Crying Over Spilled Milk: my afterword to a new Taiwan translation of Jesmyn Ward

Plus, come to my Taipei event at Bookman Books on August 17th; a dialogue on teaching and learning in prison; and book club about Claire Messud's THIS STRANGE EVENTFUL HISTORY

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Jul 07, 2024

Thank you, kind readers, for replying to my missive about letting of English. It means a lot to me. If you’re in Taipei, I have an event here at Bookman Books on Saturday, August 17th at 14:00 to 15:00, where I’ll be in conversation with Katherine Chang about my book Reading with Patrick. You can register for this bilingual event here; I’d love to see you!

Readers of my book often ask how Patrick is doing and what it has been like since its publication. I’ve been thinking through these questions for years, and this is the first time I’ve shared my thoughts on paper. Today’s writing is probably the most honest thing I’ve ever written about it, and I’m really grateful to you for reading.

I incorporated this writing into an afterword of a new translation of Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped, which was just released last week. Ward’s book is a record of five men in Mississippi, among them her brother, whom she lost in a two-year period. 嘉世強 , editor-in-chief of an imprint at China Times, acquired it and asked me to contribute an afterword. I wrote it in English, and it was translated by 何穎怡, who has translated Ocean Vuong, George Saunders, Paul Beatty, and Abdulrazak Gurnah. The editor-translator pair have made a concerted effort to bring African American and African literature to Taiwan. For this reason, among others, their work is close to my heart. (If you can read Chinese, the translation has been published by Okapi.) For today’s newsletter I’ve edited and expanded the afterword.

My parents are from Taiwan, where I now live, but I was born and raised in the United States. I attended public schools in Michigan and then Harvard College, where I found myself craving a sense of purpose. Education was worthwhile, I felt, only insofar as it gave us a moral and political vision to live by. I felt indicted and challenged by the African American writer James Baldwin, who wrote: “There are liberals who read all the right books, who have all the proper attitudes, but no real convictions. When the chips are down and you expect them to deliver, they are somehow not there.”

I took that phrase literally: They are somehow not there. From where were they missing? Where should I put myself?

On the eve of graduation, I decided on the Mississippi Delta, accepting a position as a middle school teacher. At twenty-two, naïve and full of energy, I moved to Helena, Arkansas, a rural town roughly three hundred miles north of LeIsle, Mississippi, where Jesmyn Ward grew up (and the subject of the book you hold in your hands). I chose the Delta, and more broadly the American South, because I saw it as a place of radical action and endurance. It’s a place where, as Ward puts it, “a transplanted people survived a holocaust and slavery,” where “black people in the South organized to vote under the shadow of terrorism and the noose.” Where people “sleep and wake and fight and survive.” I resolved to prove I was Baldwin’s ideal, a person of “real convictions,” a person ready to “deliver.”

Ward’s memoir is set roughly in 2002; I got to Helena not long after. Though its landscape differs from that of LeIsle, the cities face similar problems: rural poverty, de facto segregation, the disappearance of manufacturing jobs. The school I taught in had no library, no gym, no counselor. Half its staff were substitute teachers; one year we cycled through four principals. Designated an “alternative school” for expelled students, it was really, I discovered, a dumping ground for the kids nobody wanted.

Yet, as Ward wrote, the people there are fighters, survivors. My students were eager to find and feed their passions, even if they didn’t initially show it. They savored “silent reading,” a thirty-minute period where they could read any book of their choice. One young woman said it was the only quiet time she had. Another wanted to bring books home to share with her little brothers and sisters. “Books are expensive,” she said, admiring the newness of a freshly arrived shipment. Students read and read, exchanging their favorites. “This class isn’t like other classes, where you sit there and feel stupid,” one told me. “I can hear myself think.”

We read young adult books dealing with loss and death, which prompted the students to open up. All of them—every single one, all of them under seventeen—had a friend who had died. From gun violence, from drugs, from the bad accidents that are more common in rural places. Where should they put their memories? Whose fault was it? Was it theirs? Why did this happen?

