The years immediately before and after the discovery of insulin and the introduction of insulin therapy, anything that could prevent diabetic coma for an indefinite period could seem worth the risk. “When I was a student and young doctor” in the 1920s, as the University of Edinburgh diabetologist Derrick Dunlop (later Sir Derrick) described thirty years later, “we were entirely occupied, so far as diabetes was concerned, with endeavoring to keep the patient alive for a while… we were taught little of its ultimate complications, for relatively few patients had by then lived long enough to develop them.”

If an intervention restores the patient to health, but is associated with premature death or disease months or years later from side effects or complications, the treatment might still be readily justified. This was the case with insulin therapy for type 1 diabetes, as it is with many cancer therapies today. But the “ultimate complications” cannot be ignored. If the physician has a choice of two treatments that will restore the patient to health in the short run, then the long-term effects must be weighed before a choice is made.

For a chronic disease or disorder, one like heart disease or type 2 diabetes that disables and kills prematurely but does so only years or decades in the future, physicians had been forced to speculate on whether what they were doing would cause more good than harm. But with the invention of the modern clinical trial in the late 1940s—technically known as a randomized controlled trial—these doctors benefited from one of the great advances in medical science. For the first time, they had a means to assess the long-term risks and benefits of medical interventions and to compare interventions to establish—for an idealized, average patient—what would most likely be the safest, most effective one. The proliferation of clinical trials by the 1980s had launched the era of evidence-based medicine.

With its reliance on clinical trials to dictate accepted practice, medicine left behind the notion of basing therapeutic decisions on clinical experience and observations. But by the time diabetologists started to embrace the notion of an “evidence base” for their beliefs on the nature of a healthy diet, they had already succumbed to the biases formed decades earlier.

*

The history of diabetes therapy, or at least successful therapy, begins with case reports. In an era when a physician might diagnose a case of diabetes only once in his lifetime, John Rollo, a Scottish doctor, saw it three times and published a pamphlet documenting his success in the second of his three cases. “The ingenious author of the work now before us,” as a 1797 review in the Edinburgh journal Annals of Medicine put it, “recommends a mode of treatment, which, in some instances, has been decidedly productive of remarkable benefit. It may justly, therefore, be considered as well meriting a fair trial in future cases.”

Rollo had been trained in Edinburgh, joined the Royal Artillery in 1776, and eventually rose to the rank of surgeon general. He may have been the first physician to successfully bring a case of diabetes under control. Variations on his approach would become the standard of care for the next 125 years.

Until Rollo came along, physicians considered diabetes inevitably a progressive and quickly fatal disease. Their attempts to treat it were scattershot and ineffective; “whatever was available in medicine seems to have been employed against diabetes for centuries,” as one medical historian has put it: “massage in the sun, hot and cold baths, steam baths, wine, whey, milk diet, various nostrums, bleeding, emetics, narcotics, and astringents.”

Rollo had seen his first case of diabetes in 1777, but the patient had been discharged shortly afterward and Rollo learned little from the experience. On October 16, 1796, he diagnosed his second diabetic patient: a Captain Meredith of the Royal Artillery, formerly corpulent, now much diminished in size—“fallen away in fat and flesh considerably,” as Rollo described him. Meredith had experienced symptoms for seven months by the time he saw Rollo, complaining of “great thirst and a keenness of appetite.” He was also urinating copiously, but neither Meredith nor his regular physician had paid attention because he was drinking so much to slake his thirst, “the quantity of urine had appeared to him a necessary consequence.” When Rollo tasted the urine, a common diagnostic method in that era, it was noticeably sweet, confirming that his patient had diabetes.

Rollo theorized that the cause of the disease was the formation of carbohydrates in the stomach—an excess of “saccharine matter.” Assuming that the substance could only come from vegetable foods, he concluded that they should be restricted. He therefore prescribed an “animal diet” (and various salves and concoctions, including opium) as a treatment for Meredith. His patient was expected to eat puddings “made of blood and suet only” for lunch, and old meats and fat “as rancid as can be eaten” for dinner. He was allowed milk for breakfast and lunch, and bread and butter, so his diet was not free of vegetable foods, though nearly so.

The diet rendered Meredith’s urine sugar-free and returned him to health. Within a month, Rollo had prohibited Meredith from drinking the milk (which contains carbohydrates in the form of lactose, although Rollo would not have known that) and replaced it with what he called beef tea—we would call it broth or stock—made from boiling fat beef (or mutton) with water, and then straining the result to produce a clear liquid.

By the end of the year, Meredith seemed “free of disease,” wrote Rollo, “rapidly gaining flesh,” and was allowed to eat more bread and to exercise. By the following March, Meredith seemed cured. He “might, we apprehend, now eat and drink any thing with impunity,” Rollo noted. On May 10 of the following year, Meredith wrote to Rollo that he continued “in perfect health.” (Historians later established that Meredith remained, as his wife would write to a relative in 1805, “in tolerable health but quite thin.” He died in March 1809, twelve years after last consulting with Rollo.)

Rollo’s third case didn’t go as well, but confirmed, Rollo thought, the principles of the animal diet. The patient was a fifty-seven-year-old general in the British army who had been ill for at least three years. Rollo first saw him in January 1797 and was not optimistic that he could return him to health. “We are satisfied the saccharine matter and morbid action of the stomach may be removed, yet the sequela of the disease may be such as to prevent the return of perfect health.” He reported, once again, that so long as his patient adhered strictly to the animal diet, his condition improved. By now Rollo’s dietary prescription was less reliant on rancid old meat and fat, and allowed meat of any kind.

Whenever the general’s health deteriorated, Rollo would interrogate his patient and conclude that he had been eating vegetable matter or fruit or drinking beer. “We have on the whole to lament our patient’s inclination to variety,” Rollo wrote, “and his extreme impatience under restrictions, as otherwise we have no doubt he would have returned in a much better state to his family.” When the general returned home, already cheating on the animal diet, a local physician further encouraged him “to eat what he pleased, and to drink wine,” Rollo reported, and the general did. He was soon dead.

Rollo then compiled the two case studies and his speculations into a pamphlet and posted it: he wrote, “to every person in England or Scotland, who I thought were likely to meet with the disease; and I solicited a trial of the mode of cure, with an account of the results.” Physicians were encouraged to write back to him with their experience, and some two dozen did. He compiled those into a book with his two cases and published it in multiple editions. The conclusion, again, was that the animal diet worked. Removing the vegetable matter from the diet resulted in mostly sugar-free urine, a resolution of the thirst, and normalizing of the appetite and urination. The patients felt healthier.

The letters to Rollo also confirmed that the animal diet was seen by patients, and often their physicians, as only a short-term necessity. The patients would ease off the dietary restrictions as soon as they started experiencing beneficial results. Rollo, for his part, was confident the diet would work if the patient would follow it. “We have to lament, that our mode of cure is so contrary to the inclinations of the sick,” Rollo wrote. “Though perfectly aware of the efficacy of the regimen, and the impropriety of deviations, yet they commonly trespass, concealing what they feel as a transgression on themselves. They express a regret, that a medicine could not be discovered, however nauseous, or distasteful, which would supersede the necessity for any restriction in diet.”

Rollo hoped, as did the other physicians trying his approach, that once the disease was in abeyance, it was cured, or maybe it could be cured. Building up the body’s ability to tolerate carbohydrates— vegetable matter—seemed to be the obvious therapeutic goal: establish a maximum amount of carbohydrates the patient could tolerate without the symptoms reappearing. Rollo recommended that when the patient seemed to be well, the physician should suggest “a gradual return to the use of bread, and those vegetables and drinks which are the least likely to furnish saccharine matter, or to become acid in the stomach.” He also worried about causing “scurvy,* or something akin to it” without any vegetables in the diet.

It all came down to a balancing act between physician and patients, between the strict animal diet that might keep the disease at bay and what the patients preferred to eat and the physicians thought they should. This conflict was most apparent with children, which is still the case today. One physician in the London area wrote to Rollo in February 1798 describing his trial of Rollo’s animal diet with a twelve-year-old girl. She was “of a thin habit of body, tall of her age,” he wrote, accustomed “to eat much fruit, sweetmeats and pickles,” and now afflicted by diabetes. As her health would seemingly improve on the animal diet, the physician would either give her a “small quantity of bread” or a few biscuits to see if the sweet urine returned. Occasionally the physician would learn that his young patient had been indulging herself in forbidden foods. Thirst, headache, and sweet urine betrayed the deviation. In his letter to Rollo, the physician notes repeated transgressions followed, invariably, by assurances from the young patient of “more steadiness in future.” If nothing else, the physician concludes, Rollo has gifted medicine with a way to control diabetes. After that, it was up to the patient.

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Excerpted from Rethinking Diabetes: What Science Reveals About Diet, Insulin, and Successful Treatments by Gary Taubes. Copyright © 2024. Published by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

In November 1960, a traveler of ambiguous origin, brown-skinned but not African, arrived in Mali. Issued in Tunis two years earlier, his passport identified him as a doctor born in 1925 in Tunisia, height: 165 cm, color of hair: black, color of eyes: black.

The pages were covered with stamps from Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia, Guinea, Italy. The name on the passport, a gift from the government of Libya, was Ibrahim Omar Fanon, a nom de guerre. The psychiatrist Frantz Fanon was not from Tunisia but from Martinique. He had not come to Mali to do medical work: he was part of a commando unit.

It had been a long journey by car from the Liberian capital of Monrovia: more than twelve hundred miles through tropical forest, savanna, and desert, and the eight-man team still had far to go. From the journal he kept, it’s clear that Fanon was mesmerized by the landscape. “This part of the Sahara is not monotonous,” he writes. “Even the sky up there is constantly changing. Some days ago, we saw a sunset that turned the robe of the sky a bright violet. Today it is a very hard red the eye encounters.” His entries move freely between rousing expressions of hope and somber reminders of the obstacles facing African liberation struggles. “A continent is on the move and Europe is languorously asleep,” he writes. “Fifteen years ago it was Asia that was stirring. Today 650 million Chinese, calm possessors of an immense secret, are building a world entirely on their own. The giving birth to a world.” And now an “Africa to come” could well emerge from the convulsions of anti-colonial revolution.

Yet “the specter of the West,” he warns, is “everywhere present and active.” His friend Félix-Roland Moumié, a revolutionary from Cameroon, had just been poisoned by the French secret service, and Fanon himself had narrowly escaped an attempt on his life on a visit to Rome. Meanwhile, a new superpower, the United States, had “plunged in everywhere, dollars in the vanguard, with [Louis] Armstrong as herald and Black American diplomats, scholarships, the emissaries of the Voice of America.”

Yet in the long run, Fanon believed, the African continent would have to reckon with threats more crippling than colonialism. On the one hand, Africa’s independence had come too late: rebuilding and giving a sense of direction to societies traumatized by colonial rule—societies that had long been forced to take orders from others and to see themselves through the eyes of their masters—would not be easy.

On the other hand, independence had come too early, empowering the continent’s narcissistic “national middle classes” who “suddenly develop great appetites.” He writes: “The deeper I enter into the cultures and political circles the surer I am that the great danger for Africa is the absence of ideology.”

Fanon recorded these impressions in a blue Ghana School Teachers Book No. 3 that he had picked up in Accra. It is now stored at the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, a research library housed in a former monastery in Normandy that sheltered partisan fighters during the Second World War. To take it in one’s hands sixty years later and leaf through the pages is to inspect the thoughts of a dying man: Fanon did not yet know he had leukemia, or that his life would end in 1961 in a hospital in Maryland, in the heart of the American empire he despised. On the road in West Africa, he was open, thoughtful, and intrigued by the continent from which his ancestors had been carried on slave ships to the French colony of Martinique.

In Mali he imagined himself home, among his Black brothers, yet he remained a stranger. He had come as an undercover agent of a neighboring country in what he called “White Africa”: Algeria, then in the seventh year of its liberation struggle against French rule. The aim of his reconnaissance mission was to make contact with the desert tribes and open a southern front on Algeria’s border with Mali so that arms and ammunitions could be moved from the Malian capital of Bamako through the Sahara to the rebels of the Front de libération nationale (FLN).

