It Occurs to Me That I Am America Page 2

  Part of the fault is ours; too many writers are removed from the world of our readers. After my novel The Sympathizer was published, I would get letters from people who accused me of being “ungrateful” to the United States. The places where the book was most popular were the Northeast, West Coast and big cities. A vast section of rural Americans in the Deep South, heartland and North were not buying the book.

  The day before the presidential election, an obscure novelist attacked me on Twitter. I was “NOT an American author (born in Vietnam).” As for my Pulitzer, it was “An American prize that shuns the real America. We long for the Great American Novel. When?”

  Despite that criticism, this election reminds me of the necessity of my vocation. Good writers cannot write honestly if they are incapable of imagining what it is that another feels, thinks and sees. Through identifying with characters and people who are nothing like us, through destroying the walls between ourselves and others, the people who love words—both writers and readers—strive to understand others and break down the boundaries that separate us.

  It’s an ethos summed up by the novelist Colson Whitehead in his acceptance speech at the National Book Awards for his novel The Underground Railroad: “Be kind to everybody. Make art. And fight the power.”

  Fighting the power is what the American Civil Liberties Union has done for nearly one hundred years. I am proud that one of my Berkeley classmates, Cecillia Wang, is a deputy legal director for the ACLU. She was an English major, like me, and it is no coincidence that the love of literature has some relationship to the love of justice and liberty. Such love is not partisan, but is a matter of principle, which is why the ACLU has worked with and battled against American presidents of both parties to ensure that our country makes good on its founding premise as the land of the free.

  After election night, during which my partner, my graduate students and I drank two bottles of Scotch, I renewed my commitment to fight for freedom and to fight the power. That was always my mission. I was thinking of it when I named my son Ellison, after the novelist Ralph Waldo Ellison, himself named after the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. Making my son a part of this lineage, I wanted him to understand the basic paradox at the heart of literature and philosophy: even as each of us is solitary as a reader or a writer, we are reminded of our shared humanity and our inhumanity.

  My son need not become a writer, but he will become a storyteller. We are all storytellers of our own lives, of our American identities. I want my son to rise to the challenge of fighting to determine which stories will define our America. That’s the choice between building walls and opening hearts. Rather than making America great again, we should help America love again. This is what the writers and artists in this collection do, through their insistence that each of us is a part of America.

  Viet Thanh Nguyen

  JULIA ALVAREZ

  * * *

  Speak! Speak!

  I had all kinds of Spanish sass to say to the mean girls in my sixth-grade class next time they made fun of my accent, my stinky lunch, my loud clothes, my skinny legs.

  El problema was that I didn’t know how to say smart stuff in English. What I did manage to say, the girls mimicked, exaggerating my mispronunciations, so I sounded even dumber. “Spik! Spik!” they cried, hilariously.

  The boys roughhoused: yanking my braids, slamming into me like bumper cars, pulling down my knee socks, lifting the hem of my skirt to see if I had a tail. They, too, taunted me, “Spik! Spik!”

  What was this strange word they hurled like a weapon? Papi wouldn’t know. His English was terrible. Mami was the most fluent. As a girl, she had gone to a boarding school in Massachusetts—a name the rest of us couldn’t pronounce without our tongues tripping over all those cluttery consonants.

  Mami claimed I had misunderstood. “The children want you to be their friend. They are asking you to talk to them. Speak! Speak!” For a tiny segundito, I felt a rush of relief. But then I recalled those flushed faces, grimacing, and I knew those kids didn’t want to hear anything coming out of my mouth.

  • • •

  We’d come to the United States from the Dominican Republic, fleeing the dictator Trujillo. My father had been part of an underground movement and we’d escaped just in time. My parents kept saying we were so lucky to be in the home of the brave, the land of the free. A country where we could be whatever we wanted to be.

  But on the television we watched as black people were hosed down, attacked by dogs, hit with batons, hauled off to prisons. Churches and storefronts were burning. How was this any different from the dictatorship we had come from?

