newyorker--2020-01-20--Pioneers of American Publicity

Pioneers of American Publicity

Legendary development can happen with astonishing speed after a life is past .
Gore Vidal , in his 1992 novel , “ Live from Golgotha , ” made sport of the notion of television coverage of the Crucifixion , as the kind of thing that would happen only in contemporary America , but in truth Jesus ’ body was hardly cold , or gone , before the apostle Paul , in a single generation , had made the desert rebbe into a demigod .
The special American contribution to legend-making has not been speed so much as absolute simultaneity , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ together .
The American frontier , the Wild West , was not burnished and made epic in memory .
It was made epic even as its very brief life was taking place .
Buffalo Bill was only twenty-three when dime novels about him began to appear in New York , and early accounts of Billy the Kid ’ s life read “ like a press agent ’ s yarn , ” as one biographer says , because they were .
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were robbing banks and posing for mock @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
This national truth remains constant even in our own time .
The Apollo missions were genuine acts of daring—and were also , as everyone knew at the time , scripted television programming , with well-wrought lines delivered live .
This habit , of legend unfurling alongside history , has some oddly perverse effects .
First , it can make an event itself dubious .
If it was so obviously orchestrated and cynically exploited , might it not be real at all ?
And so we get the loony theories of a faked @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Kid ’ s killing is now said to have been faked as part of a conspiracy—and we get , too , the still hardy story that Butch and Sundance never really died in Bolivia and Butch came back and thrived out West .
The habit can also delay our genuine perception of an event until after the mythical parts have faded .
Apollo 11 , a triumph of human audacity—think of going in a telephone booth to the moon under the guidance of a 1969 computer—was in its time dismissed by Norman Mailer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ efficiency .
We had to wait fifty years to get a movie saying , Yes , it really was a remarkable thing !
Attempting to puff adventures , we can increase their immediacy and diminish their significance .
Billy the Kid may have been a publicist ’ s token , but he really did live , and Pat Garrett really did kill him dead .
One of the virtues of Steve Inskeep ’ s new book , “ Imperfect Union : How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West , Invented Celebrity , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( Penguin Press ) , is that it tracks this American phenomenon back to something like a satisfying starting point—the life of the Frémonts and their pursuit , in the eighteen-forties , of the Oregon Trail , the very first real American adventure that was cynically stage-managed for propaganda ( and commercial ) value .
Even before the ubiquity of speed-of-light communication , which one might have thought essential , John Frémont ’ s westward travel was rapidly shared , with Jessie helping to ghostwrite the exploits .
It was almost as if @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trail before he ever made it to Oregon .
“ Celebrity ” and “ celebrity culture ” are parts of modern life itself , and tracing them to a single source is silly—no celebrities could have been more popularly celebrated than the aristocrats of eighteenth-century French courts—but this particular American phenomenon , in which being a striver and becoming a star flow together in one field of action , really does seem to get started here .
Inskeep ’ s subtitle might be a bit showy , but the Frémonts turn out to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or a miniseries , for that matter .
Pretty much the entire dramatic matter of America before the Civil War passes through their lives : the gold rush , the way west , the taking of California , the Donner Party , the growth of abolition , and the coming of the war .
But it is their relation to publicity that seems most current .
There were towns called Fremont and a street in newly minted San Francisco named for them while the couple were still trying to make their fortune with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ John Frémont emerges as one of those characters—like Aaron Burr or , in another way , Charles Lindbergh—who seemed born to end up with their face on currency but instead inspired only the names of streets whose origin the people who walk on them no longer know .
An antislavery Republican candidate for President , Frémont also played a crucial role in what is in retrospect one of the most astonishing parts of the American story : the inclusion of California as part of the United States , and not as the separate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its geography and history would seem to dictate .
Inskeep , a reporter and NPR host , puts Jessie on equal footing with John , not just because of contemporary feminist tastes but also because his life really was dependent on hers .
His marriage to her was hypergamous , with her lifting him up socially .
A good-looking Army officer with a French background , he was twenty-eight when , in 1841 , he eloped with Jessie , the pretty , super-bright , and ambitious seventeen-year-old daughter of Senator Thomas Hart Benton @ @ @ @ @ @ @ son-in-law , more or less grudgingly , as a fait accompli , Benton did a great deal to promote Frémont and the cult of celebrity that his life embodied .
A onetime newspaperman , a ferocious self-publicist , and a resolute expansionist , Benton decided to send his son-in-law out West and to , Inskeep says , “ make John C. Frémont the leading character in a news story.
” Once Benton contrived , against objections from the military , for him to be sent toward the Oregon territory , the young Frémont @ @ @ @ @ @ @ instruments from a friend , did some shopping in New York for adventuring equipment , and set out .
Fitfully leading an expedition of some twenty men over what was for the most part previously trodden ground , he managed to get to South Pass and climb a nearby peak , which he decided was the highest in all the Rockies .
He planted a flag there ( a camera that he had bought in New York didn ’ t work , the kind of detail that NASA would later get right in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in time to lay the flag ostentatiously on the belly of his pregnant wife .
The two of them soon got to work on a “ Report on an Exploration , ” which brilliantly made much , rather than little , of Frémont ’ s erratic and amateur leadership , complete with vomiting and headaches .
Inskeep gives Jessie much credit for the book , observing that its “ apparent humility made the narrator seem honest and relatable , even as he was making the extraordinary claim of having climbed the highest point @ @ @ @ @ @ @ account of the short trip made Frémont a national hero and helped inspire thousands of Americans to head west from Missouri .
It later turned out that a hundred peaks in the Rockies were higher than the one that Frémont had climbed and claimed for wife , child , and country , but no matter .
His countrymen continued to print the legend .