The head of Fanon’s commando unit was a major in the FLN’s military wing, the Armée de libération nationale (ALN). He was a “funny chap” who went by the name of Chawki: “small, lean, with the implacable eyes of an old maquis fighter.” Fanon was impressed by the “intelligence and clarity of his ideas” and his knowledge of the Sahara, a “world in which Chawki moves with the boldness and the perspicacity of a great strategist.” Chawki, he tells us, spent two years studying in France but returned to Algeria to work his father’s land. When the war of liberation launched by the FLN began on November 1, 1954, he “took down his hunting rifle from its hook and joined the brothers.”

Not long after, Fanon, too, had joined “the brothers.” From 1955 until his expulsion from Algeria two years later, he had given sanctuary to rebels at the psychiatric hospital he directed in Blida-Joinville, just outside Algiers. He had provided them with medical care and taken every possible risk short of joining the maquisards in the mountains—his first impulse when the revolution broke out. No one believed more fervently in the rebels than the man from Martinique. He had gone on to join the FLN in exile in Tunis, identifying himself as an Algerian and preaching the cause of Algerian independence throughout Africa. Every word that he wrote paid tribute to the Algerian struggle.

But he could never really become an Algerian; he did not even speak Arabic or Berber (Amazigh), the languages of Algeria’s indigenous peoples. In his work as a psychiatrist, he often had to depend on interpreters. Algeria remained permanently out of reach for him, an elusive object of love, as it was for so many other foreigners who had been seduced by it—not least the European settlers who began arriving in the 1830s. He would be, at most, an adopted brother, dreaming of a fraternity that would transcend tribe, race, and nation: the kind of arrangement that France promised him as a young man and that had led him to join the war against the Axis powers.

France betrayed its promise, but even as he turned violently against the colonial motherland, Fanon remained faithful to the ideals of the French Revolution, hoping that they might be achieved elsewhere, in the independent nations of what was then known as the Third World. He was a “Black Jacobin,” as the Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R. James described Toussaint Louverture in his classic history of the Haitian Revolution.

Nearly six decades after the loss of Algeria, France still hasn’t forgiven Fanon’s “treason”: a recent proposal to name a street after him in Bordeaux was struck down. Never mind that Fanon had bled for France as a young man, then fought for Algeria’s independence in defense of classical republican principles, or that his writing continues to speak to the predicament of many young French citizens of Black and Arab descent who have been made to feel like strangers in their own country.

In 1908, Georg Simmel, a German Jewish sociologist, published an essay called “The Stranger.” The stranger, he writes, “is not a wanderer, who may come today and leave tomorrow. He comes today—and stays.” This was Fanon’s experience throughout his life: as a soldier in the French army, as a West Indian medical student in Lyon, as a Black Frenchman, and as a non-Muslim in the Algerian resistance to France. Simmel suggests that even as the stranger arouses suspicion, he benefits from a peculiar epistemological privilege since “he is offered revelations, confessions otherwise carefully hidden from any more organically embedded persons.”

Listening to such confessions was Fanon’s trade as a psychiatrist, and it was in doing so that he decided to throw himself into the independence struggle, even to become Algerian, as if a commitment to his patients’ care and recovery required an even more radical kind of solidarity, a marriage to the people he had come to love.

The twentieth century was, of course, full of foreign-born revolutionaries, radical strangers drawn to distant lands upon which they projected their hopes and fantasies. Yet Fanon was unusual, and much more than a sympathetic fellow traveler. He would eventually become the FLN’s roving ambassador in Africa—his complexion a decided asset for a North African movement seeking support from its sub-Saharan cousins—and acquire a reputation as the FLN’s “chief theoretician.”

This he was not. It would have been highly surprising if such an intensely nationalistic movement had chosen a foreigner as its theoretician. Fanon’s task was mostly limited to communicating aims and decisions that others had formulated. But he interpreted Algeria’s liberation struggle in a manner that helped transform it into a global symbol of resistance to domination. And he did so in the language of the profession he practiced, and at the same time radically reimagined: psychiatry.

Before he was a revolutionary, Fanon was a psychiatrist, and his thinking about society took shape within spaces of confinement: hospitals, asylums, clinics, and the prison house of race, which—as a Black man—he experienced throughout his life.

Fanon was not a modest man. He struck some of his contemporaries as vain, arrogant, even hotheaded. Yet to his patients he could hardly have been humbler.

What he saw in their faces, and in their physical and psychological distress, were people who had been deprived of freedom and forcibly alienated from themselves, from their ability to come to grips with reality and act upon it independently. Some of them were mentally ill (in French, aliénés); others were immigrant workers or colonized Algerians who suffered from hunger, poor housing, racism, and violence; still others suffered from performing the dirty work of colonial repression. (Fanon treated French soldiers who had tortured Algerian suspects, and wrote with remarkable lucidity and compassion about their traumas.) What they shared was an invisible, lacerating anguish inscribed in the psyche, immobilizing both body and soul. This anguish, for Fanon, was a kind of dissident knowledge: a counternarrative to the triumphal story that the West told about itself.

In a 1945 essay on Richard Wright’s memoir Black Boy, Ralph Ellison observed that racial oppression begins “in the shadow of infancy where environment and consciousness are so darkly intertwined as to require the skills of a psychoanalyst to define their point of juncture.” Fanon was a psychiatrist, not a psychoanalyst, but he read deeply in the literature of psychoanalysis.

His first book, Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks), published in 1952, when he was twenty-seven, was an attempt to reveal the shadow that racial oppression cast across the lives of Black people. In his later writings on Algeria and the Third World, he powerfully evoked the dream life of societies disfigured by racism and colonial subjugation.

“History,” in the words of the Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson, “is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis.” Fanon had a rare gift for expressing the hurts that history had caused in the lives of Black and colonized peoples, because he felt those hurts with almost unbearable intensity himself. Few writers have captured so vividly the lived experience of racism and colonial domination, the fury it creates in the minds of the oppressed—or the sense of alienation and powerlessness that it engenders.

To be a Black person in a white majority society, he writes in one of his bleakest passages, was to feel trapped in “a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an incline stripped bare of every essential from which a new departure can emerge.”

Yet Fanon himself had a fervent belief in new departures. In his writing, as well as in his work as a doctor and a revolutionary, he remained defiantly hopeful that the colonized victims of the West—the “wretched of the earth,” he called them—could inaugurate a new era in which they would be free not only of foreign rule but also of forced assimilation to the values and languages of their oppressors. But first they had to be willing to fight for their freedom. He meant this literally. Fanon believed in the regenerative potential of violence.

Armed struggle was not simply a response to the violence of colonialism; it was, in his view, a kind of medicine, rekindling a sense of power and self-mastery. By striking back against their oppressors, the colonized overcame the passivity and self-hatred induced by colonial confinement, cast off the masks of obedience they had been forced to wear, and were reborn, psychologically, as free men and women.

But, as he knew, masks are easier to put on than to cast off. Like any struggle to exorcise history’s ghosts and wipe the slate clean, Fanon’s was often a confrontation with impossibility, with the limits to his visionary desires. Much of the power of his writing resides in the tension, which he never quite resolved, between his work as a doctor and his obligations as a militant, between his commitment to healing and his belief in violence.

Fanon made his case for violence in his final work, Les Damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth), published just before his death in December 1961. The aura that still surrounds him today owes much to this book, the culmination of his thinking about anti-colonial revolution and one of the great manifestos of the modern age. In his preface, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that “the Third World discovers itself and speaks to itself through this voice.” An exaggeration, to be sure, and an inadvertently patronizing one: Fanon’s voice was one among many in the colonized world, which had no shortage of writers and spokespeople.

Yet the electrifying impact of Fanon’s book on the imagination of writers, intellectuals, and insurgents in the Third World can hardly be overestimated. A few years after Fanon’s death, Orlando Patterson—a radical young Jamaican writer who would later become a distinguished sociologist of slavery—described The Wretched of the Earth as “the heart and soul of a movement, written, as it could only have been written, by one who fully participated in it.”

The Wretched of the Earth was required reading for revolutionaries in the national liberation movements of the 1960s and ’70s. It was translated widely and cited worshipfully by the Black Panthers, the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa, Latin American guerrillas, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Islamic revolutionaries of Iran. From the perspective of his readers in national liberation movements, Fanon understood not only the strategic necessity of violence but also its psychological necessity. And he understood this because he was both a psychiatrist and a colonized Black man.

Some readers in the West have expressed horror at Fanon’s defense of violence, accusing him of being an apologist for terrorism—and there is much to contest. Yet Fanon’s writings on the subject are easily misunderstood or caricatured. As he repeatedly pointed out, colonial regimes, such as French-ruled Algeria, were themselves founded upon violence: the conquest of the indigenous populations; the theft of their land; the denigration of their cultures, languages, and religions.

The violence of the colonized was a counter-violence, embraced after other, more peaceful forms of opposition had proved impotent. However gruesome it sometimes was, it could never match the violence of colonial armies, with their bombs, torture centers, and “relocation” camps.

Readers with an intimate experience of oppression and cruelty have often responded sympathetically to Fanon’s insistence on the psychological value of violence for the colonized. In a 1969 essay, the philosopher Jean Améry, a veteran of the Belgian anti-fascist resistance and a Holocaust survivor, wrote that Fanon described a world that he knew very well from his time in Auschwitz. What Fanon understood, Améry argued, was that the violence of the oppressed is “an affirmation of dignity,” opening onto a “historical and human future.”

That Fanon, who never belonged anywhere in his lifetime, has been claimed by so many as a revolutionary brother—indeed, as a universal prophet of liberation—is an achievement he might have savored.

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Excerpted from The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon by Adam Shatz. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, an imprint of Macmillan. Copyright © 2024 by Adam Shatz. All rights reserved.

Studio system Hollywood horror films featured Black monsters only when the films were based in “deepest, darkest Africa.” There were savages running around, worshipping big gorillas like King Kong or making do as cannibals eager to dine on white meat. The classic Universal horror creatures were far out of reach of the few Black actors big enough to play them.

Hollywood would never turn Sidney Poitier into a teenage werewolf like Michael Landon, nor would Paul Robeson be cast as Dr. Frankenstein (though he got close enough to that level of madness in The Emperor Jones). Negroes couldn’t even play the Invisible Man, not Ralph Ellison’s version and certainly not H.G. Wells’s. And viewers couldn’t even see him! Mummies were also off the table, even if they did come from Africa.

In January 1972, at the same time Warners was making Super Fly in New York City, director William Crain was in Los Angeles to begin production on the first monster film to feature a Black vampire. Of course, American International Pictures (AIP) made the title a play on “Black Dracula,” calling the film Blacula.

Inspired by the previously successful idea of casting a stage veteran like Vincent Price to class up their low-budget literary adaptations, AIP hired Shakespearian actor William Marshall to portray Prince Mamuwalde, the man who would be Blacula. Marshall was six feet, five inches tall, the same height as the white guy who held the monopoly on vampires in 1972, Christopher Lee. Like Lee, he was also a classically trained opera singer who rarely got to employ that talent onscreen.

Born in Gary, Indiana, in 1924, Marshall had already been working for almost thirty years before he was cast in his signature role. He made his Broadway debut in Carmen Jones in 1944 before being directed by Marty Ritt in Dorothy Heyward’s play Set My People Free in 1948. In 1950, he understudied the role of Captain Hook for fellow monster movie legend Boris Karloff in Peter Pan (in addition to playing Cookson) and, a year later, played De Lawd in a revival of The Green Pastures.

It was seeing that Pulitzer-winning racist musical onstage that made Marshall, then eight years old, want to be an actor. He studied at the Actors Studio before journeying to Europe to play in numerous Shakespeare plays, most notably the lead in Othello (no blackface necessary). The London Sunday Times called him “the best Othello of our time,” which really must have burned Sir Laurence Olivier’s ass with a vengeance! Marshall used his deep, bass voice with preternatural precision, whether as the US attorney general in Robert Aldrich’s excellent 1977 thriller, Twilight’s Last Gleaming, or as the King of Cartoons on the ’80s children show Pee-wee’s Playhouse.

Such an awesome voice also made Marshall a formidable bad guy, though in the case of Blacula, his villainy is far from certain. The screenplay by Joan Torres and Raymond Koenig has an unusual amount of sympathy for Mamuwalde. His tale is tragic, and his lust for blood is more out of need than desire. Even so, their script doesn’t scrimp on the genre goods; Blacula has a large body count, even if the bodies don’t stay dead for long. It also has an ending that destroys its monster in an unconventional fashion.

