The Best American Essays 2017 Read online

  A convoy kicked up a rooster tail of dust in the distance to the south. Marines from Third Platoon showed up to make sure the PUC became a POW with no problems. After several minutes the IA convoy pulled alongside Echo’s perimeter and sent a single vehicle into the circle. The man stopped crying as the IA truck reached him. His jaw set as Marines loaded him in, and his eyes searched the sky after they slammed the door. Maybe he took some solace in knowing he’d done what he felt was right. I wondered if I could say the same if the desert’s people took my life tomorrow. I tried to think back to the start of Iraq for me, months before, tried to feel the same feelings and commune with the same beliefs. I watched the small Iraqi Army convoy fade into the desert’s whitewashed horizon. It was just me and Ulrich standing there.

  “I had a strange dream last night,” I said.

  “What happened?” Ulrich said.

  “I had blood on my hands and he was there,” I said with a nod toward where the convoy had disappeared on the horizon.

  Ulrich followed my gaze without answering for a moment. The wind hissed between us.

  “Sounds like being awake,” Ulrich said.

  We turned and started walking back to the part of the perimeter where Machine Guns stood post.

  “You know, I’m beginning to worry about that,” I said. “The way that my nightmares and reality are so similar.”

  “Do you think it has something to do with the stress?” Ulrich asked.

  “Maybe,” I said. “I think it has to do with a lot of things.”

  When we neared the truck, Prockop slept, Ulrich broke away from me to find out where his post would be. He needed to get some sleep, pretty obviously; his words slurred and his syntax jumbled. Whatever was happening in his head wasn’t translating to his mouth right anymore.

  “Well good luck getting a post that’s far enough away you can sleep,” I said. “I’m heading over to the small contingent of IA that came.”

  “I forgot they were with us,” Ulrich said.

  Four Iraqi Army trucks had been tasked by the IA to come along on the safari for Bomb Makers so it could be called a “joint operation.” In actuality the IA slept outside of their trucks on cots they had brought; they slept all night and most of the day. I wanted to get their take on the Bomb Maker, see what they thought and ask if they knew what would happen to him. When Echo had trained in Israel with the Israeli Defense Force Counter-Terrorism Instructors a year or so before going to Iraq, I’d asked the instructors what they thought about Palestinians, since there was so much conflict between the two peoples. One instructor, Tom, went on about killing them; how he would sometimes shoot toward their villages in hopes that his stray round might snuff out a life. Another instructor, Gal, told me how they didn’t want to kill them, that it was war, an unfortunate circumstance that set brothers against each other. Gal had made certain that I was understanding him correctly, that I knew he didn’t take pleasure in killing Palestinians and was only protecting his home and people. I wanted to know if the Iraqi Army had similarly diverse thoughts, or if it was enough to simply be on the winning team.

  The four trucks stood parked in a row forty or so meters outside of Echo’s perimeter.

  “How are you folks?” I asked.

  Eight men lay on cots by their vehicles; they were all middle-aged and overweight, with bellies that hung over their belts and bushy mustaches. None of the vehicles had turrets, and only one of the vehicles was armored. The other three were pickup trucks painted Iraqi Army colors.

  “Mista, water?” one of the men said without bothering to sit up in his bed.

  The man had more rank on his shoulders than the other men, who hadn’t bothered to wake or move at all.

  “You don’t have any water?” I said in complete disbelief.

  “Mista, water, water, please!” the man said again.

  Another one of the men woke up and started asking me for food.

  “I only have enough for me,” I said. “I can’t help you.”

  Now more of the men started begging, some of them getting up to show me their empty water bottles and MREs. My mind was boggled. These men who were supposed to be soldiers were begging the same way the Iraqi children begged for chocolate. After a few more minutes of empty water bottles being waved in my face and MRE trash being thrown at my feet I turned and walked away.

  “Mista, water, please!” Over and over as I walked away.

  “What the fuck were you talking to those Hajjis for?” Sergeant Prockop asked me when I got back to the perimeter. Someone on post must have told him I’d walked out of Echo’s circle.

