The book takes Mozingo, a Los Angeles Times reporter, on a great chase—from Los Angeles, to the American South, to Angola—as he traces the history of the first American Mozingo, Edward Mozingo, a former slave from West-Central Africa who eventually won his freedom by suing for it in a Virginia court. Some Mozingos fought for the Union; others for the Confederacy. Some were abolitionists; others were in the Ku Klux Klan. One thing they all have in common is Edward Mozingo, a man who—in spite of everything—held onto his royal name.

As somebody with very little knowledge of my own name (I’ve always been told we were trouble-making Hungarian Jews—or were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, anyway), the name “Orner” apparently means, I’m told, in French, “to decorate.” I’m sure, though, my own quest, should I ever decide to get to the bottom of my name, will be far less interesting than Mozingo’s. I was moved by the book and Mozingo’s thoughtful prose. He’s a humble narrator, not one of those voices that come at you with all the answers. This is a book about what we don’t know about ourselves. Mozingo’s cluelessness (I mean this in the best sense: we should all be as forthcoming about what we don’t know) is not only endearing and honest, it’s profound. What we don’t know about the names we lug around with us our whole lives might be a key to solving the racial divide we can never seem to get over. We know that deep down—somewhere deep in our roots—we’re all connected. The rare and great thing about Fiddler on Pantico Run is that Joe Mozingo is able to prove it.

***

The Rumpus: Your story is especially remarkable in that Mozingo is only one of two African names to survive slavery. Since you had no idea how significant your name actually was when you went into this, could you trace how the revelation came about?

Joe Mozingo: The understanding that I descended from this African man who kept his African name came in different waves. First there was puzzlement—how could this be?—then deep curiosity, then frustration, and eventually this exhilaration. The frustration was this: I needed to envision my ancestor, Edward, but subconsciously I harbored this white-black binary view that has been bestowed to us by American history. I was white. So it was hard to envision him as my ancestor at first. But that blockage gave way as I researched more, visited the places Edward lived, met more Mozingos—black, white, and in-between—and went to Africa. The exhilaration came then, when I felt that link to him, to this lineage spinning back to the beginning. In Angola, where he sailed off into the Atlantic for Jamestown, that connection to this eternal system just welled up inside. It was this great feeling of opening up.

Rumpus: I was struck by your bringing into the discussion of your own family history one of the great characters in our literature, Faulkner’s Joe Christmas from Light in August. How does the fictional Christmas figure into your story?

Mozingo: What little I heard as a child about my father’s family’s past always carried this scent of dysfunction, a sourness. Brothers didn’t get along, no land was passed down, no family lore existed. We didn’t know where our name came from. When I researched the book, I followed our lineage back to a man, Spencer Mozingo, who looks to have been the orphaned child of an unwed, mixed-race mother in the mid-1700s. He lived next to James Madison, but in poverty. As he grew older, he seemed to have fractious relationships with his children, and he died alone and poor in Kentucky. The more I learned about him, the more I saw this Joe Christmas-type character. Like Christmas, Spencer had one foot across the color line. Officially, he was white, on censuses and court records, but he had this weird name, and no standing in the white world, and he was undoubtedly darker-skinned.  Suspicion had to surround him. I couldn’t know everything about him that I wanted to understand; poor people’s lives were mostly undocumented. So Light in August gave me this oblique view that I couldn’t get through the records: of this rough-cut soul exiled from both worlds, white and black. Writing the book, I relied on Faulkner to flesh out my ancestor’s life because the author had this proximity to that Southern burden of ancestry and the past that I couldn’t truly know having grown up in Southern California, a place where the past was effectively erased.

Rumpus: The book is as much about our more troubled past as our distant past. At one point you evoke Faulkner when discussing a case involving one of your distant relatives (on the black Mozingo side), to explain what may have been in the mind of the judge who changed his mind after first not declaring him at fault in a car accident case. Upon finding out your relative was black, the judge reversed course. Why did you bring in Faulkner in this instance?

Mozingo: Another part of the reason I employed Faulkner was that I wanted readers to realize the story I was telling was not a freak occurrence in American history. The point was, Look here, one of our greatest novels revolved around the wrath that mixed lineage stirred in people. It threatened the construct of “whiteness,” as shown in that scene. If everyone thinks the guy in the car accident is white, and he obviously has lots of white ancestry, what exactly makes him not white? So many of these stories I was digging up in my reporting had parallel reverberations in Faulkner’s book, I just couldn’t resist using some of his dialogue in a few scenes to give them both blood and credence.