“‘You’re joking,’ I said, when I was asked to do it,” Marshall told Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times. “But I thought it had possibilities. I had damn near many pages of criticism as there were in the script itself.” AIP declined most of those changes, but some of Marshall’s demands for historical context wound up on the screen: Mamuwalde is African royalty, and he gets to speak a bit of Swahili and educate the viewer on African art and rituals. He never looks less than regal in his human form, carrying himself with a distinguished carriage that matched that incredible voice.

In a pre-credits sequence set in 1780, the powerful Mamuwalde and his beautiful wife, Luva (Vonetta McGee) visit the Transylvanian palace of Dracula (Charles Macaulay). Mamuwalde hopes to get his host’s assistance in stopping the African slave trade, but Dracula does not take too kindly to uppity Negroes who don’t know their place. To quote Gene Siskel’s positive review in the Chicago Tribune, “Dracula, it seems, was a redneck.”

As punishment, Dracula bites Mamuwalde, but not before lecturing him. “You shall pay, Black prince. I shall place a curse of suffering on you that will doom you to a living hell. I curse you with my name. You shall be Blacula!” An even worse fate befalls Luva; she’s left in mortal form to starve and die while listening to Mamuwalde’s anguished screams for blood.

A pause here to pay tribute to Charles Macaulay, whose characters were responsible for the creation of two of the first major movie monsters played by Black actors. Before his Count Dracula turned William Marshall into a vampire, his Dr. Gordon turned Marshall’s future co-star, Pam Grier, into the Panther Woman in The Twilight People. That film, a very-low-budget riff on H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, opened in cinemas in June 1972, a month before Blacula.

Grier told the audience at her 2022 TCM Film Festival tribute that she enjoyed playing a character who was strictly an animal. Her enjoyment is in every frame of her performance. Despite some hideous makeup, Grier is a convincing half-human, half-panther creature who, like Mamuwalde, racks up an impressive body count before her demise.

Blacula’s reign of jugular vein puncturing starts when the film jumps to the present day. Two homosexual interior decorators, an interracial couple named Bobby and Billy, buy Mamuwalde’s coffin and ship it back to Los Angeles. They both think it looks fierce! What’s inside it is equally fierce. Mamuwalde has been starving for blood for two hundred years, so the couple become his first victims and, by extension, his first minions.

At the funeral home, Tina (McGee again) and her sister Michelle (Denise Nicholas) mourn their friends. Tina gets Mamuwalde’s attention because she looks exactly like his former love, Luva. Bobby’s corpse gets the attention of Michelle’s man, pathologist Dr. Gordon, because it is completely drained of blood. Gordon is played by the Blaxploitation ubiquitous actor Thalmus Rasulala. Soon after, Bobby disappears from the funeral home, returning home to his master.

Mamuwalde is obsessed with Tina, and she falls for him despite his inability to appear in the daytime. A photographer friend of hers accidentally takes a picture of the two of them, signing her death certificate because vampires cast neither a reflection nor a photographic image. A taxicab driver, Juanita (Ketty Lester) also gets sucked dry after she runs Mamuwalde over with her cab. Now a vampire, she figures in the most terrifying scene in Blacula, a slow-motion run down a morgue hallway. Her prey is the hapless mortician Sam, played by film noir legend Elisha Cook Jr. in a cameo.

Despite all that biting and sucking, Blacula is a love story where the viewer hopes Tina is indeed Luva reincarnated. She’s surprisingly understanding when Mamuwalde explains why he’s pursued a relationship with her. It’s too bad Dr. Gordon figures out who the Blacula in the title is. Along with Peters (Gordon Pinsent), a cop who gets a sobering lesson in the existence of vampires at Sam’s morgue, the good doctor tracks down his foe. Meanwhile, Tina is hypnotized to follow the bat version of Mamuwalde (yes, he turns into a fake bat on a string) to his hideout.

Just when it looks like the two lovers will be reunited forever, Tina is accidentally shot dead by the cops. After bringing her back to “life” with a vampire bite, Mamuwalde puts her in his coffin. When Peters opens that coffin expecting to find its owner, he stakes Tina instead. Having lost his true love twice in one lifetime, Mamuwalde does something unprecedented in horror movie history. He gives up.

Marshall plays his last scene with a haunting dignity and resignation. Here is a tired Black man, done so wretchedly by bad luck that his only recourse is to end it all. “That won’t be necessary,” he says somberly when Dr. Gordon attempts to stake him. Mamuwalde walks past him and into the daylight, frying himself to death. There’s a sense of relief in his demise, for at last the evil curse put upon him by white racism has been lifted. Blacula ends with a very lousy (but still gross) melted head special effect.

When it opened on July 26, 1972, Blacula didn’t do too poorly with the critics. In addition to Siskel, Variety gave the film a good review, as did the Chicago Reader and the Miami Herald. Audiences liked it as well, bringing in $3,000,000 in ticket sales against a $500,000 budget. Along with Shaft, it was one of the few Blaxploitation films to win an award, earning Best Horror Film at the inaugural sci-fi- and horror-based Saturn Awards.

Though it featured educated Black characters and a lead that was far from a stereotype, Blacula still drew the ire of Junius Griffin. A month before he created the Coalition Against Blaxploitation, he started a beef with Marshall over the actor’s dream project, a film version of Martinique poet Aimé Césaire’s play The Tragedy of King Christophe. King Christophe was a real-life Haitian revolutionary hero, a great opportunity for Marshall, but he was outranked by Anthony Quinn’s competing project, Black Majesty. The Mexican-American Quinn had intended to play the Black lead role himself, causing all manner of controversy. To everyone’s surprise, Griffin endorsed Quinn’s project.

“If Black actors can play demeaning roles in Blacula,” Griffin told Daily Variety, “I could hardly oppose Quinn’s portrayal.” The head of the Los Angeles NAACP did not look good approving a white Latino actor playing a Black character in blackface. As a result, Griffin was forced to resign his post, freeing him up to be a thorn in the side of Blaxploitation. Blacula’s director, William Crain, was on record saying Griffin tied him to a chair to prevent him from working on 1976’s Dr. Black and Mr. Hyde.

Vengefully, Blacula rose again in 1973’s Scream Blacula Scream. Bob Kelljan took over for Crain, but Torres and Koenig returned as scriptwriters. This time, voodoo is added to the mix courtesy of Pam Grier’s Lisa Fortier. It’s how Mamuwalde is reborn. He’s not happy to return, at least until he casts his eyes on Pam. Marshall is a more brutal vampire this time around, and he’s been given a Renfield in the guise of a soul brother named Willis Daniels, played by Richard Lawson in his film debut. Lawson is hilariously over-the-top, going full jive ass at some points before Mamuwalde chews him out for his stupidity.

Like most sequels, Scream Blacula Scream is bigger but not better. The plot is muddled, and the audience sympathy is no longer with Mamuwalde. On the plus side, Marshall and Grier were a dream team for fans, and Grier proves herself worthy of being in the same scream queen fraternity as Jamie Lee Curtis. She didn’t have to go that route, however, because when Scream Blacula Scream hit theaters, Coffy was already making Pam Grier a Blaxploitation star.

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Excerpted from Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras: A History of Blaxpoitation Cinema by Odie Henderson. Copyright © 2024. Published by Abrams Books.

The following is excerpted from Cold Crematorium:Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz,  József Debreczeni’s firsthand account of his deportation to Auschwitz, from Hungary, in May 1944.

*

The long train, comprised of low boxcars with German insignia, was grinding to a halt.

“We’re stopping,” the word spread among the barely conscious, listless crowd.

We suspected that we were nearing our destination. We’d been herded aboard two and a half days earlier in Bačka Topola, and since then we’d stopped just twice, and only for a minute or two. On the first such occasion, some sort of thin soup was handed in through a gap wide enough to fit only the bowl containing it. The second time, the train slowed down along the open tracks.

The bolts screeched open, and the German military police, in grass-green uniforms, barked shrilly: “Aussteigen! Zur seite! Los! Los! [Exit! To the side! Come on! Come on!]”

We stopped by an embankment awash with flowers and beside a little patch of woods. Who could say where we were? In Hungary, Slovakia, or perhaps Poland? The henchmen, in their grass-green uniforms, announced that we could relieve ourselves.

“Going into the woods is prohibited! We will shoot at every suspicious movement!”

Hundreds upon hundreds of people stampeded toward the designated narrow space. Old women’s fading eyes were grotesque mirrors of terror. Six days earlier, these women had been sitting in their lovely old armchairs talking of Sunday lunch. They’d been listening to the radio and looking out at their yards from the living rooms of their provincial homes, awaiting news of grandchildren away on forced labor service.

Younger, married women. Days earlier they’d been sprinkling their bosoms and arms all over with eau de toilette, and discreetly draping their skirts over their knees each time they sat down.

Girls. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old. They’d learned to curtsey properly. At home they’d left schoolbooks; perhaps a few timid love letters in ribbon-tied, paper lace–adorned boxes of chocolate; and wildflowers pressed between the pages of keepsake albums.

Men. Young and old. Wide-eyed schoolboys and disheveled adolescents. Grown-ups in their prime, men getting on in years, octogenarians. They run; they run. For two days they had no way of relieving themselves. They spread their legs instinctively, squatting like animals. Urine collects in pools.

Nearby, the camp guards, in spick-and-span grass-green uniforms, don’t take their eyes off them. Not a line stirs on the faces of these guards. They aren’t human. Nor, any longer, are those who are squatting.

I believe that somewhere in Eastern Europe an extraordinary metamorphosis took place at the edge of a verdant forest along a railway embankment. That is where the people of this tightly locked train of hell were transformed into animals. Just like all the others, the hundreds of thousands of people that the madness had sent spewing out of fifteen countries toward factories of death and gas chambers.

At that moment they put us on all four legs for the first time.

*

The train is slowing….

What remains of life stirs in the darkness of the train cars. Of the sixty human beings herded into our boxcar back in Topola, fifty-six still show faint signs of life. Primal terror, hunger, thirst, and lack of air have already done in four of us. Their corpses have been heaped into a pile in a corner. Most of us are from the southern and central Bačka region of Serbia’s Vojvodina. Mr. Mandel, the old carpenter, a good friend of my father, was among them, and he was the first to fall. Mr. Mandel had made the furniture for more than a few girls from Bačka for their betrothals. He did so always reliably, honorably.

What the old carpenter died of, I think, was that his cigarettes had been taken away. For sixty years he’d smoked fifty a day. Not a man alive had ever seen Mr. Mandel without a smoldering cigarette. His supply, along with his jewelry and money, had been confiscated back in the camp in Topola. For twenty-four hours en route, Mr. Mandel just stared blankly, stubbornly, deliriously, at the surging mass of people all around, at the billowing of all those stinking, steaming human bodies.

Sixty years of work had stained his hands to a mahogany hue. On the train his right hand sometimes moved mechanically, as if holding a cigarette. Between his index and middle fingers Mr. Mandel raised the imagined cigarette to wilted lips. Like a child pretending to smoke, he even pursed his lips to puff.

But after Nové Zámky, that aging head of his tilted to the side. His death was not an event. Here death could no longer be an event. For a moment, Dr. Bakács from Novi Sad, raised that haggard head above the frayed fur vest. He gave a tired wave of the hand. Dr. Bakács was already in a bad way, too. Perhaps he was thinking that in twelve hours some other doctor in the car would be taking note of his own death.

Two people went mad. They raged incessantly for many hours. Bloodshot eyes bulged from their waxlike faces as they sprayed foamy spit all over and tried clawing at the faces and scratching at the eyes of those standing nearby. Without further ado, the camp guards shoved these two and those rounded up from the other boxcars into the woods when we stopped to relieve ourselves. A few minutes later we heard the crackle of machine-gun fire. One of the grass-green henchmen let out a thick, vile guffaw, and spat.

No, we didn’t look at each other. We’d been on the road too long for that.

On the road… to where?

I was somehow amazed at myself. This road…Subotica, Budapest, Nové Zámky. Lo and behold, I’m still alive, and I haven’t gone mad, either—so came the fleeting thought. Not that I was thinking much. To be thinking, I too—no matter how much I’d managed to hold myself together—would have needed cigarettes. And yet I had none.

Lake Balaton, frothing a restless green, comes into view through the tiny cell window of the car. On this windy, rainy first of May, tonguelike waves vomit with revulsion toward the train. I see Nagykanizsa. We rumble past the small city without stopping, though back in Topola policeman number 6626 said we’d be brought here to work.

“Have no fear,” 6626 had whispered to us. “You’re off to Nagykanizsa, where you’ll do agricultural work.”

