Then, under the water, the dance begins. According to James W. Petranka, in Salamanders of the United States and Canada (2010), the male contacts the female with his snout, once, twice, again, and again; she prods him in return each time. He circles her ceaselessly, rocking his head back and forth over her back and beneath her chin. Then, shuffling aside, he deposits several packets of sperm on substrate in the water, or on top of other males" deposits. Called spermatoph.o.r.es, these are six- to eight-millimeter tapering gelatinous stalks with little calderas at the top holding the seminal fluid. The female searches for them, a side step with the back feet, a walk with the front. She cha.s.ses across the pond bottom, squatting over spermatoph.o.r.e after spermatoph.o.r.e, taking in seminal fluid with her cloacal lips. The mating occurs in groups of three to fifty or more, and with all that twisting and turning of spots I imagine it must look like a sort of subaquatic Jackson Pollock painting.
Although it is referred to as Big Night, the mating period can actually last from three days to over two months; but even when prolonged, breeding usually occurs in just a few major bouts. The point is not to miss it. Because I couldn"t know when it was going to happen, by my logic, I needed to be at the water before it possibly could. So all through March I hiked to frozen pools. I wasn"t wearing snowshoes anymore-but only because the trail was so packed I didn"t need them; if I stepped off the path, winter was still knee-deep.
Five years ago, after four years of trying unsuccessfully to conceive, my husband and I gathered with several other couples at a local agency for an informational meeting on adoption. It was exactly the opposite of Big Night. There we were: the city"s infertile, unfecund, no matter our achievements, unable to create in the most basic, most ancient of ways, in a way some people did by accident. There was no need to meet and greet. We knew all about each other-the baby-name books resignedly shelved amid rows of travel guides, all the insane things we"d considered, like postcoital headstands and egg-white lubricant. But in spite of the air of defeat, the faces of the women looked paradoxically triumphant; their determination to be mothers would not be trounced by this refusal of their unborn children to come into existence, to continuously pa.s.s out of them like tears, not solid, but liquid. After receiving a fat folder of handouts, my husband and I paraded to our seats, navigating the circuitous route afforded by round tables b.u.t.ted up against walls in a small room. We sat down and took off our coats. I heard something but didn"t move. Then, a voice: "Your wallet," it said.
I turned and saw the source of the sound I had ignored. My wallet had fallen out of my pocket. It was now lying on the floor in the center of the room. The finger of the man who had seen it fall extended toward it, as if accusing us all of what it seemed we were about to do: buy something. Not a baby, of course. What was it we really wanted?
Although the child wish itself may not be innate, it may still have natural underpinnings. Our biological clock is perhaps not set at "baby" but at more abstract things: security, love, esteem, meaningfulness. Such needs can be met in many ways, including having children. And the child wish, of course, like all human behavior, is heavily influenced by learning and environment. Perhaps no other period in history than the 1950s and 1960s, with its focus on the perfect family-think Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver-has made it seem as if not having children is abnormal, that if you choose to remain childless, you don"t know what you are missing.
The child wish can be so strong, sometimes good people who want to be parents do desperate things. A week earlier, I had read a blurb in the U.S. news section of my local paper about a man and woman who traded an exotic bird for two children. The guardian of the children wanted $2,000, originally, for the boy and girl, four and five years old, respectively. But the couple, who had been trying unsuccessfully to get pregnant for years, did not have two grand, so they gave her $175 in cash and their $1,500 pet c.o.c.katoo.
The "adoptive" parents, according to the case detective, "had good intentions from what we see." But I had trouble believing this, that to buy a child, even to raise it as one"s own, was not tainted with the same unlawfulness as to sell one. An economic transaction seemed no way to start a family. Weren"t the buyers as much at fault as the sellers? After all, if there were no demand in the first place, there would be no supply. Isn"t that the law of economics?
Dutch philosopher Paul van Tongeren has written that a paradox arises when "the manner in which we want something is in conflict with the nature of the thing we want." Although he seems to be writing primarily about the use of a.s.sisted reproductive technology, I can see how adoption also applies. According to van Tongeren, the child wish hinges on elements of surprise combined with unmatched love; we don"t choose our children and we love them unconditionally. What we desire when we desire children is actually a wild unbridling from choice and control-the most intense astonishment and rapture the universe can provide. Yvonne Denier, of Belgium"s Center for Biomedical Ethics and Law, agrees: when we wish for a child, she notes, we want something that by its very nature escapes us, something we are unable to control attaining. We cannot decide to have a child, she writes, in the same way we might decide on a holiday destination, by weighing pros and cons and choosing the characteristics we do and do not want.
Compared to the heat of pa.s.sion in which one normally produces children, a.s.sisted reproductive technology and adoption can at times feel rather calculated. Beyond s.e.x, fulfilling the child wish naturally is pa.s.sive, a nine-month unraveling from womb to world governed only by imagination. It takes just two people. ART and adoption, in contrast, usually take much longer and involve crowds of stakeholders. Both feel deliberate, premeditated, a long road of things changing hands. ART can feel like playing G.o.d, disrupting natural selection, messing with the rhythm of the universe. We measure adoption"s progress not by sonograms and tiny knit caps, but in fits and starts of legalese and paperwork. At times one worries that adopting means partic.i.p.ating in a system that exploits the poor. One unhinges at the phrases child laundering and human trafficking.