Rumpus: In addition to Faulkner, you quote another writer with an especially complicated and nuanced view of our history, the great historian John Hope Franklin. Why is Franklin’s work important to your own story?

Mozingo: John Hope Franklin did majestic research laying out how free people of color were seen as a threat to the whole system of white superiority in the South, and how they were savagely debased for it. A free black man coming into North Carolina from Virginia, for instance, had to place a huge bond with the local sheriff to guarantee his good behavior, or he’d be sold at auction. Children were stolen and sold into slavery, or forced into indentured servitude with white families. Black and white people who married—believe it or not, this did happen well into the 19th Century in the South—were fined, or their marriages were nullified. Mozingos went through all of this. One of the families I wrote about descended from a “colored” man named Christopher Mozingo who was married to a white woman in 1830, and then they seemed to have been driven apart. Franklin dug up incredible anecdotes to bring the brutal history of these mostly-forgotten people to life.

Rumpus: What’s the reaction of other Mozingos to what you’ve found? Especially the information you found in Angola?

Mozingo: Edward Mozingo’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren scattered and tried to reinvent themselves in new places where no one knew of their heritage. They created myths about their origins, and their descendants took these stories as truth. So Mozingos are scattered about the country now, with these myths ingrained in their identity. There is little sense that we are all came from one man, much less any collective acceptance that he was black. So it was strange sitting with some of them because we just had such different backgrounds. Some were very rural and poor, self-described “rednecks” whose families have struggled in America every generation for the last 370 years. Some grew up on the wrong side of Jim Crow, living in sharecropper shacks, tormented by white society. There were a lot of racists, but there were people who really embraced this news of our origins.

Rumpus: I was stuck by the reaction of one of your relatives, Shirlyn, who said she would have perferred that the name have come from Italy! Such an honest, human moment.

Mozingo: Yes, Shirlyn. She is wonderful. She grew up in a black family—at least that’s how society saw them—but she is very light-skinned, and one of her brothers is so light, I mistook him for a “good ol’ boy.” Shirlyn married the actor who played Kunta Kinte’s father in Roots. The presumptuous white guy in me thought she would be ecstatic for some reason when I told her the name is African—but she was disappointed because her family thought it came from Milan. She had her own stereotypes about Africa.

Rumpus: The book is able to merge history with a personal quest pretty seamlessly. Can you talk about the challenges here?

Mozingo: Everywhere I traveled I was looking for the past. So it actually never felt too tortured to let the passages of that past come out amid my quest. Not to say that I didn’t struggle with the structure to keep the narrative tension, particularly because the central mystery is solved pretty early in the book and there was no obvious conclusion. So that tension had to be internal, and it was.

Rumpus: The whole issue of white Mozingos, black Mozingos, and those who straddle both—what does this tell us, not only about your namesake, but about this country in general? This is absurdly broad, but it seems to me that there’s a great metaphor for why we are always confused about who we are right here in your name…

Mozingo: When I first wrote about this for The Los Angeles Times, the headline was, “In Search of the Meaning of Mozingo.” Because Mozingo was much more than a name. It was the story of what could have happened in America if they allowed black people the level of freedom Edward and others had at the very beginning of our country. It was the story of our messy, violent, mixed-race birth, as well as of the centuries of trying to sanitize it, and the tortured ironies that sprung from that (KKK members with Bantu last names, for instance). And it was the flipside of the American Dream, where families struggle for centuries, but are held down by the past as captured in a name.

***

Photograph of Joe Mozingo ©  2013 by Noaki Schwartz.

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This bus I’m in happens to be in Haiti. I’m out in the countryside, about fifty miles west of Port-au-Prince. What I’m doing here isn’t important to this column, which is supposed to be about the short story. I will say, though, that there are times when I wonder if I don’t go out of my way to find new places to be lonely. I wasn’t lonely enough at home? And not to toot my own horn, but someone who can feel alone on a packed bus in Haiti has a certain amount of talent in this area.