Number 6626 was an amiable, sober-minded Hungarian peasant. He bellowed loudly at the internees loitering about in the yard, hauling stewpots, drawing water from the well, or standing about exhaustedly, but meanwhile—when the German guard wasn’t looking—he winked at us blithely, wagging his head, like some chummy little rascal.

It was May 1944, and by then few Hungarian peasants were still so beguiled by Nazism that they couldn’t see this much: Döme Sztójay, László Baky, László Endre, Béla Imrédy—pro-fascist Hungarian leaders—and other such murderers had lost the game. Someone would have to pay for the blood, the tears, and the kicks.

Number 6626 was mistaken all the same. We didn’t go to Nagykanizsa.

The mirror of the Drava River sparkles meaninglessly upon us. On the other side is Pavelić’s Nazified Croatia. That is, death. Just like that, from the middle of life. I wave my hand as did my onetime teacher of Greek, Mr. Lendvai, from the window of his faculty office ten days earlier in Sombor, as we were being loaded onto trucks on the street below, in front of the high school.

I’m standing on the bed of the truck, wearing a backpack and a jacket with a homemade, regulation-size yellow star. Mr. Lendvai, whose class I finished in 1924 with an A, and the other teachers look out numbly at the truck and its anxious throng of passengers. Our eyes meet, and Mr. Lendvai waves his hand just so. I understood.

The world is over. Everything is over. So said Mr. Lendvai’s wave of the hand.

Nenikekas Judaiae…nenikekas Judaiae….Wretched Jews…wretched Jews….

*

The prisoners walk on the sprawling grounds of the Topola internment camp. Older folks dodder along, hands clasped behind their backs. Some people exchange tearful smiles on recognizing each other. Present here is practically the entire team of Yugoslavia’s onetime Hungarian-language daily paper: editors and other staff, old and new. Our cynicism masks our despair.

“The women and children were rounded up yesterday,” says stumpy Lajos Jávor, who suffers from heart trouble. His bloodless lips are wincing strangely even though his perpetual smile is frozen on his face. “In Subotica, Sombor, Novi Sad. Everywhere. They rounded up everyone.”

Dr. János Móricz, the onetime editor in chief, to whom I’d once handed over my first pieces, in anxious veneration, wipes his pince-nez spectacles and snaps at me: “Translate this to Hungarian if you’re a translator.”

Hopelessness takes off all its clothes in everyone’s eyes. Damp, frayed straw mattresses lie about within the ugly, red-stone building. The persecuted sit on heaps of suitcases and rucksacks, staring blankly ahead. A few of them still have cigarettes, which they managed to hide from the guards on arrival. They are now prodigal smokers.

No one here bothers with tomorrow. Nor even with the next fifteen minutes. Despair doesn’t look through calendars, and it pays no heed to planning. Tomorrow is shrouded in a fog of distance so hopeless that it might as well be the next millennium, when people might be wandering about in skirts or tunics, when there won’t be relocation camps and, perhaps, the guiltless need not be punished.

Tomorrow….But who bothers with that? After all, even the women were rounded up yesterday. As were the children. But why? Almighty madness, why? We don’t dare think through the thought. There, in Topola, few of us had heard of Auschwitz, and little at that. Vague snippets of information about the chilling terrors of the Polish ghettos had reached us, true, and with chattering teeth we can recall the deportation of women from Slovakia, but only yesterday all this was distant and unbelievable.

Not even now did we dare think seriously that we would be hauled away, abroad, thousands and thousands of innocents. We tried cheering up ourselves and the others by concocting technical difficulties.

“The Nazis now have other problems. Where would they acquire the coal, boxcars, trains, and people needed to pull off this sort of mass migration?”

So said Béla Maurer, lawyer and political commentator, in a tone of voice tolerating no dissent. Indeed, the others’ expressions were encouraging. Hungarian workers and peasants had not yet been irrevocably clouded in their thinking by the madness of the brownshirts. They sensed instinctively that the folks in charge had lead in their wings. The more intrepid among them mouthed off in taverns about villainous things going on. They were already smiling at the flowery communiqués from the front, at constrained euphemisms such as “breakaway military maneuvers,” “strategic retreats,” “redeployments,” and “repositioning.”

On Hungarian land, smug Germans were already being showered with dark glances. The people could see what their leaders didn’t want to see: the tired, rumpled, unshaven Wehrmacht regulars; the imbecilic, apathetic SS guards, whose merciless eyes had already sunk deep under their helmets; the ditzy fifteen- and sixteen-year-old kids draped in shirts made of tent canvas—the army with which the German “allies” had occupied the country. They saw they had to go back, and they knew there was no going back.

Empty streets, shuttered windows, defiantly sullen faces. The awaiting silence of the inevitable horror skulked in the villages of the Bačka region, too. The quiet of the coming storm stood on tiptoes.

When we set off on the four-kilometer march from the grounds of the camp in Topola toward the railway station, none of us—not the men with their bundles and backpacks, not the waddling kids, not the tired women—knew about Auschwitz. But the bayonet-adorned Hungarian policemen the Germans had positioned every fifty meters along the road, they knew.

Hatred smoldered in the eyes of the policemen. That carefully seeded hatred whose proxies, trained to follow commands, didn’t exactly question a whole lot. And yet there were some whose sober-minded peasant humanity was resuscitated by the stunning scene. A few of the armed statues lining the road murmured: “May God save you!”

The half-conscious people wobbling along don’t even glance that way, but that ominous sentence of farewell is still resounding in me when, from far away, I first glimpse our train along one of the platforms at the station. The cars with their “DR” emblem—Deutsche Reichsbahn (German National Railway)— speak a German even more German than that of the German camp guards accompanying us. We’re being deported, after all. The best-case scenario: gas chambers. The worst-case: slave labor until death.

And to think how sorry we’d felt for those eight among us who’d taken their own lives at the camp when the order for departure had come—when it became clear that our Hungarian camp was nothing more than a relocation site. The whole thing had been more tolerable, after all, as long as we could keep telling ourselves that they’d keep us there or order us to some other place in Hungary. Topola, Bačka….!

This familiar conceptual duality, this thought, had somehow kept the terror of utter hopelessness at bay. Topola was still a bit of home.

Our eyes sought hope, and glinting before them was the dubious, if not yet completely discredited, promise of personal security represented by the four numbers gleaming on the belts of the Hungarian Royal Gendarmes. Grasping at the straws of a familiar landscape, we held out hope that we were not yet completely outside the law of our land.

A Hungarian Nazi could be just as cruel as a German one. He could be just as determined. But his ingenuity—so we felt—had not yet warped into the sadism of the gas chambers.

______________________________

Copyright 2023 by the Estate of József Debreczeni. Courtesy St. Martin’s Press. Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz by József Debreczeni and translated by Paul Olchváry is available via St. Martin’s Press.

I first read Virginia Woolf’s novels in the early 1980s as a visiting undergraduate at the University of Sussex, its campus nestled in the South Downs just seven miles from Monks House, Woolf’s country home in Rodmell village. Since then, I have been fascinated by her pacifism, and by the veterans, shell-shocked soldiers, and war dead who haunt her books.

In Mrs. Dalloway (1925), I am drawn not to the tinselly Clarissa, but to the brain-fissured Septimus Warren Smith. Each time I read To the Lighthouse (1927) I am once again shocked by World War I encap­sulated in square brackets. In Jacob’s Room (1922), it is the dismay of a mother cradling an empty pair of her dead son’s shoes that chokes me up. Writing about the Dreadnought hoax seemed the natural extension of my long admiration for Woolf, the pacifist.

The Dreadnought hoax took place on a cloudy afternoon in early February 1910. Woolf—then the unmarried 28-year-old aspiring novelist Virginia Stephen—joined her brother and friends in a practical joke on the British Navy. Putting on blackface makeup and theatrical costumes, they went aboard the nation’s most famous battleship, the H.M.S. Dreadnought, posing as African princes.

Incredibly, they got away with it. When the story of the stunt was leaked to the press, it made headlines around the world for weeks, embarrassed the Royal Navy, and even provoked heated discussions in parliament. Exactly what the hoax meant has been debated ever since.

When I first read about the Dreadnought prank in the waning decades of the twentieth century, it was celebrated as Woolf’s cheeky act of defiance targeting militarism, empire, and patriarchy, a perfect skewering of war mongers and their war machines. It seems impossible to believe now, but there was little concern that the young Virginia Woolf boarded the formidable warship wearing blackface make-up as she masqueraded as an African prince, an act of unthinkable offensiveness. The past, they say, is a foreign country. What they don’t tell you is how even your own past can feel like a bewildering, inexplicable land.

After the racial reckoning of the last twenty years, it is impossible to look at the hoax as merely an audacious pacifist prank. No serious writer can ignore the racist attitudes at its core.

Once I realized that I needed to see Woolf’s life afresh, to reimagine it in the context of Black British history, my view opened to a host of extraordinary individuals invisible to traditional approaches. I found that Woolf’s Bloomsbury neighbor­hood was home to many Black people, some of whom would go on to play crucial roles in the dismantling of empire. I discovered that her personal history was intimately connected to a nineteenth-century Ethiopian prince ripped from his homeland by a British general and brought to England to live out what would be a short, unhappy life.

I also realized that her blackface masquerade linked her to the exploits of a Jamaican swindler who impersonated African royalty and became something of a folk hero. As I spent time exploring the rich world of Jamaicans living in early twentieth-century London, I also understood that the redoubtable Caribbean writer Una Marson’s play London Calling was, in fact, a rewriting of the Dreadnought stunt as an anti-imperialist, anti-racist comedy. As I researched, I saw that telling the story of the hoax was inseparable from talking about the lives of Black people in Britain.

As I worked, I found a wealth of materials describing the prank, includ­ing naval memoranda, newspaper stories, interviews, photographs, telegrams, letters, and memoirs. There were innumerable retell­ings in newspapers, popular maga­zines, Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, and all manner of blogs and podcasts. The practical joke even played a bit part in an episode of the hit televi­sion show Downton Abbey. It seemed as if nothing could be easier than to describe what had taken place.

And yet, once I started digging into the historical documents, I discovered that nearly every account I had read about the hoax was wrong including, amazingly enough, Woolf’s own. Since 1910, writers—even those who were there—have miscon­strued the most basic facts: the day it occurred, who was being impersonated, even the top-secret status of the Dreadnought.

There were times writing this book when no one could have been more afraid of Virginia Woolf than I was. As I reread her diaries, I delighted in her wit and thrilled at her brilliant insights even as I winced at her easy racist remarks, her cruel caricatures of her friends, and her sense of superiority over the people who had been so shortsighted as to be born into a lower class. Rereading her nov­els, some dazzled me all over again. Others put me to sleep.

Returning to her biography, I pitied her for the bereavements that darkened her youth, cringed as she covered her face with burnt cork, admired her work ethic in the face of recurring mental illness, envied her easy entrée into the literary world, and mourned her early death by her own hand. I thought about our desire as readers to place our literary heroes on pedestals because their books have moved us with their beauty and wisdom. We don’t seem to know how to deal with the lives and the works of writers who are at once revolutionary and deeply flawed.

Some people may argue that they should be discarded altogether. But if we do that, we lose the les­sons that past lives offer. Could looking closely at the Dreadnought hoax, I wondered, and the stories we have been spinning about it for over a hundred years, tell us not only about this iconic writer and her world, but also about ourselves?

If Virginia Woolf had not put a stone in her coat pocket and walked into the Ouse on 28 March 1941 when she was 59 years old, it is possible she might have altered her bigoted ideas about race. In one of her last book reviews, she observed that even people of “genius and learning” have difficulty swimming against the current of their times. And while their genius and learning may “come downstream untouched,” as she put it, it soon becomes obvious that the social conventions which dictated their lives are “obsolete and ridiculous.”

Just as Woolf predicted, her talent, intelligence, and sensitivity have sailed downstream to us intact, and the racist conventions that bound and blinded her look obsolete, hateful, and absurd. Had she lived into her sixties, seventies, or eighties, would she have seen their absurdity, too? We will never know, of course. Death has made her unchangeable.

Yet Virginia Woolf’s writing can still be alive to us, revealing as it so often does that lives are a messy, confusing miasma of emotion and reason swirling around together and apart, blinding us, holding us back, or thrusting us forward toward our blunders and our triumphs.