Four months after I arrived, we lost one of our own, fifteen-year-old J., shot in the back of the head as he tried to rob a flower shop. At his funeral, I saw that my students already knew the rituals of mourning: what to do, where to place the flowers. The next year, J.’s younger brother became my student. He smoldered with anger and distrust. Once he threw a chair at me; more than once he shoved papers and books from his desk onto the floor. But when I asked him if he’d like to write about his brother, his eyes lit up. Yes, they said, though he didn’t say the word.

I showed him how to do it. Every day after school we worked to shape his poem, chipping away at it like stone. When it was done, I drove an hour and a half on a Sunday to a copy shop to have it blown up to poster size. I hung it on our classroom wall. For the rest of the year, whenever he came to class, the first thing he looked for was his poem. His mother would lay that poem on J.’s grave.

As I read Men We Reaped, I kept thinking about my students: their grief and love, their passion and gifts, their hunger to ask questions and the absence of good answers. I don’t know what it’s like to lose a brother, but Ward’s devastatingly powerful final chapter lets me glimpse that grief: “Every year on the day he died, I wake up to the dread of another year passing. I lock myself in my room, wherever I am living, and I cry until my eyes swell shut. And at the edge of the longing, the terror that I will forget who he was and forget our lives together immobilizes me, pulls me down further.”

She also shows how her brother’s death changes her parents. Her father “stops working and watches television on two different sets at the same time.” Her mother cleans her brother’s grave every few weeks, “picking stray grass, brushing the sand to an even smoothness… ‘I only dream of him as a child,’ she says. ‘He’s always my little boy.’”

An all-Black regiment lost half its men during the Civil War in its assault on Fort Wager, South Carolina, 1863.

The title of Men We Reaped comes from Harriet Tubman, who famously escaped slavery. Instead of going to freedom and safety in Canada, she led at least thirteen missions to rescue enslaved people, including her family members. During the civil war she served as a nurse, armed scout, spy, and officer for the Union army. Tubman wrote about what she witnessed at Fort Wagner, South Carolina, when all-Black regiment failed its assault and lost half its men. She pictures death as a bad harvest, like blighted fruit: “We saw the lightning and that was the guns; We heard the thunder and that was the big guns; we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.”

If you drive through Mississippi and Arkansas today, you’ll see acres of cotton fields in bloom. It’s impossible not to think about the people who once picked that cotton, who worked the land they were promised and never given.

How young people in the Delta relate to this history is one subject of my book, Reading with Patrick. When I met Patrick in my second year of teaching, he was fifteen and in the seventh grade. I was struck by his quiet intelligence and introspective demeanor. He loved reading and thrived on positive reinforcement. I saw a future full of possibility for him. Three years later, just as I was finishing law school, I learned that he’d dropped out of school, gotten into a fight, and killed someone; now he was in jail awaiting trial. I rushed to bring him books to comfort or inspire him, and deliberately included Douglass’s first and best-known autobiography. I thought he’d be moved by it. Douglass is a hero, right? Like Tubman, Douglass chose to stay and fight slavery.

Instead, the book put Patrick in a kind of panic. He fixated on a story Douglass tells about masters giving slaves gin on Christmas Day to prove to them they couldn’t handle being liberated: stumbling through the fields, they begin to believe they don’t deserve to be free. But Douglass isn’t deceived: he refuses the gin, and so refuses ignorance, even as he envies the slave’s ignorance too. It was that envy that Patrick saw in himself. This was his favorite line: “Anything, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me.” Patrick said he related. People don’t want to think about pain, he told me, about the past and how far we still have to go. But we have to think if we hope to be free. So, in spite of the panic, Patrick sped ahead, finishing the book on his own in an unlit concrete stairwell.

The so-called “recreation area” at the jail.