  “They don’t have any water or food,” I said.

  “What?” Prockop said. “You have got to be kidding me.”

  “I shit you not,” I said.

  “Go talk to Company Guns and see what he can work out for them,” Prockop said before climbing back into his truck to sleep.

  I made my way back to the center of the circle to find Gunny Vance busy looking at maps and personnel rosters. He informed me that each platoon had given up food and water to the IA that had been sleeping by the circle for the last twelve days. Now it was Machine Guns’ turn.

  “I know it shouldn’t be this way,” he said. “But this is the way it is.”

  I nodded in agreement, a grim look on my face.

  “Prockop always says it’s the nature of the beast,” I said.

  Gunny Vance spit a long tendril of chew spit from his mouth to the desert floor.

  “That’s because Prockop knows not to try and make sense of it,” Gunny said. He looked up at me from his map. “That’s something you could learn a lesson from, Arment.”

  I didn’t say anything in response. Maybe he was right and I needed to stop thinking. I looked at the circle of trucks all around me, then back at the Gunny deep in thought over his map, then at the four IA trucks. My walk was more of a stumble back to my post. I had to stand watch during the day; somehow the posts had been shuffled around and I ended up with extra. I let a Marine know to run some of our food out to the IA, then I crawled up in the turret. I lit up a cigarette and started chain-smoking and staring into the desert, trying not to think about anything. But it couldn’t be helped.

  I was standing in the truck’s turret that overlooked the graves. When Echo had first arrived in the desert plain, I’d thought the graves could be used for whoever we caught out here. Now I knew better. One grave for the Bomb Maker, and one grave for whatever was left of me at the end of all this.

  RACHEL KAADZI GHANSAH

  The Weight of James Arthur Baldwin

  FROM BuzzFeed

  It was an acquaintance’s idea to go there, to James Baldwin’s house. He knew from living in Paris that Baldwin’s old place, the house where he died, was near an elegant, renowned hotel in the Côte D’Azur region of France. He said both places were situated in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, a medieval-era walled village that was scenic enough to warrant the visit. He said we could go to Baldwin’s house and then walk up the road for drinks at the hotel bar where the writer used to drink in the evening. He said we would make a day of it, that I wouldn’t regret it.

  For the first time in my life I was earning a bit of money from my writing, and since I was in London anyway for work and family obligations I decided to take the train over to Nice to meet him. But I remained apprehensive. Having even a tiny bit of disposable cash was very new and bizarre to me. It had been years since I had bought myself truly new clothes, years since going to a cash machine to check my balance hadn’t warranted a sense of impending doom, and years since I hadn’t on occasion regretted even going to college, because it was increasingly evident that I would never be able to pay back my loans. There were many nights where I lay awake turning over in my mind the inevitable—that soon Sallie Mae or some faceless, cruel moneylender with a blues song–type name would take my mother’s home (she had cosigned for me) and thus render my family homeless. In my mind, three generations of progress would be undone by
my vain commitment to tell stories about black people in a country where the black narrative was a quixotic notion at best. If I knew anything about being black in America it was that nothing was guaranteed, you couldn’t count on anything, and all that was certain for most of us was a black death. In my mind, a black death was a slow death, the accumulation of insults, injuries, neglect, second-rate health care, high blood pressure, and stress, no time for self-care, no time to sigh, and, in the end, the inevitable, the erasing of memory. I wanted to write against this, and so I was writing a history of the people I did not want to forget. And I loved it; nothing else mattered, because I was remembering, I was staving off death.

