forgiveness.

Leslie T. Sharpe is a writer, editor, and educator based in New York.

“And then they heard the sound of wings roll in on the summer breeze like the coming of a storm. They saw silhouettes pass before the moon, and they watched shadow sweep the dead brown grass.”

– from “The Tale of the Pegasus”

I

t is difficult to pull one or two sentences from a story by Leslie Woodard. There are writers who craft by the sentence, each one seemingly standing on its own. She, however, was a writer with a complete construction in mind, so that to pull at a sentence is to recognize how it is so tied to all that comes before and all that follows that it feels impossible to isolate individual parts. Nevertheless, these sentences from “The Tale of the Pegasus” are full of the mysteriousness of the world that the best fiction can lay bare to us. The sibilance of the “s” sounds in these lines (lines which appear at the beginning and again at the end) evokes the very thing being described. The tropes are charged and risk being too Romantic at a time when readers are often skeptical of such a tendency. And yet Dean Woodard, so attuned to craft, knew to understate the lyricism by keeping the verbs simple and direct: thus the images exist just outside of our world, yet stand with an uncanny familiarity at that edge where imagination meets perception.

Richard Deming is a poet, art critic, and Yale University professor.

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 17

Moral Mondays

Dissecting civil disobedience in today’s South

BY WILL KRONICK

B

eneath the beating rays of the North Carolina sun, I catch sight of a sign carried by a fellow protestor: “Injustices Run Rivers Down the Face of G-d.”

Another protestor, a silver-haired woman wearing a purple scarf and holding a rainbow banner, condemns NC Amendment 1, the 2011 ballot initiative that defines marriage as a union between a man and woman. Yards away, a flannelwearing Greenpeace organizer shouts into his megaphone decrying the state’s legalization of fracking. A man with salt-and-pepper hair from the Unitarian Universalist Church protests to continue his church’s struggle for social justice. Standing before a mass of thousands, a Christian minister who is a leader of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP charges the crowd “to fight for the dream!”

The date is Jun. 3, 2013. It’s the fourth consecutive week of the Moral Mondays protests. Around 5 p.m. every Monday, an army of North Carolinians flood the General Assembly in Raleigh to revolt against the state legislators who sit inside.

I’m working this summer as an assistant field organizer for UE 150, one of the state’s municipal labor unions. I’m no stranger to the South — I’m Tennessee born

Yash Mori/Creative Commons

and bred, and I’ve spent holidays in Charlotte. I’d grown up seeing the effects of weak labor unionism in the South. Three weeks into my job with UE 150, I’m running through the Moral Mondays crowd with a clipboard, collecting signatures on the union’s petition against two House Bills recently passed.

The people of North Carolina are angry. They’re angry, protestors tell me, at a state government that has shrunk the public school budget to a historical low. They’re angry at the state’s assault on voting rights that were originally installed to empower low-income and minority communities to vote. Jostling my way through shouting crowds, I recall what Yale historian Andy Horowitz calls “the American freedom struggle that began in 1776,” the unique form of inequality that each generation must tackle to realize the promise of a more perfect union. To many of these angry protestors, the legislature has undone the work of the Civil Rights Movement. In some ways, Moral Mondays is bringing back the sense of protest and progressivism from that turbulent period of the South’s history.

But today in 2013, as I stand amidst a crowd of diverse people protesting for broad agendas — agendas that are farther-reaching

feature than any fought for by activists in the 1960s — I cannot help but think that the current challenge facing these protestors is not only how to most effectively oppose the North Carolina legislature. Another tougher struggle is their struggle to stick together.

The toughest obstacle for the Moral Mondays protestors may be the Moral Mondays coalition itself.

T

he following Monday, during a summer gale, I find myself at the State Assembly, pushing up the sleeves of my rain jacket to join a line of protestors entering the legislature. As our line moves forward, I join hands with a Lutheran preacher, a six-foot-five man from Winston-Salem wearing a rainbow stole. I hear the president of the North Carolina NAACP, Rev. William Barber, shouting, “We faced fire hoses, dogs, and lynchings to secure our rights!

The Republicans cannot take away the rights our parents and grandparents literally died for!”

In recent anti-austerity movements in Michigan and Wisconsin — the respective birthplaces of American trade unionism and progressivism — the language of protests has been seeped with hope for greater economic justice and equality. Here at Moral Mondays, the rhetoric of protests is inseparable from the religious discourse common to the South.

Earlier that day, a minister galvanized protestors with a version of the famous polemic of anti-Nazi Lutheran minister, Martin Niemöller: “First they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the LGBT community, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a member of the LGBT community. Then they came for the blacks, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t black … And finally. Then they came for me. And there was no one left to speak for me.”

Before beginning my job, I’d assumed from the newspaper

headlines I’d seen that the crowd would be made up of mostly AfricanAmerican clergy. But at the threshold of the state capitol, while I do see pastors and church leaders, alongside them are LGBTQ activists, trade unionists, white-collar workers, and a handful of students. The diversity of the crowd surprises me. These are not groups who have traditionally banded together.

We sing in the lobby of the state legislature. (“Woke up this morning with my miiiind, stayed on freedom!”) My voice and the voice of the Lutheran minister blend in with 90 others around us. Many of these songs originated during the Civil Rights Movement, and were used to challenge the violence and injustice committed across the South when conservative legislators were lobbying to preserve Jim Crow.

We keep singing. “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around! Turn me around! Turn me around!”

The security guards command the crowd to disperse, but we don’t move.

The first person they handcuff is an 80-year-old black man from Pinehurst, who has spent his retirement growing tomatoes and volunteering for his church. He missed the Civil Rights Protest while serving in Vietnam, and feels he owes all those who fought for his rights. Today he wants to “give back what had been given to him.”

Eventually, we’re all arrested, handcuffed, and taken to the cafeteria in the basement of the legislature.

I

sit in a row filled with ministers while waiting to be taken to the Wake County Detention Center.

One by one we introduce ourselves and the faith community we represent. I think to myself that it sounds like a bad joke: a Lutheran, an AME Zion, a Unitarian, and a Baptist minister all sit handcuffed, leaving the state legislature. When it’s my turn to speak, I chuckle and say I’m not a rabbi, but I am Jewish.

As we walk into the detention center, a guard thanks us. The state, he tells us, “is in a bad way.” We’re sorted into holding cells, and the guards seat me beside Eric Smith, a retired Duke University librarian and, along with myself, one of the few nonclergy present. Smith is gay, and he joined the protest after the legislature introduced NC Amendment 1 (the ballot initiative that marginalized the LGBTQ community by defining marriage as union of a man and woman).

Smith and I learn that, two weeks earlier, we’d attended the same church meeting in Durham, a meeting to rally support for Moral Mondays. As we talk about Amendment 1 and the state’s position on gay rights, we both recall a crowd-riling speech given

by Reverend Curtis Gatewood, a representative from the NAACP. The spirit of LGBTQ equality in his words was unmistakable. Gatewood pointed out the Republican Party’s hypocrisy in referencing Christianity when it supports their causes, but ignoring it otherwise. “They said the Bible prohibits gay marriage. Now, they cut welfare. Where are the Bibles?

Now they cut MedicAid. Where are the Bibles?” he shouted. “Now I don’t condone homosexuality, but I know the Bible only talks about it once.

How many times does the Bible talk about justice? About treating each other fairly? Nearly every page!”

In the holding area, Smith asks me if I, too, had heard Gatewood say that he didn’t condone homosexuality. I told him I had.

Smith worries that the NAACP isn’t pushing hard enough for LGBTQ equality in the black community.

Moral Mondays has roots in the fight against Amendment 1, and Smith first learned of Reverend Barber (the president of the North Carolina NAACP) from an impassioned speech he delivered condemning the Amendment. But Smith worries that in order to avoid alienating

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 19

feature conservative North Carolina AfricanAmericans, the NAACP has decided to distance itself somewhat from the topic of LGBTQ equality.

The religious language of Gatewood’s speech, meant to empower all North Carolinians and welcome them into the kingdom of G-d, falters when it comes to gay people. Gatewood’s speech reveals the struggle necessary to maintain the diverse coalition of Moral Mondays.

I

’m jostled awake in the car at 2 a.m.

After being held for 10 hours at the Wake County Detention Center, I’m riding back to Charlotte. Earlier that day I’d thought that I had secured transportation from Raleigh, but due to a mix-up, my ride had returned without me. I’d managed to catch a ride with an AME Zion bishop, an older woman with long curly hair and a massive cross around her neck. She is from Gastonia, a mill town suburb of Charlotte. In the car, she lights incense to “keep the devil away.”

The others sitting in the car include Ladale Benson, a liberal Baptist minister, and another AME Zion minister. Benson is arguing with the other two about sin and free will. “Of course we all sin!” Benson exclaims.

Making mistakes is a natural human action, he says. The AME Zionist bishop and minister say that while life is determined by G-d, we choose to sin, and those who sin go to hell. The bishop points to me gravely and says, “If you are a homosexual, you will turn black, like me, before you die!”

Astounded, I fail to respond, but Benson steps in. “Gay people are G-d’s children too,” he says to the bishop.

“They sin, just like everyone else.” I sit in silence as the bishop and ministers argue all the way back to Charlotte.

E

ven with the protests’ seemingly united front, conflicting opinions still run wild beneath its surface. Away from the color and chaos, the differences between 20 | Vol. XLI, No. 2 | November 2013

religiously conservative protestors like the woman in the car and liberals like Eric Smith appear sharper. I realize that the minister in the car is caught up in a movement that, in many ways, is anathema to her.

But the minister still protests, and her religion does not contradict her overall cause. The stereotype of Southerners who President Obama said “cling to guns or religion” fails to fully capture the role of religion in the political world of the South.

In part, it is because citizens like the AME Zion bishop from Gastonia have traditionally turned to churches when other institutions have failed them. In 1865, the federal government officially ended slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment, but failed to protect freedmen from the racial violence they’d come to experience during Reconstruction. In the mid20th century, state officials of North Carolina supported policies that alleviated poverty and illiteracy, but, in the eyes of the protestors, those days are gone. Religion promises comfort — if not in this world, then at least in the next.