  My mother scolded me for my lack of gratitude. “You don’t know how lucky you are! So many people would die to be here.”

  Exactly, and they were on TV right now, trying to eat at lunch counters, to sit where they wanted to, not just at the back of the bus. “Tell that to those black people!”

  “Don’t think because you’re in a new country, you can get fresh with me!”

  “What about freedom of speech? What about the home of the brave and the land of the free?” I always answered back out of reach of the slipper she’d take off to spank me.

  It was a slippery slope in our family, what country we were in and what rules applied at any given moment.

  • • •

  I practiced in front of the mirror. How to pronounce Massachusetts. How to look American when I was speaking. How to say the clever things smart girls said in the stories I was reading.

  I had recently become a reader. It was all my teacher’s doing. Sister Mary Zoë could see I loved stories. She put books in my hands. She sent me to the library. A librarian recommended books she was sure I would love. It turned out there was room for me in the ever-expanding circle of readers. I had found what we came looking for in the United States of America between the covers of books. A world where everyone was welcomed. No warnings posted on the covers: NOT FOR SPIKS. NOT FOR BLACKS. NOT FOR GIRLS.

  What an amazing world this was, what freedom came with reading. I could go back to olden times, I could go to a whole other country, I could go to the future. I could be a prince or a pauper. I could be a slave girl in the South. I could be a young woman who solved mysteries and drove a convertible and had a boyfriend and a widowed father—no mami to tell her what she could and couldn’t do.

  The more I read, the more I wanted to be a storyteller myself. But deep inside, I really didn’t believe I was welcomed. I had never read a book about people like me. Or books written by people like me. This was the United States of pre–multicultural studies, pre–anything but the melting pot, that old assimilationist, mainstreaming model. And so the message to me was that although the underlying truth of everything I was reading was no one is an alien here—still there were big gaps on that shelf of American literature.

  But then, in one of our anthologies, among absent voices and missing stories, I discovered a poem that meant a great deal to me. “I, Too,” by the African-American poet Langston Hughes. He, too, had encountered prejudice. He had not been invited to the big table of American literature, sent instead to eat in the kitchen of minor writers. But Mr. Hughes knew that tomorrow he’d be at the table, claiming his place in the chorus of American song, an America that was still not listening to him, treating him like a second-class literary citizen.

  That poem was music to my ears. The fact that it was included in my textbook proved that he had been right. That it was possible.

  And so I set out to be a writer. All through high school, college, graduate school, I kept writing—that little poem had given me a lot of gasoline! Upon graduation, I was hired by the National Endowment for the Arts to give writing workshops in schools, prisons, old-age homes, in Kentucky, North Carolina, California, Maryland. I felt like a migrant poet, traveling across America, listening to its varied carols, like that most Latino-sounding of poets, Walt Whitman.

  I was already into my thirties, largely unpublished, when I won a r
esidency at Yaddo, the prestigious writing retreat. My first big lucky break! I would be surrounded by writers I admired as well as by the ghosts of those who had been there before me, including, I found out, Langston Hughes!

  Driving into the grounds, 440 wooded acres with stone walls, statues of Greek gods and goddesses overlooking the formal gardens, I wondered if I had the right address. My awe was compounded once inside the ornate, neo-Gothic mansion with its Tiffany windows and its wide, winding wooden staircase. I felt as if I had entered a cathedral of literature.

  Talk about location pressure!

  I was assigned the tower room with a God’s-eye view of the grounds. A frieze above the fireplace portrayed the muses playing lyres and flutes. Like Yeats in his tower, I wanted to write something important, something on the order of Turning and turning in the widening gyre. Something that might get me invited to the big table, where I hoped to meet up at last with Mr. Hughes and thank him.

  A week passed, two, I hadn’t come up with a damn thing. Those were the days before computers, and I could hear everyone else being productive, their typewriters clacking away.