  So I was in London when a check with four digits and one comma hit my account. It wasn’t much but to me it seemed enormous. I decided if I was going to spend any money, something I was reluctant, if not petrified, to do, at the very least I would feel best about spending it on James Baldwin. After all, my connection to him was an unspoken hoodoo-ish belief that he had been the high priest in charge of my prayer of being a black person who wanted to exist on books and words alone. It was a deification that was fostered years before during a publishing internship at a magazine. During the lonely week I had spent in the storeroom of the magazine’s editorial office organizing the archives from 1870 to 2005, I had found time to pray intensely at the altar of Baldwin. I had asked him to grant me endurance and enough fight so that I could exit that storeroom with my confidence intact. I told him what all writers chant to keep on, that I had a story to tell. But later, away from all of that, I quietly felt repelled by him—as if he were a home I had to leave to become my own. Instead, I spent years immersing myself in the books of Sergei Dovlatov, Vivian Gornick, Henry Dumas, Sei Shōnagon, Madeleine L’Engle, and Octavia Butler. Baldwin didn’t need my prayers—he had the praise of the entire world.

  I still liked Baldwin but in a divested way, the way that anyone who writes and aspires to write well does. When people asked me my opinion on him I told them the truth: that Baldwin had set the stage for every American essayist who came after him with his 1955 essay collection Notes of a Native Son. One didn’t need to worship him, or desire to emulate him, to know this and respect him for it. And yet, for me, there had always been something slightly off-putting about him—the strangely accented, ponderous way he spoke in the interviews I watched; the lofty, “theatrical” way in which he appeared in “Good Citizens,” an essay by Joan Didion, as the bored, above-it-all figure that white people revered because he could stay collected. What I resented about Baldwin wasn’t even his fault. I didn’t like the way many men who only cared about Ali, Coltrane, and Obama praised him as the black authorial exception. I didn’t like how every essay about race cited him. How they felt comfortable, as he described it, talking to him (and about him) “absolutely bathed in a bubble bath of self-congratulation.”

  James Baldwin and my grandfather were four years apart in age, but Baldwin, as he was taught to me, had escaped to France and avoided his birthrighted fate, whereas millions of black men his age had not. It seemed easy enough to fly in from France to protest and march, whereas it seemed straight hellish to live in the States with no ticket out. It seemed to me that Baldwin had written himself into the world—and I wasn’t sure what that meant in terms of his allegiances to our interiors as an everyday, unglamorous slog.

  So even now I have no idea why I went. Why I took that high-speed train past the sheep farms and the French countryside, past the brick villages and stone aqueducts, until the green hills faded and grew into Marseille’s tall, dusky pink apartments and the bucolic steppes gave way to blue water where yachts and topless women with leather for skin were parked on the beaches.

  It was on that train that I had time to consider the first time Baldwin had loomed large for me. It had occurred ten years earlier, when I was accepted as an intern at one of the oldest magazines in the country. I had found out about the magazine only a few months before. A friend who let me borrow an issue made my introduction, but only after he spent almost twenty minutes questioning the quality of my high school education. How could I have never heard of such an influential magazine? I got rid of the friend and kept his copy.

  During my train ride into Manhattan on my first day, I kept telling myself that I really had no reason to be nervous; after all, I had proven my capability not just once but twice. Because the internship was unpaid I had to decline my initial acceptance to instead take a summer job and then reapplied later. When I arrived at the magazine’s offices, the first thing I noticed was the stark futuristic whiteness. The entire place was a brilliant white, except for the tight, gray carpeting.

  The senior and associate editors’ offices had sliding glass doors and the rest of the floor was divided into white-walled cubicles for the assistant editors and interns. The windows in the office looked out over the city, and through the filmy morning haze I could see the cobalt blue of one of the city’s bridges and the water tanks that spotted some of the city’s roofs. The setting, the height, and the spectacular view were not lost on me. I had never before had any real business in a skyscraper.