Frémont may have been a fraud , but he was not a phony : although he hadn ’ t done anything like what his fellow-citizens believed he was doing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he seemed to be .
Instead of remaining in the East , he spent the rest of the decade returning west , leaving his wife in St. Louis and Washington D.C. , where she raised their family and managed his reputation .
It was after 1845 that he engaged in his greatest exploit , one pitched in the usual register of slightly daffy , nearsighted happenstance .
Headed to Oregon again without explicit orders to either assault or avoid California , he made an intrusion into the Mexican region called Alta California .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ enough , to respect their authority and leave .
They made an effort to get him out , but he hung around .
Then a local Mormon settler named William Ide , who had been in California for less than a year , decided that the lives of the local Americans were being threatened .
With the blessing of Frémont , who was camping nearby , Ide joined a party of Americans on a raid of the Sonoma residence of a Mexican general , Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo .
The general , outnumbered , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Americans some of the already promising local wine , which he had been among the first to produce .
The Americans , one by one , got drunk , except for Ide , who was a Mormon .
( Nondrinkers have a huge advantage in an alcohol-fuelled civilization . )
Accepting the surrender , Ide declared California an independent republic .
He then marched Vallejo and his men off to Frémont ’ s encampment .
A natural opportunist if not much of an imperial adventurer , Frémont decided to keep Vallejo captive and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ He had gone from a reluctant warrior to , in his mind , the keystone of the revolution , ” Inskeep explains .
At this point , a nearby naval commodore , falsely assuming that Frémont must have acted on Presidential orders rather than on his own muddled improvisational initiative , sailed in with a small group of ships and seized California on behalf of the United States .
Frémont ’ s fate was ironic : having accepted the primacy of the Navy , he refused to take orders from the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he was court-martialled on his return to D.C .
Nothing at all was at stake in this confrontation ; the fate of California was already fixed , and Frémont , however improbably , had already been assigned as its hero .
Nonetheless , interservice rivalry , a force never to be underestimated , had to have its day .
Frémont was found guilty—then was immediately pardoned and restored to rank by President James K. Polk .
Towns across the country would soon be named for him .
Frémont then acted foolishly , as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ life .
Ignoring Kenny Rogers ’ s later , appropriately fake-frontier wisdom , he didn ’ t know when to hold ’ em and when to fold ’ em .
Instead of counting his winnings and leaving the table—the guilty verdict was as much pure newspaper fodder as his climbing the mountain had been , and he could simply have accepted victory when he was pardoned—he melodramatically resigned from the Army , insisting that his honor had been stained .
Having left the military , Frémont occupied that odd American ground of those @ @ @ @ @ @ @ famous for having done it , without doing very much now .
He speculated in California land and was , once again , a kind of innocent , bemused spectator to the coming of the gold rush , in 1849 , more or less stumbling into a significant ( though later much adjudicated ) mineral holding near Yosemite .
Then , as later military celebrities would do , he made a run for the White House .
Frémont secured the Republican Presidential nomination , in 1856 , by a shrewd piece of political @ @ @ @ @ @ @ how complex and contradictory the politics of abolition were : some of the Know- Nothings , fiercely anti-immigrant ( and anti-Catholic ) , were also antislavery , it being possible at the time for white working-class Americans to hate Irish people as much as they hated black people .
Frémont ’ s political managers got him the nomination by building a coalition of anti-immigrant opponents of slavery and progressives who opposed slavery—aligning proto-Trumpists with proto-Sandersites .
In the campaign , Frémont was taken to be an abolitionist , which he really wasn ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ feminist , which she wasn ’ t really , either .
Frémont was also falsely accused in the campaign of being a secret Catholic , and , as with Barack Obama ’ s supposed Muslim boyhood , there was just enough complexity in his past to sell the charge .
( John and Jessie had been married by a Catholic priest , but John ’ s mother raised him Episcopalian . )
Frémont , to his credit , thought it beneath his dignity to refute the claim , which , alas , gained @ @ @ @ @ @ @ played a crucial , rather Hillary Clinton-like role in the campaign .
“ Give ’ em Jessie ” —which Inskeep identifies as an old-fashioned way of saying “ Give ’ em hell ” —became a Frémont slogan , and one New York newspaper wrote , “ The felicitous double entendre only needs to be published to become the watchword of the campaign , and .
.
.
if the gallantry of the country demanded a Queen at the head of the nation , the lovely lady of the Republican nominee would command the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ badly lost the election , even in California , to James Buchanan , a Democrat from Pennsylvania , who dithered for another four years until the Republicans decided that they needed an antislavery ideologue , not an all-purpose hero , and nominated Abraham Lincoln .
Lincoln , in turn , briefly gave Frémont command of an army during the Civil War , but the badly miscast Frémont blew it , in part because of a well-meaning but premature emancipation proclamation he declared in Missouri .
Jessie went to Washington to straighten Lincoln out @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he may have felt worn out by the Frémonts ’ lobbying—called her , to her face , “ quite a female politician.
” “ I felt the sneering tone , ” she remarked afterward , fairly enough .
There is a lot of ruin in a nation , Adam Smith once said , meaning that it is born ruined—that any social system is rotten already , yet still keeps most people fed and placated .
Those systems and practices can be dysfunctional while the whole still works , more or less .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a lot of chaos in a hero—meaning not that all heroes are chaotic but that the elements of heroism flow back and forth uncertainly through a life .
The great virtue of Lin-Manuel Miranda ’ s musical is to see that Hamilton might have been Burr ; Burr , Hamilton .
Most men and women who rise above or venture outside the norm turn out to have a bewildering variety of gifts and defects , and they blunder as often as they pursue a fixed purpose .
Looking back , Frémont seems mostly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of one than Ulysses S. Grant was , right until the Mississippi River campaigns .