And I have to say also that there is something comforting about watching a movie on someone else’s computer while on a packed bus. My seatmate’s daughter is asleep, squeezed in the nook between the seats. Her name is Chantal. She’s four. Before she fell asleep, she and her mother talked to me. Chantal dozed off during an earlier shootout. But just now she woke up and tugged her mother’s arm because she’s hungry. Her mom has paused the movie and I’m taking this opportunity – Van Damme’s face frozen in fierce contemplation on the screen (he’s sad, as if he wishes he didn’t have to be so strong and fearless all the time) – to take down a few notes for a long, long over-due column. A half hour ago I was in the middle of a V.S Pritchett story called, “The Fall.”  My finger is still holding my place. I’ve read this story many times, and though it is brilliant, almost miraculous in my view, Van Damme totally walloped it.

***

It’s been the habit of this column to bring together disparate elements. Usually this has to do with where I am and what I happen to be doing at a particular time, and how it all connects to a given short story.[1] So it might be expected that I will now link the elements I’ve raised here, Van Damme, the Republic of Haiti, and the great English storywriter V.S. Pritchett. But this time I won’t. The fact is that but for all three things happening to me at this moment, on this bus, they have zero to do with each other. Why force it? I should also mention that while Haiti itself is fascinating and difficult and very welcoming (note Chantal and her mother’s kindness to a stranger), even Haiti’s green, often breathtaking, severely denuded countryside is no match for this goon, Van Damme.

General Dessalines

I could, of course, remark on the irony of a Haitian woman watching a Jean Claude Van Damme movie at all, and talk about how Haiti whooped Napoleon’s French ass in 1804.

(Is Van Damme French?) Anyway, you get my point. Or maybe not. Wait, that’s right, I’ve decided not to make a point here at all. What I’m trying to say, without making a case out of it, is that the world is full of these crazy crosscurrents. Let us now praise disconnection. It doesn’t fit. It will never fit. It fits. A Haitian woman and her daughter, a somewhat lost American, this idiotic movie, V.S. Pritchett on my lap – all here, all now.

***

This said, it is tempting to inject a bit more meaning by replacing the Pritchett book with the Lyonel Trouillot novel that’s in the backpack at my feet. There would be more symmetry if Van Damme, (the French?)[2] action hero, had distracted me from a profound and intense novel of Port-au-Prince called The Street of Lost Footsteps. I might then have been able to say colonialism remains alive and well via the entertainment industry.

But no, it won’t line up. What can I do? I’m blown away by the Trouillot book, but it’s Pritchett I’ve been reading, trying to read, this morning.

And traveling in a relatively unknown place with V.S. Pritchett is like having a busload of befuddled oddballs along with you on the bus of oddballs you are already on. Right then, onward with the column. Chantal will be done eating her oatmeal, potato chips, and string cheese soon.

***

“The Fall” is about an accountant. The scene is an industrial city in England, also a former colonial power but that is neither here nor there. The story opens with the accountant, Charles Peacock, in his hotel, getting ready for the annual accountants’ dinner.

At the Royal was Charles Peacock, slender in his shirt, balancing on one leg and gazing with frowns of affection in the wardrobe mirror at the other leg as he pulled his trousers on; and then with a smile of farewell as the second went in. Buttoned up, relieved if his nakedness, he visited other mirrors…

Frowns of affection! Saying goodbye to his legs as he puts his pants on! Relieved of his nakedness! See what I mean? This is the third sentence in the story, and you are already starting to know, intimately, a guy named Peacock. We are nothing more and nothing less than our idiosyncrasies. For example, I often carry on detailed conversations with my shoes. And like us all, Peacock is burdened by problems, family problems. In his case, it is his brother, Shelmerdine Peacock – the movie star – who plagues him. Everywhere Peacock goes he is only his brother’s brother. As soon as he enters the dinner, the president of the accountants’ association shouts, “I saw your brother this afternoon.”

Peacock’s drink jumped and splashed in his hand. The president winked at his friends.

“Hah!” said the President. “That gave our friend Peacock a scare!”

“At the Odean,” explained a kinder man.

“Is Shelmerdine Peacock your brother? The actor?” another said, astonished, looking at Peacock from head to foot.

There’s an upside though to being Shelmerdine Peacock’s brother, and Peacock vacillates between being horrified to basking. He’s a lonely neurotic. Even here among all his fellow accountants, Peacock is jittery and isolated. The man’s got no Van Damme. (His brother might, not him.) So being the brother of celebrity takes the edge off a little.