My husband and I left that day without filling out any paperwork, unable to pinpoint exactly what it was we wanted or to reconcile that with how we were going to get it. We also never set foot in a fertility clinic. Five years pa.s.sed. We met a couple who did not want to become parents, a friendship that did not require bracing ourselves for the inevitable phone call or dinner announcement that would change every second spent with them to a reminder of our inadequacies. We took up wine and mojitos and went to Paris. We got advanced degrees. Every month we buried the possibility of a child, until we had no more room for grief.
Once, teaching that herpetology session at the environmental education center, surrounded by fifth-graders, I held a northern red salamander we"d just found. As I relayed some fact or another the salamander began to writhe, opened its mouth, and out popped another, smaller salamander.
"It just had a baby!" one of the children shouted.
"No," I said after a moment, gently correcting him, "I think that was dinner."
Many salamanders, including the northern red, engage in cannibalism. The tiger salamander-the country"s most widespread species-actually produces larva that can develop to be either cannibalistic or not. When populations are dense, the cannibalistic morph appears. Through smell, it can tell whom it"s related to and how closely they"re related, preferring to prey on non-kin.
The fifth-graders and I knew that amphibians don"t have live births, and births don"t originate from the same place as words. But what had happened seemed perfectly natural, expected even: something smaller had come from something larger. So I have to admit, looking down on what had occurred, feeling topsy-turvy from the moment, birth was also my first thought.
The tendency to see death as birth, or link the two in some way, is not all that unreasonable a leap. For an organism programmed for survival, recognition of mortality results in all kinds of tricks of the mind to reduce our anxiety, including, according to one study, increasing our desire for children. It makes sense: children offer both literal and symbolic immortality. They can carry on one"s genes, one"s beliefs, one"s business, one"s memory. Part of our wish for having a child is really about reducing our fear of no longer existing.
Is this why, at age thirty-eight, sitting in an airport waiting for our plane after visiting my family at Christmas, watching worn-out parents trying to corral their spirited children, I turned to my husband, who had over the past five years often brought up adoption, and said, "Let"s do it"?
Fear of death is hardly the only motivator for having children, and certainly not a totally conscious one. There are a multiplicity of factors, measured by many tools: the "Reasons for Parenthood Scale," the "Parenthood Motivation Index," and, my favorite mostly because of its t.i.tle, which sounds like something a six-year-old might create to interview Santa Claus, "The Child Wish Questionnaire." I muddle through the research: a whole host of causes for desiring children exists, ranging from happy early childhood memories to the influence of organized religion and traditional female s.e.x roles to the belief that having a child around is "nice," makes one happy, and provides a unique relationship. Nothing is that surprising. What actually surprises is the reality of parenthood, which, most research suggests, decreases happiness. Much has been written about it. Roy F. Baumeister, in Meanings of Life (1992), called this the "parenthood paradox." Perhaps the most cited indicator of the lowered sense of well-being felt by parents is the fact that on one survey, women rated taking care of their children only slightly more positive than commuting and doing housework. This makes the great lengths folks using ART or adopting go to even more curious.
By April the snow began to melt. I knew the time was approaching for Big Night. At work, vernal pools strung through my mind like the trail of shiny white pebbles laid by Hansel and Gretel. One night I took the dog to the woods. In the past she had stumbled upon a spotted salamander or two when we weren"t even looking. But that night, when the beam from my headlamp, aimed at curious holes in the mud-probably openings where squirrels had buried and dug up nuts, or rained-out tracks from deer hooves-crossed before her in the dark, in the rain, she just looked confused.
If even the dog was flummoxed, I thought, what would a baby do? We had received a return letter from the adoption agency confirming our entry in the May lottery, but with no information regarding when or where it would happen, or how they would deliver the results. I worried a little bit. Could a baby do this? I wondered.
Could you bring a baby to the woods in the rain on a cold night? Sit it on your hat or gloves laid side by side-like you sometimes do yourself-on top of the wet gra.s.s while you moseyed around looking for amphibians? A fear overtook me. How would I change as a parent? Would I leave my baby at home with my husband while I went on amphibian hunts? Would I stop hunting altogether? I didn"t find any salamanders that night, but when I got home and took off my clothes to shower, I did find the first tick of the season. Ticks don"t faze me. But how would I feel if I found this tick crawling over the pudgy little kneecap of my amphibian-hunt-spectating baby?
A certain level of ambivalence toward parenthood is common. A 1997 study in the Journal of Marriage and the Family found ambivalence toward childbearing in 20 percent of young couples. A 2010 Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology article concludes that some ambivalence toward childbearing is "widespread." And the 2012 National Center for Health Statistics reports that 37 percent of U.S. births are unintended, meaning mistimed or unwanted-more than a third. Particularly for women, to whom most childbearing and -rearing responsibilities still fall, and who more accurately antic.i.p.ate all these responsibilities, whether or not to have a child is a complex issue.
And statistics show the social pressure to have children may be changing. One study followed 12,700 U.K. women born between 1950 and 1960 to their midforties. Seventeen percent are childless. That number was 10 percent for those born in 1946 and rose to 19 percent for those born in 1960. Delaying parenthood has birthrates down in multiple countries: Greece, Switzerland, Britain, j.a.pan, Canada. While delaying parenthood doesn"t necessarily mean couples will remain childless, it does alter the idea that childlessness is selfish, shameful, or to be pitied.
A married friend of mine who decidedly does not want children-never has, never will-once asked her mother, who also had two boys and another girl (all healthy, all successful), what she thought about having children. The reply: "If I could do it again, I wouldn"t." My friend was pleased with the answer, which vindicated her own feelings. And yet, of course, she would not exist if this very woman had not conceived her.