Anders Hultgard, a former religious historian at the University of Uppsala, writes in “Persian Apocalypticism” that “Apocalyptic hope is invariably hope deferred. Nonetheless, it has persisted as a recurring feature of Western religion for over 2000 years. While it can never deliver on its promises, it continues to speak eloquently to the hearts of those who would otherwise have no hope at all.” The belief the bishop has in her religion, in one way, aligns with her belief in standing with Moral Mondays: larger powers have failed her community’s trust, and new sources of power must be found.

T

hree days after the ride back from Raleigh, I email Benson to thank him for the courage I failed to muster in the car. I explain that the stand he took meant much to me

because I am gay. The previous week, I’d spoken with a rabbi who chose not to participate in the Moral Mondays protests. He explained, “A rabbi cannot alienate the congregation he or she represents. We represent Republicans and Democrats.”

The rabbi differed greatly from Jeremiah, the weeping prophet who denounced the idolatry of the Israelites — despite his own brothers beating him, the king arresting him, and the officials locking him in the stocks.

Benson, in contrast, rose to the occasion to challenge his Baptist congregation and defended gay people against the bishop’s remarks. In the end, it was the Baptist minister who exemplified the values that, in my opinion, the House of Israel should have. The word Israel means, “to struggle with G-d” in Hebrew, and Benson did not shy away from the struggles of G-d or man.

Al Locklear, the president of UE 150 in Charlotte and a lifelong worker for Charlotte solid waste disposal, explains why people should continue to fight the legislative agenda, “[The legislature is] taking people’s rights away from them … Already, people aren’t getting paid for the work they do.

They’re trying to work us like slaves.

Overworked, underpaid, understaffed.

Everybody has to work two, three jobs.

The families suffer. Be fair. That’s all I want.”

Today in North Carolina, the movement continues in the form of smaller protests across the state, in Asheville, Charlotte, and other cities. The hope is that voters will remain mobilized for the 2014 General Assembly elections. But the bigger hope for the Moral Mondays movement is that today, half a century after the Civil Rights Movement, the coalition won’t allow inner strife to get in its way. “Let’s get the job done together,” Locklear said. The bigger hope is that today, half a century after the Civil Rights Movement, the coalition of discontent doesn’t allow its dream to get deferred.

NAMING BIRDS DIANA SAVERIN

A

rne Rosengren sometimes forgets a human name, but he rarely forgets a bird name.

Before he learns my name, or I learn his, I watch him watch birds. He leans back, hangs his jaw open, and holds his binoculars to his glasses with agespotted hands. Lowering his lenses, he places his hands at the small of his back, occasionally reaching into his pocket to retrieve the handkerchief he swipes across his nose. He narrates the sky. Early autumn near the shore he sees, and shows me how to see, a bald eagle, a few sharp-shinned hawks, a cast of Cooper’s hawks. He tells me that before I arrived at 10 a.m., he saw 150 birds. He says it is a quiet morning at Lighthouse Point Park.

I am not a birder. I have no field guide, no binoculars, and no idea what to call the black squiggles overhead.

Arne (pronounced Ar-nee) introduces them to me, one speck at a time. He tells me that after seeing a few hundred thousand hawks, you can recognize them from far away by their silhouettes and the shape of their wings.

Between species, he tells me stories

about his service in the navy during World War II (he was at the epicenter of Leyte Gulf, the world’s largest sea battle), his love life from around the same era (he danced with a girl, Yolanda Betbeze, before she became the 1951 Miss America), and his hawk-watching counts in the ’70s and ’80s (he saw more bald eagles, peregrine falcons, and osprey before DDT poisoned the fish they snacked on and thinned their eggshells).

Arne writes the tallies and names the species he sees or hears in a small notebook he keeps in a pocket of his chunky coat. He wants to donate the 57 field notebooks he has filled over the past few decades to the New Haven Bird Club when, as he puts it, he “kicks the bucket.” He is ninety-and-a-half years old.

Arne blinks his milky grey-blue eyes behind his wide bifocal glasses.

He scans my face. Before I leave, he pulls out his 57th field notebook and writes my full name beneath “Oct, 7th, Lighthouse Point.” His memory, he explains, is fading.

C

ertain details stick out in Arne’s looping narrative of the past, like the cadence of a wren’s song (loud and bubbly), or the date of the article that brought him back to birds (May 1967).

Though he has lived in Whitneyville, a neighborhood in Hamden, since he was four, he spent summers as a kid in a lakeside cottage in East Hampton, Conn.

He slept in a hammock on the porch below the nests of house wrens that had settled into the eaves. At 5:30 a.m. on June mornings, the wrens started to sing. Just outside the cottage, catbirds nested and laid eggs in laurel bushes. Arne listened to their squeaks and whistles.

Arne’s father tried to convince him to pick up fishing like the other men of the family, but Arne preferred paths to boats, wings to fins, and observation to harvest. Unlike the fish he caught, birds were colorful. They sang. They flew.

They were around 52 weeks of the year, and every day they were different.

Decades later, when he was 49 years old, Arne walked to the East Hampton drugstore and flipped through the pages of The New Yorker. When he saw an article about birds in the table of

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profile contents, he bought the issue. Reading Peter Matthiessen’s descriptions in The Wind Birds of plovers and sand pipers — flying from northern Canada to southern Argentina, just to lay a few eggs — triggered memories about the catbirds and house wrens he’d treasured as a child. He went to Macy’s, bought a pair of binoculars on sale for $19.99, and turned his eyes back to the sky.

Arne was working as a treasurer at the Shubert Theater in New Haven at the time. Six evenings a week, he counted how many crowd members were seated in the theater’s red velvet seats. This left his mornings open to counting birds.

Many of these mornings he spent alone.

While other birders arrived at offices and desks, Arne watched hawks from the parking lot at Lighthouse Point, a pair of binoculars in one hand, and a clicker in the other to keep tallies of the streams of sharp-shinned hawks overhead.

To date, Arne has identified 373 species of birds in Connecticut. 431 species, total, have been recorded in the state.

“I don’t have the unbridled enthusiasm I did when I started,” he says in the car on our way to the shore one Saturday.

“When you’re really into birding, you’ll do anything to see a new species. I like the common, ordinary birds more now.

Starlings, crows, blue jays, ring-billed gulls, herring gulls. I used to shrug them off. I used to say, that’s just a junk bird, as we call them. But we’re all God’s creatures — the common birds and me.

We’re all here temporarily on Earth.”

After several birding Saturdays with Arne, I start to see the common birds, too: the finches on the sidewalk, the robins in my backyard, the crows by the telephone pole. They are easy to identify, unlike the dozens of shorebird species, which are impossibly similar to each other. I don’t need to spend afternoons hunched over the Sibley field guide I checked out from the library, flipping through the illustrations, searching for a clue in the curves of a wing, the speckles on a neck, the width of a tail. Names of common birds stay familiar, like the 22 | Vol. XLI, No. 2 | November 2013

names of old friends.

I

n the Aeneid, the name of the lake at the entrance to the underworld is “Avernus,” which translates to “a world without birds.” In the Book of Job in the Old Testament, “the birds of the heavens” are cited as evidence of God’s existence.

In ancient Egypt, the ibis, a white bird with black wingtips and a long beak, was considered so sacred that it was reared for sacrifice; in the burial place in Hermopolis, archaeologists found oneand-a-half million-mummified ibises.

Worship in a world with birds now involves binoculars and field guides.

America’s first field guide, Birds through an Opera Glass, was published in 1888, reaching a generation of Industrial Revolution urbanites eager for a reason to return to the woods. Over a century later, in 2006, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service published a study showing that one fifth of Americans were birders.

Eight percent of these birders could identify more than 41 species, and 5 percent kept lists.

Arne is in that 5 percent. He has taken the vague fondness others feel toward birds, and based his life upon seeing, hearing, and naming them. For Arne, birding is one of three consistent elements of his existence, in addition to swimming four times a week (one mile of laps at six in the morning) and listening to opera once a week in the winter (the Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday matinee broadcast). Naming and listing birds makes every year count: January 1 means starting anew with a fresh “year list.”

Arne says most birders don’t bother with year lists or state lists or life lists; it’s just the ones he calls “nutty,” members of what another New Haven birder calls an obsessive “tribe.” Like other members of this local elite, Arne sometimes leaves his Peterson field guide in the backseat of his car. He can recite much of its content, such as the description of the short-billed dowitcher’s bill moving up and down like the needle of a sewing machine. He brings his field notebook of names, instead.

One Saturday in Madison, Conn., next to a marsh punctuated by osprey nests, we meet a man sinking his knees into the ground, looking for grasshoppers.

The man recognizes Arne from the New Haven Bird Club. He says they have known each other for years. Arne doesn’t recognize him. Arne starts stuttering fragments about why he and I are birding and how we met.

Later, as we walk side-by-side through a trail lined with sassafras and pines, Arne shakes his head. He realizes who the man is (and recalls his name, too: Himmelman, which Arne tells me means “heavenly man”).

“It’s very strange with memory,” Arne says. “Alzheimer’s. I don’t know if many of my friends have it, but they can’t remember things. My memory is good with most things. But common names, like a high school, or John Himmelman, I just can’t think of.”

Arne sometimes stammers when conversations drift away from the sky, but he seems to remember every detail, fact, and name of the birds we see. Even when hawks fly thousands of miles south for winter, and fewer and fewer members of his birding tribe accompany him through the woods near Lighthouse Point, there is no day of the year when Arne’s New Haven is a world without birds.

A

t Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History in late October, Arne tells three people in the elevator that we are on our way to see dead birds stuffed in cages. The three people nod. We get out on the top floor.

There are 722 skinned, stuffed, and mounted specimens in the Birds of Connecticut exhibit. Arne takes me through the room bird-by-bird, name-byname, complaining when he encounters a name that has changed. They used to call a deep diving duck with black-andwhite feathers an “oldsquaw,” he tells me, but they changed it to “long-tailed duck” in 2000 due to concerns that the term “squaw” was offensive.

“I like oldsquaw better,” Arne says.

profile “Only males have long tails.”