It was pleasing. There was always the praise; there were always the questions. He had seen the posters about Shel’s film during the week on his way to the office. They pleased, but they also troubled. Peacock stood at his place in the Great Hall and paused to look around, in case there was one more glance of vicarious fame to be collected.

And yet, something beyond his merely being Shelmerdine Peacock’s brother occurs and this is where the story takes a turn for what I will call: the ordinary strange. By this I mean that V.S. Pritchett has a way of immortalizing the plain weirdness of being alive on a daily basis. Charles Peacock hates the annual dinner, but at the same time he – desperately – doesn’t want it to end. (Who can’t relate to this? I dread going to parties, but once I get to one you got to pry me loose.) So Charles Peacock, a most average man, in order to try and convince his fellow men to stay a little while, is about to do something no reader will ever forget. Because Shelmerdine is not the only Peacock with talent. As the men begin to leave the Great Hall, Peacock drops to the floor.

‘Falling,’ said Peacock. ‘The stage fall.’ He looked at them with dignity, then let the expression die on his face. He fell quietly full length to the floor. Before they could speak he was up on his feet.

‘My brother weighs two hundred and twenty pounds,’ he said with condescension to the man opposite. ‘The ordinary person falls and breaks

an arm or a foot, because he doesn’t know. It’s an art.’

…

And down he went, thump, on the carpet again and lying at their feet he said: “Painless. Nothing broken. Not a bruise. I said “an art.” Really one might call it a science. Do you see how I’m lying?’

‘What’s happened to Peacock’ said two or three of the men joining the group.

And Peacock falls and falls again.

After a while, most of the accountants begin to lose interest. One of the few men who has bothered to stay finally tells Peacock all right already, that he gets it, that he appreciates the demonstration but that Peacock need not fall again, that he’s actually more interested in the theory behind the falling than the falling itself. This infuriates Peacock who insists that there is nothing theoretical about it. Once again, he hits the floor. Peacock’s falling is not unlike a Pritchett story itself. His stories never call attention to how good they are. They just do. They just are. Meaning is never handed. Connections are never forced. Now a man – a man we have come to know – is standing. Now he’s at our feet. Peacock stands, Peacock falls. A character is redeemed, and for me, enshrined in my memory for good. Who needs Shelmerdine and his movies (Waste, The Gun Runner, Zut)? I, for one, will always have his brother, Charles. At last the final indifferent accountant slowly wanders away.  It’s his brother who’s famous, not this hapless clown. Why should I watch him fall?

“The Fall” ends – hilariously, movingly – with Peacock alone in the Great Hall, showing off his skills to a portrait of Queen Victoria. And the queen might or might not have clapped her little hands.

***

There’s some Charles Peacock in us all. We fear other people while at the same time we have an insatiable craving for attention. Don’t look at me, don’t look at me. Look at me. By the way, our bus is now, in case it is of interest, stopped at a police roadblock. The guy in the seat behind has just handed me – an obviously lunchless person – half his turkey sandwich. “We’re going to be here a while,” he said. “As soon as they get bored terrorizing us, we’ll be on our way.” So on the bus we remain. Out the window, on the left is a small lake; on the right a steep cliff. In front, and behind us, a line of cars, buses, motorcycles, women and men and children on foot hauling merchandise. Money changers wave wads of bills. A woman selling hats wears, I count, eighteen of them on her head.

***

And, yet in my mind – even as Chantal has finished eating and the three of us are once again ensconced in the movie – I’m also still thinking about the story I didn’t re-read and how nice it might be to simply let go and fall on the floor. Any floor. Which is, in a way, comforting. As comforting as this turkey sandwich, as comforting as my seatmates and this movie.

***

Two last things: (and with my apologies for the whiff of connections): One, I no longer want this bus ride to end and am half hoping that the cops find some reason to detain us. Or maybe later we’ll break down. And two, I just remembered that a couple of days ago, in Port-au-Prince, I saw a man selling a peacock on John Brown Avenue.[3] He was selling the bird for 1600 U.S. dollars, cage included. I asked my friend Jean Pierre who he thought might buy it. Jean Pierre said someone with 1600 USD who also wants a peacock. Like that would not be unusual at all, and maybe it wouldn’t be.