Chances of becoming pregnant through ART, one cycle of which costs, on average in the U.S., $12,400, an amount rarely covered by health insurance, are 40 percent for women aged thirty-five and under, 32 percent for women aged thirty-five to thirty-seven, 22 percent for women aged thirty-eight to forty, 12 percent for women forty-one to forty-two, 5 percent for women forty-three to forty-four, and 1 percent for women forty-four and older. Despite less than promising odds for even the youngest age bracket, each year more than 85,000 women choose ART, on average requiring three cycles (over $36,000) to have a "live birth," a clinical-sounding term which also includes babies born alive, preterm, who won"t survive.
Adoption may seem like less of a gamble: if you have unlimited funds, inconceivable patience, and openness to a child with any type of needs, you will end up a parent. But most people do have boundaries. When I looked at the numbers, I was comfortable with the $3,000 required for a home study and initial fees, even though I knew we might never be chosen by an expectant couple considering adoption; but I worried about the unpredictable amount we might pay for prenatal care, legal fees, and counseling to an expectant mother who could understandably change her mind at some point during the pregnancy or (in Wisconsin) the thirty-day period after birth (called a "false start"-for the majority, 72 percent, false starts costs less than $5,000); the possibility of this happening multiple times (38 percent of adoptive parents have at least one false start); or, in the unlikely chance a birth mother with whom we were matched gave birth to a baby with serious defects (chances: less than 4 percent), that we would make the decision to walk away. If we did this, our losses would be big: the entire cost of the adoption (usually around $25,000), any hope of ever becoming parents, and our own integrity.
I wondered how we would fund an adoption should we win the lottery (pardon that irony). I did some research; one article listed hard-to-get grants, loans, and ideas for saving up this large chunk of money, ending, rather ridiculously, with the idea of garage sales and bake sales. Leave no stone unturned, the last line said.
ART and adoption both involve uncertainty, though hardly the type von Tongeren and Denier describe that characterizes the child wish. Any uncertainty involved in ART and adoption clashes with a cavalcade of consciously and carefully considered decisions, procedures, phone calls, and appointments. Often you must move forward deliberately in the face of crushing defeat. The child wish can become a child obsession. Why do people go through with it?
I found more insight into the answer to this question not from studies of the motivations of couples considering IVF or adoption (such studies tend to give results not much different from studies of those trying to conceive naturally), but in studies of problem gambling. Research on gambling addiction gleans insight on how we make decisions, how we respond to personal gains and losses, and why we take risks. Humans seem to be drawn to the astounding occurrence, regardless of its likelihood of happening. We are traditionally bad odds-makers. We believe that a win is likely after a series of losses, just as we expect sun after a week of rain, or, if you are looking for salamanders, vice versa-though here our a.s.sumptions may be correct, as weather does follow patterns. We abhor cognitive regret-stopping something too early and missing out on the next big reward-and are driven to recoup our losses. There is always the possibility that, although we never know where or when we"ll hit it, a big win is just around the corner. One more rock overturned, one of my sources said, and you"ll find dinner.
The closer it got to the adoption lottery, however, I found myself no more distressed about losing than I was about winning. I began, salamander-style, to get cold feet.
The adoption lottery seemed a bit unconventional, despite its being hosted by a licensed Christian social service organization of Wisconsin and upper Michigan. When my husband and I first heard of it, I imagined that if they drew your application, somewhere, instantaneously, a stork that would soon appear above the thatched roof of your own house was plucking a baby from the pond where all little children lie, according to the Hans Christian Andersen tale, "dreaming more sweetly than they will ever dream in the time to come." It seemed almost too good to be true.
The prize, though, if they drew your application, wouldn"t be a baby but acceptance into the agency"s domestic infant program, just the start of the sometimes multiple-year process of becoming an adoptive parent. It"s a popular agency, probably because of its long, successful history of providing good counsel to birth parents and adoptive families, as well as its reasonable fees. So instead of dealing with a never-ending wait list, they hold a biannual lottery.
At the meeting required to enter the lottery, we were told that on two unspecified dates-one in early May and one in early November-social workers from the organization"s various offices throughout the state would gather together, number the applications, put the numbers in a hat, and blindly draw a particular quant.i.ty determined by their leader. After we mailed in our application, I wondered often about this event. I imagined tiny slips of paper-the one with my number on it, for instance-blowing off a table when someone exited or entered the room before it made its way into the hat, leaving me with no chance at all of being picked. Was there a lottery witness? Did a senior citizen stand against the wall, hands joined together solemnly as on so many states" televised daily lotto picks, to ensure that everything went fairly and squarely? And if, as the social worker informed us, we would be allowed to reconsider the items we marked on the application again at a later date-whether we could parent a child with microcephalus or one born from a schizophrenic, for instance-why was it even on the lottery application in the first place? Was this really some kind of weeding-out process? I imagined the social workers-all women, most likely mothers themselves-laughing wildly at those whose applications indicated a desire for the perfect child, ripping them up, and trashing them immediately. If this truly was a lottery, why not just have us write our name and number on the back of a raffle ticket and, if our ticket was drawn, consider the hard questions later?
Some psychologists believe gambling mirrors s.e.xual excitement, with its repeated buildup, climax, and release of tension. Maybe this is why the idea of the adoption lottery excited my husband and me so much, why we chose this agency over others where we could have signed a contract and jumped right into the adoption process. It felt natural to begin parenthood this way: to cast our lot, and then wait a month or two to see what happened.