__________________________________

Adapted from The Girl Prince: Virginia Woolf, Race, and the Dreadnought Hoax by Danell Jones and published by C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd. in the UK and Oxford University Press in the US © Olga Onuch and Henry E. Hale 2023. Used by permission. All rights reserved. 

On June 15, 1905, Clara Magdalen Jansen killed all four of her children, Mary Claire, Frederick, John, and Theodore, in a little farmhouse in Jamestown, Wisconsin. She cleaned their bodies up, tucked them into bed, then took her own life. Her husband, Paul, came home from work to find his entire family under the covers of their little beds, dead, in what must have been one of the most horrific and traumatic experiences a human being can suffer.

There is a concept in philosophy known as amor fati, or love of one’s fate. We must accept that our lives are the culmination of everything that came before us. You may not know the names of all eight of your great-grandparents off the top of your head, but when you look in the mirror, you are looking at generational composites of their eyes, their noses, their lips, an altered but recognizable etching from a forgotten past.

When we meet someone new, we can be certain of one fact: none of their direct ancestors died before having children. It’s a cliché, but true, to say that you wouldn’t exist if your parents had not met in just the same, exact way. Even if the timing had been slightly different, a different person would have been born.

But that’s also true for your grandparents, and your great-grandparents, and your great-great-grandparents, stretching back millennia. Your life depends on the courting of countless people in the Middle Ages, the survival of your distant Ice Age ancestors against the stalking whims of a saber-toothed tiger, and, if you go back even further, the mating preferences of chimpanzees more than 6 million years ago.

Trace the human lineage back hundreds of millions of years and all our fates hinge on a single wormlike creature that, thankfully for us, avoided being squished. If those precise chains of creatures and couples hadn’t survived, lived, and loved just the way that they did, other people might exist, but you wouldn’t. We are the surviving barbs of a chain-link past, and if that past had been even marginally different, we would not be here.

The Paul who came home to that little farmhouse in Wisconsin was my great-grandfather, Paul F. Klaas. My middle name is Paul, a family name enshrined by him. I’m not related to his first wife, Clara, because she tragically severed her branch of the family tree just over a century ago. Paul got remarried, to my great-grandmother.

When I was twenty years old, my dad sat me down, showed me a 1905 newspaper clipping with the headline “Terrible Act of Insane Woman,” and revealed the most disturbing chapter in our family’s modern history. He showed me a photo of that Klaas family gravestone in Wisconsin, all the little kids on one side, Clara on the other, their deaths listed on the same date. It shocked me. But what shocked me even more was the realization that if Clara hadn’t killed herself and murdered her children, I wouldn’t exist. My life was only made possible by a gruesome mass murder. Those four innocent children died, and now I am alive, and you are reading my thoughts.

Amor fati means accepting that truth, even embracing it, recognizing that we are the offshoots of a sometimes wonderful, sometimes deeply flawed past, and that the triumphs and the tragedies of the lives that came before us are the reason we’re here. We owe our existences to kindness and cruelty, good and evil, love and hate. It can’t be otherwise because, if it were, we would not be us.

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones,” Richard Dawkins once observed. “Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia.” These are the limitless possible futures, full of possible people, that Dawkins called “unborn ghosts.”

Their ranks are infinite; we are finite. With the tiniest adjustments, different people would be born, leading different lives, in a different world. Our existence is bewilderingly fragile, built upon the shakiest of foundations.

Why do we pretend otherwise? These basic truths about the fragility of our existence defy our most deeply held intuitions about how the world works. We instinctively believe that big events have big, straightforward causes, not small, accidental ones. As a social scientist, that’s what I was taught to search for: the X that causes Y.

I am a (disillusioned) social scientist. Disillusioned because I’ve long had a nagging feeling that the world doesn’t work the way that we pretend it does. The more I grappled with the complexity of reality, the more I suspected that we have all been living a comforting lie, from the stories we tell about ourselves to the myths we use to explain history and social change. I began to wonder whether the history of humanity is just an endless, but futile, struggle to impose order, certainty, and rationality onto a world defined by disorder, chance, and chaos.

But I also began to flirt with an alluring thought: that we could find new meaning in that chaos, learning to celebrate a messy, uncertain reality, by accepting that we, and everything around us, are all just flukes, spit out by a universe that can’t be tamed.

Such intellectual heresy ran against everything I had been taught, from Sunday school to grad school. Everything happens for a reason; you just need to find out what it is. If you want to understand social change, just read more history books and social science papers. To learn the story of our species and how we came to be us, dive into some biology and familiarize yourself with Darwin. To grapple with the unknowable mysteries of life, spend time with the titans of philosophy, or if you’re a believer, turn to religion. And if you want to understand the intricate mechanisms of the universe, learn physics.

But what if such enduring human mysteries are all part of the same big question?

Specifically, it’s the biggest puzzle humanity must grapple with: Why do things happen? The more I read, year after year, the more I realized that there are no ready-made solutions to that enormous puzzle just waiting to be plucked from political science theories, philosophy tomes, economic equations, evolutionary biology studies, geology research, anthropology articles, physics proofs, psychology experiments, or neuroscience lectures.

Instead, I began to recognize that each of these disparate realms of human knowledge offers a piece that, when combined, can help us get closer to solving this bewildering puzzle. The challenge of my new book, Fluke, is to try to join many of those pieces together, to yield a new, coherent picture that reframes our sense of who we are and how our world works.

When enough puzzle pieces snap together, a fresh image emerges. As we see it come into focus, there’s hope that we can replace the comforting lies we tell ourselves with something that approaches a more accurate truth, even if it means that we must flip our entire, deeply ingrained worldview on its head.

A fair warning: some of you may find that flip disorienting. But we already live in disorienting times—of conspiratorial politics and pandemics, economic shocks, climate change, and fresh society-bending magic, produced by the wizardry of artificial intelligence. In a world of rapid change, many of us feel lost in a sea of uncertainty. But when lost at sea, clinging to comforting lies will only help us sink. The best life raft may just be the truth.

We live in a more interesting and complex world than we are led to believe. If we gaze a little closer, then the storybook reality of neat, tidy connections might just give way to a reality defined much more by chance and chaos, an arbitrarily intertwined world in which every moment, no matter how small, can count.

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Adapted from Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters by Brian Klaas. Copyright © 2024. Available from Simon & Schuster.

In the beginning, there was fire, and it came in the shape of a young man writhing and wriggling on the steps of a municipal office. His name was Mohammad Bouaziz. He was 26 years old. He was a street vendor. He lived in the white and blue town of Sidi Bouzid in Central Tunisia. With his cart of fruit and vegetables, he provided for his mother and six siblings. 

Humiliation drove him to the flames on that crisp sunny morning. A beating by the police, the confiscation of his cart. He walked up those steps hoping to get his cart back, to speak to someone, to ask for help. No one would listen to him. 

Mohammad Bouaziz set himself alight outside the municipal office right where the palm trees grew. As the blaze swallowed up his body, he was unaware that this act of rage and desperation would soon set in motion the largest wildfire of revolts the Arab world had seen in decades. It was December 17th, 2010.

Rage turned into hope, and hope stole into the ancient lands like a morning mist. It did not stop until it had spread throughout palm trees and pyramids, tourist beaches and moonlit deserts, bazars and hookah bars, lines of soldiers and street vendors, teachers and barbers, doctors and lawyers, workers and farmers. Demonstrations followed, courage was rekindled, city squares taken, shots heard, chants of “Get out!” erupted on every street corner, tyrants were on the run: the Arab Spring was born. 

We come from a history of suffering, the protesters exclaimed as they held hands and sang songs and kept to the streets. From centuries of exploitation, of degradation. It is up to us to end it differently. The country’s future, they said, depends on us. 

In the year that followed, these revolts sent a shock wave into the hearts of authoritarian regimes throughout the SWANA region. From Tunisia to Egypt to Yemen and Syria, people rose demanding justice, freedom, equality and democracy, and they refused to leave until the dictatorial regimes, which had ruled their countries for decades unchallenged, had been dismantled. 

And yet, as it always seems to be the case in the tragic history of our lands, the demands of the people went systematically unheard, their rage discredited, their grief vilified, their hopes unacknowledged, and their courage was answered with nothing but bullets and batons. Soon that was not enough. Soon tanks rolled in where just a few months ago people were reciting poetry, and villages were shelled where people had refused to give up rebellion, and mass graves were dug where students had once staged sit-ins.

Bombs.

Tanks.

Gunshots.

The smell of burnt flesh. 

It is not easy to fight where your adversary is armed to the teeth, and all you have is the street stretching back behind you. It is not easy to fight where your adversary has the power of reincarnation, and all you have is one life, which has never been easy. It is not easy to fight where your adversary thinks the world belongs to it, and all you have is the unrelenting belief that it doesn’t, because you’re there and as long as you’re there, the fight is not over. 

The Arab Spring was born out of a people’s audacious vision for a just and democratic future. It did not know borders, nationalities, nor religion. The slogan “Get out!” which later traveled throughout the world roared the rejection of dictatorships, oppression, corruption and violence. It was a courageous demonstration to the world that contrary to popular belief, the people of our region are not mere victims bereft of agency and aspiration. We are not all battered souls and broken wings. We are not all fragmented aftereffects of yet another mayhem rocking our lives.

The Arab Spring was significant, not only because it ousted two ferocious dictators, but because it bespoke our resilience, our capacity, that we know we deserve better, that we yearn for a world where we can all live with dignity and safety, that we know freedom is weaved in with equality and prosperity, that we are not resigned to our destiny and have the audacity to dream of a better future. 

And yet, none of this was truly the beginning. Not the flames, not the revolts, not the spring. To understand the story better, we have to go back even further, before the revolts, before the dictators.

In the beginning, there was the earth, and it came in the form of lands trodden under the boots of colonizers, protectors and foreign-backed rulers. The boots spoke English, French, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish. Sometimes the boots were multilingual. Sometimes they promised roads. Sometimes oil refineries. Sometimes they built schools to teach us how to better hate ourselves. Always, they refused to leave.

They bombed if necessary. They threw bodies into the river if necessary. They raped and pillaged. Sometimes, they dreamt that these lands were truly their God-given right and woke up believing in their dreams. The dreams made it easier to spill blood. They dug in their heels, closed their eyes, and let the terror take over. 

The loss.

The indelible inheritance of trauma.

The open wounds.

It is impossible to tell the story of our region without going back in time. It is impossible to talk about the misery, the relentless violence, the rise of extremism, authoritarianism, poverty, persecution, the continuous stifling of progressive movements without going back to the moment where lands were taken then returned emptied of their pride and future.

History was never meant to be about the past. It is not about forgiveness, oblivion, nor peace. History is about why we are the way we are today, why we live the way we live and die the way we die. 

The legacy of colonization and imperialism in our region is a dizzying myriad of fake borders, heartless nationalism, and religious fanaticism. Those who promised us liberation turned into dictators once in power, and those who promised us a new self out of the ashes of foreign rule, gave us nothing but the words of God to hold on to.

Soon we were out of options. Our liberation was postponed to unknown futures. We were gaslighted into thinking prosperity had already been achieved, and that the security of our newborn nation was more important than our own safety, its stability than our integrity, its welfare than our basic human rights.

What happened next throughout the SWANA region, from Egypt to Libya to Syria to Iraq, and similarly in the non-Arab countries, such as Iran and Afghanistan, was not merely the disheartening linearity of history, but the shocking lack of mystery in the way tyrannies rose and planted their roots in the debris and disgrace left behind by colonizers. The people were once again trapped, taken hostages in their own land by despotism and greed, by false narratives, by fear and made-up enemies kept alive generation after generation as boogeyman against liberation and progress.

And the people of the land endured. At times, they rebelled. At times, they tolerated. At times, they believed in the lies of those in power. At times, they sank deeper into the wreckage generated by these lies. Always, they struggled to survive, to find meaning in the mayhem around them, to build something dignified they could call life.

But it is not easy to build when you’ve never been given a chance to mourn what you have lost. It is not easy to build when there’s never been any reckoning for the destruction left behind, any healing, any proper words for the scale of your loss. And what you have lost was taken away from you so ferociously and carefully that it will take decades if not centuries to get back on your feet. Because this is not like starting from scratch; this is like opening your eyes and rising from the dead.

Tyrannies thrive on death and ruins. They thrive on marginalization, despair and exclusion. Tyranny is inherently immune to crisis of conscience. Its only way of survival is through violence and repression. It is the only way to exist, the only way to keep going, and none of the regimes ruling these lands in the past decades have been an exception to this rule. 

