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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781628952995 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 226 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Tina Mitchell is an Adjunct Instructor at University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She is the founder of The Turnip Truck(s), an evolving graphic landscape for essayists, artists, and theorists interested in the dialectics of the human and its environments.
Read an Excerpt
Kept Secret
The Half-Truth In Nonfiction
By Jen Hirt, Tina Mitchell
Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2017 Michigan State UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62895-299-5
CHAPTER 1
Maybe It Happened
Jo Ann Beard
Maybe she was a kid. Maybe she wasn't quite housebroken. maybe she was playing outside one summer afternoon with a couple of older cousins who were. Maybe they got deeply involved in a game where she was the baby and they were taking care of her. Maybe this involved cooing and being pushed in a wagon and having bows tied into her slippery, nonexistent hair. Maybe when the moment came that the baby should have gotten up out of the wagon and excused herself to go indoors and use the facilities, the baby decided instead to really get into her role. Maybe she wet her pants.
It's possible the oldest of the older cousins was nine, and possible that the youngest of the older cousins was seven. It's possible that the nine-year-old wore a fashion-conscious sherbet-orange skirt and a ruffled midriff top, making her seem even more sophisticated than her actual years, and possible that the other one wore a sleeveless white blouse, gray pleated shorts, and glasses with light blue frames, making her seem like a seven-year-old teacher. It's possible that they were bored, stuck at somebody else's house for the afternoon with nothing to play with except a little kid who had just sat there and peed while they were petting her, like a puppy. It's possible that they abandoned playing mothers then, to go sit on the stoop and squint into the summer sunlight, waiting to have their pictures taken so they could be seen many years later as they looked that day, hugging their knees, silently sharing their pop-bead wardrobe, one wearing the bracelet, the other wearing the necklace.
Perhaps the baby who wasn't a baby climbed up on a metal milk crate like they used to have back then and peered through the back window at her mother and her aunt. Perhaps her mother was sitting at the kitchen table with her head stuck through a plastic tablecloth, drinking coffee from one of the pink Melmac cups that would outlast all the people in this story, and all the people reading this story. Perhaps the mother was smoking a cigarette and was holding it out every so often so that the aunt, who was wearing plastic gloves and mixing up a vat of hair dye, could take drags off it. Perhaps the flat bottle of liquor that the mother and this particular aunt favored was sitting on the table. Perhaps they had dosed their coffee with it, in order not to "kill the children." Perhaps just beyond them was the small, neat living room, with its chunky green furniture and its cabbage-rose draperies closed against the sun. Perhaps all the way through, nearly to the front door, was their telephone table, on which sat the heavy black telephone with a dial that the kid in soggy shorts standing on the metal milk box could barely even move. Perhaps the mother herself resorted to using a stubby pencil to dial this phone, which suddenly rang out in the tiny house, a loud, old-fashioned sound, startling everyone and causing the milk box to wobble and the mother, who was getting her head painted dark brown, to say "Shit" in a loud voice.
It's likely then that the tipped milk box pitched its rider onto the dirt by the back door, embedding a piece of gravel in her right knee, leaving a pale blue Oshaped spot that, along with two accommodating moles, would form what she would ever after think of as that knee's stricken face. It's likely as well that the mother, wearing her plastic tablecloth poncho, walked through the living room with its one dramatic dark green wall to the telephone. Just as likely is that the aunt stayed where she was, setting down the bowl of dye and whatever she was applying it with, which is why while the mother was picking up the phone and saying hello and then listening to what the caller had to say, the aunt was peeling off the gloves and stepping out onto the back stoop to pick up the kid who had fallen onto a sharp rock and was wailing. It's likely the aunt was confused for a long moment that afternoon, about why when she got the soggy child with the bloody knee calmed down, she still heard crying.
Or did she? Maybe on those hot summer afternoons, when coffee madewomen languid, when the scent of trellis roses mixed with the scent of ammonia, when girls pretended they were mothers while mother pretended something else entirely, perhaps anything could happen.
But then again, it's maybe possible, perhaps likely, that it never did.
Interview with Jo Ann Beard
1. This piece first appeared in O, the Oprah Magazine in 2008, a couple of years after Oprah's confrontation with writer James Frey, who had fabricated part of his memoir. Was the Frey scandal on your mind as you wrote this? Did anyone at O, the Oprah Magazine try to fact-check your piece? As a writer whose work has been celebrated for how it falls between nonfiction and fiction, how do you decide what is ethical to cast as half-truth, and what (if anything) has to adhere to full truth?