For seven months, as I tutored Patrick, he began to fill notebook after notebook with beautiful, intricate letters to his baby daughter. Soon I became less a teacher and more a librarian, bringing him different books and letting him choose what he liked. He was becoming a writer, a reader, a dreamer, a father.

This is the part of the story where you might expect a redemption arc. That’s the triumphalist turn for Douglass, who went from slave to man, fugitive to world-famous orator. Patrick’s story is not without heroism and grace, but I think instead of Dostoevsky’s House of the Dead, an account of a prison in Siberia, where Petrovich, a nobleman, teaches Ali, a young Tartar, how to read and write. The day Ali is liberated, he throws his arms around Petrovich and sobs: “God will bless you; I shall never forget you, never!” To read this scene is to feel the possibility of brotherhood. But Dostoevsky doesn’t end the story there. He ends it like this: “Where is he now, where is my good, kind, dear Ali?”

Where is Patrick? He isn’t thinking about literature much these days, I think. He’s out of prison but his journey ever since has been excruciating. His mother, his closest friend in the world, died months after his release, from diabetes and heart disease; she was forty-three. He’s applied to hundreds of jobs and been turned away because of his criminal record. Biking to a short-term construction job, he was a hit by a car that didn’t stop; the hospital sent the emergency care bill to a collection agency, which now hounds him. His child support debt is piling up. The state of Arkansas cut off his food stamps, and he has emailed me before to say there’s nothing in his refrigerator. He’s been homeless, he’s been hungry. He’s been beaten up and robbed countless times. He’s self-medicated. And beyond all this, I think, beyond a gutted welfare state and a cruel health care system, he is hounded by his conscience. Sometimes, he tells me, he talks to his victim’s mother at night; he feels he did something he can’t take back, something irreparable. At one point I found him a job in Mississippi but he didn’t take it, out of fear running into the victim’s family. A person who doesn’t feel he deserves to flourish will not flourish.

For months at a time, Patrick will vanish completely, and I’ll have no idea where he is. Sometimes, I get panicky and call local jails and hospitals. When he doesn’t turn up in any of them, I worry he’s lying in a ditch somewhere.

The daily harshness of Patrick’s life, the miserabilist gore I sometimes find reductive in fiction, is excruciating to behold. My book was an attempt to create a record of his potential, his thirst for intellectual liberty—but had he merely been determined by the facts of where he was born? In Brothers and Keepers, a memoir about his brother’s incarceration, the novelist and critic John Edgar Wideman writes, “The story confronted me with its intimidating, legitimate otherness, a resistance and weight that caused me continuously to question any point of view I could fashion to represent that otherness.”

In teaching and then writing, I hoped to negate that feeling Ward describes of being nothing, to attest to the sacredness of a private mind. Patrick’s notebooks and the poems he learned by heart, his gorgeous letters to his daughter and the glow on his face as he played in the backyard with his sisters: about all of this the official record, the police reports, say nothing. “Maybe people look at me and think I’m scary,” Patrick said to me a few weeks after he was arrested. “Like a criminal.”

In the preface to Brothers and Keepers, Wideman chastises himself for naively believing that writing would change his brother’s life. Had he deluded himself? Why had he even written? Thinking about the “contemporary world’s rage to subdue and incarcerate,” he writes, “I’m dogged by a nagging sense of dissatisfaction and futility. Whom does the book address. Whose compassion and/or outrage does it seek to engage. Does all writing, lyric or propaganda, amount to crying over spilled milk.”

For Wideman, the fact that his subject comes from the same race, the same class, the same neighborhood, the same mother and father, does not save him from otherness. Prison is the institution that renders him the Other. So Wideman questions his own authority to write. “Was this my story or not my story; did I belong to it as much as it belonged to me. Who’s in charge here.”

I asked myself these same questions as I wrote Reading with Patrick. Unlike Wideman and Ward, I can’t claim to be a sister in a literal or racial sense. The relationship between a teacher and a former student has little social status or legibility, despite the work and love at its foundation.