Mid-April rolled around. I still had not seen a single salamander. One weekend the forecast was warm and rainy, but I was busy entertaining a friend who had flown in to visit. On Sat.u.r.day she slept in, and I grabbed an umbrella to walk the dog and check out an overflow area near our lake, finding two deep open holes: turtle hatchlings must have overwintered in the nest and emerged in the last few days. It was a sign of something-but as of yet, I saw no amphibians.
We stayed indoors all weekend. On Sunday morning we missed a call from my husband"s little brother. On Sunday night it was still raining. He called again, and my husband disappeared to talk to him. He returned to announce that his brother"s wife was pregnant-twelve weeks pregnant, with identical twins.
I left my husband and guest to hunt for salamanders. Many factors were at work in my decision to go out that night, and I don"t deny any of them. The major mistake in psychology may be the belief that awareness changes behavior. It doesn"t: we like our social pressure, our sorrow, our envy. I knew I should be overjoyed by the prospect of two new nieces or nephews-and I was-but I admit I was also irritated, as if there were some kind of cosmological math occurring that didn"t add up: two babies for them, and zero for us.
I drove the streets past every pond I knew, looking for slick salamander bodies in my headlights, wondering how many I was running over in my desperate quest. But it began to snow. In the morning five inches would cover the ground. I became dizzy from the windy country roads, staring into the oncoming flakes with my brights on. The seasons ran through my mind, lapping one another. They tangled in my brain and I couldn"t shake the feeling that I"d missed something, even though I knew it was still early. It felt too late.
A week or so later I bought a pair of boots-no matter that I should be saving money-at the local Fleet Farm, the kind kids wear to jump in puddles (or obstetricians, I recently found out from a friend, whose son"s birth proved messy and more difficult than the norm). I couldn"t believe I"d been traipsing around the sh.o.r.es of ponds all these years without them. I also couldn"t believe I was still traipsing around the sh.o.r.es of ponds at my age, a kitchen strainer in hand. I knew I should be shuttling kids to soccer practice, piano lessons, laundering the clothes of kids who do this. Was there something wrong with me? Because I didn"t have children I couldn"t stop being one? I felt like a ten-year-old boy, not a thirty-eight-year-old woman. In an old army ammunition plant near Madison, Wisconsin, a reservoir contains a population of tiger salamanders that, in adapting to their enclosed environment, have become neotenic, retaining for life their juvenile characteristics-feathery gills, keeled tails. They still reproduce, but along with their young, never leave the water to live on land as do most adult tiger salamanders. Officials want to drain the reservoir, seen as a safety hazard, but locals are working hard to preserve it and its salamander population.
The day before Easter I hiked to a pond a couple miles into the forest. It was dry and warm, so I still didn"t find any salamanders. For this reason, I was reluctant to put on my boots, which I had been carrying in a backpack. Finally, since I didn"t want to have carried them in vain, I slipped them on and waded into the water. That is when I saw them.
All over the substrate, on submerged sticks and gra.s.ses, like a thousand tiny gla.s.s slippers, lay the spermatoph.o.r.es of now-vanished male spotted salamanders. I picked up a stick where a salamander had laid three in a row to examine them more closely. They were translucent, the size of half your pinkie fingertip. You might think they were some kind of tree mold, or something a snail left behind. They littered the bottom of the pond like confetti, evidence of the start of the salamander new year. Upon further inspection, I found floating beneath last year"s submerged cattail leaves loose constellations of eggs coalescing into infant galaxies.
I wanted to pick them up, but two feet was as far as I could go. I began to sink a little, and water threatened to deluge my boots. I was in the muck.
Despite knowing that the day-to-day tasks of raising an infant (changing diapers, doing laundry, cleaning up vomit) and raising a teenager (worrying, feeling hated) are unlikely to increase my happiness, and that social pressures to have children and labels of selfishness for the child-free are diminishing, I have not lost my child wish. Perhaps my (and others") child wish is so strong because the paradox of parenthood was nonexistent in the ancestral evolutionary environment. When we lived in small clans and tribes, children weren"t such a drain on just two people. The "village" helped to care for the howling, nocturnal infant and adolescence wasn"t so trying on parents because children began their own families at p.u.b.erty.
So say Sonja Lyubomirsky and Julia K. Boehm of the University of California, Riverside, in their 2010 article "Human Motives, Happiness, and the Puzzle of Parenthood" (Perspectives on Psychological Science). Furthermore, they point out that studies indicating a correlation between parenthood and decreased well-being have a severe limitation: it may not be possible to measure the kind of joy we receive from hanging out with our kids.
Consider this: When my nephew was a baby (he is eighteen now) I carried him along on a hike with my mother and his two sisters. We jumped over puddles in ATV trails where, annually, American toads laid their jellied egg-strings, and descended to the creek where my father had often taken my sisters and me as children. A soft wind blew aspen leaves from the trees. I took in the whole scene. But then my attention was caught by something I will never forget: my nephew"s long moment of focus on a single leaf falling to the creek, from sky to water"s surface. It was the first time he had seen the likes of this. He had no room in his head for the big picture, for cycles and seasons and laws of physics. His life thus far was a patchwork of private astonishments. Maybe this is what children give us.
The night of Easter was warm and humid. When I walked the dog, the spring peepers were deafening, like some kind of unoiled mechanism inside my ears. Despite my previous day"s discovery of the eggs and spermatoph.o.r.es, I reasoned that maybe a bout of latecomer-breeding would happen again that night.