From torture rooms in Egypt to mass graves in Iran, from shelling of villages in Syria to floggings and public executions in Afghanistan, from Israeli bombs and atrocities in Gaza to slave markets of refugees in Libya, from Kurdish villages gassed in Iraq to Armenian enclaves besieged in Azerbaijan, from the breaking of civil wars everywhere to refugee children drowning over and over again in European seas, tyranny in our lands is in continuous metamorphosis.

At times, it appears in the shape of a ruthless dictator, at times in the form of extremist groups passing off as liberation movements, and other times in the form of occupiers whose sense of home is so destructive that they don’t hesitate to raze villages to the ground for its sake. Death seems to be everywhere. It seems to be everything. Like it has only been biding its time, ready to strike the land at any moment.

And yet, we are the children of this land. 

We are here. 

We are alive. 

We are the children of its olive groves, its mountains, its seas, its jasmine trees. We are the children of its history. Its revolutions. Its fury and frenzy, its prisons, its terror and loss. We are the children of its dreams. Of the tomorrow it once envisioned. Of the fight that continues to be silenced, buried for posterity. 

The revolution in Tunisia was born on the ashes of Mohammad Bouazizi’s body. The revolution in Egypt on the broken face of the 28-year-old Khaleh Said beaten to death by security forces for posting a photo on social media. The revolts in Syria erupted when little boys were arrested and tortured by the police for writing anti-regime graffiti. The revolution in Libya when Fethi Tarbel, a human rights lawyer, was imprisoned. The revolts in Iran when a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Zhina Amini, was murdered by Morality Police for wearing her hijab too loosely.

The sparks are endless, and so are the revolts. And nothing in the magnitude of their fury, courage and demands is different from each other except the artificial borders drawn by others to separate and isolate us. 

Nothing ever disappears. Neither the loss nor the dream. What we must build is not only what has been destroyed, but the hope that once was, the struggle that still is, and an unfinished revolution that has no alternative but to keep growing, keep moving forward, keep spreading its wings far and wide across this land. Because that is what we are. That is what we have. A single scream. A single dance. A single force against those who kill and think we will let them be. That is what brings us together: our stories, memories, future, the promise of our long undying dreams.

And we must own them, stand up for them, and know that our fight is no different to that of our neighbors and that of their neighbors. That happiness is not a solitary thing, and neither is freedom. That only together we can prevail. It is all we have. Our only alternative.

We must know that there will never be freedom in Iran if millions of Afghan refugees are abandoned without a home. Never freedom in Turkey if Kurds are oppressed and humiliated over and over again. Never freedom in Azerbaijan if Armenians are under siege. Never freedom anywhere if Palestinians bleed to death, their limbs, spirits and homes shattered to pieces.

We must know this, and we must hold on to it, believe in it. And we must always remember where our dreams are, that they’re not an instant failure of God, that they are anchored, and they are anchored to something beautiful.

I don’t think it is a coincidence or an exaggeration to say that down through time and certainly over the past century women writers, such as Rachel Carson, have produced an overwhelming number of change-making stories told through narrative, more perhaps than men. Women who wanted to be journalists during the time that London, Sinclair, Hemingway, Orwell, and others were publishing and enjoying attention and praise always had two missions in mind.

There was the story they wanted to write that might create change, and an even more challenging mission: to penetrate the white male journalist fortress that was dead-set against offering them opportunities to write their stories, because they were women.

Until very recently, women journalists were not considered worthy of writing serious stories. Even in the 1960s, as Wolfe and Talese were beginning to pioneer their new journalism, it was not new enough to include women. Gail Sheehy’s book Passages, about the predicable crises people experience as they age, published in 1977, was on the New York Times best-seller list for three consecutive years, and the Library of Congress named it one of the ten most influential books of our time. Writing in The Cut a few years before she died in 2020, Sheehy remembered the struggle and the challenge for women journalists in 1960s and 1970s: the atmosphere of forced division, the lack of acknowledgement of the work they produced, where they were positioned in the newsroom.

“When I was a news chick at the New York Herald Tribune,” she wrote, “sequestered in the flamingo pink Women’s Department (as were all the paper’s female journalists in the ‘60s), the male reporters I might encounter in the elevator looked straight through me, probably assuming I was somebody’s stenographer.”

One specific elevator ride, however, led to an opportunity to write, after she asked the tall sandy-haired reporter: “Mr. Wolfe, what’s it like, writing for Clay Felker?” Felker was the editor of New York and later became the editor of Esquire and later yet of the Village Voice. Wolfe, to his credit, encouraged her to find out from the source—Felker himself.

“I crossed the DMZ into the City Room, all bobbing heads of white men with crew cuts (except for Bad Boy [Jimmy] Breslin and his tangle of black curls) and tapped on the door of the editor-in-chief. Clay Felker’s booming voice came back: ‘Where did you come from? The estrogen zone?’”

Even ten years later, in the New Journalism anthology of the twenty writers selected as the best new journalists of the era, edited by Wolfe and E.W. Johnson, only two women were included: Joan Didion and Barbara Goldsmith, who wrote may books in her long career, including the classic best seller Little Gloria…Happy at Last, about Gloria Vanderbilt’s difficult coming of age, which became both a movie and a TV series.

But long before Sheehy was confined to the “estrogen zone,” women journalists were persona non grata in newsrooms, not included on mastheads and not legitimately acknowledged in bylines. But women managed, through force of will and ingenuity, to do good in the world or for the world by hiding who they were, often assuming a male identity—or disguising themselves as someone else. And not only were they writing narrative, employing the techniques of fiction writers, as Wolfe had described, but daringly and courageously involving themselves in their stories, diving into unknown territory in situations that men could not or would not confront. And they worked really hard at it because they were, in many cases, not wanted and certainly not appreciated as women. But they not only made history; they changed history. And in order to do that, they often changed their names.

*

There are three statues at the Pittsburgh International Airport, through which I mostly travel from home to wherever and back. Two are heroic examples of the city’s history. First, George Washington, the father of our country, who initiated the French and Indian War near Pittsburgh and helped built Fort Necessity and Fort Duquesne; second, the famed Pittsburgh Steelers running back Franco Harris, making his incredible immaculate reception in a divisional playoff game against the Oakland Raiders. If you are a Pittsburgher or an NFL fan, you will know the exact details of this improbable catch he made and the thirty seconds that followed, leading the Steelers to their first of four Super Bowl victories. If you’ve never heard of the immaculate reception, you ought to look it up, unless you want to be perceived as a fool while visiting the town.

The third statue is quite a contrast to George and Franco and somewhat of a surprise and maybe a bit misleading: A young woman, twenty-four years old, with short brown hair, wearing a neat, tailored plaid coat and black leather gloves, with a small woolen hat on the back of her head. She is carrying at her side a small leather satchel. She was a journalist who early in her career worked as a reporter for two local newspapers, but achieved greatness after she left Pittsburgh in 1887 to work for the New York World.

Her name, when she began her journalistic career in Pittsburgh, was Elizabeth Jane Cochrane. But by the time she left the area where she had grown up, she was known as Nellie Bly. It was a name chosen by her editor, taken from a Stephen Foster song. So, a man was able to name her and forge her identity. Women were not allowed to write under their own names at that time, because—according to their publishers and editors—being weak and helpless, they would be much too vulnerable to the wrath of the men who were subjects of the undercover stories they wrote.

Bly—or Cochrane—became famous worldwide by circling the globe in a record-breaking seventy-two days, leaving the fictional character Phileas Fogg, the protagonist in Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days, published in 1873, in the dust. The statue in Pittsburgh depicts her outfit on the day of her departure, on November 14, 1889. The satchel she carried, the size of a small toaster oven, held everything she needed for those seventy-two days of journeying by ship, train, and horseback, including her writing materials and a small flask with a drinking cup. Bly had confronted a great deal of resistance when she proposed her around-the-world plan to her editor, who told her, “No one but a man can do this,” to which she replied: “Very well, start the man, and I’ll start the same day for some other newspaper and beat him.”

She won the assignment and the race against Fogg. Her editor was well aware that Bly could do anything she set her mind to, not despite the fact that she was a woman, but because of it.

For her first big story for the New York World the previous year she exposed the horrific living conditions of the patients of what was then known as an “insane asylum” on Blackwell’s Island, now Roosevelt Island, in New York. Her plan was to get herself committed to Blackwell’s by convincing officials that she was insane, a performance that might have earned an Academy Award if she had been making a movie.

In preparation, Bly rented a room in a tenement boarding house, the Temporary Home for Females, on Second Avenue in the East Village in New York. In her room, she practiced how to look and act insane, as she would later describe in the first ten articles for the World: “I flew to the mirror and examined my face. I remembered all I had read of the doings of crazy people, how first of all they have staring eyes, and so I opened mine as wide as possible and stared unblinkingly at my own reflection…I read snatches of improbable and impossible ghost stories, so that when the dawn came to chase away the night, I felt that I was in a fit mood for my mission.”

When she was satisfied that she was well-prepared to prove herself insane, she had momentary second thoughts. “Who could tell but that the strain of playing crazy and being shut up with a crowd of mad people, might turn my own brain, and I would never get back. But not once did I think of shirking my mission. Calmly, outwardly at least, I went out to my crazy business.”

Her story, the first in a ten-part series, begins that way—from acting out in the boarding house to being taken by police to the Essex Market Police Courtroom and acting out again so that a sympathetic Judge Duffy allowed her to move one more step forward—to be admitted to Bellevue Hospital’s “pavilion for the insane.” And then finally, after another day of examination and acting out, sent where she wanted to be all along, Blackwell’s—the focus of her stories about the city’s treatment of the mentally ill—where she was immediately undressed and prepared for confinement. She wrote:

The water was ice-cold, and a crazy woman began to scrub me. I can find no other word that will express it but scrubbing. From a small tin pan, she took some soft soap and rubbed it all over me, even all over my face and my pretty hair. I was at last past seeing or speaking, although I had begged that my hair be left untouched. Rub, rub, rub, went the old woman, chattering to herself. My teeth chattered and my limbs were goose-fleshed and blue with cold. Suddenly I got, one after the other, three buckets of water over my head—ice-cold water, too—into my eyes, my years, my nose and my mouth. I think I experienced some of the sensations of a drowning person as they dragged me, gasping, shivering and quaking, from the tub. For once I did look insane…They put me, dripping wet, into a short canton flannel slip, labeled across the extreme end in large black letters, “Lunatic Asylum, B.I., H. 6.” The letters meant Blackwell’s Island, Hall 6.

Nellie Bly’s “Ten Days in a Mad-House,” capturing her experiences at Blackwell’s Island, immediately made a difference, as she wrote in the introduction to her series: “I am happy to be able to state as a result of my visit to the asylum and the exposures consequent thereon, that the City of New York has appropriated $1,000,000 more per annum than ever before for the care of the insane. So, I have at least the satisfaction of knowing that the poor unfortunates will be the better cared for because of my work.” Like Rachel Carson, a fellow Pittsburgher, her mission forced change. Although not enough change to allow women to write as women under their own given names.

Picture a scene two years after Bly’s sensational exposé: A helpless young girl in old tattered clothes staggers and stumbles across a busy street in San Francisco’s Mission District and suddenly faints in front of a moving carriage, which nearly runs her down. The police are called to move her out of the street, but when she resists, they club her with wooden batons, throw her on the hard floor of a horse-drawn buggy, and transport her to the emergency room of a nearby hospital. The staff at the hospital, men and women both, are dismissive and annoying, and pepper her with lewd and insulting remarks. She is treated coldly and quickly, no real examination provided, medicated with a concoction of mustard and hot water to precipitate vomiting—and soon thereafter released.

Two weeks later, the San Francisco Examiner, owned by William Randolph Hearst, published a five-part series of stories capturing and documenting the brutal and insensitive treatment of women in hospital emergency rooms. Like Bly’s work, this dramatic account of treatment led to the establishment of a well-trained ambulance service in the city—for men and women. Later, this writer—identified as Annie Laurie—was to become the first woman journalist to cover a prize fight. Later still, disguised as a boy, she was the first reporter on the scene to cover the horrific Galveston hurricane of 1900 in Texas.