The question of the ethics of writing about others becomes more simply about the ethics of living with others. How to live with minimal hypocrisy. How to form relationships beyond one’s own circle. It would be silly to decide, “I will not write about others” without also deciding to commit to moral values of love, friendship, equality, and justice. As for writing, wouldn’t life be less rich and less honest if we were to leave the “legitimate otherness” undescribed, unexplored?

Today I remember the private fictions that sustained me as I wrote: that it would help Patrick in some way. That a millionaire would read it and buy Patrick a house; that the governor of Arkansas would read it and reinstate food stamps; that an employer would reach out and ask how to get in touch with Patrick so he could hire him. None of this happened. Twice a year or so, a generous reader makes a donation to Patrick’s life, and I hold those people close to my heart. Trying to do my part, I gave him a portion of my book advance, created a college fund for his daughter, and still send him money regularly, though I make little. I bought him a car, then another, then another; anybody who has lived in rural America knows a car is an indispensable condition for employment. Over the years Patrick and the mother of his child have sent me emails to say I’m hungry, or the lights are off, or the water got cut off, or I can’t pay for gas to get to the job interview, or the towing company got my car and the bill is $200. Sometimes I find myself wanting proof, like a screenshot of a bill. But how do you take a screenshot of the lights being off?

Some will think I’m a fool, others that I haven’t given enough. Probably both are right. I have a bad feeling sometimes that people in the middle and upper classes avoid relationships with poor people because they don’t want to be asked for money. And that it’s not just simple miserliness that prevents people from giving, but rather the fear of being made a fool.

Can books change lives? Of course they do. We know this from Malcolm X, who taught himself to read and write in prison. Just last month, a friend introduced me to Khaled Miloudi, a French-Algerian writer who was incarcerated for 22 years. He said he’d planned to kill himself inside. But one day in solitary he saw a paper pad on the table. He began to write. And then he read everything he could find. “Words saved my life,” he said.

Still, the fact is that the book I wrote didn’t change Patrick’s life, and it remains ambiguous whether books changed his. Meanwhile, I’ve become an Author, a person who has to peddle her own work. Having not grown up or worked inside the culture industry, I discovered my naïveté on this front. After publishing, I now saw books in a freshly ugly light, as part of a game of commerce, a conduit for personal vanity. Before, I’d revered “the Book,” having cherished it since perhaps the moment I learned to read. Now I no longer do. I regard this as one of the greatest losses and disenchantments in my life. In place of my former reverence is an inner conflict; the part of me I hate (my ambition) battles the part of me I love (a desire to live by my values). The larger backdrop is a structure of class oppression that continues undestroyed. Every few weeks I think about that extraordinary Richard Wright line—that he was angry at himself for writing books that make bankers’ daughters cry.

There are writers, though, whose lives tell us that hypocrisy is not inevitable. They show it through their choices of where and how to live. At the end of Men We Reaped, Ward decides to return to Mississippi. She could have stayed in New York; she could have gone anywhere. Lived anywhere. Worked anywhere. Her Stanford classmates were recruited by top consulting firms and investment banks. “Yet I’ve returned home,” she writes, “to this place that birthed me and kills me at once.”

To choose to live in a place that kills you: this is the paradox that closes her book. It’s the deliberate choice of a thinking woman. It’s the choice of someone who has interrogated what home is: a trap or a muse, a refuge or a suicide, a murderer or a salve? It’s the choice of an artist who knows the beauty of her landscape, its coastline and sunrises. It’s a choice about filial duty; in high school, when she tells her mother she wants to leave, she is told, “You can’t leave. You have to help me with your siblings.” Ward recalls: “When she said that, I felt all the weight of the South pressing down on me […] How could I know then that this would be my life: yearning to leave the South and doing so again and again, but perpetually called back to home by a love so thick it choked me?”

So she decides to make a life and raise a child in the place that killed the children she loved. I say children because all five of the men from her title were just kids when they died.