___________________________________________________________________________

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• The Lonely Voice #22: RIP Richard Stern
• When Fiction Won’t Let You Lie to Yourself
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In the case of Stern, I hadn’t heard of him up until just a few years ago. Here was this great Chicago writer and I’d never read a single word. I have Alana Newhouse, formally of The Jewish Daily Forward, to thank for bringing him to my attention. She thought I might connect with his work. But what if Newhouse hadn’t thought of me? What if that day she sent the book to someone else? You see what I’m getting at here, the crazy workings of fate our reading lives depend on? And I came across this particular writer in a pretty conventional way. It is almost dizzying to contemplate all the stories I will never read because, for whatever reason, a certain author’s work will never cross my path. Which is why I’m always searching for so-called neglected writers. What if what they have to tell is the essential thing I need to know?

In the case of Stern we are talking about a highly visible writer with a large and important body of work. Still, he was way under my radar. Maybe he’s under yours? Philip Roth says of his old friend that, in his day, he was known by writers but not by the general public. I wonder if Stern is, today, known by writers. I hope so. But again, it’s not the issue. The question is: how good is his work? What does it have to tell us about who we are as human beings? And – maybe more significantly – who we aren’t? (See: in addition to Stern’s short stories and novels, the essay collection, The Books in Fred Hampton’s Apartment. The title essay refers to Fred Hampton, a Black Panther leader murdered by Chicago Police in 1969. Stern was somehow able to enter the apartment after the assassination. The essay is about the books he found on Hampton’s shelves and what these books have to teach us about a society that had just killed one of its own bright lights.)  Stern wrote brilliantly about the myriad ways we fail as human beings. I think of “Packages” today and I want to get down on my knees with guilt and sorrow – and laughter too.

***

Click here to read Peter Orner’s review of Stern’s Almonds to Zhoof over at The Jewish Daily Forward.

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In a post for the New York Times‘s “Draft” series, “about the art and craft of writing,” Rumpus columnist Peter Orner recalls a long-ago event that his psyche can’t shake: as a child, he stole a pair of nice gloves from his father.

He’s tried for years to let his brain turn the troubling memory from a grain of sand to a pearl by reimagining it as fiction, but so far, it just stays sand:

This is where the truth of this always derails the fiction. I can’t give the gloves back, in fiction or in this thing we call reality. If I did, I’d have to confront something I’ve known all along but have never wanted to express, even to myself alone.

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How many nights, after wandering hours, have I landed in one of the broken down easy chairs at Adobe Books? All the conversations I have listened to. I’ll miss a place where people actually talk to each other.

When it closes for good, sometime next month, some will mourn but not nearly enough. And Adobe too will be replaced with another sleek, high end clothing store. I’m afraid there is nothing unique about this lament.

All the books are now 60% off, but Andrew McKinley, among the kindest and most generous bookstore owners on earth, will still try and make you pay even less.

Last night I bought The Collected Stories of Wolfgang Hildesheimer. The book was originally listed at 9.95. Then it went down to 6.50. 60% off of 6.50 is, what? I’m terrible at math. I tried to pay four dollars. Andrew wouldn’t take it. He’d only accept three bucks, his final offer.

Is there another place in the universe can you buy The Collected Stories of Wolfgang Hildesheimer at one o’clock in the morning?

Wolfgang Hildesheimer by the way is – was – a very good, and funny, German story writer. Among the stories in the book is one called, “I Am Not Writing A Book On Kafka.”

Evil tongues, or rather their owners, claim (and I can see them sneering) that I am writing a book on Kafka. This accusation is false, I repudiate it. For I am working on a book on Golch.

No, the narrator is not writing a book on Kafka. The narrator is writing a book on Golch! Of course, Golch. Golch, an unknown schoolteacher from the town of Altzmunzach, a town in which the express trains do not stop…

Golch taught English and German at the High School for Daughters (this institution actually existed then and still does today)….

Don’t you all see what we are losing? If this city still has a soul, it’s at Adobe.

So long books I will never find. So long Wolfgang Hildesheimer. So long, Adobe Books. 16^th Street will never be the same, and neither will we.

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I mean no disrespect, to my mother or to Barnes. And I’ve truly enjoyed his work in the past. I remember fondly the book about the parrot, as well as a number of his stories. There is no accounting for taste on a given day, or suicidal thoughts.

Dramatization: Not the actual book or intersection described in this column.

The lines that sent me over went something like this: “I wrote another message to Veronica and wrote in the subject line, Question. Then I wrote, “Do you think I was in love with you back then?”