Frémont was possessed not of “ undaunted courage ” but of intense ambition , the habit of perseverance in a cause , and the ability to rebound from disappointment .
He also had something essential to what we call heroism : a kind of emotional efficiency that led him , from time to time , to drive his followers through the snow and into needless frostbite .
At various moments , he might have become President or a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ actual , and not just fictive , father of California .
But none of this quite happened , in part because of flaws in his nature—he got impatient or just confused when faced with a decisive moment—and in part simply because of chance .
The irony is that the Frémonts , pioneers of publicity as much as of the American frontier , are now largely forgotten , and in need of salvage operations like Inskeep ’ s good one .
( John , constantly on the hunt for a fortune , ended up @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in 1890 , though Jessie , who lived on into the new century , stayed in California and became one of the living legends of the newly bustling city of Los Angeles . )
Very much in the spirit of 2020 , Inskeep asks , in his last chapter , whether the Frémonts made the country more equal ; the question that his countrymen would have asked was whether he had made it greater .
Their complicated sense of greatness turned on an idea of character and courage and helped explain why , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ given so many more chances .
His contemporaries had watched him cross the country , ocean to ocean , and , even if they knew it was a little bit fake , they also thought it was extremely cool .
Thomas Hart Benton , the superintending father-in-law , was , not entirely incidentally , the great-great-uncle of the regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton , who was , in turn , the teacher and mentor of Jackson Pollock , who became something like the Frémont of American art , the man who scaled the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the pages of Life .
The circuits of celebrity in America never really close .
♦

Legendary development can happen with astonishing speed after a life is past. Gore Vidal, in his 1992 novel, “Live from Golgotha,” made sport of the notion of television coverage of the Crucifixion, as the kind of thing that would happen only in contemporary America, but in truth Jesus’ body was hardly cold, or gone, before the apostle Paul, in a single generation, had made the desert rebbe into a demigod. The special American contribution to legend-making has not been speed so much as absolute simultaneity, with the life and the legend developing together. The American frontier, the Wild West, was not burnished and made epic in memory. It was made epic even as its very brief life was taking place. Buffalo Bill was only twenty-three when dime novels about him began to appear in New York, and early accounts of Billy the Kid’s life read “like a press agent’s yarn,” as one biographer says, because they were. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were robbing banks and posing for mock formal photographs all at the same time. This national truth remains constant even in our own time. The Apollo missions were genuine acts of daring—and were also, as everyone knew at the time, scripted television programming, with well-wrought lines delivered live.
This habit, of legend unfurling alongside history, has some oddly perverse effects. First, it can make an event itself dubious. If it was so obviously orchestrated and cynically exploited, might it not be real at all? And so we get the loony theories of a faked moon landing, just as Billy the Kid’s killing is now said to have been faked as part of a conspiracy—and we get, too, the still hardy story that Butch and Sundance never really died in Bolivia and Butch came back and thrived out West. The habit can also delay our genuine perception of an event until after the mythical parts have faded. Apollo 11, a triumph of human audacity—think of going in a telephone booth to the moon under the guidance of a 1969 computer—was in its time dismissed by Norman Mailer as a dull example of Wasp engineering efficiency. We had to wait fifty years to get a movie saying, Yes, it really was a remarkable thing! Attempting to puff adventures, we can increase their immediacy and diminish their significance. Billy the Kid may have been a publicist’s token, but he really did live, and Pat Garrett really did kill him dead.
One of the virtues of Steve Inskeep’s new book, “Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War” (Penguin Press), is that it tracks this American phenomenon back to something like a satisfying starting point—the life of the Frémonts and their pursuit, in the eighteen-forties, of the Oregon Trail, the very first real American adventure that was cynically stage-managed for propaganda (and commercial) value. Even before the ubiquity of speed-of-light communication, which one might have thought essential, John Frémont’s westward travel was rapidly shared, with Jessie helping to ghostwrite the exploits. It was almost as if he became famous for trekking the Oregon Trail before he ever made it to Oregon. “Celebrity” and “celebrity culture” are parts of modern life itself, and tracing them to a single source is silly—no celebrities could have been more popularly celebrated than the aristocrats of eighteenth-century French courts—but this particular American phenomenon, in which being a striver and becoming a star flow together in one field of action, really does seem to get started here.
Inskeep’s subtitle might be a bit showy, but the Frémonts turn out to be fine characters for a book, or a miniseries, for that matter. Pretty much the entire dramatic matter of America before the Civil War passes through their lives: the gold rush, the way west, the taking of California, the Donner Party, the growth of abolition, and the coming of the war. But it is their relation to publicity that seems most current. There were towns called Fremont and a street in newly minted San Francisco named for them while the couple were still trying to make their fortune with dubiously acquired property elsewhere in California. John Frémont emerges as one of those characters—like Aaron Burr or, in another way, Charles Lindbergh—who seemed born to end up with their face on currency but instead inspired only the names of streets whose origin the people who walk on them no longer know. An antislavery Republican candidate for President, Frémont also played a crucial role in what is in retrospect one of the most astonishing parts of the American story: the inclusion of California as part of the United States, and not as the separate, perhaps Spanish-speaking country—the North American Chile—that its geography and history would seem to dictate.
Inskeep, a reporter and NPR host, puts Jessie on equal footing with John, not just because of contemporary feminist tastes but also because his life really was dependent on hers. His marriage to her was hypergamous, with her lifting him up socially. A good-looking Army officer with a French background, he was twenty-eight when, in 1841, he eloped with Jessie, the pretty, super-bright, and ambitious seventeen-year-old daughter of Senator Thomas Hart Benton, of Missouri. Accepting his new son-in-law, more or less grudgingly, as a fait accompli, Benton did a great deal to promote Frémont and the cult of celebrity that his life embodied. A onetime newspaperman, a ferocious self-publicist, and a resolute expansionist, Benton decided to send his son-in-law out West and to, Inskeep says, “make John C. Frémont the leading character in a news story.”