And then in July 1888, Nell Nelson, a young schoolteacher in Chicago, wearing a brown veil and a tattered coat, began taking a number of jobs in factories, stitching coats, shoe linings, and shirts at the Excelsior Underwear Company for eighty cents a dozen. It was hard work, to say the least—a lack of ventilation, poor lighting—and it was bloody hot. And as it turned out, the first dozen shirts she sewed were free—at least to her employer. For, she learned: Rent for the sewing machine she was using was fifty cents. And the thread for the shirts she sewed? An additional charge of thirty-five cents. But if that wasn’t bad enough, Nelson and her fellow employees were insulted and berated. And not just at Excelsior; it was no different wherever she went. Her series of stories ran for nineteen straight weeks, doubling circulation for the Chicago Times. And then there was Eva Gay, who, in disguise, infiltrated an industrial laundry to document the unhealthy conditions for the women who labored there.

These writers made an impact; they changed lives because of their personal narratives, but despite their bylines, few readers knew who they really were. But as Kim Todd wrote, the names these women used, their bylines, “were often fake. Stunt reporters relied on pseudonyms, which offered protection as they waded deep into unladylike territory to poke sticks at powerful men. Annie Laurie was really Winifred Sweet; Gay was Eva Valesh; Marks was Eleanor Stackhouse…. ‘Many of the brightest women frequently disguise their identity, not under one nom de plume, but under half a dozen,’ wrote a male editor for the trade publication The Journalist in 1889. ‘This renders anything like a solid reputation almost impossible.’”

All of these boundary-breaking reporters were forced into a similar identity deception. And the treatment of some of these stories, as serious as they were, was often trivialized with inappropriate illustrations of billowing skirts and wild wind-whipped hair, depicting the helplessness of the “opposite” sex. Even the ways in which women writers were referred to and labeled were often demeaning. Laurie, Bly, and their ilk were treated as novelty writers, performing tricks to get access to their stories. In fact, they were called as a group, as Todd reports, the “stunt girls.”

There was another label, which as most ironic, especially since it wasn’t actually the “stunt” that captivated readers and motivated political and social action, but the voices, observations, and feelings—the deep-seated personal observations of the writers and the descriptions of the characters they captured. When the stories were especially poignant, critics and colleagues referred to the women who wrote these stories as the “sob sisters.”

The personalization, the confessional aspects of these stories, would, nearly a century later, become a flashpoint of the creative nonfiction debate and movement, when writers like James Wolcott demeaned them in Vanity Fair, characterizing their emotional honesty and intensity as “navel gazing.” But at the time, the confessional aspects of their work weren’t seen as worth debating—or criticizing. This whining and wailing about the ills of the world, the man’s world, was to be expected coming from women. Journalists generally did not take the “girls” seriously. They were simply a means to the end. They used a woman to get a story that would not be possible for a man to get, a story that would sell papers and advertising and attract attention and praise—perhaps until Ida Tarbell.

Ida Tarbell, an investigative journalist and lecturer, became as famous and as influential as Upton Sinclair and others of what Theodore Roosevelt had labeled as the “muckraking” crowd. The History of the Standard Oil Company by Tarbell was first published as a nineteen-part series in McClure’s Magazine and then in 1904 as a two-volume book. As one critic described her reporting, Tarbell “fed the antitrust frenzy by verifying what many had suspected for years: the pattern of deceit, secrecy and unregulated concentration of power that characterized Gilded Age business practice with its ‘commercial Machiavellianism.’” Tarbell was prolific, to say the least, and most enjoyed digging deep into her subjects for long periods of time, as in her series of articles for McClure’s about the life of Napoleon and an eye-opening twenty-part series on Abraham Lincoln to which she dedicated four years of her life.

Tarbell’s success and celebrity were due, not so much to the impact and drama of her prose, but more so to her dogged dedication to truth and accuracy and to uncovering heretofore undiscovered information and sources that led to deeper and richer stories. Liza Mundy, writing in the Atlantic, observed that “a half century before the New Yorker’s Joseph Mitchell went to the waterfront to write about clammers and fishermen, before John McPhee started hanging out with greengrocers, Tarbell was visiting out-of-the-way sectors and practicing immersive journalism…. Today,” Mundy concluded, “Robert Caro is lionized for his exhaustive gumshoe method, but Tarbell was there before him, reading pamphlets and the opinion columns of local papers. ‘There is nothing about which everything has been done and said’ became her core insight.”

Even after Tarbell and the work of the stunt girls had produced such serious and game-changing work, it remained a struggle for women to be considered equals in the journalistic world. Even when they succeeded, broke through the barriers, their work was often discounted or ignored. As it was for Martha Gellhorn, who was on the scene in Madrid in the heat of the Spanish Civil War.

Here’s the opening of a dispatch from Madrid filed by Gellhorn in July 1937, which appeared in Collier’s magazine:

At first the shells went over: you could hear the thud as they left the Fascists’ guns, a sort of groaning cough; then you heard them fluttering toward you. As they came closer the sound went faster and straighter and sharper and then, very fast, you heard the great booming noise when they hit.

But now, for I don’t know how long—because time didn’t mean much—they had been hitting on the street in front of the hotel, and on the corner, and to the left in the side street. When the shells hit that close, it was a different sound. The shells whistled toward you—it was as if they whirled at you—faster than you could imagine speed, and, spinning that way, they whined: the whine rose higher and quicker and was a close scream—and then they hit and it was like granite thunder. There wasn’t anything to do, or anywhere to go: you could only wait. But waiting alone in a room that got dustier as the powdered cobblestones of the street floated into it was pretty bad.

I went downstairs into the lobby, practicing on the way how to breathe. You couldn’t help breathing strangely, just taking the air into your throat and not being able to inhale it.

Later, despite her accomplishments, Gellhorn had to fight or trick her way into reporting on World War II. Women journalists could not be trusted to report the news accurately, or so it was believed, and they were much too vulnerable to be let loose in a war zone like their male colleagues. But Gellhorn ignored the warnings and the arbitrary rules excluding women. She was one of the very few correspondents to make it ashore during the D-Day invasion, male or female. She did this by hiding in a bathroom of a hospital ship to be part of the landing, and once ashore disguised herself as an orderly, carrying a stretcher. She was discovered on the beach a few days later while conducting interviews with the soldiers who had safely landed, and she was stripped of her press credentials. She was not, however, deterred. A year later she was part of the first wave of reporters at the Dachau concentration camp when it was liberated.

I think it is really terrific every time I pass through the Pittsburgh airport that Nellie Bly has been so deservedly honored, side by side with Franco and George, but I do wonder if travelers really understand the significance of her statue and what it should mean to them and the world—not only the amazing trip around the world in seventy-two days, but the beginning of the liberation of women from a bastion of white men who had demeaned and disregarded them simply because of their gender. This liberation, would, however, not be quick or easy.

__________________________________

From The Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting: How a Bunch of Rabble-Rousers, Outsiders, and Ne’er-Do-Wells Concocted Creative Nonfiction by Lee Gutkind. Copyright © 2024. Published by Yale University Press. Reproduced by permission.

“In the suburb, one might live and die without marring the image of an innocent world, except when some shadow of evil fell over a column in the newspaper. Thus the suburb served as an asylum for the preservation of illusion.”
–Lewis Mumford, The City in History, 1961
*

I was born into my American dream in a suburb called Penn Hills.

But growing up on a quiet street ten miles east of downtown Pittsburgh, in a middle-class white family that had no trouble accessing suburbia’s bounty, especially from public schools that delivered hundreds of kids like me to state colleges each year, I often found myself on the receiving end of a cryptic message.

I just don’t want you to end up stuck like me, my father might blurt out during a commercial or while I was helping him in the garage.

Then his attention would snap back to the Steelers game or whatever backyard do-it-yourself project he was fixated on that month, leaving me alone to puzzle over his words. Were they an order to be followed? A secret to be kept? I remained paralyzed with uncertainty right up until the end of high school, when I decided my dad had been trying to warn me. Driven by a dread I didn’t understand, I resolved to escape from suburbia as fast as possible.

It was in Philadelphia that I found work as a journalist, writing about the spaces between this country’s promises and its realities. Like so many others before me, I became obsessed with the ways our education system so often seemed to widen that gap, especially for families of color. Still blind to the suburbs’ role in that story, I struck out for everywhere else, reporting from the boarded-up blocks of North Philly and the wide-open ranges of western New Mexico, from weary tumble-down buildings on the South Side of Chicago and the rutted sweet potato farms of central Mississippi.

It seemed obvious that the country’s social contract had been broken in the cities we’d abandoned and the rural outposts we’d forgotten. It never occurred to me that the heart of the problem might instead lie in the tidy ranch houses and solid SAT scores of places like my hometown.

But then, in 2015, a flood of devastating headlines began pouring out of Penn Hills. After running up a staggering $172 million debt, the same school district that had once served my family so well was on the verge of collapse. Teachers were being furloughed, services slashed, programs eliminated. Home values stagnated. Property taxes skyrocketed. The state auditor general described the district’s finances as the worst he’d ever seen. A grand jury concluded that the “catastrophic” fallout would cast a pall over my hometown for “literally decades to come.”

And underlying all the bad news, I soon learned, was a surprising demographic shift. The public schools in Penn Hills, seventy-two percent white when I’d graduated back in 1994, were now sixty-three percent Black. Thousands of families of color had come to suburbia in search of their own American dreams, only to discover they’d been left holding the bag.

Suddenly, the humdrum little town I’d fled a quarter century earlier seemed to be sounding a dire warning. The opening of suburbia was supposed to be the culmination of the greatest mass movement in our nation’s history, and experts were still pushing to move Black and Brown families into the suburbs and their “good” public schools. After all, that’s where the country’s foundational covenant—everyone is created equal, we all get a fair shot, success is determined by merit—was supposedly strongest.

But what if those families were discovering that their advanced degrees and carefully tended cul-de-sac lawns still didn’t grant them access to all the country’s benefits? That their children still weren’t safe, even in the nation’s most sought-after public schools? That they were now stuck, not just in some quiet personal crisis, but in a wider unraveling, one that threatened to undermine the civil-rights-era dreams of equal opportunity and harmonious integration that followed the deeply flawed vision upon which suburbia was built? America, with its long history of broken promises, might not hold.

It was this fear that ultimately drew me back home. On a blustery day in January 2020, I climbed into my station wagon and drove across the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I was forty-three, tired, with a to-do list already spilling off the page. But I desperately wanted to locate an American dream that wouldn’t leave my own two children stuck, financially or emotionally or morally. And now, the path forward seemed clear: I first had to understand how the abundant opportunities my family extracted from Penn Hills a generation earlier were linked to the cratering fortunes of the families who lived there now.

My search for answers would eventually lead me on a journey across America’s rapidly changing suburbs, from the McMansion-filled subdivisions sprouting up north of Dallas to the bungalow-lined blocks of long-blighted South Central Los Angeles. Connecting these far ends of the suburban spectrum, I learned, was a relentless cycle of racialized development and decline that took root after World War II, then sucked huge swaths of the country into a pattern of slash-and-burn development that functioned like a Ponzi scheme.

Through massive public subsidies, exclusionary local policies, and a nasty habit of pushing the true costs of new infrastructure off onto future generations, our government had essentially paid millions of white families to run away from Black America, then encouraged us to cycle through a series of disposable communities with shelf lives just long enough to extract a little more opportunity before we moved out, stuck someone else with the bill, and restarted the cycle somewhere new.

But even as this pattern became ubiquitous, it remained mostly invisible. One big reason was described by philosopher Charles Mills as a willful racial ignorance that allows white people to protect ourselves from the truths we’ve “needed not to know” since the country’s founding.

Even today, elected officials and everyday Americans alike remain deeply committed to forgetting about the government-sponsored white flight that fueled suburbia’s rise. To erasing from memory the burning crosses, racial real-estate covenants, and gerrymandered school boundaries that were used to keep everyone else out. To ignoring the scars left by the long-ago compromises of desegregation, and to dismissing the pain of whole neighborhoods that mass suburbanization helped undo.

When an aging suburb began to teeter, we turned a blind eye, leaving ourselves unable to reconcile the vacant businesses, declining test scores, and dwindling property values with our vision of what that place was supposed to be. And after the community’s tax base vanished, its school system capsized, and its residents were all Black and Brown, we promptly forgot that the hollowed-out place left behind had ever been a suburb at all.

Much attention has already been paid to how this cycle and its underlying ideology decimated America’s cities. In their classic book American Apartheid, sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton found that by the late 1970s, roughly two thirds of the white people in the nation’s major metropolises had already fled to suburbia, often on the strength of privileged access to cheap mortgage loans guaranteed by the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration.