Leaving aside the fact that I read to escape from email, there was something too cooked up about the narration in Sense of an Ending, something too obvious about the withholding nature of Tony’s guilt, a treading of water, before the revelation of something astonishing.

In the rear view, I watched a woman stop in the middle of the intersection. She was carrying a shopping bag in one hand and an umbrella in the other. The woman, deftly and, I thought, with a great deal of style, swung the umbrella up and lodged the shaft under her armpit so that canopy bloomed out behind her. Then she swooped down with her free hand and grabbed the book. I watched her shove it in one of the big pockets of her raincoat. I hope she enjoys it. When the mystery of Adrian’s suicide is explained, may she be deeply moved. (Personally, I hope it has something to do with Veronica’s mother. A good character, I liked the way she cracked the eggs early in the book.)

Is it just me or is the moment of finishing (rare) or abandoning (frequent) a book an especially exciting moment for you as well? I find it a thrill because I’m freed up once again to choose another story out of the infinite dark that constitutes all the unread books in the universe. All the possibilities. Maybe this time I will find the one book that will save me from myself. Sometimes, as a kind of temporary solace, and also to stave off the commitment issues I have with new books, I go for something I’ve already read and loved before I resume the search for the one book that will save me from myself. Today, despairing and feeling guilty about throwing my mother’s nice hardcover into the street, I reached for an old friend: William Maxwell. I say friend. I never knew him. And yet still, he speaks to me, as I know he does to so many legions of others. Even gone these past ten years or so, he speaks and I listen, as if for the first time.

It is raining in San Francisco. It has for four or five or six days straight. I’m losing track. There’s a leak in my bathroom, a rhythmic crashing, that provides a kind of beat to my reading. I pray that the sun never rises over Bernal Hill again. Let there be sog. Today, I read, and read again, Maxwell’s very short story, “With Reference to an Incident at a Bridge”. It’s such a brief story that some might relegate it to the status of anecdote. There is little action, little character development, just a voice really. Not all that different, in a way, from Sense of an Ending, which also relies so heavily on the voice of one character. Except, and this is crucial, William Maxwell never treads water. His sentences are as clear, as honest, and as potentially deadly – as water itself.

“Incident at a Bridge” is also about the weight of guilt. As a Boy Scout in Lincoln, Illinois in the early part of the last century, the narrator commits an act that haunts him for the rest of his life. He’s a twelve year-old goody-two-shoes, the kind of scout who, “went out of his way to help elderly people across the street who could have managed perfectly well on their own.” He and his fellow Boy Scouts organize a few boys younger themselves into a troop of Cub Scouts, ostensibly to teach them the ropes.

We taught the Cub Scouts how to tie a clove hitch and a running bowline and how (if you were lucky) to build a fire without any matches and other skills appropriate to the outdoor life. Somebody, after a few weeks, decided there ought to be an initiation. Into what I don’t think anybody bothered to figure out.

This power to initiate, as it so often does, goes temporarily to the heads of the older boys. The narrator and his fellow Boy Scouts end up blindfolding the group of young recruits, which includes a kid named Maxie Rabinowitz (the son of a broke Jewish shopkeeper from the wrong side of town) and marching them to the outskirts of Lincoln.
They stop at a bridge. The narrator then orders the Cub Scouts to run, at full speed, into a railing on the side of the bridge. All the boys got the wind knocked out of them.

Some readers conflate the first person narrator Maxwell often employs (an older man who recounts his boyhood in Lincoln, Illinois) with Maxwell himself. As if his work was mere autobiography. As if all he had to do was remember and transcribe. But few American writers have ever known better how to twist – and manipulate – real life into fiction than William Maxwell. So again, the incident at the bridge isn’t about Maxwell, and it isn’t true even if it’s true. Does this make any sense? I’m trying to say that turning true events into fiction is to carry them beyond memory. Great fiction writers contort the actual into something far greater: myth.

And so an incident on a bridge in a small Illinois town, in the 1920’s, becomes immortalized, burned into the souls of anybody who reads it. It isn’t so much about the improvised hazing ritual as it is about what we do with what can never be undone. Think of all the things you wish you could erase, forever, from the record. No matter how we airbrush our own histories, the hurt we have caused will, always, reach out for us out of the December rain.

This is why, for me, Maxwell’s story transcends anecdote. Here’s the second to last paragraph. The boys are on the ground, struggling to breathe.