Back home, sweating, I sat in a chair facing my husband, who was on the couch typing up his doctoral thesis.
"I feel like tonight is the night." I said. "It"s foggy. It"s still sixty degrees. And it"s very humid."
I was surprised when he put his laptop to the side and grabbed his camera to accompany me. We made the brief drive to the pool. Right away, when we exited the car, I saw something dark and glossy in the middle of the road. A salamander. Not the spotted but the blue spotted: slightly smaller and more slender, deep indigo on top, cloud-colored on the bottom, with sky-blue speckles. Blue spotteds also migrate to vernal pools in great ma.s.ses, though their mating dance is more private as they pair off in the water, spread out, and lay their eggs mostly singly, attached to underwater vegetation.
When we entered the woods, we were in new territory. My husband and I have spent plenty of time outside in daylight hours, and certainly done our share of camping, but this was the first time we"d been out and about together in a dark wood. And it was unexpectedly pleasant. Something rustled, a sound that, we were surprised to find when we shined our lights at the ground, came from leaves lifting over worms pushing out of the soil. For a while we saw nothing, but when we got closer to the water they started appearing, every five feet or so a blue-spotted salamander, same as the one we saw on the road.
"This is a good pool," my husband declared, and I felt a small surge of affirmation. "I wonder if there are any in the frog pond by my work."
"The frog pond?" I asked, curious.
"The overflow area by the lake," he replied.
We went to check out this pond, along with another one nearby. The night was perfect. We labored for hours, covering ground we"d never walked in daylight. Even though we saw no nuptial dancing, it was clearly a Big Night for blue-spotted salamanders. I"d never seen so many. We didn"t get home till after midnight, and fell into bed, exhausted.
We did not win the lottery. The news was delivered in the mail along with another child characteristics checklist-blank, to be pondered all over again-and an invitation to enter the next lottery, which would occur in November. Earlier that week we had also received a large manila envelope enclosing a poster-sized drawing of "Quinn County." My niece, for a school a.s.signment on mapping, had named a district after us. I wondered what part of that child"s mind, who lives 800 miles distant and whom I hadn"t seen for a few months, I occupy. What word ignited her memory of me, brought me into existence in a place I no longer inhabit, to be gifted with a whole province?
We must never balk at unfamiliar territory. The worlds we discover, like those unantic.i.p.ated red eft migrations that so engrossed my students or the midnight parade of blue-spotted salamanders my husband and I encountered, are often more astounding than what we set out for. For the truth is this: no one is desperate for a child until they can"t have one. The child wish is an art. We may entertain it any way we want as long as we know it is not about fulfillment. We must recognize that the laws mothers everywhere lay across the land-the gra.s.s is always greener; life is a gamble-were writ by the universe long ago and to live fully we must embrace them.
Finished with lotteries, I picked up the phone and called another adoption agency that had openings. I would, I decided, burrow beneath the bills and contracts, let them occupy a level I was not fully conscious of, as do those fossorial creatures I so admire, surfacing and resurfacing for the false starts. I would invite the ambivalence, the uncertainty that accompanied my original wish for a child, which is what, finally, defines it. Right then all I felt was calm. It was a calm that allowed me to imagine what it would look like if I ever found those spotted salamanders on Big Night in the beam of my flashlight: the yellow spots on their backs a hundred gold coins tossed into a fountain-the child wish, in whatever way it would, unraveling.
JUSTIN PHILLIP REED.
Killing Like They Do in the Movies.
FROM Catapult.
1. Digging Beneath My Uncle"s Feet.
In 1996, I knew nothing of the word lynch, only that it was also the last name of a girl in my grade whom none of us talked to.
They found Uncle Craig hanging from a tree on McKeever Road. I remember that his skin was darker than most of the skin I had seen, remember thinking later that his body and the tree must have shared a darkness. Crooked silhouette of limbs and fingers and trunks, all that Carolina morning burning holes through it. I shouldn"t have been able to beautify that image. I want to take to task my mind"s archive of envisioned, consumable violence.
At seven, I knew only what it was: a hanging. Not who, not why, and not since when.
A chain of a.s.sociations drags me out of sleep. I dreamed someone tattooed on my forearm a talismanic pentagram. I somehow surface recalling the gruesome kills of Michael Myers throughout the Halloween franchise. All the white teenage girls, strangled or bleeding out, and then Tyra Banks: gutted and hanging by the neck from a wire. I demand a metaphor for how these scenes are imagined-how dust and waste and forgotten things might collect in the bed of a huge river, how I could pick up a small stone formed from centuries of this and wonder about its weight in my palm, the color contrast, and never question the river, what cut across it, sank through it, floated on its surface.
It"s not that Michael Myers had never strung up a body before Halloween: Resurrection (2002). On the contrary, it was by then the killer"s hallmark to suspend his victims, c.o.c.king his head in odd curiosity or appraisal of his work. It"s that Banks"s Blackness, her Black woman body silent in the center of the room, reveals the grotesque as no curio but a well-known wound. I"ve been failing to write a poem that ends with the lines this body didn"t teach you all/you know about gore, but d.a.m.n/if it didn"t try.
I haven"t thought about Uncle Craig in I don"t know how long, had forgotten ever having known someone who was lynched, and this lapse is what troubles me when I throw back the sheets. I ask my mother for details, and she calls from work, and yeah it had to be about "96 because that was the year after Daddy died and left her with two sons and the year my sister was born, and she wants to send me pictures of Craig"s daughter"s daughter, who is beautiful and in one picture is holding my baby niece, and our girls are always beautiful, but yeah, Momma doesn"t think they ever found who did it, doesn"t think they were really looking, no use in me being mad about it now, she"s gotta go visit Craig"s wife Aunt Deborah in Columbia and see the new granddaughter, and she"s gonna send me all these pictures of the beautiful girls.