Once Benton contrived, against objections from the military, for him to be sent toward the Oregon territory, the young Frémont dutifully borrowed a sextant and some surveying instruments from a friend, did some shopping in New York for adventuring equipment, and set out. Fitfully leading an expedition of some twenty men over what was for the most part previously trodden ground, he managed to get to South Pass and climb a nearby peak, which he decided was the highest in all the Rockies. He planted a flag there (a camera that he had bought in New York didn’t work, the kind of detail that NASA would later get right in its expeditions) and came back East in time to lay the flag ostentatiously on the belly of his pregnant wife. The two of them soon got to work on a “Report on an Exploration,” which brilliantly made much, rather than little, of Frémont’s erratic and amateur leadership, complete with vomiting and headaches.
Inskeep gives Jessie much credit for the book, observing that its “apparent humility made the narrator seem honest and relatable, even as he was making the extraordinary claim of having climbed the highest point” in the mountain range. The account of the short trip made Frémont a national hero and helped inspire thousands of Americans to head west from Missouri. It later turned out that a hundred peaks in the Rockies were higher than the one that Frémont had climbed and claimed for wife, child, and country, but no matter. His countrymen continued to print the legend.
Frémont may have been a fraud, but he was not a phony: although he hadn’t done anything like what his fellow-citizens believed he was doing, he sincerely wanted to be what he seemed to be. Instead of remaining in the East, he spent the rest of the decade returning west, leaving his wife in St. Louis and Washington D.C., where she raised their family and managed his reputation.
It was after 1845 that he engaged in his greatest exploit, one pitched in the usual register of slightly daffy, nearsighted happenstance. Headed to Oregon again without explicit orders to either assault or avoid California, he made an intrusion into the Mexican region called Alta California. The local officials asked him, peaceably enough, to respect their authority and leave. They made an effort to get him out, but he hung around.
Cartoon by Navied Mahdavian Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Then a local Mormon settler named William Ide, who had been in California for less than a year, decided that the lives of the local Americans were being threatened. With the blessing of Frémont, who was camping nearby, Ide joined a party of Americans on a raid of the Sonoma residence of a Mexican general, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo. The general, outnumbered, agreed to surrender, and offered the Americans some of the already promising local wine, which he had been among the first to produce. The Americans, one by one, got drunk, except for Ide, who was a Mormon. (Nondrinkers have a huge advantage in an alcohol-fuelled civilization.) Accepting the surrender, Ide declared California an independent republic. He then marched Vallejo and his men off to Frémont’s encampment. A natural opportunist if not much of an imperial adventurer, Frémont decided to keep Vallejo captive and take credit for the liberation of California. “He had gone from a reluctant warrior to, in his mind, the keystone of the revolution,” Inskeep explains.
At this point, a nearby naval commodore, falsely assuming that Frémont must have acted on Presidential orders rather than on his own muddled improvisational initiative, sailed in with a small group of ships and seized California on behalf of the United States. Frémont’s fate was ironic: having accepted the primacy of the Navy, he refused to take orders from the Army general who arrived later, and he was court-martialled on his return to D.C. Nothing at all was at stake in this confrontation; the fate of California was already fixed, and Frémont, however improbably, had already been assigned as its hero. Nonetheless, interservice rivalry, a force never to be underestimated, had to have its day. Frémont was found guilty—then was immediately pardoned and restored to rank by President James K. Polk. Towns across the country would soon be named for him.
Frémont then acted foolishly, as he would again and again throughout his life. Ignoring Kenny Rogers’s later, appropriately fake-frontier wisdom, he didn’t know when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em. Instead of counting his winnings and leaving the table—the guilty verdict was as much pure newspaper fodder as his climbing the mountain had been, and he could simply have accepted victory when he was pardoned—he melodramatically resigned from the Army, insisting that his honor had been stained.
Having left the military, Frémont occupied that odd American ground of those who have done something once and are famous for having done it, without doing very much now. He speculated in California land and was, once again, a kind of innocent, bemused spectator to the coming of the gold rush, in 1849, more or less stumbling into a significant (though later much adjudicated) mineral holding near Yosemite. Then, as later military celebrities would do, he made a run for the White House.
Frémont secured the Republican Presidential nomination, in 1856, by a shrewd piece of political maneuvering, one that reminds us just how complex and contradictory the politics of abolition were: some of the Know- Nothings, fiercely anti-immigrant (and anti-Catholic), were also antislavery, it being possible at the time for white working-class Americans to hate Irish people as much as they hated black people. Frémont’s political managers got him the nomination by building a coalition of anti-immigrant opponents of slavery and progressives who opposed slavery—aligning proto-Trumpists with proto-Sandersites.
In the campaign, Frémont was taken to be an abolitionist, which he really wasn’t, and Jessie to be a feminist, which she wasn’t really, either. Frémont was also falsely accused in the campaign of being a secret Catholic, and, as with Barack Obama’s supposed Muslim boyhood, there was just enough complexity in his past to sell the charge. (John and Jessie had been married by a Catholic priest, but John’s mother raised him Episcopalian.) Frémont, to his credit, thought it beneath his dignity to refute the claim, which, alas, gained further purchase as a result. Jessie played a crucial, rather Hillary Clinton-like role in the campaign. “Give ’em Jessie”—which Inskeep identifies as an old-fashioned way of saying “Give ’em hell”—became a Frémont slogan, and one New York newspaper wrote, “The felicitous double entendre only needs to be published to become the watchword of the campaign, and . . . if the gallantry of the country demanded a Queen at the head of the nation, the lovely lady of the Republican nominee would command the universal suffrages of the people.” Frémont badly lost the election, even in California, to James Buchanan, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, who dithered for another four years until the Republicans decided that they needed an antislavery ideologue, not an all-purpose hero, and nominated Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln, in turn, briefly gave Frémont command of an army during the Civil War, but the badly miscast Frémont blew it, in part because of a well-meaning but premature emancipation proclamation he declared in Missouri. Jessie went to Washington to straighten Lincoln out, but Lincoln—a little uncharacteristically, but he may have felt worn out by the Frémonts’ lobbying—called her, to her face, “quite a female politician.” “I felt the sneering tone,” she remarked afterward, fairly enough.