As he strolls past the cases, he sings in a clear, trembling baritone, giving voice to the long-dead specimens: the “hooh’HOO—hoo-hoo” of the great horned owl, the “blo blo blo” of the piping plover, the “chuck willow will willow” of the willet.

“If we do every bird, we’ll be here ’til midnight!” he says.

We walk next door to a building where scientists have preserved more of the dead. 124,000 birds lie on cotton paper inside steel cabinets. Unlike the taxidermied birds on display, these study skins are not mounted to look alive.

They rest, dead and deflated with pinned wings and cotton eyes, inside coffin-like drawers.

Arne talks with Kristof Zyskowski, Yale’s ornithology and mammalogy collections manager, in his office. He tells Zyskowski that he taught David Sibley how to count hawks at Lighthouse Point Park when Sibley was a kid.

“You’re kidding,” Zyskowski says. A New York Times article described Sibley, of The Sibley Guide to Birds, as having changed the way people look at the world. Zyskowski asks how many birds are on Arne’s Connecticut list.

“373,” Arne says.

“Oh, my, God,” Zyskowski

says. He covers his mouth with one hand and whispers to me, “That’s amazing.”

Arne tells us a story about New Haven birder Davis Finch, who, in 1969, saw a spotted redshank, a rare red-legged shorebird with a round gray body and skinny red beak. Finch ran to a pay phone and called a friend with a gun.

The spotted redshank did not survive the encounter. Zyskowski spins in the chair to search his database for the exact specimen, which now lies flat in one of the collection’s 5,000 drawers. Finch’s red shank, the computer confirms, was shot near Long Wharf in November of that year.

We walk to the long white room to find the red shank. The chilly air hits us; the room’s temperature stays 60 degrees to protect the skins from being infested by moths or beetles. Zyskowski pulls a drawer open. A musty smell drifts up.

About twenty birds lie with puffed-up chests and small legs crossed and tied together. Zyskowski scoops Finch’s red shank, now stiff, into his palm. He hands me the small bird. The feathers brush against my skin. They are softer than I imagined.

The

bumpy wing bones feel like Braille.

Zyskowski scribbles Finch’s name onto the previously incomplete label dangling from the bird’s foot.

We pace among cabinets before opening a drawer labeled “extinct birds.”

The musty smell returns. One side has an array of passenger pigeons, birds some estimate to have had a population of over 3 billion in North America before Europeans arrived. They were declared extinct in 1914. The 22 pigeons have creamy chests and light brown wings folded against their sides.

“I just don’t understand how they could all be wiped out,” Arne says, his eyebrows pressing toward his eyes, his voice full of breath.

“Do you know that one?” Zyskowski asks, pointing to a small bird body with white and black patterned wings and a blaze of red along its cap and crest.

“Oh yes, that’s an ivory-billed woodpecker,” Arne says.

The woodpecker was declared extinct in 1994.

“I regret not becoming a birder until I was middle-aged,” Arne says. “I could have seen that one.”

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profile

A

rne gets defensive when I ask why he cares so much about learning and listing the names of birds, slicing the tree of life thinner and thinner into hundreds of skinny, taxonomic sticks. Many species look the same to me, and I don’t understand why learning each of their names helps him appreciate them.

“What’s the point of learning anything?” he asks in return. “Why do people become scientists or poets?”

He says we are always identifying and classifying our surroundings; the fact that birds have both common names — like his favorite, the piping plover — and Latin names — like Charadrius melodus — does not make them any different. He says we categorize our fellow humans, too, looking at people and saying, that’s a tall person, or that’s a young girl, or that’s an old man. Some bird names, Arne says, are appreciable in themselves: the name Charadriidae, for the family that includes the plover, comes from the mythical medieval bird charadrius, who could tell a sick man whether he would live or die.

Like many amateur birders, Arne is not a biologist. “In terms of living creatures,” he says, “it’s all about birds.”

He does not know the name of the tree whose wiry branch the red-tailed hawk wraps its toes around, or the species of sunflower above whose drooping stem the Carolina wren flutters and trills.

Binoculars zoom in on beady eyes, underbelly plumage, and a pointy beak, providing a circular frame that crops out the rest of the world.

The skinny-stick specificity of speciation and familiarity with the names of hundreds of species allows Arne to link together the fraying roots of his past. For Arne, that sharp-shinned hawk soaring above the trees is a reminder of a man who came down from Boston and called it “shaaaaw-pee.” Those Canada Geese way out on the horizon — the faint line of dots, you can barely see them — are a reminder of Margie Pitcher, who studied at Quinnipiac University and spent mornings with Arne in the mid70s learning how to see faraway flocks.

24 | Vol. XLI, No. 2 | November 2013

That broad-winged hawk picking up two swallows below the telephone line is a reminder of Neil Currie, who spotted them in the ’60s from the stands of the Yale Bowl when he turned his binoculars from the football field to the sky.

Arne likes talking about his own name, too: genus, Rosengren, species, Orvar Arne. The name Orvar comes from a Viking legend of the war hero ÖrvarOddr. In his saga, a shamanic seeress tells Örvar that he will die when he is 300 years old. He tries to escape death, but eventually, a snake bites him and he dies.

Arne talks about other figures who lived into old age, too, like Methuselah of the Old Testament. He sometimes sings, “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” a song from the opera Porgy and Bess, “Methus’lah lived nine hundred years, / But who calls dat livin’ / when no gal will give in / to no man, what’s nine hundred years?” Both mythic characters eventually pass, but their names and stories remain.

I

n late October, Arne and I drive to a park in Madison, Conn. The branches are half-bare; the leaves that remain are red and orange. Arne taught an adult birding course at Amity High School for 20 years, and has been taking people who took the course birding every few Saturdays since. Today, four of them arrive with binoculars hanging from their necks as they step out of their cars.

“Hear that?” Arne asks, as we follow a dirt road into a field. I hear nothing. ”That’s the ‘cheep’ of an English sparrow.

They call it a house sparrow, but I call it an English sparrow.” Arne blames the English for bringing these sparrows to America, along with other introduced species like starlings that were released into Central Park so that New York would have all of the species of animals that appeared in Shakespeare’s plays.

Arne tells the group that we are looking for anything that flies. One member of the group says he sees a helicopter. We walk through the field, pointing our binoculars into trees and through the brush of yellowing strips of old crops.

“Hear that?” Arne asks again. “That ‘tweedle, tweedle, tweedle’? That’s a Carolina wren.”

The five of us nod. Arne plays field guide for the group: he differentiates between the song of the red-winged blackbird and that of the chickadee; he points into the reeds where a great egret bends its long neck; he spots amid the red-brown autumn world the fluttering feathers of a gold finch.

After over two decades, birds remain the group’s focus. They have awkward, jolting conversations during post-birding lunches, asking each other, “How many kids do you have, again?” and “Where do you work?”

We drive from the field toward the beach. We step through dark sand at Meg’s Point, the sea sloshing onto the shore and the green dunes swishing behind us. Arne holds his binoculars against his glasses, following the flight of a black “v” skimming the surface of the water. He says there is a double-crested cormorant in the distance, but nobody else sees it. We scan the shoreline before turning back to the parking lot, stopping to let a man and a woman jog in front of us.

“Now that’s compatibility!” Arne says, as the two runners and their brightly colored t-shirts dissolve onto a trail.

Later, when Arne and I get into the car to drive to another spot along the shore, we close the car doors and I ask if Arne ever married. He laughs.

“Oh me?” he says, as if I might have been talking to some other person who happened to appear in the backseat. “No, no. I had some narrow escapes, some I liked who didn’t like me, and vice versa.”

He turns on the ignition. He says that when he was 23, he met a 17-year-old girl in Mobile, Alabama. She cried when he left. I ask if he is lonely.

“Oh yes,” he says. “I am lonely. I live alone. I have lots of quote-unquote friends, people I bird with, but it’s all pretty casual. I have two good friends, the Millers and John Maynard. Everyone else is gone.”

I watch him drive slowly through

profile the bog-lined road, his wisps of white hair combed so that one drooping tuft falls onto his forehead, his nose bent downward, his neck tucked into his ribbed wool collar.

“If I didn’t have birding, I’d be really lonely,” he says. “Subconsciously I wanted to outlive everyone, but I’ve changed my mind about that. It’s not that great. All the people you’re close to are gone.”

He points to a ring gull, then some Canada geese, in a patch of grass to the right of the road.

“I go swimming, I go to the opera, I keep birding,” he says. “We’re just a speck, though. Planet Earth is what?

Three, four billion years old. And the universe is how many? We’re just a dot.”

He parks the car next to a marsh where a great egret bends its long, white neck. We stay inside and watch.

B

y November, most leaves have coated the ground with a soggy mix of orange and brown and the branches have become sinewy silhouettes against the white sky. Arne adds me to his lists of hobbies: the pool, the opera, the birds, and “you.”

One Saturday morning, he drives me to a dead-end road. Ahead there is a fence. We squeeze between wires and hold our binoculars to our faces, looking toward the pond across the train tracks, following the flight of a great blue heron (a bird he calls clumsy because of its slow, bulky wing beats). The stripes of the surrounding reeds absorb its navy wings. We lower our lenses.

Back in the car, Arne hands me a piece of folded yellow paper. It is a checklist of birds in New Haven County. I take out a pen and scan the names, recalling my first red-winged blackbird at Lighthouse Point, the laughing gulls that Arne stepped along a thin wooden board while clutching surrounding brush to see pecking at the sand in East Shore Park, the cormorants hanging their wings out to dry on a barnacle-coated rock at Hammonasset beach. I write an “x” next to 21 species.

At Lighthouse Point, Arne urges me to look through the binoculars I stole from my dad.

“There’s a flicker!” he says. “It’s a woodpecker. Did you see it?”

I watch a speck lift on a shaft of wind with outstretched wings and land on a telephone line. I hold up my binoculars and see black and tan checkered wings flapping into stillness. There is a tuft of red above its eyes. I pause, watching it sit perched on the wire, its small head jerking.

“Have you ever seen one before?” he asks, as I look at the dot on the line without binoculars. I shake my head.

“Life bird!” he says.

The bare branches swing in the woods. It is windy and cold. My knuckles

stiffen. Arne worries, so we walk back to his silver station wagon and drive away from the sea.