2. We Live on Elm Street.
Wes Craven died. Brain cancer. Violent, but relatively goreless, considering. Features and images went up online to commemorate what Craven had given us. I wonder if maybe lately I don"t have much grief left on reserve for famous white men, or if I have trouble mourning in general, but in a predictable mix of homage and nostalgia, that evening I decided to watch A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Craven"s cla.s.sic franchise-starter in which razor-fingered Freddy Krueger stalks the dreams of four archetypal suburban kids.
I rarely think of Craven, but I can easily visualize many of the kill scenes that made him famous and his killers infamous. I keep a mental library of the kills. I often call on them while writing poems as though for a diction of fantasized violence, a showcase of its p.r.o.nunciations. This is what Craven and his counterparts have given me.
A few minutes into the film I began to dread the rest of it. Each scene seemed to climb toward the least red death in the film-that of Rod, the first victim"s dark, "rough-edged," pretty-faced boyfriend, the prime suspect in her death; Rod, whom Freddy-existing somewhere between nightmare and poltergeist-hangs by a bedsheet in what will appear to the always-ain"t-seen-nothin" cops to be an otherwise empty jail cell.
It"s a bloodless kill. It looks to the adults like a simple guilt-fueled suicide. Meanwhile, I barely register it as the scene of a film. My ears fumble the dialogue. My eyes take in the images from the laptop screen, but my mind is digressing, recycling props kaleidoscopically, replacing Rod with Sandra Bland. That I can color in the glue-and-scissors details around Bland"s death with a scene as outrageous and inventive as this one irritates me. The story from the Waller County jail has as many holes, cuts, edits, and special effects as Craven"s slasher. Black ghosts dangle in all the corners of my horror flicks lately, even when I am not looking.
Upon discovering Rod"s body, the heroine, Nancy, shrieks the beginning of her long frustration. She knows what"s killing her friends, what"s coming after her. Knowing makes her crazy. Disrupting everyone else"s resistance to knowing makes her the problem.
3. Everybody Knows Your Name When I enter the bar, its walls are talking loudly among themselves, the way a dead woods might always be filled with falling trees regardless of whether an eavesdropping ear would hear. One wall has its mouth full of Josephine Baker and all her feathers. Another holds Miles Davis in the dark throat of its holler, his trumpet paused mid-rapture. There are others, bound in frames, jazzing up the s.p.a.ce. All the patrons are white. Their beer voices slap up the Black talent and bounce back. I come like a gap in a white caravan and grit my teeth against the din of it. Down an aisle of stools and minimalist tables, a vintage-looking man plays a vintage-looking piano, grinning at the skinny woman thinly singing another jazz standard, her hair in a vintage-looking bun. A young New Yorker sits across from me and gets bored with my pointing out how white s.p.a.ces have "this thing" for making ornament of nonwhite strife and achievement-which are often difficult to tell apart. I"m also bored. I"m trying to understand this nearly ubiquitous need for the Negro edge. Bodies dangling like festive decorations, tricking the light. Somehow I"ve become a conduit for haunting-a needle pushed across the black cut, which spins even when I don"t want to lower my nose to it because maybe tonight my spine needs respite from the violent signals of memory and literacy. How hopeful. Not this night. What happens when I"m not here? What am I a.s.sumed to cosign when I am here? These are two different questions with similar answers. Sometimes when I say I"m bored, I mean bored into. White nostalgia in the age of the hipster bar is a dense sulfuric stink. For one reason or another, I keep inhaling. I order a pizza and neat whiskeys.
4. Who Kills Casey Becker We are introduced to a blonde, and the plot seems likely to center on her. She is stalked and attacked, but her blondness and surplus lines of dialogue are supposed to save her. She dies around twelve minutes in, murdered in the most violent way. The violent murder of a blonde who spoke frequently suggests that no one is safe. Craven"s Scream, credited with revitalizing the slasher subgenre in 1996, follows a formula previously deployed in A Nightmare on Elm Street. I can trace the tradition back to Hitchc.o.c.k"s Psycho.
Some nights, when I want to slip inside the guilty s.p.a.ce between guaranteed discomfort and the foreknowledge of it, I turn on the movie just to watch this paradigm-shifting first scene. The killing of Casey Becker in Scream was momentous. It marked the end of Craven"s hiatus from big-box-office horror. It marked Drew Barrymore"s return to prominence. It established the Ghostface Killer-that easily laughable horror symbol-as a significant addition to the lineage of masked murderers. It brought the Michael Myers tradition back to the unsuspecting suburbs, where high school girls are often home alone and anyone, especially their boyfriends, could be the home-invading butcher. It"s as if in the imagination of Smalltown, USA, few other perils exist.
The killing of Casey Becker was historic. It"s difficult to see the scene-her body disemboweled, dragged, and hanged from a large tree with the rope of a swing-as existing outside of American history, as created anywhere but in the continuum of a societal id that can"t forget what it"s seen its own hands do, that merely shuffles the moving parts of memory.