I believe in the forgiveness of sins. Some sins. I also believe that what is done is done and cannot be undone. The reason I didn’t throw myself on my knees and beg them (and God) to forgive me is that I knew He wouldn’t, and that even if he did, I wouldn’t forgive myself. Sick with shame at the pain I had inflicted, I tore Max Rabinowitz’s blindfold off and held him by the shoulders until his gasping subsided.

There is something frighteningly counterintuitive about the narrator’s inability to forgive himself. God might have mercy on me, but I never will. This is so much darker than the easier redemption of some of the books I read, as well as the many others I put down.

Although the narrator of “Incident at a Bridge” is Presbyterian, and he recites the Apostle’s Creed on the opening page, I believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the story reminds me of something my rabbi in Chicago said this past Yom Kippur. One may never achieve atonement unless one begs the forgiveness of everyone one has sinned against. In other words, you can’t go straight to God. You got to take care of things down here first. My gut sank at the work I have to do, and the work that is too late to do. Maxwell’s story seems an attempt on the part of the narrator to make amends though he knows damn well such a thing is useless. Yet, he’s not going through the motions. What the story does, ultimately, is instruct him on the dangerousness of his own heart. Here’s the final glorious paragraph in full:

Considering the multitude of things that happen in any one person’s life, it seems fairly unlikely that those little boys remembered the incident for very long. It was an introduction to what was to come. And cruelty could never again take them totally by surprise. But I have remembered it. I have remembered it because it was the moment I learned I was not to be trusted.

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• The Lonely Voice #22: RIP Richard Stern
• The Lonely Voice #21: So Long Adobe Books
• THE LONELY VOICE #14: Isaac Babel, Every Grief Soaked Word
• THE LONELY VOICE #12: Cheever in Albania Or The Lonely Voice Hates Travel Writing
• THE LONELY VOICE #11: Eudora Welty, Total Bad Ass

It will include a conversation with fellow author (and occasional Rumpus contributor) Michelle Richmond and, of course, deep-dish pizza.

Here’s the event page.

Related Posts:

• “Words for Remembering”
• More Praise for Love and Shame and Love
• This Week in Love and Shame and Love
• There’s Still Time to Get Love and Shame and Love!
• Fall’s Rumpus Book Club Selections

Will he read from his latest novel Love and Shame and Love? Something new? Juan Rulfo fanfiction? (Kidding.) Go find out!

And if you can’t make it to this reading, there are lots of stellar writers lined up to read at Story Hour in the coming weeks. Check them out here.

Related Posts:

• The Rumpus Interview with Joe Mozingo
• THE LONELY VOICE #23: It Doesn’t Fit, It Will Never Fit, It Fits
• The Lonely Voice #22: RIP Richard Stern
• When Fiction Won’t Let You Lie to Yourself
• The Lonely Voice #21: So Long Adobe Books

Peter Orner remembers his friend, the late poet and novelist Victor Martinez.

***

This, not graveyard roses, is my gift;
And I won’t burn sticks of incense:
You died as unflinchingly as you lived,
With magnificent defiance.

- Anna Akhmatova,
“In Memory of Mikhail Bulgakov”

I am not a poet and this is not a gift. When you fell down in the parking lot in front of the free acupuncture place you no longer had the strength to be embarrassed, and it wouldn’t have been your style anyway. If it had been me who’d fallen, if it had been me who’d been too weak to take a single more step, if it had me on the ground on that bright, ordinary October day, you wouldn’t have blinked. You’d have shrugged off my apologies and my shame at being such an inconvenience, and pulled me right up. When you fell I hesitated. I looked at you on the ground as if you down there was something I needed to remember, as if you were already gone, and when I finally did yank you by the arm pits, you didn’t mention it. You asked how far the car was. You said, ‘Lets get hot dogs.’ It’s a lie when I say that I wish it had been me on the pavement, the sort of easy lie you detested. I wish it had been me on the pavement. At least you’ll know I’m thinking of you now, today, another October, which even you would concede isn’t nothing. Damnit it, Vic, at least give me this: I wish the car had been further and that we were still walking towards it.

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• X by Dan Chelotti
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• Notable New York: 5/20-5/26
• Rise in the Fall by Ana Božičević
• Desolation: Souvenir by Paul Hoover

“Life in Hot Pink is raw, messy, yet replete with moments of awkward grace. There are times when these characters hold steady amid the mayhem, when the long, crazy struggle makes fleeting sense.”

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