The week before, Hurricane Sandy had swept through New Haven. I stood on the second floor porch of my house, watching a thick trunk on the horizon bend and sway. Its branches twisted and its leaves shook as the wind hissed. I asked my seven roommates where they thought the birds had gone.

I called Arne the next day. He had no power, and said he was sitting alone in his apartment next to a candle and a radio. He told me that the birds knew what to do and where to go. He told me that, like names or field notebooks, the birds found a way to stay. He said that they knew how to survive.

ORIGIN The birth of light is like this: A horizontal slice in the face of the black tunnel of the hallway that leads to the room where my ill father sleeps.

The light and the muted sound of his snore announce his life to the hallway.

And on the the other end, my mother and my sister sit around the table, dismembered by the kitchen’s shadows, bending their soft backs towards a candle like two floating moths knowing no other truth but that of light.

They hover over its simple mass of melting wax collapsing into a white cake at the center.

It is my birthday today, and I blow for the usual wish— to know my body, beyond the darkness after my breath consumes the candlelight, see my soft limbs between the lights and read there what my father calls the feminine sensibilities of my walking, the heritage of my mother’s too obliging kiss, of my mouth that is too much a red invitation when blowing candles, he says.

Now, only the hallway and its glowing scar mirrored on my face. I am the moth imagining a truth without his light, imagining a breath that could erase it, too, and concede my dusty flesh: naked like an exclamation, or the burning tips of candles.

I imagine my mother and sister doze in the kitchen still, no less real now.

I close the bathroom door to strike matches, watching myself come in and out of being by virtue of my own hand, proving my body by leaving all this wax, burnt wicks, flickering pleasures.

— Pedro Javier Rolón

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ISABEL IS ALREADY AWAKE

BY NIMAL EAMES-SCOTT ILLUSTRATIONS BY ANNELISA LEINBACH

I

sabel is already awake. Her comforter lies heaped on the floor, bottom end folded under the mattress (as always).

Peter lies naked on her bare mattress. She should cover him up but she likes him like this, back rounding ass into thigh like a parabola, little bumps of vertebrae poking up like the ridge on a lizard, all rolled into a ball, sunk blue in the deep end of sleep. He’ll only know he’s cold when he emerges.

The bedroom is small enough that there’s no way for Isabel to turn without feeling her own presence rubbing against the edges. The ceiling cuts a deep slant through the room, and the twin bed is wedged against the beams. Clothes lie clumped on the floor, limbs twisted inside out. The bedside lamp is on now.

Isabel stands smoking by the window in white underwear. It’s dark out. The window reflects the room back to her, translucent like a celluloid still held up to dim light. If she angles right, she can see both of their faces. Isabel has black hair, eyes that don’t always look yellow, and a big nose (but he says he likes it).

Peter has brown hair. When he buzzed it she thought it would feel like the loop side of Velcro, but it feels like the hooks.

Isabel was preparing to say goodbye, but now she may never need to. She’s about to open the window to ash her cigarette.

She wishes for a moment that she were wearing nicer underwear.

That’s when the meteor hits.

She’ll find out later that it was five stories tall, that it weighed ten thousand tons and exploded through Earth’s atmosphere with five hundred kilotons of energy, like twenty Hiroshimas. Right

26 | Vol. XLI, No. 2 | November 2013

now it resembles a star. It starts high in the left side of Isabel’s sky, small and green. It stretches like warm gum, down and to the right. Its front coalesces into a large white ball. In ten seconds the whole world is brighter than day: a time-lapse sunrise. Isabel’s pupils constrict and her limbs go numb. Then the window reflections are gone and she can see outside. Everything slows.

There’s an old gray road lined with pines and telephone lines but no streetlights. There are fields beside the road, covered in snow. In one of them sits a rusted metal drum. The road curves

left, through the center of Miasskoye in Oblast, Siberia, the town her father wants to leave behind. Then the road curves right, through vast plains and toward the Ural Mountains.

As the meteor gets brighter, the shadows of all things lengthen and darken, swinging in opposition to its motion. And when the meteor is at its greatest fluorescent brilliance, just above the tree line, it fades to a little orange LED and flicks out. It drops black by the foothills of the mountains, silent at first.

Isabel starts to count while she waits for a sound, like after lightning, but can’t

fiction

remember what it means.

Peter is awake and behind her now (did she scream?). In the pause, he leans down and whispers what the fuck into her ear, small and shy like a lover’s secret.

Then the crash sound arrives and the pandemonium begins. Isabel can hear a distant chorus of car alarms, cracking walls, and muffled voices.

Her father is awake now and probably thinking about the American missiles of his childhood nightmares, big white raindrops that fly sideways. He’s shouting her name. Isabel slips into an old dress, puts out her cigarette, and pushes Peter

into a corner out of sight. He stands there naked with his toes turned in while Isabel opens the door.

“Isabel! Thank God! I thought…”

Now that he’s seen his daughter alive his adrenaline begins fading to confusion, “I’m not sure…”

“I saw it too,” Isabel says. She leads her father into the living room, turning on the cable television on the floor. The screen comes into focus on a series of phone videos of the meteor’s fall through the sky. A voice says that this may be one of the largest strikes in recorded history. Ground zero: Lake Chebarkul.

Shockwave of undetermined radius.

Casualty count as yet unknown.

“Thank god you weren’t there,” Isabel says. Her father knocks on wood and mimes spitting over his left shoulder. He catches fish on Lake Chebarkul that get turned into pickles.

The screen cuts to aerial images of the old pickleries by the lake. Isabel’s father used to sell to those factories before they closed and he had to begin shipping to big pickle corporations for almost nothing. The TV zooms in on a crumbling factory, and there’s a clip of the shockwave blowing in the windows, played on repeat. It looks like sci-fi to Isabel.

“Can I borrow the truck?” Isabel asks, “To … to visit Peter?”

“Just be safe,” her father says, “Have you told him yet?”

“I’ll tell him today.”

Isabel’s father goes off to pray in his corner full of crosses and painted icons and then call his brother-in-law in Moscow. Isabel heads back to her room.

Peter has been smoking in bed, listening.

She climbs in with him.

“It’s a meteor,” she kisses him, “It’s like the apocalypse out there.” He kisses back.

The sex is great then. Isabel is thinking about dinosaurs: giant, craning their necks, squinting their big wet eyes, reaching up with little arms to wipe away the dust kicked into the sky. She and Peter running from dinosaurs. She and Peter in a prehistoric cave filled

with stalactites and extinct oversized ferns, and he’s fucking her one last time while the world ends. She’ll tell him later and they’ll laugh about it because it’s embarrassing and funny.

Afterwards Peter turns to her. “Tell me what?” he asks.

“Oh,” she says, “It turns out we don’t have the money to move to Moscow.”

“Holy shit,” he grins.

“About one hundred thousand short.

So we’re staying.”

“We’ve got to get something to toast with,” he’s laughing.

“It’s such good news.” Her smile comes after her words.

“Look at that,” he says, “a shooting star comes crashing down and grants my wish.”

“Probably flattened the whole town along the way,” she says.

“The TV said it dropped in the lake.”

“Probably caused a tidal wave.”

“It probably just plopped in softly like a stone you hoped would skip.”

I

sabel is driving Peter in a slowly warming pickup truck. Old pines lean over them, and now their needles, fresh and green, scatter across the road, gust-plucked by the shockwave. They’re alone outside. Siberia is ten percent of Earth’s land, but it feels like all of it.

The plains are flat, and when you move toward an edge the planet unrolls more land in front of you. Isabel pictures the world from afar, like a ball and only she and Peter are on it, large and cartoonish, made of paper. She’s giddy with the image of it, thinks she likes it, although she can’t think about it for too long. Her wool gloves begin to feel like cellophane, and she takes them off one by one to stretch her fingers. Peter adjusts a winter hat clinging to the stubble on his head and hums low. He has a beautiful voice that rubs against something in his throat before it comes out.

“Let’s go to my house,” he says, “Tell my brothers that you’re staying.”

“Peter —” “They’ll pull out our best bottle, and the four of us will sit and drink it to the

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 27

fiction bottom.”

“We have to see the meteor.”

They’re driving through the center of Miasskoye. Rolling bits of paper trash fill its cramped streets.

“This summer after we graduate I’ll take you out on my father’s boat.”

“By then it’ll be your boat.”

“Sure, on my boat.”

“I have to see it today.”

Black buildings line the road, extending into an empty industrial park to the right. The windows are broken into jagged open mouths. On the ground it’s hard to tell glass from ice. The Urals loom ahead, inestimably close or far in the peculiar way of large objects on the horizon. As Isabel and Peter drive over the top of a hill, they see the lake below.

It sits in a vast field under the mountains, covered in snow. This close to the impact the snow is melted unevenly, icy and dripping, with little holes to the ground like the sad bottom of a frozen drink.

There’s a hole in the lake, eight meters across. It’s perfectly round, and so deep its blackness looks flat, like a pupil sometimes does. Isabel looks around and stops the car. Red tape encircles the field.

Boxy VAZ-114 police cars with flashing red lights patrol the perimeter. Men in goggles and puffy nylon jackets sift through the snow.

“Well this is pretty close.” Peter says.

Isabel turns the wheel to the right and fishtails into the industrial park. She weaves between the factories and down

the hill, parking behind a large black building right on the edge of the field, and turning off the truck.

“This is closer,” she says and jumps out. A faded sign on the building says Miasskoye Picklerie, Factory No. 6.

The doors are bolted. Isabel leads Peter carefully through a shattered ground floor window and into an enormous empty hall that must once have been filled with machinery. Light streams through stacked rows of window sockets. They can see their breath. Snowflakes drift through the air. The bare rusted arches remind Isabel of giant ribs. The walls are covered with wet-looking graffiti.

A bearded man smokes a pipe with a bouquet of roses popping out of the bowl in psychedelic shades. A fat fish with popping eyes is squished inside a tiny jar.

Isabel pulls Peter across to the lakeside windows, glass crunching beneath her feet. They are fifty meters from the red tape now, one hundred from the hole.

“Wow,” Peter says from behind her at the window, “You were right. This is amazing.”