  During the workday, we were forbidden to visit each other’s studios or talk in public spaces; our prepared lunches were laid out on a table for us to pick up. At night, we gathered together for dinner, everyone discussing what they were working on. I kept my mouth shut, not only out of deference to all the accomplished writers there, but also because I had nothing to report.

  One morning, at my desk, I heard what was music to my ears: a vacuum cleaner coming up the narrow stairs toward the tower room. Someone to talk to! I leapt to the door, swung it open, and startled the young woman with my desperately eager “Hello!”

  She held a finger to her lips and gestured for me to follow her downstairs to the kitchen, where the housekeeping staff and the cook were having a coffee break around a big wooden table. I felt like a released prisoner, listening to their stories, juicy tidbits about different writers who had been residents at Yaddo, this one’s escapades, that one’s drinking problem. As they gossiped, I paged through the cook’s thick, falling-apart cookbook, with notes scribbled in the margins, favorite recipes bookmarked with greeting cards and old letters.

  I started jotting down the lovely vocabularies: the names of spices, lists of garnishes, icings, pastries, condiments; how to cook a ham, blanch almonds, make a fluffy soufflé. These lists were my madeleines, taking me back to the world of my childhood. Before I had ever dreamed of becoming a writer, I’d been raised, as were most girls in the Dominican Republic in the fifties, to be a housewife and mother. My first apprenticeship had been in the household arts, in the company of women who put meals on the table, hung up the wash, ironed, swept, dusted, sewed at treadle machines or with needle and thread; women who took care of their familias, which were extended and sizable. As they worked, they told stories, they gossiped, they sang songs to lighten the load of their labors.

  I realized why I had gotten stuck: I had been ignoring their voices inside me. They did not sound like Turning and turning in the widening gyre, or Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story. They said things like Don’t put so much salt on the salad, you’ll wilt the lettuce! You call that a blind stitch? I see it.

  I went upstairs and began writing what would become The Housekeeping Poems. The first was a poem composed of the lists I had copied from that Yaddo cookbook:

  Cup, spoon, ladle, pot, kettle,

  grater and peeler,

  casserole, colander, corer,

  waffle iron, small funnel—

  the names of our instruments.

  Knead, poach, stew, whip and stir,

  score, julienne, whisk,

  sauté, sift, scallop,

  grind, glacé, candy, and garnish—

  the names of our movements.

  Dash of salt, twist of lemon,

  bit of bay leaf, pinch of thyme,

  sprinkle with bread crumbs,

  deep fry, dice, let rise.

  I thought of Langston, and how he’d wanted to eat at the big table in the dining room. I was just as happy staying in the kitchen among the women who had first taught me service to an art. Strong, resourceful, bighearted women, who kept the world running smoothly for the rest of us. They were the America I wanted to belong to, theirs the songs I wanted to write down.

  I went back to my tower room, and ignoring the figures on the frieze, I sat at my desk and summoned my muses: Speak! Speak!

  JULIA ALVAREZ was born in New York City. Alvarez’s parents returned to their native country, the Dominican Republic, shortly after her birth. Ten years later, the family was forced to flee to the United States because of her father’s involvement in a plot to overthrow the dictator Rafael Trujillo. Alvarez has written novels (How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, ¡Yo!, In the Name of Salomé, Saving the World ), collections of poems (Homecoming, The Other Side/El Otro Lado, The Woman I Kept to Myself), nonfiction (Something to Declare, Once Upon a Quinceañera, and A Wedding in Haiti), and numerous books for young readers (including the Tía Lola Stories series, Before We Were Free, Finding Miracles, Return to Sender, and most recently, Where Do They Go?). Alvarez’s awards include the Pura Belpré and Américas Awards for her books for young readers, the Hispanic Heritage Award, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award. Most recently, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Obama. Alvarez is cofounder of Border of Lights, an annual gathering between the Dominican Republic and Haiti to commemorate victims of racial violence and to promote peace and collaboration between the two countries.