There is a lot of ruin in a nation, Adam Smith once said, meaning that it is born ruined—that any social system is rotten already, yet still keeps most people fed and placated. Those systems and practices can be dysfunctional while the whole still works, more or less. In the same way, there is always a lot of chaos in a hero—meaning not that all heroes are chaotic but that the elements of heroism flow back and forth uncertainly through a life. The great virtue of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical is to see that Hamilton might have been Burr; Burr, Hamilton. Most men and women who rise above or venture outside the norm turn out to have a bewildering variety of gifts and defects, and they blunder as often as they pursue a fixed purpose. Looking back, Frémont seems mostly like a fascinating screwup—but he was less of one than Ulysses S. Grant was, right until the Mississippi River campaigns. Frémont was possessed not of “undaunted courage” but of intense ambition, the habit of perseverance in a cause, and the ability to rebound from disappointment. He also had something essential to what we call heroism: a kind of emotional efficiency that led him, from time to time, to drive his followers through the snow and into needless frostbite. At various moments, he might have become President or a truly successful military leader or even the actual, and not just fictive, father of California. But none of this quite happened, in part because of flaws in his nature—he got impatient or just confused when faced with a decisive moment—and in part simply because of chance.
The irony is that the Frémonts, pioneers of publicity as much as of the American frontier, are now largely forgotten, and in need of salvage operations like Inskeep’s good one. (John, constantly on the hunt for a fortune, ended up dying in a New York boarding house in 1890, though Jessie, who lived on into the new century, stayed in California and became one of the living legends of the newly bustling city of Los Angeles.) Very much in the spirit of 2020, Inskeep asks, in his last chapter, whether the Frémonts made the country more equal; the question that his countrymen would have asked was whether he had made it greater. Their complicated sense of greatness turned on an idea of character and courage and helped explain why, having failed so often, Frémont was given so many more chances. His contemporaries had watched him cross the country, ocean to ocean, and, even if they knew it was a little bit fake, they also thought it was extremely cool.
Thomas Hart Benton, the superintending father-in-law, was, not entirely incidentally, the great-great-uncle of the regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton, who was, in turn, the teacher and mentor of Jackson Pollock, who became something like the Frémont of American art, the man who scaled the highest Picasso peaks but did so in the pages of Life. The circuits of celebrity in America never really close. ♦


newyorker--2020-01-20--The Long War Against Slavery

The Long War Against Slavery

“ Here ’ s to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies , ” Samuel Johnson once toasted at an Oxford dinner party , or so James Boswell claims .
The veracity of Boswell ’ s biography—including its representation of Johnson ’ s position on slavery—has long been contested .
In the course of more than a thousand pages , little mention is made of Johnson ’ s long-term servant , Francis Barber , who came into the writer ’ s house as a child after being taken to London from the Jamaican sugar plantation where he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the surviving pages of Johnson ’ s notes for his famous dictionary have Barber ’ s handwriting on the back ; there are scraps on which a twelve-year-old Barber practiced his own name while learning to write .
Thirty years later , Johnson died and left Barber a sizable inheritance .
But Boswell repeatedly minimizes Johnson ’ s abiding opposition to slavery—even that startling toast is characterized as an attempt to offend Johnson ’ s “ grave ” dinner companions rather than as genuine support for the enslaved .
Boswell was in favor @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a literary historian at Barnard College , has suggested that this stance tainted his depiction of Johnson ’ s abolitionism , especially since Boswell ’ s book appeared around the time that the British Parliament was voting on whether to end England ’ s participation in the international slave trade .
Johnson ’ s abolitionist views were likely influenced by Barber ’ s experience of enslavement .
For much of the eighteenth century , Jamaica was the most profitable British colony and the largest importer of enslaved Africans , and Johnson once described @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wealth and dreadful wickedness , a den of tyrants , and a dungeon of slaves.
” He wasn ’ t the only Englishman paying close attention to rebellion in the Caribbean : abolitionists and slavers alike read the papers anxiously for news of slave revolts , taking stock of where the rebels came from , how adroitly they planned their attacks , how quickly revolts were suppressed , and how soon they broke out again .
In a new book , the historian Vincent Brown argues that these rebellions did more to end @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by white abolitionists like Johnson .
“ Tacky ’ s Revolt : The Story of an Atlantic Slave War ” ( Belknap ) focusses on one of the largest slave uprisings of the eighteenth century , when a thousand enslaved men and women in Jamaica , led by a man named Tacky , rebelled , causing tens of thousands of pounds of property damage , leaving sixty whites dead , and leading to the deaths of five hundred of those who had participated or were accused of having done so .
Brown ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and his comrades were not undertaking a discrete act of rebellion but , rather , fighting one of many battles in a long war between slavers and the enslaved .
Both the philosopher John Locke and the self-emancipated Igbo writer Olaudah Equiano defined slavery as a state of war , but Brown goes further , describing the transatlantic slave trade as “ a borderless slave war : war to enslave , war to expand slavery , and war against slaves , answered on the side of the enslaved by war against slaveholders , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Understood as a military struggle , slavery was a conflict staggering in its scale , even just in the Caribbean .