“It looks,” Isabel pauses, “it looks kind of small though doesn’t it? From here?”

“What does?”

“The hole. Doesn’t it look kind of small?” she says, “Like just a little hole in the ice?”

“What do you mean?”

“And it all looks so contained. It looks like some Ministry has the situation under control and everyone else should,

you know, go about business as usual.

Undisrupted.”

“People have to live their lives.”

“I know this sounds crazy, but I’ll bet you not even one person died. I’ll bet not one,” she looks at him, “That’s not what I mean. I don’t want anyone to die. It just seems like if something’s a disaster then … I don’t know … then it should be disastrous.”

Peter turns Isabel around and pulls her in. “I certainly hope no one died,” he says, kind of laughing. He kisses her then, sweet as always. She thinks to herself, Would this taste different if it were our last? Hard, heavy, salty? She’s glad she doesn’t have to worry about that. But when she opens her eyes they feel dry from the cold. She blinks and looks away.

On the ground outside the window is a spray of debris (mostly glass and wood) and Isabel notices something in the snow. She climbs out into the open.

Her eyes go vacant, searching for what they’ve lost. Stillness. She reaches down and picks it up off the ground: a little pockmarked black rock.

She climbs back in. “Look at that,” she says.

“Wow,” he grins, “That’s great.”

“Yeah,” She looks up, “What do you mean by, just, ‘great’?”

“Great that you found it.”

“You know what this is, right?”

“Sure,” he says, “It’s a little piece of Sputnik.”

I

sabel drives home with a glow you can’t get from something earned. She’ll find out later that the meteor exploded into at least fifty-three little meteorites. If she knew that now, she might be trying to come up with one fifty-third of a wish.

As it is, she feels like anything is possible.

She calls a few friends on the way home to tell them what she found. She’s already dropped Peter off at home. She realizes that she wishes he had been a little bit more moved by the meteorite. Why wasn’t he in love with it, a little terrified?

It’s midday now, and women look out their windows as she drives through Miasskoye. She passes under the pines,

28 | Vol. XLI, No. 2 | November 2013

fiction and by the field with the metal drum.

The sun is high and the snow is bright.

Isabel’s house is narrow, with vinyl siding and windows that don’t line up.

When she sees it today, Isabel thinks it looks less like a house and more like an upside-down boat. She imagines the snow melting and the whole steppe turning into a lake. Her house rolls over and buoys up on the deep hull of its roof.

All of her belongings clatter to the floor, and she sits on top of the heap, sailing away, past the factories, past the lake, over the mountains, and along the Reva Moska, landing wedged in a narrow alley in downtown Moscow. The buildings are all muddy pastel versions of their original paint colors. There are billboards that are actually television screens, pulsing with women’s legs and collarbones. The taste in the air is all sticky tar, spiced pork belly, fresh magazines, strawberryscented toilet paper, men’s bodies. The taste in her mouth is the way her room smells after sex. And Peter misses her desperately. It’s a crazy dream, more of a thrilling nightmare really. Isabel kills the engine and walks into her house, trying to think of a better wish. Her father is sitting on the couch watching a soap her mother used to like.

“I still think this is garbage,” he says, as she kisses him on his big cheek.

“Me too,” she says, sitting down to watch.

“I think I’ll save up for a new boat motor,” he says, “Your uncle says he can send me one from the city.”

“Really?”

“Then it won’t be so bad to stay,” he smiles.

I

sabel wakes up late to find a white car parked outside her window. When she walks into the living room, her father looks up at her from the couch. There’s tea on the table. A strange man stands from the leather chair as she enters. He’s very young, she thinks, with eyebrows as thick as her thumb. He looks at her as if he’s comparing her to a photograph.

“This man is a scientist,” her father tells her.

“Pleased to meet you,” he says, “My name is Dr. Konstantin Ivanovich, with the State Institute for the Study of Astronomy and Physics at the University of Yekaterinburg. It’s Isabel isn’t it?”

His breath smells like uncooked dough.

He smiles with a warmth that reminds her of small bureaucratic kindnesses.

“I’m so sorry to drop in on you unannounced. I’ve been working with the research team over on the lake.”

“He is studying the meteor,” her father says.

“But this morning when I was getting my breakfast in town, nice warm butterbrots and coffee, I overheard a conversation about … well, it was about you. You’ll have to pardon my eavesdropping, but I overheard that you found something yesterday. Something buried in the snow.”

Isabel’s jaw clenches.

“What was it?” he asks.

“A rock,” she says.

“A little one?” he smiles, “a little black one?”

“Yes,” she answers. Her father is looking down. Dr. Ivanovich’s presence is ballooning into the room.

“Do you know what the meteor was made of?” he asks, “The minerals?”

Isabel looks at her father. He shakes his head. She shakes her head.

“Neither do we, not exactly. Some townspeople are claiming that fresh pieces heal the sick and improve male erectile function, if that’s not crude to say,” he laughs, “I’m not so sure. My guess is that it’s mostly iron and nickel. Some chrysolite and some sulfite, maybe. What

do you think? Do you think it’s magic?”

“No.” “Well we at the Institute are just dying to find out. Events like this one are exceedingly rare. We’d like to run a variety of tests to figure out what exactly this object is and where it came from. All in the interest of protecting Earth from future catastrophe. We need physical samples for those tests. The problem is that not many fragments survived impact. The largest piece is submerged in the lake, inaccessible for now. Smaller pieces should have fallen around the crash site. Apparently one hit an elderly woman on a morning stroll. Burned right through her coat and into her pocket, according to the story in town. Do you believe that?”

“No … I mean I don’t —” “But Yekaterinburg is four hours away.

By the time my team arrived on the crash site, children in town had already made a game of snatching up the little fragments that they could find and running back into their homes.” Dr. Ivanovich smoothes back an eyebrow, “How large is yours by the way?”

She hesitates.

“Isabel?”

She holds up a circle made of her thumb and index finger.

“Good,” he smiles, “Now it’s hard to say for sure where these civiliandiscovered meteorites are now. We know that many people have sold their pieces into the black market. We see them popping up on Internet auction sites, going for exorbitant prices. But you wouldn’t do that would you Isabel?

Because that would be illegal.”

“We are not criminals,” her father says.

“Good,” Dr. Ivanovich nods to him, “Well neither am I. I won’t steal it from you. To keep up with our black market colleagues, my Institute is prepared to offer you an exchange. You give us the meteorite, and we give you one wish.” Isabel is confused. Dr. Ivanovich chuckles, “If that wish happens to be a state-funded tax-free monetary compensation equal to one hundred

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 29

fiction thousand rubles.”

Isabel’s father looks up at her.

“Your father can join your uncle’s business in Moscow,” Dr. Ivanovich smiles. “You can see the city.”

She looks at her father, who looks away. Her thoughts are blurry and vibrating.

“It’s your choice, Isabel,” says Dr. Ivanovich. “Of course I’ll have to the take it to the lab for some preliminary testing first.”

Isabel retrieves the tiny black rock from her drawer and places it in Dr. Ivanovich’s upturned white hand, watching it settle into the basin of his palm.

W

hen Peter sneaks into her house that night Isabel is lying in bed awake. He’s carrying a bottle of vodka and two glasses. She’s wearing her nicest underwear.

“I have to sell it,” she says to him when he climbs into bed, “I have to go.”

“No,” he says.

“I have to.”

“You can stay with me.”

“It’s for my father.”

“Just think about it. My mother won’t mind.”

“I’m sorry.”

“She’s always wanted another girl around the house.”

“I’ll miss you.” The words feel full now, resting on her chest like the rumbling of low music. She kisses him.

When they have sex she imagines Peter freezing below a second story window she’s never had, throwing rocks and beer cans, screaming. She imagines an ache in her stomach that’s horrible and exciting.

But when it’s over, all he says is “Is this for your father or for you?” His eyes are withdrawn. She wants him to break something. She wants him to love and to hate her, to give her something overflowing and large. Maybe he knows, because instead he gives her something small: he tells a joke.

“Did you ever hear the one about camping,” he asks without explanation,

30 | Vol. XLI, No. 2 | November 2013

“It’s from my favorite episode of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes from NTV in the Eighties,” he smiles, “Vasily Livanov as Holmes and Vitaly Solomin as Watson. Great chemistry between them.”

He’s lying still in bed next to her, looking up.

“They’re out in the woods, pitching their tent in a clearing. And in the middle of the night, Holmes wakes Watson up and asks him to look at the stars. ‘Tell me what you see, Watson,’ he says. ‘Well, I see what appear to be billions and billions of stars,’ Watson replies. ‘And what does that mean to you?’ Holmes asks. ‘Well, if there are billions of stars, we can reasonably deduce that at least a few million must have planets orbiting around them.

And if even one planet in one million is like Earth, then there must still be life out there somewhere.’ It’s the height of the space race, and all that. ‘And someday,’ Watson continues, ‘we may go off and find it.’ But Holmes just turns to his friend. ‘No, you idiot,’ he sighs, ‘It means somebody has stolen our tent.’”

Isabel says nothing.

Peter says, “You can keep the bottle.”

I

n the morning, Dr. Konstantin Ivanovich is back.

“I was right, if you’re interested,” he says, smoothing down his tie, “Iron and nickel.” Isabel’s father looks confused. Dr. Ivanovich pulls the tiny meteorite out of his pocket and holds it up. “Do you know what this is made of?” he asks coolly, “Black granite. Most likely mined in Koyelga. Most likely crumbled off a wall in your industrial park.”

He places the rock into Isabel’s hand.

“I thought it might be.”

Isabel’s father rushes to bring more tea.

In the afternoon, Isabel leans out her open bedroom window, bundled in coats. Her elbows are pressed against the sill’s wooden edge, but she doesn’t mind. She drops a cigarette into the snow, and lets the smoke drift out of her. Her phone is in her hand. In a minute she’ll call Peter and he’ll say, well now we know. They’ll laugh about it. It’ll all be such a relief. But right now, everything is still. In the distance, people are back on the road, but you can’t tell if they’re moving, and it’s all so flat.

SAVING French seed laws and farmers’ resistance

“A

re you sure this is legal?”