James Frey was very much on my mind when I was writing the piece — I didn't agree to do it, but only agreed to try to do it, because sometimes the writing goes its own way and tries to make something interesting out of something that isn't. Like peeing one's pants at an age when it's almost acceptable to do so. I stalled for days and weeks; everything that I wrote had untruths in it — how did I know what I was wearing, what kind of cup my mother was drinking out of, what my cousins were thinking, etc.? — the kinds of questions that are meaningless in memoir, of course, but still I was stuck back in that moment, standing in the doorway of my living room watching through my fingers as poor James Frey was publicly shamed for the benefit of the studio audience and all of us at home. You would think he had lied about weapons of mass destruction instead of exaggerating his own self-destruction. I don't believe anyone fact-checked my essay at O, because the editorial staff at O is more sophisticated than that; how do you fact-check something that is purely speculative? There probably is no such thing as a half-truth, and the full truth is subject to the particular sensibility it's being filtered through. That goes for essays, for magazine articles, and for newspapers. I know certain facts about my own experiences, as well as anyone can, but facts are not what make a memoir live and breathe. What gives life to memoir are the physical details and the emotions and the words that were spoken — sometimes remembered and sometimes imagined — and the meaning that is made of all those things together.
2. Your first paragraph's sentences start with "Maybe." Second paragraph, "It's possible." Third, "Perhaps." And the last paragraph has "It's likely." This wording emphasizes uncertainty. Why should writers embrace uncertainty?
Well, the easy answer is that life is uncertain, memory is unreliable, and the truth is malleable. But in fact, I was just playing around. To me as writer, the fun part was skirting the issue of truth-in-memoir by using those words and then getting to figure out how to fashion a final sentence that had all of them in there. So finally the assignment felt engaging instead of intimidating, and in an hour I had finished the piece and liked it.
3. We never find out the nature of the phone call, although we know it is bad news. The full details are literally kept secret from the reader, because the piece ends. Why did you decide to end it like that? Have any readers ever asked you what the phone call was about?
Nobody has ever asked that question, but then again, nobody has ever mentioned that essay to me until now. In my own mind, the phone call is probably the most important thing in the essay, but the mystery is what makes that so.
4. Does the girl, as an adult, still have a scar? And how are scars like secrets?
If the girl ever had that scar, I believe she would still have it now. Since she rarely lets people see her knees, it's hard to say. Even though she writes memoir, she keeps her scars secret.
CHAPTER 2My Father's Secrets
Ron Tanner
When i was fourteen and fifteen, I lived with my family on a small island called Kwajalein, part of an atoll with the same name, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It was, and still is, a top-secret missile test site for the U.S. Army. Now called the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site, the atoll possesses one of the largest arrays of radar antennas in the world. One of them, called the ALTAIR, is as big as a baseball diamond and looms from the equatorial jungle like something from a James Bond movie — a giant laser that's capable, say, of blowing up the moon. It is, in fact, sensitive enough to track a wrench floating from a space shuttle. My father worked at the ALTAIR site, on an island near Kwajalein.
He called himself an "electrical engineer," but this wasn't entirely accurate. You have to have top-level security clearance to work at facilities like ALTAIR. That's why my father never answered the question What do you do for work, Daddy? He was sworn to secrecy. By the time our family moved to Kwajalein, I had given up asking him such questions. At first, it seemed he wasn't articulate enough to explain his work — he was a shy man — but then, as I kept asking over the years, it became clear he was hiding something. He wasn't a dishonest man — I knew that much — but I wondered why he quietly refused to give me what most fathers would have happily offered.
The sum total I knew of my father's history I could have written on a postcard. He was the only child of a feckless, alcoholic father and a tough Appalachian mother, both of whom labored in California's orange groves and packing houses. In 1942, at age seventeen, he joined the Navy and then saw three years of fighting in the Pacific. As a child, I often dug through his steamer trunks in our basement and pored over the artifacts that told of his life as a young man. There was a Japanese officer's sword, a hara-kiri knife, Navy medals, old foreign coins, mothballed uniforms, old photos, a couple of high school yearbooks, even artwork he'd done as a schoolboy. I found several yellowed photos of him in his Navy whites, always smiling. He had a great smile, which my mother says I inherited. One snapshot showed him grinning with a grass-skirted hula dancer in Honolulu. He was a radio operator on a Navy cruiser. By the time he sailed west toward Japan, his ship would have been in contact with the top-secret long-range radio facility (constructed in 1943) in the Koolau Mountains on the island of Oahu, not far from Pearl Harbor. That is to say, his life of secrets began early — six years before he met the young woman who would become my mother.
Although my father had an obvious aptitude for electronics, he really wanted to be a farmer, and, in fact, he tried his hand at raising cucumbers in California after the war. The crop failed, and he never ate another cucumber for the rest of his life. Four years later, after earning a degree in engineering, he was recruited by Western Electric, a company that worked with Bell Laboratories to do research and development for the U.S. military. My mother told me he helped test one of the first nuclear-powered submarines, though it was an assignment I could never verify since it was shrouded in secrecy. Years later, while at work on other secret projects, my father wore a wallet-sized badge that measured the level of radiation he was exposed to. My mother told me his badge was tested every month to make sure he wasn't overexposed. "It was bullshit," she says now of this precaution. "He was so irradiated, he should have glowed in the dark." When he died of stomach cancer at forty-nine, she blamed overexposure to electromagnetic radiation.