Beginning in the seventeenth century , European traders prowled Africa ’ s Gold Coast looking to exchange guns , textiles , or even a bottle of brandy for able bodies ; by the middle of the eighteenth century , slaves constituted ninety per cent of Europe ’ s trade with Africa .
Of the more than ten million Africans who survived the journey across the Atlantic , six hundred thousand went to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the size of Connecticut .
By contrast , four hundred thousand were sent to all of North America .
( The domestic slave trade was another matter : by the time the Civil War began , there were roughly four million enslaved people living in the United States . )
Jamaica had hundreds of plantations , which grew cocoa , coffee , ginger , indigo , and , above all , sugar .
Half the enslaved population labored on sugar plantations , where even a modest operation had a hundred and fifty slaves @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and refining the crop , which was sold around the world .
Brown ’ s previous book , “ The Reaper ’ s Garden : Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery , ” described the miserable conditions that prevailed in Jamaica after the British seized control from the Spanish , in 1655 .
Mortality rates were exceptionally high for both Europeans and Africans , not only because of tropical diseases like malaria and yellow fever but also because of poor nutrition and oppressive working conditions .
On some sugar @ @ @ @ @ @ @ deaths as births ; the average slave could expect to survive only seven years of forced labor .
An Anglican missionary observed that the first toy given to white children in Jamaica was often a whip ; the overseer Thomas Thistlewood , who managed forty-two slaves in St. Elizabeth Parish , kept a horrifying diary that describes how , in a single year , he whipped three-quarters of the men and raped half the women .
When he moved to a different plantation , he threatened to dismember the enslaved men and women @ @ @ @ @ @ @ humiliations that included forcing some to defecate into other slaves ’ mouths and urinate in others ’ eyes , rubbing lime juice in their wounds after floggings , and covering a whipped , bound man in molasses while leaving him for the flies and mosquitoes .
Alongside the daily temperature and rainfall , Thistlewood recorded the equally appalling behavior of his slaveowning neighbors .
Those were scarce , however , since , by 1760 , fewer than one in ten Jamaicans was white .
There were so many Africans in Jamaica that the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ owners to have at least one white man for every twenty slaves on an estate .
Most planters couldn ’ t comply , and the ratio was revised to one for every thirty .
The British had already learned how vulnerable white colonists were in Jamaica .
Since their expulsion of the Spanish , they had been engaged in intermittent conflict with the Maroons , a population of former Spanish slaves who had fled into the Blue Mountains , in the island ’ s interior .
Their name derived from the Spanish word @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had been imported from Africa to replace the indigenous people , the Arawaks , nearly all of whom had been killed by the Spanish .
The Maroons had periodically raided British plantations , stolen supplies , and seized farmland .
When the attacks escalated , in what became known as the First Maroon War , the island ’ s militia began retaliating , and it took more than ten years to reach a peace , in 1739 .
The British government agreed to recognize Maroon sovereignty in designated areas ; the Maroons agreed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ slaves .
There were other free blacks in Jamaica , too , including women who had been freed in the wills of white colonists who had kept them as concubines , and children who were the products of such unions .
The social hierarchies of the colony were complicated , and would only become more so .
Just as many of the colonists who arrived in Jamaica were veterans of the British Army or the Royal Navy , many of the enslaved there had participated in armed conflicts before being forced into bondage @ @ @ @ @ @ @ long before European interference , and , after the transatlantic trade incentivized the kidnapping of enemies , the kingdoms of Akwamu , Akyem , Asante , Dahomey , Denkyira , and Oyo went to war with one another over territory , minerals , and people .
Slaves from certain regions became more highly valued than others , including , for a time , the so-called Coromantee , who came from many different kingdoms on the Gold Coast .
Named for the town of Kormantse , in present-day Ghana , the Coromantee were at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and work ethic .
One colonial historian wrote that the Coromantee were “ hardy , laborious , and manageable under mild and just treatment , ” but warned that they were “ fierce , violent , and revengeful under injury and provocation.
” The name was more stereotype than anything : many of the people to whom it was applied had little in common except language , and not always that .
It soon became the preferred pejorative for any rebellious slave , as if geographic origin were the only possible explanation for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the Coromantee became so feared that colonists in Jamaica actually proposed banning their importation .
They were said to have been the leaders of rebellions not only there but in Cartagena de Indias , Suriname , St. Croix , St. John , Antigua , and New York .
Perhaps no one fantasized about slave rebellions more than the whites who benefitted from the subjugation of slaves .
Some of those fantasies were driven by fear , but some of them , strangely , stemmed from a romanticized notion of the figure of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one of its most enduring forms in “ Oroonoko , ” a 1688 novel by Aphra Behn , about the enslavement of a Coromantee nobleman .
Tricked into slavery by the villainous captain of a slave ship , the heroic prince Oroonoko is taken from his African homeland to a West Indian colony , where he stages an unsuccessful revolt , after which he is tortured and executed .
“ Oroonoko ” was adapted into one of the most popular plays of the Restoration era , and its renown endured well into the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ king , Oroonoko represented an archetype : the royal whose servitude is a mistake , and whose rebellion is justified because he was wrongly enslaved , not because slavery is wrong .
It took decades for audiences to start seeing the play and its source text from an abolitionist perspective , but by the time Samuel Johnson wrote about “ Oroonoko , ” at the end of 1759 , the version being staged featured two additional antislavery scenes .
Around the same time , a Coromantee named Tacky , from the Frontier plantation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sneaking away to a coastal cave with a few other slaves to plan their own rebellion .
Sometimes spelled Takyi , the name means “ royalty ” : Tacky was said to have been the chief of his village in West Africa , where he sold Gold Coast rivals into slavery and learned English from the traders who came to buy his prisoners of war .