There being no Black characters in Scream and so few in its contemporaries ill.u.s.trates a dissonance, the rasp of an unintended truth. These films imagine the extremities of white cultural depravity and brutality but do so in an America where only whiteness factors (and is in fact not "white" but some agreed-upon glare of h.o.m.ogeneity convinced of its comfort). This arrangement falls back quickly on psychosis-as-motive, in which the mysteries of mental disorder and individual deviance are alibis for the whites-only fantasy. The artifice of chance is the drama. In the case of Scream, the logic seems presented like so: "These two white teens are psychological anomalies and their killing spree of other white teens is an isolated incident although all of their parents are always circ.u.mstantially absent and there will be a sequel in which another white man terrorizes the very same white people ..."
5. My Other Education I was a queer and skinny child whose dominant emotion was fear. While other boys practiced succeeding at masculinity, thrashing and breaking their bodies in hours of commune, I hung back and cultivated a knowledge of exits, of how to get out alive, how to avoid entry. I was probably sitting on the floor, legs in a bow, safe from my cousins" game of tackle football in the front yard, when my aunt and uncle put a rented copy of Scream in the VCR.
When I was a fifth- or sixth-grader in after-school care, Momma had an HBO subscription and I had a habit of unwrapping the aluminum foil from the school"s afternoon snacks, folding and shaping it into a hook circa Ben Willis of I Know What You Did Last Summer, and smuggling the flimsy prop out of the cafeteria and onto the playground, where I stalked my cla.s.smates throughout the plastic fort. I daydreamed of drafting a horror novel but only got as far as the cover image. I filled sketchbooks with color-penciled movie posters for teen slashers that existed and some that I hoped soon would. My drawings were decent. My ill.u.s.tration of the new playground had graced the school yearbook cover. One of my tornado scenes, inspired by Jan de Bont"s 1996 special-effects montage Twister, had aired on the morning news. In third grade, my post-t.i.tanic sketches of nude women had stirred some quiet controversy among the faculty, but in the end the princ.i.p.al was lenient, even impressed, having found the renderings "tasteful." I managed to keep the slasher sketches to myself until middle school, when all the low-boiling parts of me wanted to be acted out. My crosshatched knives stabbed no bodies but hovered in white s.p.a.ce, dripping potential.
6. The Punch Line I"m a queer and skinny adult whose flesh has known more blades than fists, whose mind knows the MOs of Bundy, Dahmer, Gacy, Ramirez, and others, who is still a bit bolstered by being able to stomach certain information without a cringe.
One study purports that Black people are believed to feel pain to a lesser degree than whites. Another supports the existence of racial PTSD. Another: the physiological effects of racism can substantially shorten a life. What Black bodies perhaps know: you can spend a long lifetime performing the role of a retort, a punch line. I want to make of this an if-then statement, a colored optimism. My poetry students are optimistic about cliches. They hypothesize that if an artist acknowledges the cliche and/or transforms it just enough, then an audience can more readily accept the cliche.
In 1997, singer Brandy played the lead role in an updated movie version of Rodgers and Hammerstein"s musical Cinderella. The cast-portraying mixed-race families, royal and common-still (humorously) perplexes people on IMDb message boards. The year after, Brandy was Karla Wilson in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, a sequel for which the filmmakers seem to have taken a cue from Scream 2 and included Black characters in the supporting cast and allowed them to survive more than half the action.
Scream 2 cast Omar Epps, Jada Pinkett, Elise Neal, and Duane Martin. In the first minute, Pinkett"s Maureen delivers the line "All I"m saying is the horror genre"s historical for excluding the African-American element," and the sequel laughs loudly at its predecessor. Epps"s Phil jokes about "an all-Black movie," and Craven maybe giggles a little at himself. (His directing credit immediately preceding Scream had been Vampire in Brooklyn, which grossed less than its budget and boasted a predominantly Black cast.) Martin"s character, Joel-a source of comic relief-is the only one of the four who survives Scream 2; the others suffer together a total of at least thirteen stab wounds, Phil and Maureen having been targeted, it turns out, because their names loosely replicated those of white characters who died in the original Scream.
Karla Wilson is the best college friend of Last Summer veteran Julie James, played by Jennifer Love Hewitt. Julie runs a lot but lives again, as does her partner, Ray. Unlike her partner, Tyrell, Karla-having fallen backward through the gla.s.s ceiling of a bedroom, having fallen backward through the gla.s.s roof of a greenhouse, having fallen backward through a gla.s.s door and played dead-also lives, limping into the penultimate scene.
7. She Is (Beside) Herself My first and only real conversation with my great-grandmother, the truest stoic I ever knew, was a warning after she caught wind that I "went around" with white girls. Perhaps she recalled how this would"ve ended in the early part of the century she had lived, had witnessed. The consistent drama of horror seems to be its nestling inside the trope of preying on and violating innocence, which is the domain ruled by young white women, if ruling is a way of being puppeteered. I wonder if Uncle Craig was somebody"s Black friend, or if I should mention that Aunt Deborah could pa.s.s as white.
In Sylvia Plath"s poem "The Jailer," the speaker declares that the t.i.tle figure burns holes in her skin with lit cigarettes, Pretending I am a negress with pink paws./I am myself. That is not enough. I hold these lines like a grudge. Plath"s speaker wants to level an indictment against the shadowy man who has imprisoned, abused, sedated, and violated her. A numeration of injustices. Here, to be burned with cigarettes is apparently a violence that a Black woman traditionally vests. Unambiguously, "paws" belong to an animal. I am myself, as if the rapist"s imagining the inhuman Black body in the speaker"s stead lubricates his brutality. He is deluded, unappeasable. The poem swells with the desperation of this moment. I am myself. For whom is that not enough?