Thibaut and I were making paper envelopes, labeling them, filling them with seeds, taping them shut, and stuffing them into our pockets.

“I don’t know,” he said. He held up a jar marked Fèves d’Aguadulce. “Did you get any of these?”

Behind us, a drum band danced past tables spread with figs and grape bunches. We could smell the wood-fired oven to our right, where a man in a beret was baking bread. It was Heritage Day. We’d come to the tiny town of Lodève for a festival.

This was one stop along my route through southern France. I was researching agricultural traditions and policy; Thibaut Schelstraete, an agronomist, 26 years old, was my guide. Over the course of a few weeks, I would visit seven farms within a 150-mile radius of Montpellier: a melon farm in St-Nicolas-de-la-Grave; a honey farm in Malemort-du-Comtat; a sunflower farm in Venasque; a vegetable farm in Vézénobres; a cereal farm and bakery in Montignargues; a wine, wheat, fruit, and nut farm in Laure-Minervois; and a horse-powered grain farm in Bezouce.

The festival in Lodève was a last-minute addition to the itinerary. A criminal seedcollecting spree wasn’t part of the original plan either.

Taped to the plastic table in front of Thibaut and me was a sheet of graph paper, where someone had written in blue ballpoint: EXCHANGE OF SEEDS, SEEDLINGS, CUTTINGS, AND IDEAS Around the sign were scores of recycled containers — jam pots, a coffee can, a deer pâté jar — all full of seeds. A woman with red hair stood behind the table.

“These are the ones I brought,” she said, passing her hand over a few jars. “Here, help yourselves.”

SEEDS

BY HANNAH SASSOON

Thibaut was so excited about the arugula seeds that he spilled a spray of them on the table. He was already imagining next year’s garden at his home near Avignon. I imagined my garden in upstate New York.

The seeds I pocketed would become contraband the minute I got them to JFK — that much I already knew. What I didn’t know was whether the “exchange” was legal in the first place. Regardless of where the seeds ended up, this was all unregistered plant reproductive material, or, as the European Commission abbreviates it, “PRM.” Were we breaking the law? And could somebody please tell me — why would the exchange of vegetable seeds be forbidden?

A

griculture has been around for 10,000 years. It’s the base of human society. And the base of agriculture is seeds. The first ancients ever to “farm” were only “farmers” (as opposed to hunter-gatherers) because they saved and planted seeds. We’ve been doing it every year since. From this simple practice springs all agricultural and culinary diversity.

Seed saving is where selection happens. It’s the moment when a farmer culls the gene pool: the best of this year’s crop becomes the starting point of next year’s. Thousands of years of seed saving have generated millions — maybe billions — of agricultural species.

Between 1900 and 2001 — a mere hundred years — 75 percent of cultivated varieties disappeared.

You may have heard the story already: industrialization, consolidation, standardization, hybridization, patents, and property rights.

There are fewer and fewer farmers. Fewer of them save seeds because they can buy them.

And what they’re buying are the same certified, homogenous varieties as everybody else. Fewer than 10 firms control more than 70 percent of the seed market.

observer Last month, a report released by the Gaia Foundation, the Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance, and the African Biodiversity Network warned that farming will not adapt to climate change without seed diversity. If we don’t pay attention to seeds, in other words, we won’t have any food. The first word of the report is “Urgent.”

S

ome of the farmhouses in France are older than the United States of America. When it comes to agriculture, French heritage is of a different order — rich and ancient.

Consider the wines that can only come from certain grapes grown in certain soils; the bread from wheat selected only for its flavor; the cheeses from certain animals grazing certain pastures; curd cured in certain caves. This is thousands of years of work — of evolution. French farmers don’t take it lightly.

paysans. The most literal translation of paysans is “countrymen” — though we so rarely use the word, and it belongs so inevitably to Shakespeare’s Mark Antony, that it doesn’t seem quite right. Some people translate paysan as “peasant,” but it’s hard to shuck the pejorative connotation, which paysan doesn’t carry.

Paysans are farmers: they draw their livelihood from the land. They also feel a strong sense of duty to their country (pays) and heritage.

Over thousands of years, French farmers have accumulated a staggering number of “heritage” crop varieties (they call them paysan varieties), many of which are adapted to hyper-local conditions. From an evolutionary standpoint, this is cause for optimism.

Facing climate change, the diverse gene pool will be adaptable.

The problem with paysan varieties

“If the legislation tightens,” an old man in a knitted sweater was saying, “we’ll disobey.”

“There’s a reason why the rooster is a symbol of France,” Thibaut told me.

The rooster is brave and proud. His daily work is the wake-up call.

Many of France’s small-scale farmers are activists — much more so than American farmers. They join groups and networks; they attend meetings and festivals; they pay attention to agricultural policies; they stage protests.

In 1974, farmers from Larzac set their sheep to graze under the Eiffel Tower to protest the expansion of a military base.

In 2012, dairy farmers sprayed thousands of liters of milk at the EU Parliament in Brussels to protest low milk prices.

This summer, poultry farmers smashed 100,000 eggs a day to protest low egg prices. It seems more than a coincidence that the French word campagne means both “countryside” and “campaign.”

French activist farmers call themselves 32 | Vol. XLI, No. 2 | November 2013

is that they’re hard to regulate. Nobody owns them — they’re a common inheritance. They can’t all be named and catalogued because their lineages can’t be precisely traced. And there’s so much variation among the seeds of a single crop that they’re never pure enough to market. So paysan seeds remain largely out of reach of corporations and the government — much to the irritation of the multi-billion-dollar seed industry, in which Monsanto is company number one, and the French company, Limagrain, is number four.

But industry must control its commodity.

Recent and upcoming legislation is now threatening paysan seeds. And French farmers are sounding the wakeup call.

A

t the Lodève festival, the drum band had quieted down. Thibaut and I had left the seed exchange table and followed a dirt path to a small wooden shed, where twenty-odd people were gathered.

“If the legislation tightens,” an old man in a knitted sweater was saying, “we’ll disobey.”

This was Michel Metz, an administrator of the Réseau Semences Paysannes. The RSP, the host of the festival, is a network of farmers, gardeners, syndicates, NGOs, and regional groups. They help each other cultivate and exchange paysan seeds, and, on a national scale, they lobby for farmers’ rights.

French seed legislation is complicated: several documents from several decades, fattened with amendments and appendices. Many farmers don’t know what their rights are.

They do know that the laws are under revision. To streamline, France is preparing to adopt new EU-wide seed legislation that should be ready by 2019.

Paysans, of course, fear they’ll lose their most basic right: the right to freely save and exchange seeds as they’ve been doing for thousands of years.

“Exchange is important,” Michel said.

“That’s how it’s always worked. The other thing that’s very important is to be able to sell seeds that aren’t registered in the Catalog.”

France’s Official Catalog of Species and Cultivated Plant Varieties is nothing new. It first appeared in 1932, well before the postwar rise of chemical agriculture.

The government needed to ensure that a single variety wasn’t sold under multiple names, and that multiple varieties weren’t sold under the same name. The Catalog, really, was created to protect consumers.

Nowadays, in order for a variety to be registered, it must meet three strict criteria. It must be distinct (D) — that is, different from everything else in the Catalog. It must be uniform (U) — all of its seeds the same. And it must be stable (S), meaning that the plants stay the same

observer from generation to generation. Seeds that don’t meet DUS criteria can’t be registered. Seeds that aren’t registered can’t be sold.

The logic is clear-cut and sound, except that most paysan crops — especially grains — don’t meet this political, rather than botanical, definition of “variety.”

Because they’re excluded from the seed market, it becomes difficult — even illegal — to obtain them. Diversity dwindles.

A few exemptions protect paysan seed varieties. You’re allowed to exchange non-registered seeds locally and in small quantities, so long as they’re not intended for commercial production.

Two annexes to the Catalog also list permissible heritage varieties.

Paysans have had to fight for these small allowances. Their seeds and seed trading are still marginalized.

“Of course what’s really important is that you, citizens and gardeners, participate in [cultivating] biodiversity,” Michel said. “Gardeners, don’t worry” — for now, at least, there isn’t much that’s illegal.

Behind us, I spotted a table wrapped in yellow paper. About 20 heritage varieties of figs had been arranged on it — a pair of fruits and a leaf for each.

Their names were written on the table in large Sharpie cursive: Marie Madeleine, Grise de St. Jean, La Blanquette.

“Hey, Thibaut, look at this,” I said.

One of them was labeled Couilles de Papa — Dad’s balls.

“Well,” he said, “you certainly wouldn’t find that in the Catalog.”

T

he Catalog names all the seeds on the market. But it doesn’t say who owns them.

Plant patents, the linchpin of the U.S. seed industry, are forbidden in Europe.

Instead, France grants plant breeders’ rights.

If a breeder develops or discovers a plant variety that meets DUS criteria, he can register it in the Catalog and buy the exclusive rights to sell the seeds. It costs €10,000 to €15,000. If anybody else wants to sell those seeds, they’re required to

pay him a royalty. They also have to pay him every time they replant the variety, even if they’re using their own saved seed.

Breeders’ rights law is lenient compared to U.S. patents, but the conditions may tighten in the next few years. Farmers worry that if patents make it through the door, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) will be close behind, knocking. GMOs are perceived as the greatest threat to paysan heritage.

“Paysan seeds can’t coexist with GMOs,” the moderator of the discussion in the shed in Lodève said. “GMOs, once they’re cultivated, will pollinate paysan varieties [and] contaminate them.”

So far, GMOs aren’t on the French seed market. But during free trade talks this summer, lobbyists began increasing pressure on France to adopt them.

France refused, but paysans know the debate has only just begun.

T

wo weeks after the festival, we drove to a small farm near Nîmes in search of heritage wheat seeds for Thibaut to plant.

The door of the house was open when we arrived — rather, there was no door in the doorway at all, only a white curtain drawn to one side. We stood in the driveway. It didn’t look like anyone was home.

We’d parked next to a shed that was twice the size of the house, so I went to look inside. It was full of old farm equipment: grain mills, winnowing machines, half pipes, sieves, buckets, barrels, combine harvesters. A stack of square hay bales. I recognized the disarray: this was a place full of life and trial and error — full of the methodologies of an old farmer.