Eventually , he met the same fate , when a warring tribe defeated his ; sent to Jamaica , Tacky brought his military knowledge with him .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Easter Monday in 1760 .
Just after midnight , they attacked Fort Haldane , where a single sentinel guarded all of Port Maria Harbor .
They murdered the watchman and made off with four barrels of gunpowder , a keg of musket balls , and forty guns , then used those supplies to make their way southward , raiding estates and burning whatever plantation land they could , disrupting the agricultural economy and , more crucially , recruiting comrades .
By first light , Tacky had attracted hundreds of slaves to his cause @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Together , they moved onto Ballard ’ s Valley Estate , a sugar plantation , and surrounded the overseer ’ s house .
The owner of one of the plantations they had already raided happened to be staying there ; when he woke to news of the revolt , he went to see the attackers and was startled by a war cry .
“ Boys , don ’ t you know me ?
” he called out to some of the rebels he recognized , thinking they might lay down their arms @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they tried to kill him .
That night , though Tacky ’ s army had no way of knowing it , the insurrection was at its height .
They had killed dozens of whites , and they celebrated by roasting an ox and drinking stolen rum and Madeira wine .
Obeah men , the spiritual leaders of the Coromantee , who carried out religious ceremonies not unlike those of Santería and vodou , had encouraged the rebels , and now administered oaths to new recruits , drawing blood from every rebel , mixing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and distributing the mixture to each to drink , promising that it would protect them .
Tacky himself was said to have been given the power to capture bullets in his hands and , like the Obeah men , was supposed to be safe from harm by any white man .
These religious practices emboldened the rebels and terrified the whites , who later insisted that Tacky ’ s troops not only murdered servants in their sleep at Ballard ’ s Valley but drank the blood of those they killed .
“ And @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , I brought Scrabble.
” The next day , the colony ’ s lieutenant governor declared martial law and dispatched sixty soldiers to suppress the rebellion , which had splintered into gangs , some moving along the roads , others retreating into the forests .
The colonists managed to capture and hang an Obeah man , apparently the chief oracle , demonstrating that no amount of enchantment could spare a Coromantee the wrath of the whites .
After his death , the rebels had a more difficult time recruiting reinforcements , and many @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the British , as soon as they alerted the Maroons , had more men for their cause , and ones who could draw on decades of experience tracking and hunting in Jamaica ’ s interior .
Within a week , the Maroons had flushed Tacky and what remained of his insurgency out of the woods and toward the coast .
A Maroon sharpshooter killed Tacky , and some of his followers took their own lives rather than surrender .
As evidence of their victory , the Maroons cut off seventeen pairs of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ head could be paraded along the roads of the parish , then placed on a pike in Spanish Town .
But the end of Tacky was not the end of Tacky ’ s Revolt .
Brown argues that the conflict might more accurately be called the Coromantee War , since it was followed by more than a year of rebellions .
Whether these were triggered by or organized in tandem with Tacky ’ s uprising is a matter of dispute .
Some claim that Tacky had been part of an island-wide revolt planned @ @ @ @ @ @ @ too much one night , he mistakenly launched the attack weeks early .
Others have argued that word of Tacky ’ s actions inspired people to take up arms on their own plantations .
Whether coördinated or concomitant , what Tacky did in April , 1760 , looks , in retrospect , like a prologue .
Around the same time , a woman named Cubah , who called herself the Queen of Kingston , planned an insurrection with the aim of ruling the colony .
At the end of May , a few @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a Coromantee named Wager , began an uprising that lasted nearly a year .
In August , a slave named Simon marched twenty or so rebels from Hanover toward St. Elizabeth Parish .
Meanwhile , dozens of other slaves whose names were never recorded rose up on their plantations , in small groups that never escaped , or , if they did , didn ’ t make it very far—seemingly isolated episodes of violence that , taken together , looked like a war raging all over Jamaica .
“ The whole Island remained @ @ @ @ @ @ @ time , ” a British squadron commander observed .
Like guerrilla warriors elsewhere , the enslaved Jamaicans often attacked and then dispersed , frustrating the militia ’ s attempts to track them and harassing estates near the edges of the forest by stealing supplies or damaging property .
The colonists , meanwhile , burned their crops to try to starve the rebels out of the woods and struggled to supply enough troops to pursue so many separate insurrections , a problem that grew worse as the conflict dragged on and members of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ until October , 1761 , rebellious prisoners were killed or were captured , tried , and executed—sometimes burned alive , sometimes hanged or gibbeted .
Five hundred Africans died during the Coromantee War , and another five hundred were shipped to other colonies , to discourage rebellion—a questionable strategy , since they carried knowledge of the insurrection wherever they went .
Brown dutifully records every troop movement , skirmish , and counterattack .
The details can feel tedious , but the cumulative effect is to transform scattered and largely forgotten episodes into a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Maroons , and British soldiers .
After Tacky ’ s uprising , the Jamaican government tried to ban the importation of Coromantees , then settled for separating them from one another on different plantations and expelling the more rebellious ones .
The government also passed laws criminalizing the open practice of Obeah , forbidding slaves from possessing guns , and preventing blacks from gathering .
Since most of the enslaved never had these freedoms to begin with , the new laws disproportionately affected free blacks , whose movements were newly regulated and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ blue crosses on their right shoulders .
Such Draconian measures did little to stop slave revolts in Jamaica or elsewhere , but the revolts did change the debate over slavery .
Within a few weeks of Tacky ’ s attack on Fort Haldane , British newspapers were reporting “ some Disturbances among the Negroes , ” and by the end of the summer the various uprisings were said to be “ of bad Consequence to the whole island.