But I knew none of this when I was a teenager living on that secret missile base in the middle of the Pacific. It would be decades before I learned that my father's specialty was radars and their antennas. One afternoon, out of boredom — of which there was an abundance on our island — I decided to climb an antenna at the south end of Kwajalein. The antenna was a semicircular steel grid forty feet high. I was good at climbing, and the structure's fretwork made it easy. Within a short time, I was twenty feet off the ground. That's when a security guard showed up.
"Get down from there," he called. "You'll kill yourself."
I looked down at him, a middle-aged man with few prospects. "It's my life," I called. "What do you care?"
"You get down from there right now!" he shouted, swiping his fist at the air. I didn't understand why he was so upset. When I touched ground, he dragged me to his pickup truck and drove me to the police station. It just so happened that my mother was at the sergeant's desk, renewing her bicycle license. Even though I was often getting dragged to the police station, my mother, who retained an astoundingly resilient naiveté, was surprised to see me.
"I don't understand," she said. "Why aren't you in school?"
It occurs to me now that had I reached the top of the antenna, I might have been too weary to climb down. Fatigued, I might have lost my grip and fallen. How ironic would that have been, to have accidentally killed myself on the very thing to which my father had dedicated his life?
I was often getting into trouble on Kwajalein. Mostly, I'd sneak out to drink beer with friends. Beer was easy to get. If you didn't steal it, as my best friend Spud did, you could buy it from vending machines at Bachelor's Beach for a quarter a can. In the tropics, it was summer year round, and we wayward teens had a blast running through Kwajalein's leafy alleys after curfew, when the grown-ups were sleeping. We did this nearly every weekend. One night, Spud downed sixteen beers and got so drunk I nearly had to carry him home.
His arm slung over my shoulder, I struggled to keep him upright and moving.
It seemed he could say nothing more than "Fucking-A, man!" Fortunately, we didn't have far to walk because it was such a small island, but we had to be mindful of Security, the civilian rent-a-cops who acted as our police force. We teens despised Security. They drove slowly through the neighborhoods in white pickups, their spotlights scanning the nooks and crannies, roofs, and patios for curfew breakers.
Dogs were prohibited on Kwajalein, so it was quiet but for the clatter of palm fronds in the breeze overhead and the distant wash of waves. I was dizzy from my beers, but I wasn't drunk. Spud's house was a little larger than mine because his father was higher up in the hierarchy, but his furniture was made of Japanese bamboo like ours — like everybody's. Inside, I could smell the stink of the cigars Spud's father smoked. Spud stumbled then fell to the linoleum floor. He started cursing. I motioned for him to be quiet.
Then he looked up at me, grinned, and said, "Fucking-A!" Suddenly, the room brightened. Someone had flicked on the overhead light. Spud's father, wearing a bathrobe and slippers, stood in the hallway that led to the house's three small bedrooms. I expected him to have a cigar in one hand, as it seemed he always did. He was a pugnacious little man, with an underbite and small eyes. I saw something of Spud in his face. He said, "What're you boys doing?" I winced at the light and said, "I brought Spud home."
"What'd you do to him?" He stared in disbelief at his son, who was still sprawled on the floor. "You been drinking?"
"Dad?" Spud propped himself on one elbow and looked up at his father. He could hardly talk. "Dad?"
It sounded like he was asking for something — sympathy? help? forgiveness?
Spud's father stared at his boy in pained disbelief. Then he glared at me. I wanted to protest: I've brought my friend home. I've looked after him. I did not get Spud drunk! But I was not practiced at talking back, and I felt bad about Spud.
His father said, "You get out of here."
My face burning, I walked out. When I stepped into my house minutes later, our cat pushed between my ankles and squeaked a greeting. Spud was going to be OK, I told myself. And we had escaped Security, hadn't we? That was something to be proud of. And I had handled my liquor, hadn't I? I was growing up, I decided. I made myself a ham sandwich. Then the phone rang, startling me. I answered quickly, thinking it would be Spud. Or his father.
The caller identified himself as a Security officer. He asked if I'd been out drinking. I hesitated to answer. He said, "Come on, I know you have. Just tell me the truth."
"If I tell you the truth," I said, "will you tell my parents?" "I just want to know if you've been out tonight." He spoke casually, like a friend.
"You won't tell my parents?" I asked.
"No," he said easily, "just tell me if you've been out."
"Yes," I said. "I've been out."
"Drinking?"
"Yes."
After a pause, he said, just as easily as before, "Let me speak to your father."
"Why?"
"I just want to talk to him for a minute."
"He's sleeping," I said.
"That's all right. You can wake him up."
Again, I hesitated, then asked, "Are you going to tell him what I said?"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Kept Secret by Jen Hirt, Tina Mitchell. Copyright © 2017 Michigan State University. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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