François, the old farmer we were looking for, emerged from behind the house. His pants were caked with flour.

He smoothed his white mustache as he approached.

“I was just feeding the mares!” he said.

We followed him under a fig tree to a little wooden building, the atelier.

“Wow, it smells good in here,” said

Thibaut when we stepped inside — pine walls, milled flour, basil.

On one side of the atelier, François’s wife makes pasta: elbows, bowties, corkscrews, spaghetti nests dyed with beets. On the other is François’s conservatory.

There was barely enough room for the three of us to stand between his four-chute grain mill and his floor-toceiling shelves stocked two feet deep with seeds. Hard wheat, soft wheat, red, white, bearded, beardless. Blue-gray rye.

Green lentils. Chickpeas. Canola.

François leaned over a crate of basil.

“It repels the weevils,” he explained.

He clipped a sprig and tucked it into a tiny plastic bag along with two handfuls of seed and a scrap of paper marked “Touzelle rouge sans barbe” (beardless red wheat). He zipped the bag and handed it to me, then began preparing another, and another, and another.

All this, he said, was illegal. His round cheeks wilted. An official from the National Inter-professional Seed and Seedling Association had told him he didn’t have the right to sell, exchange, or give these seeds to anybody.

“But — ,” said Thibaut. This sort of exchange was supposed to be exempt: a small quantity, not intended for commercial use.

“Well, that’s what they told me.”

What they told him isn’t what the law says. It’s no wonder that François and so many other farmers are confused about their rights.

Nonetheless, here we were. Here was an old farmer handing seeds to a young one, explaining which wheat would make the highest-rising bread loaf and how best to grind the grain.

“We need as many people as possible,” François said, “to help maintain the heritage our elders have given us.”

Next week, Thibaut will plant the seeds.

All quotations are translated from the French. Hannah Sassoon got her seeds through customs, and she plans to plant them this spring.

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 33

W

hen Leonard Thomas ’14 got to Yale, he realized that the kids at parties didn’t know how to dance.

Back home in inner-city Detroit, people had moves. They showed up to parties tipsy, and then they danced, and they danced well. At Yale parties, people mostly stood around holding cups, talking drunk. If they did dance, it was uncoordinated, just fist-pumping to music Thomas didn’t know. Sometimes they didn’t dance at all, making out instead.

But Thomas just wanted to dance. At Greek parties and big Yale dances, he was disappointed. Nobody was dancing the way people danced in Detroit.

It wasn’t just his dancing that made him feel different. To the best of his knowledge, Thomas is the only student from inner-city Detroit in the class of 2014. On move-in day, he realized he was probably the only one of his suitemates not paying any tuition.

Some people knew he was poor, but nobody seemed to mind that he’d spent his high school years on food stamps.

Nobody judged him for what he couldn’t afford.

But people cared that he was too loud.

Thomas talked at soapbox volume about whatever he wanted. In the dining halls, people turned around and stared.

At home, he hadn’t needed to guard his volume or his words. Now, among politically correct peers who used “inside voices,” he realized he had to be careful.

In July 2013, the city of Detroit — “pretty poor and pretty black,” in Thomas’s words — filed for bankruptcy.

The New York Times said it was “ailing” from decades of mounting debt.

It was in this sick city, made sicker by the recession, that Thomas had gone to school. He had a 4.0, but thought he could use a leg up in the college admissions process. So he applied to be a scholar in the program offered by the Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America (LEDA), a summer program that helps minority students develop academic and leadership skills. At LEDA’s summer 34 | Vol. XLI, No. 2 | November 2013

WE DON’T

Need-blind financial aid and Yale’s new Fre the academic transition to college for low class differences play out in the social lives institute at Princeton University, which Thomas attended before his senior year of high school, he took SAT preparation classes, a college writing class, and a leadership seminar.

When he accepted Yale’s offer of admission in 2010, it was because he was finished with being poor. Before leaving, he told his parents that he “wasn’t trying” to come back.

I

f the American dream were a novel, that novel would be about class. It’s a novel Horatio Alger is thought to have written in 1867 with Ragged Dick, the story of a poor bootblack whose hard work polishing shoes earns him a spot in the middle class. Alger’s novel argues that, in America, you can get anywhere, from anywhere. You will make your way prosperous, and you will have good success.

Since opening in 1701 exclusively to

white, male members of the clergy, Yale has taken tremendous strides to make itself accessible to all students, regardless of their economic background. Like some other Ivy League colleges, Yale meets 100 percent of demonstrated financial need. More than half of Yale students receive need-based aid directly from the University, which has an estimated financial aid budget of $120 million.

But the family income distribution of Yale’s student body is hardly a reflection of income distribution in the United States as a whole.

In 2012, Yale awarded financial aid to 56 percent of students, nearly all of whom come from households making $200,000 or less. Following the logic of an article published last year in the Harvard Crimson, it is safe to assume that the 44 percent of Yale students who do not receive financial aid — either because they did not apply, or because they were

TALK ABOUT IT

eshman Scholars Program ease w-income students. But how do s of undergraduates at Yale? ineligible — come from households with a yearly income of more than $200,000.

According to the U.S. Census, 96 percent of American households have a combined family income of under $200,000. Yale’s price tag currently stands at $57,000 — the highest it has ever been.

For more than half of American families, one year of Yale tuition would comprise their entire yearly income.

Still, the number of low-income students matriculating at Yale has risen steadily in recent years, in part due to an overhaul to the financial aid policy in the 2007-2008 year. Yale families earning less than $60,000 are now completely exempt from tuition, and families earning between $60,000 and $120,000 are only expected to contribute up to 10 percent of their total income. These changes, along with increased recruitment efforts in disadvantaged cities and schools, are aimed at attracting more low-income

by Jennifer Gersten Opening photo by Jennifer Mulrow Inside photos by Henry Ehrenberg

students to Yale.

For many of these students, a Yale admissions letter begins a bright chapter of a story they have been trying to write anew. But the challenges faced by lowincome students across America do not disappear once they arrive on campus.

Yale is aware that students from lower-income backgrounds face a difficult adjustment to the college’s academically rigorous environment.

Last year, partly in response to columns in the News by Alejandro Gutierrez and Michael Magdzik, two low income students who described their struggles in the classroom, the University introduced the Freshman Scholars at Yale (FSY) program, inviting select students from low-income backgrounds to participate in its inaugural summer session. FSY is designed to help students from disadvantaged backgrounds find their academic footing. Over five weeks,

students take an introductory-level English class for credit, learn about resources that will prepare them for intensive coursework, and connect with students from similar backgrounds.

But despite Yale’s numerous financial and academic safety nets, the specter of class persists. It manifests itself in the differences between what students of different economic backgrounds can afford: a $1300 Macbook Pro, ubiquitous around Yale seminar tables, costs nearly half of the student income contribution.

Likewise, students’ ability to travel during academic breaks can be a strong indicator of income. Class also manifests itself in less tangible ways — how students think, talk, and interact with others.

Some low-income students, particularly those who are the first in their families to attend college, feel that they lack the vocabulary and experiences

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 35

cover to relate to students from middle- and upper-class backgrounds. However, the disconnect goes both ways: upperincome students may follow a path to Yale well trodden by previous students of privilege, but they, too, can have difficulty relating to students from backgrounds unlike their own.

College culture is something that anyone new to campus, regardless of her class, must learn to navigate. But while clubs and cultural houses unite students with shared interests and identities, no such social space exists for students to discuss how their experiences have been influenced by class. And while race, gender, and sexuality have become common discussion topics on campus, conversations about money and class — across income brackets — are awkward, and avoided.

The social gulf between students from low-income families and Yale’s predominately upper-middle-class culture is wide, and it is growing wider as more students from poorer backgrounds make their way to Yale. In this year’s Freshman Address speech, titled “Yale and the American Dream,” University President Peter Salovey said that while Yale is “a great equalizer,” it cannot erase the discrepancies that arise between the experiences of students from different financial circumstances.

Yacht: $1,000,000

36 | Vol. XLI, No. 2 | November 2013

Salovey said that talking about socioeconomic status is “one of the last taboos” among students at Yale.

However, a flurry of class-related articles and campus events suggests that the stigma may be fading.

Most of the 36 students interviewed for this article — students from across the economic spectrum — are eager to start talking about class. But what will be the result? Could talking about class be the first step toward closing the social gap?

Halfway through his senior year, Thomas still isn’t sure.

“Talk, talk, talk,” he said, leaning forward on a Cross Campus bench.

“What is talk, if you’re not going to act upon it?”

B

efore being initiated into Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE), new fraternity members recite “The True Gentleman,” a creed for good behavior that has been an SAE tradition since the 1930s. The speech describes a man “whose conduct proceeds from good will and an acute sense of propriety.”

“A true SAE gentleman,” it states, “does not make the poor man conscious of his poverty.”

While many members of Yale’s SAE chapter are well-off even when

compared to Yale at large — out of 19 respondents to a recent News survey, 11 reported an annual household income of over $300,000 — there are also members who place lower on the socioeconomic spectrum. Many members of SAE and other fraternities on campus view their diverse memberships as a significant strength of Greek life.

The survey, which was distributed by email in September and included questions about socioeconomic class, collected 151 anonymous responses from students in Greek and other social organizations. One SAE respondent, who reported his family’s annual household income as $10,000–$49,999, bluntly articulated what he had found useful about making relationships with students unlike himself: “The wealthy get access to the unique insights that a harder upbringing bestows: street smarts, hustle, upward drive. Just as the wealthy learn from the ‘code of the streets’ playbook, the less fortunate can observe and learn the nuance of interaction among elites, in a generally equal atmosphere. This is crucial knowledge for them once they enter the job market and begin to improve their socioeconomic standing.

The outside world is far less welcoming and forgiving.”

SAE vice president Samir Sama ’15 said that SAE places tremendous importance on learning about brothers’ pasts and even matches prospective members to older members from similar backgrounds who help them through the rush process. According to Sama, no topic is awkward in the SAE house.

“But our emphasis is on personality, not class,” he said.