This exodus led to a profound concentration of poverty in the mostly Black and Brown urban areas they left behind. Thanks to rising home values and a dizzying array of tax breaks, white suburbanites then saw our advantages multiply and ripple across generations: By 1989, the typical white family held more than ten times the wealth of the typical Black family, and white Americans were four times as likely as our Black counterparts to inherit money.

“The advantage that FHA and VA loans gave the white lower-middle class in the 1940s and ’50s has become permanent,” concluded economist Richard Rothstein in his 2017 book, The Color of Law.

By then, however, America was already entering a perilous new stage. The same cycle that had already devastated our cities was now churning through suburbia itself. Hundreds of aging inner-ring suburbs like Penn Hills were falling into debt and disrepair. Thousands of newer suburban communities found themselves in the path of the same gathering storm. And two major societal shifts were making the problem increasingly difficult to ignore.

The first was demographic. The U.S. Census Bureau began projecting that America will be majority nonwhite before midcentury, the result of a white population that began aging and declining just as the nation experienced an explosion of youthful diversity. Nowhere did these trends diverge more sharply than in the suburbs, where white people went from seventy-nine percent of the population in 1990 to just 55 percent three decades later. Inside suburban public schools, white children are already a minority.

And all the while, the heart of America’s middle class kept disappearing. Home prices soared. Water supplies dwindled. Upper-middle-income families began hoarding an ever-larger share of the country’s opportunities.

Millions of other Americans found they could no longer escape demographic change by simply moving to a newer community farther out in the countryside. By 2019, a profound pessimism had taken root: half the country expected their children to experience a lower standard of living than they’d enjoyed.

Soon to be outnumbered, with no more away to escape to, white America is suddenly face-to-face with its ghosts. It is this confrontation that will define the next few decades of American life.

And the early skirmishes are already under way. Pick a suburb. Go to a school board meeting. Sit through some high school math classes. Soon enough, you’ll see a painful truth being laid bare: The diversification of suburbia did not lead to a universal American dream, untethered from whiteness and extended equally to all. Instead, Black and Brown and white and Asian and rich and poor and immigrant and native born have all been left to craft separate variations on a theme.

As a result, many white families are now consumed with anxiety about the erosion of long-standing advantages. Countless families of color have grown disillusioned by the suburbs’ failure to deliver equally on America’s promises. And nearly seventy years after Brown v. Board of Education, many of the parents, educators, and activists who long carried the dream of integration are demoralized and retreating. Suburbia is now home to a collision of competing dreams, each of which seems to be crumbling.

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An excerpt from Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs, published by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Benjamin Herold.

What is a witch? To answer that question, we have to start with another: What is magic, the force witches use? That answer depends on time and place.

In early history, magic was considered to be a power innate in healers, shamans, and religious leaders across multiple cultures. It allowed them to go beyond natural abilities, to change the world in inexplicable ways. Communities would have several such magical workers, combining medical and priestly roles.

There was no clear line between their magical healing and harming, since good and bad magic were two aspects of the same force. On Monday a user of magic might bless you, on Thursday they might curse you—that was just how things were. If you felt a magically gifted person was using that force to do harm, you might vilify them as a “witch”—a user of evil magic—and you might hold a local trial and mandate repentance. You might banish or kill the witch if their crimes were unacceptable.

But witchcraft accusations would not spread widely, and, on the whole, you would not begin to believe all magic was evil. Some societies were concerned about this possibility—the ancient Greeks and Romans feared magic was inherently ungodly—but most retained a blurry notion that magic could be a force for good.

This changed in Europe during the medieval period, when a new theological science was established: the study of devils or demons, appropriately called “demonology.” By the 1400s, the Christian clergymen who developed demonology had convincingly claimed a unique insight into the workings of the cosmos and God’s will. Now, demonologists argued, witchcraft was not just good magic gone bad; it was envisioned as a career committed to wickedness, setting itself against the church.

The imaginative world of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries was crammed with curses and blessings, angels, devils, ghosts, spirits that could invade bodies, fairies, elves, and, ruling over it all, a benevolent God. Demonologists did not perceive the Christian God’s supernatural ability as part of that wider magical universe, however. Their deity’s powers, and the miracle-working of his priests, were not classed as magic.

Instead they were thought of as springing from religious truth, a special class of power reserved for Christian clergymen. Therefore, all the other supernatural powers swirling about in the world must be lesser, and they came to be seen as evil witchcraft.

The either/or thinking that shaped demonology developed partly because the Christian Church was splitting internally. What began as a series of arguments over church doctrine soon escalated into violence, part of a culture war called, with bland understatement, the “Reformation.” The Reformation’s disagreements forced people to choose between Catholic (traditional) and Protestant (reformed) sects.

This religious conflict began with good intentions when pious Catholics challenged their church’s leaders to be better Christians. The pope, cardinals, and bishops were no longer humble preachers, reformers argued, but palace- dwelling oligarchs condoning the sins of rich donors.

Mystics like St. Catherine of Siena, scholars like Jan Hus, and translators like John Wycliffe began to claim alternative sources of Christian wisdom: visions from God, reinterpretations of ancient texts. Some reformers were embraced by the church, but others were cast out. In the sixteenth century hundreds of thousands left the main body of the church to form their own sect, Protestantism.

As hatred between the two sides grew, it became permissible to kill fellow Christians, now branded as demonic opponents; something that Christians had been inflicting upon Jews and Muslims for many centuries but had now turned on each other.1 Catholics and Protestants came to regard each other as heretics: misbelievers, haters of the true church, and therefore, in binary thinking, Satan’s people. The punishment for heresy was to be burned alive.

In such a violently divided culture, suspicion bred suspicion; leaders of both sects soon began to investigate whether Satan had other agents within their congregations. Before the fifteenth century, most churchmen regarded the healers and diviners in their communities as ineffective fantasists—mild sinners trafficking in charms and curses who couldn’t do much harm.

But as Reformation either/or logic sank in, the fear grew that these magical practitioners had an evil source of power: Satan. If the force they used wasn’t obviously Christian, it must be evil. That would make them witches, and it was a short step from burning heretics to burning witches; although not identical, both were enemies of God. The magic deployed by the career witch was simply a maximally dangerous type of heresy.

*

Who were the people accused of witchcraft? Most witches were thought to be female. Although healers and shamans could be of either sex, as magic became associated with evil, so it also moved toward association with women; Christian priests were all male. While many churchmen were good Christians, true to their gospel of love, others were obsessed with the regulation of women: their sexuality, conduct, and thought.

There were female saints in Catholic theology and Christ’s mother, Mary, was a venerated figure—such female role models were deemed acceptable—but clergymen brooded over Eve, the first woman. Eve had lived peaceably with her husband Adam until she succumbed to Satan’s temptation to eat a fruit symbolizing knowledge. She fell into sin, persuaded Adam to join her, and condemned their descendants to damnation unless they led repentant lives.

Churchmen educated on the Eve myth—often celibate as part of their religious commitment—therefore tended to distrust women as dangerous rebels, rather like heretics. Women’s minds were clearly easily confused by demonic lies, and what was worse, their tongues then talked men into sin, these churchmen wrote. If a demonologist was looking for Satan’s people, it was logical he would start with women.

Just as Eve had been corrupted by Satan, so 15th-century women were also seen as open to his suggestions. These were not just mental temptations but were imagined as physical appearances by the devil offering practical help. By the 1480s, demonologists thought if a woman was poor, Satan could appear offering money or goods and actually enrich her. If she resented obeying men, he could free her. If she wanted companionship, the devil could visit as a lover or a pet. If she wanted revenge, he could crush her enemies.

Satan might appear in human or animal form as a “familiar,” a supposedly friendly spirit. But if he offered you his services, his fee would be your soul, your link to God, and your hope of a place in heaven. Once you accepted this pact—donating your soul in exchange for assistance—Satan would mark you with a blemish or growth, showing you belonged to him. And then he would lend you the power you’d wanted, and you would become a witch.

A witch could make her enemy’s wife sick, steal his cows’ milk, harm his goods, crops, or health, or kill him, demonologists explained. And once the deal was done, the witch was damned. She would join Satan’s church, an evil- twin opposite of Christianity. Its congregations would perform obscene rites at meetings called “Sabbaths,” a word echoing the name given to the Christian holy day. At these meetings—to which they were sometimes thought to fly on animals or broomsticks—witches worshipped the devil and sought new recruits to give their souls to Satan.

The devil, demonologists decided, was not just a tempter and facilitator of evil; their new science concluded he had become the witches’ god, a worker of wonders served with murder and mayhem. Their either/or inverted thinking—God/devil, devout/heretical, Christian/witch—prompted mass witch trials.

After all, if witches were totally evil, enemies of God and humanity, the only possible response was to put them on trial, convict, and kill them. Hundreds of witches were tried by churches and states—executed, imprisoned, or exiled as enemies of God and humanity.

Of course, that was demonological theory, rather than reality. It was impossible to prove that magic actually caused illness and death; no physical evidence of Satanic Sabbaths was found and verbal accounts of them varied widely. So if we don’t believe that the people accused of witchcraft really did kill their enemies with curses or worship at a Satanic church, then how do we explain their accusation?

Misogyny plays a crucial part here, underlying the accusers’ fear, hatred, and discrimination. Most accused witches were poorer women, some with unusual beliefs about religion or an assertive manner that worried their neighbors. Some were comparatively wealthy, but still attracted their community’s dislike. Some were older women, widows living alone.

But many were younger women: with or without children, some married, others not, some working, others begging. They were often women who their communities perceived had been hurt, bullied, jilted, refused charity or a job. Their neighbors sometimes heard them spitting out sharp words.

Then something happened to a person who had offended the suspected witch: their cow died, their child had visions, their ship sank. People began to think a witch had caused the harm. Perhaps in reality the accused had attempted magic. They were often individuals without much power in their societies, and the idea that a disempowered person could use magic did offer hope—which was in actuality limited by gender, economic status, or differences of belief and opportunity. But sometimes there was no compelling evidence that suspects had done anything magical at all.

Either way, when the accused people were arrested and dragged to the minister or magistrate, it would not be unusual for them to confess to witchcraft, or at least admit to a belief in magic. An accused witch would have her own folk beliefs about witches and magic, often differing from her interrogators’ fears.

Left to herself, she was more likely to imagine performing healing charms than curses, say she had interacted with ill-defined spirits rather than devils, and invent folkloric stories about bargains with fairies or ghosts instead of formal Satanic worship. But under pressure, her story would likely come to align with her accusers’ to the extent that conviction was plausible.

In some jurisdictions, suspects were tortured—torture using specially designed apparatus was legal across much of Europe. A tortured person might confess anything: mass witch- meetings, devil-worship, orgies, grave-robbing, baby-killing, flying, cannibalism. The interrogators’ own anxieties regarding what was evil, forbidden, or taboo would influence what they asked suspects and, therefore, what was confessed.

And even in jurisdictions where torture was banned, a witchcraft suspect would be intimidated by the officials who questioned her—churchmen and magistrates, lords and kings. Normally these men paid little attention to women like her, so she told them what they wanted to hear. She might be bullied, lied to, threatened. In some places sleep deprivation—not understood to be torture—was permitted. Under this assault she might dredge from her memory some charms she had used—angry thoughts she’d had about trader Peter; spiteful words she’d spat at farmer Anna.

Even if she had done nothing wrong and confessed nothing under interrogation, the accused person would be sent to the court that judged suspected witches in her locality. Medieval and Reformation Europe was full of jurisdictional confusion. Where Catholicism was the official faith (broadly, across middle, southern, and eastern Europe), church officials known as inquisitors often led witch trials, although bishops, parliaments, secular rulers, and local magistrates also had their own jurisdictions. In Protestant areas (largely the north and west), state authorities replaced religious courts.

Increasingly, as demonology moved west to America, a witch trial might be prompted by ordinary people, low-level officials, or amateur investigators. In state courts, there was no inquisitor. Instead, multiple accusers would give evidence to a panel of judges or jury of citizens, who would decide the verdict.

At the trial, the suspected witch might be exonerated and freed. But she might be sentenced to penance, imprisonment, exile, or death by hanging or burning. It depended on the laws of her church or state whether she was shamed, banished, or killed as an enemy of her people. Because that, by the late fifteenth century, was the answer to the question: “What is a witch?” Witches were the representation of everything evil. They were the enemy.

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Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials by Marion Gibson is available via Scribner.