8. Spectacle/Sport Consider the state-sanctioned hubs of public humiliation and mutilation. Gladiator death matches, Crusades, the Inquisition, the evolution of legal public execution including lynching, from the advent of television into continuously looped video clips of police shootings-all as if there"s a consistent desire to access carnage from the safe distance of a spectator. Less than a century out of Jim Crow, I doubt it"s difficult to argue that a public imagination lingers with the same appet.i.te for gore that lynchings-their rape, dragging, shooting, castration, hanging, burning, and displayed decay-once sated. Now it leaches elsewhere.
The physical kill. The imaginary kill. The execution that is n.i.g.g.e.r. The amateur p.o.r.n subgenre of race-play. I tell a friend, No, I won"t let a man call me that, f.u.c.king or not, but I"ve watched a Black man enjoy exactly this somewhere on MyVidster, threefourfive times now. When the white boys slap the hog-tied Rogan Hardy and call him n.i.g.g.e.r, their jaws glitch over the strange shape of the word, their faces momentarily funhoused away from human, the eyelids receding, whites waxing cartoonish. I watch and a heated radius expands. I"ve been sweating the matters of agency and impulse. My friend responds but it"s fantasy-which it is, for everyone except the actors: the man whose mouth makes the killing and the one whose body approximates a corpse. But maybe, I concede, even for them.
9. Unmaking the Monster I try to elude the burden. Then I attempt to share it. I remember how I got here, who sent me, the single sentence that propels me.
"What white people have to do is try to find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have the n.i.g.g.e.r in the first place." James Baldwin poses this challenge on a PBS segment of Henry Morgenthau III"s "The Negro and the American Promise" in 1963. "Cause I"m not a n.i.g.g.e.r," he continues. "I"m a man. But if you think I"m a n.i.g.g.e.r, it means you need it." Skip to 2011: in Chapter 7 ("Black Is Back!") of Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present, Robin R. Means Coleman a.n.a.lyzes Craven"s 1991 cult favorite The People Under the Stairs, "in which the "hood and the suburbs stood in confrontation against each other . . . with the "hood proving victorious." She writes of the white slumlords in the film: The couple, then, represent a bundle of horrible taboos: (1) food (forced cannibalism); (2) death (they murder the two thieves); and (3) incest (among themselves and with their "daughters"). Central to the narrative of their taboos is that these are horrors easily hidden behind wealth and Whiteness; two positions of power which mean one would seldom be suspected of, or can get a pa.s.s for, evil.
Coleman has, by this point in the chapter, already made legible a few ills of Candyman (1992), a supernatural slasher that is perhaps more candid about its leaning on the myth of Black monstrosity than it means to be, practically in syzygy with King Kong and, Coleman argues, The Birth of a Nation. But Candyman"s eponymous hook-handed haint is only the Vader mask to its messy racial mush-mouth.
The Candyman is the vengeful spirit of a lynched man, Daniel Robitaille, mutilated for his miscegenation. His b.l.o.o.d.y acts manifest his desire to seduce the live white Helen to her death. His trail of impoverished Black victims from the Cabrini-Green projects seems peripheral to this bizarre infatuation. Helen debuts as a (bored and scorned and) curious grad student in Chicago. After hearing the legend of Candyman, she"s taken in by a headline: "Cause of Death, What Killed Ruthie Jean? Life in the Projects." Her arrival in "the "hood" from the highway"s good side, looking for sources to inflate her thesis on urban legends, is cute and exploitative. What killed Ruthie Jean is more enigmatic and enticing than what usually kills the all-Black residents of Cabrini-Green, where, according to Helen and her friend Bernadette, every day a kid gets shot. Around seventeen minutes in: BERNADETTE: I just want you to think, okay? The gangs hold this whole neighborhood hostage.
HELEN: Okay, let"s just turn around then. Let"s just go back and we can write a nice little boring thesis regurgitating all the usual c.r.a.p about urban legends.
In recent months I"ve been gradually collecting notes for the practice of centering Blackness. The Candyman is a distraction. Decor. I fold him aside. Helen needs this haunting. Her whiteness and access to a predominantly white inst.i.tution of higher education have failed to elude the risk of mediocrity. Whatever is lurking in the gutted Cabrini-Green projects, whatever killed Ruthie Jean, can save Helen from disappointing namelessness. In a stasis-intrusion model of plot, little dissimilates the intrusion of Candyman (who appears only to her) into Helen"s high-story-condo life from Helen"s intrusion into Cabrini-Green-where most of the blood in the film is shed-except that n.o.body seems to hallucinate Helen, or the corpses made in her presence.
When I view the images of mobs huddled under hanged men, of Michael Brown"s half-fetal body four hours facedown and cops at compa.s.s points, I want to talk about necessity. I want to ask, What do you need? Do you know? What did the landscape of Darlington, South Carolina, need with Craig"s darkness? What does the urge toward ma.s.s murder need with anomalous madness? It seems that forms of atrocity have no use for the semantics of mental fitness. Darren Wilson hallucinated a demon and a body dropped. What did he need? What does ritual human sacrifice need with a G.o.d?
10. Grace and Mercy One of the most insidious facets of Dylann Roof"s ma.s.sacre of the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, is the matter of setting: the Black church is a testament to and tomb of America"s sustained racist violence, a memorial of the pillaged spirit poorly subst.i.tuted with religion. Its insistence on the power of healing forgiveness is unwavering because what else. There is always something to forgive, to get over.