  RUSSELL BANKS

  * * *

  Oh, Canada

  Fife twists in the wheelchair and says to the woman who’s pushing it, Tell me again why I agreed to this.

  It’s the first time he’s asked her, it’s a slightly self-mocking joke, and he says it in French, but she doesn’t get it. She’s Haitian, in her mid-forties, a little humorless, brusque and professional—exactly what he and Emma wanted in a nurse. Now he’s not so sure. Her name is Renée Jacques. She speaks almost no English and French he understands with difficulty, although he’s supposedly fluent, at least in Quebecois.

  She reaches over him and opens the bedroom door and eases the wheelchair into the hallway. They pass the closed door to the bedroom that Emma has used for her office and for sleeping since Fife started staying awake all night with the sweats and chills. He wonders if she’s in there now, hiding from Malcolm and his film crew. Hiding from her husband’s sickness.

  If he could, he’d hide, too. He asks Renée to tell him again why he agreed to this.

  He knows she thinks he’s only whining and doesn’t really want an answer to the question, even if she has the answer: she says, Monsieur Fife agreed to make the interview because he’s famous for something to do with cinema, and famous people have to make interviews. She says, They have already been here an hour setting up their lights and moving furniture and covering all the living room windows with black cloth. She adds, I hope they plan before they depart from here to put everything back the way it was.

  Fife asks Renée if his wife—her name is Emma Gold, but he calls her Madame Fife—has changed her mind and decided to stay home today for the filming. He says, I want her here, if possible. It’s easier for me to talk to a camera if I think I’m talking to her. Especially if I’m trying to talk about something personal. You know what I mean? he asks the nurse. He tells her that what he plans to say today he doesn’t want to say twice and probably won’t.

  Renée Jacques is nearly six feet tall and square-shouldered, very dark with high, prominent cheekbones and eyes set wide in her face. Fife likes the sheen cast by her smooth brown skin. She is a home-care day-nurse and doesn’t have to wear a uniform on the job unless the client requests it. Emma, when she hired Renée, had specified no uniform, please, my husband does not want a uniformed nurse, but Renée showed up the first day in crisp whites anyhow. It spooked Fife at fir
st, but after nearly a month he has gotten used to it. Also, his condition is worse now than when she first arrived. He’s weaker and more addled—only intermittently, but with increasing frequency—and is less willing to pretend that he is only temporarily disabled, out of whack, recovering from a curable illness. The nurse’s uniform doesn’t bother him as much now. They’re ready to add a night-nurse, and this time Emma hasn’t specified, please, no uniform.

  Renée pushes the wheelchair across the kitchen, and as they pass through the breakfast room, Fife flashes a glance out the window at the black domed tops of umbrellas fighting the wind on Sherbrooke. Large flakes of soft snow are mixed into the rain, and a slick gray slush covers the sidewalks. Traffic sloshes soundlessly past. Gusts of wind beat in silence against the thick walls and the tall, narrow, twenty-paned windows of the fortresslike building. The large, rambling apartment takes up the southeast half of the first floor of the gray cut-stone building. The archdiocese of Montreal built it to house the nuns of the Little Franciscans of Mary in the 1890s and sold it in the 1960s to a developer who converted the building into a dozen high-ceilinged, six- and seven-room luxury apartments.

  Renée says that Madame Fife took one look at the weather and decided to stay home today. Madame Fife is working in her office on her computer. She asked me to tell you that she will come out to see you when the film people have left.

  She adds that, since he will in reality be talking to a movie camera and a man doing the interview and to the people who will watch the movie on television, he can pretend that he’s talking to his wife the same as if she were there in reality.

  He says, You talk too much.

  You asked if I knew what you meant about wanting her to hear you in the interview.

  Yes, I did. But you still talk too much.