Ward with her ten-month-old son. Source: Emily Kask, NPR.

Today Men We Reaped is taught in America and across the world, but perhaps most poignantly it’s taught in the very town where Ward was raised. I’m jealous of the high school teachers who have it as a resource; I wish I’d had it. Students need its testimony, its elegy, its manifesto, its poetry. I would have put the book in their hands and said, Read this. And then I would have listened to how they responded, to the parts they liked and the parts they didn’t.

What I admire most is how Ward decides never to look away. She writes, We tried to outpace the thing that chased us, that said: You are nothing. I can picture her stopping mid-motion, turning to examine the thing that’s chasing her, chasing her loved ones, chasing the men she lost. This thing is the legitimate otherness of which Wideman speaks, the devil who tells us he can’t be described. She stands, she looks, she doesn’t run away.

Parts of this piece first appeared in a talk that I gave in 2022 at LARCA (Laboratoire de Recherches sur les Cultures Anglophones at Université Paris Cité). Thanks to the kind invitation of its director Cécile Roudeau.

Teaching and Learning in Prison

My class outside a prison in France, with guest speaker Andre Ward.

I was deeply moved to take part in a two-day dialogue called “Teaching and Learning in Prison.” We invited prison educators, librarians who work with prisons, and formerly incarcerated people who are musicians, writers, activists, social workers, educators, and leaders across France, US and Canada. Our approach was explicitly egalitarian. No long speeches, not much jargon, and real dialogue. I’m grateful to the Center for Critical Democracy at the American University of Paris for co-sponsoring, the John Lewis grant, and to my co-organizers at our nonprofit Dialogue and Transformation: Hannah Taieb, Friederike Winkel, H.W., Lauren Vanzandt-Escobar, and Kassia Aleksic. They did the heavy-lifting while I was in Taiwan.

My writing above is quite bleak, and yet there’s much inspirational work that is being done. Two formerly incarcerated women, Tiina Eldridge and Lorraine Pinnock (listen to this great conversation with Lorraine), spoke about their transformative work in the Canadian program Walls to Bridges. Andre Ward, who was incarcerated for sixteen years, spoke to guys inside at La Santé (a prison in Paris). He’s now executive director of the John Jay College Institute of Justice and Opportunity, where he oversees dozens of initiatives on everything from college access to housing. He wept as he spoke of how far incarcerated people had come; in the 1990s, when he was in prison in New York, nobody inside would have guessed they would be at the forefront of progressive moments today. Yet, he stressed, the guys with whom he did time, among them wrongly convicted Black Panthers and Young Lords, taught him how to see the world and formed who he is today.

Book table at our conference “Teaching and Learning in Prison.” Andre Ward, Khaled Miloudi, and Brigitte Brami, spoke.

Book Club: Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History

We’re reading Claire Messud's wonderful This Strange Eventful History about a pied-noir French family. Join us on Friday, Aug. 2nd, 7 PM EST / Saturday, Aug 3rd, 7 AM Taiwan time. Then, we’ll talk about Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse on Friday, Aug. 30th / Saturday, Aug. 31 (same time). On Friday, September 27th / Saturday, September 28th we’ll read Andrea Lee’s Red Island House. (If you’re into audiobooks, the reader Bahni Turpin is great.) It was wonderful to speak to you all about Claire Keegan’s work. Reply to this email for the zoom link. Thank you!

Erica Lee Schlaikjer 🍉 史光芬

Jul 9Edited

Hi! I read your little bullet point note about starting a new gig with Books from Taiwan. https://booksfromtaiwan.tw/index.php. Would love to learn more! I'm about to release my debut picture book, WILD GREENS BEAUTIFUL GIRL, which is technically *from* a U.S. publisher (Sleeping Bear Press), but it's *about* a young aboriginal Taiwanese girl, inspired by my own Amis heritage. Perhaps you'd be interested in learning more!

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