“I don’t see what there is to gain in talking about it,” he added. Whether or not students feel comfortable in social circles like fraternities, Sama said, is dependent on whether or not they are comfortable with themselves. For some students, “bringing class into focus can be more awkward than leaving it alone.”

David Truong ’14, who is not in a fraternity, understands what that awkwardness is like. Both his parents are

cover blue-collar workers: his mother works in a Texas factory and his father is a cashier.

He said that when he tells new friends what his parents do, the typical response is “Oh, cool.” Afterwards, there’s a lull.

“People just don’t know how to respond,” he said. “It’s not insulting, they’re just unfamiliar.”

Scroll and Key’s endowment: $8,332,107

D

avid Berg ’71 GRD ’72, a clinical professor of psychiatry, has firsthand experience with students’ discomfort with talking about class. In the residential college seminar he co-teaches with Howard Dean, “Understanding Politics and Politicians,” he leads an annual “money class” aimed at getting students to discuss the impact of class on their college experience and life in general.

Students are divided into three groups according to self-reported family income, and are asked to discuss in their income groups how their socioeconomic status has influenced their time at Yale.

Afterwards, Berg and Dean bring all the students together to share what each group has discussed.

In an environment in which only merit and personality are supposed to influence relationships, the notion that our college experiences are also influenced by our social class — an aspect of our identity over which we have no control — is often unpopular and unwelcome.

During the exercise, students tell Berg that they feel uncomfortable, and some view his questions about family income as inappropriate.

Berg said that some students think that the professors are manufacturing class divisions within their community, as opposed to what he and Dean are actually trying to do: provide students with a space to discuss the real differences between them that originate as a result of socioeconomic class.

According to Berg, students share a “collective denial” that money makes a difference at Yale. Not much has changed since he attended Yale in the 1960s, he said: students still feel pressure to act as though differences in income don’t

$1,299 $199

Apple products mean anything.

But by the end of the class (in some cases), or months or years later (in others), student responses to the “money class” are overwhelmingly positive.

Students say it’s the class they remember most from the entire semester.

Berg believes relationships are among the most important aspects of attending Yale. But in order to establish deep connections at Yale, students need to learn about each other — which can only happen if they are willing to share.

“It’s about telling as much of the story

$499 as you can,” Berg said. “And part of the story is about money.”

C

ory Combs ’14 came back from his FOOT trip freshman year smelling awful, but so did everybody else.

Then he cleaned up and changed for the Timothy Dwight freshman parents’ reception. Standing alone in his blue jeans among boys in ironed shirts and suit jackets, overhearing a father talking about his yacht, he grew anxious that he might be out of place.

“I felt like I didn’t even speak

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cover

Bowtie: $65 Pearls: $400 the language,“ Combs said. “I heard conversations about summers in Switzerland, and I had worked in a factory.”

Combs is a first-generation college student from rural southeast Ohio. In the spring of his sophomore year of high school, he was asked to interview an engineer for a class project. He sent out a few emails to professors at colleges he knew about, if only vaguely. One of them was Yale. He had heard of the Ivy League before, but he thought it included Oxford and Stanford.

Combs received a reply from Yale molecular biophysics and biochemistry professor Enrique De La Cruz. After a three-hour phone discussion, De La Cruz followed up with Combs and encouraged him to apply to Yale. In November of his senior year, Combs got his high school’s first-ever “Yes!” from an Ivy League college.

When he got to Yale, Combs worried that he lacked the “proper” educational and economic background characteristic of Yale students. At first, he kept silent about where he was from, fearing that he would be stigmatized.

Other low-income students described similar reluctance to talk about their backgrounds.

Ian Akers ’14, who hails from a bluecollar family in southwestern Virginia, 38 | Vol. XLI, No. 2 | November 2013

said he often “felt like a redneck” among students from higher-income families.

As a freshman, he would keep quiet in social settings, worried about saying something that would be acceptable back home, but might upset his new peers.

Chris Tokita ’14 arrived on campus in the fall of 2010 with a shaved head and tattoos. At first he thought it was funny when a few fellow students started calling him a “ghetto Asian.” At Tokita’s high school in Los Angeles, “ghetto” was a playful term, used by his friends who came from similar economic backgrounds. But people at Yale used it differently.

“Here, it’s a condescending and classoriented term, and it’s pretty derogatory,” Tokita said. “That’s what drove me to be more quiet about my background.”

Combs thinks his initial discomfort went largely unnoticed. “Frankly, I’m a tall, white male,” Combs said. “Coming here, I don’t think people had any correct preconceptions about where I was really from.”

Certain identities, like race, are visual.

Socioeconomic status is often not. But students across the economic spectrum said that it has an undeniable effect on social interactions. It can be tricky for students from lower economic statuses to connect with peers with whom they do not identify.

Some described stalling at parties when asked if their high schools were public or private. Some declined dinner invitations, pretending they were busy rather than admitting they couldn’t pay the bill. Ericka Saracho ’14 laughed off a friend’s comment about a purple shirt she seemed to wear out all the time. It was one of the three formal shirts she owned.

Many low-income students described changing the way they talked or acted in order to blend in at Yale. The practice, Thomas said, is known as “codeswitching.”

Sociolinguists use the term to refer to how members of one culture speak differently in the company of another, like when some African-Americans use different grammar when among whites in formal situations. Code-switching also applies to people who adopt the language of a different class in an oftensubconscious attempt to disguise their own background.

Uncertain of how he fit in with his upper-class peers, Combs tried to exude confidence. Beneath it, however, his insecurity about his background lingered. “I was trembling the whole time,” he said.

Combs now believes that socioeconomic status, as much as any other facet of experience, is a critical and formational part of his identity. He realized that by keeping silent about his background, he risked hiding part of himself.

About a month into his freshman year, Combs found adult mentors on campus with whom he felt comfortable opening up. His boss, who was also from a low-income background, helped him realize that others at Yale had overcome similar difficulties related to income and class. Speaking with his mentors about his anxiety helped him to clear the “emotional hurdle” of his unfamiliarity with Yale culture and to gain confidence that he did, in fact, belong.

But Combs worries that he may have been lucky. Other students from

cover backgrounds like his have had a tougher time. Over the course of his freshman year, Thomas approached various campus support systems seeking help adapting to Yale. He told his freshman counselor and his dean that he was having trouble. He explained his situation to a Peer Liaison at the Afro-American Cultural House, who, while also black, was not from similar financial circumstances and did not provide him with adequate guidance.

Ultimately, he felt that the mentors to whom he had access lacked the experience and training to understand the difficulties of his adjustment to campus.

Although Yale lacks a space specifically designated to foster dialogue about social class, nevertheless, by senior year, most low-income students have found communities in which they feel comfortable talking about their backgrounds. Often, these communities are made up of students with similar economic circumstances.

Truong, the senior from Texas, said that many of his closest friends share his income bracket. Knowing that these students are also receiving financial aid has made it easier for Truong to open up about how class and family income have influenced his time at Yale.

“It’s a shared experience — they get it,” he said.

For many members of Sigma Chi, the fraternity itself provides a social space for discussing issues that might be sensitive elsewhere. Javaughn Lawrence ’14, a QuestBridge scholar who moved with his family to Florida from Jamaica in search of academic opportunities, says he identifies with many of his fraternity brothers; indeed, the thirteen Sigma Chi respondents to the News survey come from backgrounds that are equally distributed across the socioeconomic spectrum.

Members of SAE and the coed Fence Club also say that their off-campus organizations allow members to form closer friendships than they might

ordinarily form on campus, and thus to feel more comfortable sharing details about where they are from.

Yale’s Freshman Scholars program, in addition to providing academic preparation, gives 30 low-income students the opportunity to interact with others from similar backgrounds before beginning freshman year.

By creating the program, Yale has undoubtedly made progress in addressing the needs of low-income students, and many upperclassmen interviewed wished that they had been able to participate. Tokita, who said he spent his first semester feeling like he had no one to relate to, thinks the program would have helped to ease his transition to campus culture.

Only time will tell whether or not FSY will make a significant difference in the social experience of lowincome students, a segment of Yale’s population that Truong refers to as “the experimental group.”

“The administration hasn’t yet figured out completely how to cater to our needs,” he said, though he is pleased that it is working to develop solutions like FSY. “The simple answer to whether we should talk about it is yes. The complicated answer is how.”

S

tudents Unite Now (SUN), a campus social justice group, has been trying to get the University to commit to starting a formal conversation about class. Last year, SUN circulated a petition to create a center that would give support to low-income students and provide a space for all people to come together to discuss class-related issues.

“Everyone at Yale, rich or poor, needs help figuring out how to talk about money and class,” said Berg, the psychiatry professor. When asked to propose a solution, he offered the possibility of a voluntary discussion group run through the residential colleges. Its focus would be not the plight of one class or another, but the ways that money impacts all students’

lives in and outside of Yale.

But Thomas, the senior from Detroit, said that being lower class continues to carry a negative connotation on campus, which might lead some students to feel hesitant to talk about where they are from. “Some people don’t want to be reminded of it,” he said. “They just want to fit in.” And for Thomas, conversation alone is not enough.

“It took so much for me just to be able to walk on Yale’s campus,” he said.

Talking is fine, he added, but it must lead to increased accessibility to resources at Yale for students from lower-income backgrounds.

“You don’t just want to survive,” Thomas said. “You want to thrive.”

P

resident Salovey beamed as he welcomed the 1,360 applauding students crammed into Woolsey Hall for the freshman assembly. It was a welcome they had waited a long time to hear, he said, and it was an honor for him to deliver it.

Twelve percent of those students will be the first in their families to graduate from college. Yet Salovey had more than just congratulations and greetings for Yale’s newest.

“I worry about whether the American Dream is still possible and whether education is still the best ‘ticket’ to socioeconomic mobility,” he said.

This can be the generation, he said, that ensures that “the dream of a better life” is possible for students across America and all over the world. But it remains to be seen what role Salovey and the administration will take to ensure that Yale continues to be “a great equalizer” for today’s generation.

Ian Akers, the senior from rural Virginia, will graduate in the spring with a degree in economics from an Ivy League school. More than four years have passed since he first arrived in New Haven.

Still, Akers said, “there’s so many things about Yale culture that I just never got.”

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