  Each intern group consisted of four people; my group also included a recent Brown grad, a hippieish food writer from the West Coast, and a dapper Ivy League sort of mixed-race Southeast Asian descent. We spent the first part of the day learning our duties, which included finding statistics, assisting the editors with the magazine’s features, fact-checking, and reading submissions. Throughout the day various editors stopped by and made introductions. Sometime after lunch the office manager came into our cubicle and told us she was cleaning out the communal fridge and that we were welcome to grab whatever was in it. Eager to scavenge a free midday snack, we decided to take her up on the offer. As we walked down the hall the Princeton grad joked that because he and I were the only brown folks around we should be careful about taking any food because they might say we were looting. I had forgotten about Hurricane Katrina, the tragedy of that week, during the day’s bustle, and somehow I had also allowed the fact that I am black to fade to the back of my thoughts, behind my stress and excitement. It was then that I was smacked with the realization that the walls weren’t the only unusually white entities in the office—the editorial staff was strangely all white as well.

  Because we were interns, neophytes, we spent the first week getting acquainted with each other and the inner workings of the magazine. Sometime toward the end of my first week, a chatty senior editor approached me in the corridor. During the course of our conversation I was informed that I was (almost certainly) the first black person to ever intern at the magazine and that there had never been any black editors. I laughed it off awkwardly only because I had no idea of what to say. I was too shocked. At the time of my internship the magazine was more than 150 years old. It was a real Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner moment. Except that I, being a child of the ’80s, had never watched the film in its entirety, I just knew it starred Sidney Poitier as a young, educated black man who goes to meet his white fiancée’s parents in the 1960s.

  When my conversation with the talkative editor ended I walked back to my desk and decided to just forget about it. Besides, I reasoned, it was very possible that the editor was just absentminded. I tried to forget it myself but I could not, and finally I casually asked another editor if it was true. He told me he thought there had been an Algerian-Italian girl many years ago, but he was not certain if she really “counted” as black. When I asked how that could be possible, I was told that the lack of diversity was due to the lack of applications from people of color. As awkward as these comments were, they were made in the spirit of oblivious commonwealth. It was office chatter meant to make me feel like one of the gang, but instead of comforting my concerns it made me feel like an absolute oddity.

  On good days, being the first black intern meant doing my work quickly and sounding extra witty around the watercooler; it meant I was chipping away at the glass ceiling that seemed to top most of the l
iterary world. But on bad days I gagged on my resentment and furiously wondered why I was selected. I became paranoid that I was merely a product of affirmative action, even though I knew I wasn’t. I hadn’t mentioned my race in either of my two accepted applications. Still, I never felt like I was actually good enough. And with my family and friends so proud of me, I felt like I could not burst their bubble with my insecurity and trepidation.

  So when I was the only intern asked by a top editor to do physical labor and reorganize all of the old copies of the magazine in the freezing, dusty storeroom, I fretted in private. Was I asked because of my race or because that was merely one of my duties as the intern-at-large? There was no way to tell. I found myself most at ease with the other interns and the staff that did not work on the editorial side of the magazine: the security guards, the delivery guys, the office manager, and the folks at the front desk. Within them the United Nations was almost represented. With them, I did not have to worry that one word pronounced wrong or one reference not known would reflect not just poorly on me but also on any black person who might apply after me.

  I also didn’t have to worry about that in that storeroom. I vexingly realized three things spending a week in the back of that dismal room. That yes, I was the only intern asked to do manual labor, but I was surrounded by 150 years of the greatest American essays ever written, so I read them cover to cover. And I discovered that besides the physical archives and magazines stored there, the storeroom was also home to the old index-card invoices that its writers used to file. In between my filing duties, I spent time searching those cards, and the one that was most precious to me was Baldwin’s. In 1965 he was paid $350 for an essay that is now legend. The check went to his agent’s office. There was nothing particularly spectacular about the faintly yellowed card except that its routineness suggested a kind of normalcy. It looped a great man back to the earth for me. And in that moment, Baldwin’s eminence was a gift. He had made it out of the storeroom. He had taken a steamer away from being driven mad from maltreatment. His excellence had moved him beyond the realm of physical labor. He had disentangled himself from being treated like someone who was worth less or questioning his worth. And better yet, Baldwin was so good they wanted to preserve his memory. Baldwin joined the pantheon of black people who were from that instructional generation of civil rights fighters, and I would look at that card every day of my week down there.