” But most of what we know about Tacky ’ s Revolt does not come @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Jamaicans who witnessed it : Thistlewood , the brutal overseer , whose diary runs to fourteen thousand pages and includes daily reports on the rebels ; the lawyer and planter Edward Long , who wrote a three-volume history of Jamaica that was published in 1774 ; and Bryan Edwards , who produced a two-volume history of the West Indies that was published in 1793 .
These men were all white , and , to varying degrees , they all advanced arguments rather than simply recording events .
Edwards , writing three decades @ @ @ @ @ @ @ romanticized Tacky , depicting him as an Oroonoko-like figure—a royal slave whose rebellion was justified by his circumstances and whose comrades were stoic and courageous , the archetype of the noble savage .
Edwards saw Tacky as a martyr , not to the cause of abolition but to the romantic spirit of the Coromantee , who could be tamed as long as they were treated fairly .
Although abolitionists like Samuel Johnson argued that every uprising was an appropriate response to slavery ’ s inherent brutality , Edwards represented a strand of thought @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s Revolt , as a rare reaction to aberrant treatment : one master ’ s overly harsh punishments or another ’ s refusal to let his slaves have an Easter holiday .
In reality , Tacky ’ s actions probably reflected the plotting of a military leader looking to rule a slave society , not to end slavery .
Considered in an Atlantic context and not an American one , his motivations had less to do with Enlightenment ideas of equality than with power .
Similarly , the assistance that the Maroons gave @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that dictated behavior before the beginning of the Afro-Caribbean liberation movements .
For Edwards and other planters , their political control of the Maroons provided an alternative model to abolition , letting them worry about the “ Tackeys among us , ” that is , specific rebellious slaves , rather than the institution of slavery .
But Edward Long , who served with Edwards on the committee of the Jamaican legislature that investigated the Coromantee War , insisted that all Africans were Tacky , and that all Tackys were subhuman .
In 1772 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ although chattel slavery was legal in the colonies , it was illegal in Britain itself .
After that decision , Long devoted himself to his writings , which are full of virulent racism , and used his work , including “ History of Jamaica , ” to attack the reasoning of abolitionists , defend the rights of planters , and warn that blacks were a “ venomous and dangerous ulcer , that threatens to disperse its malignancy far and wide , until every family catches infections from it.
” He insisted that rebellions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mistreatment but simply by their nature : “ brutish , ignorant , idle , crafty , treacherous , bloody , thievish , mistrustful , and superstitious.
” His solution was to advocate for abolishing the slave trade but maintaining domestic slavery .
Long was wrong about this , and almost everything else .
The revolt that ended slavery in Jamaica was led by Samuel Sharpe , a Creole born near Montego Bay who was ordained in the Baptist Church .
A few days after Christmas in 1831 , eighteen years after Long had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sixty thousand of the colony ’ s enslaved population protested their condition .
He and three hundred others were hanged .
A parliamentary investigation into what became known as the Baptist War led to the abolition of slavery everywhere in the British Empire in 1834 .
“ Because slaveholders wrote the first draft of history , ” Vincent Brown laments , “ subsequent historiography has strained to escape from their point of view.
” But “ Tacky ’ s Revolt ” is a fine start , rescuing even minor acts of resistance from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and making a coherent whole out of the diffuse , chaotic attempt to wage war on enslavers .
The book is a sobering read for contemporary audiences in countries engaged in forever wars , reminding us how easily and arbitrarily the edges of empire , and its evils , can fade from or focus our vision .
It is also a useful reminder that the distinction between victory and defeat , when it comes to insurgencies , is often fleeting : Tacky may have lost his battle , but the enslaved did @ @ @ @ @ @

“Here’s to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies,” Samuel Johnson once toasted at an Oxford dinner party, or so James Boswell claims. The veracity of Boswell’s biography—including its representation of Johnson’s position on slavery—has long been contested. In the course of more than a thousand pages, little mention is made of Johnson’s long-term servant, Francis Barber, who came into the writer’s house as a child after being taken to London from the Jamaican sugar plantation where he was born into slavery. Some of the surviving pages of Johnson’s notes for his famous dictionary have Barber’s handwriting on the back; there are scraps on which a twelve-year-old Barber practiced his own name while learning to write. Thirty years later, Johnson died and left Barber a sizable inheritance. But Boswell repeatedly minimizes Johnson’s abiding opposition to slavery—even that startling toast is characterized as an attempt to offend Johnson’s “grave” dinner companions rather than as genuine support for the enslaved. Boswell was in favor of slavery, and James Basker, a literary historian at Barnard College, has suggested that this stance tainted his depiction of Johnson’s abolitionism, especially since Boswell’s book appeared around the time that the British Parliament was voting on whether to end England’s participation in the international slave trade.
Johnson’s abolitionist views were likely influenced by Barber’s experience of enslavement. For much of the eighteenth century, Jamaica was the most profitable British colony and the largest importer of enslaved Africans, and Johnson once described it as “a place of great wealth and dreadful wickedness, a den of tyrants, and a dungeon of slaves.” He wasn’t the only Englishman paying close attention to rebellion in the Caribbean: abolitionists and slavers alike read the papers anxiously for news of slave revolts, taking stock of where the rebels came from, how adroitly they planned their attacks, how quickly revolts were suppressed, and how soon they broke out again.
In a new book, the historian Vincent Brown argues that these rebellions did more to end the slave trade than any actions taken by white abolitionists like Johnson. “Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War” (Belknap) focusses on one of the largest slave uprisings of the eighteenth century, when a thousand enslaved men and women in Jamaica, led by a man named Tacky, rebelled, causing tens of thousands of pounds of property damage, leaving sixty whites dead, and leading to the deaths of five hundred of those who had participated or were accused of having done so. Brown’s most interesting claim is that Tacky and his comrades were not undertaking a discrete act of rebellion but, rather, fighting one of many battles in a long war between slavers and the enslaved. Both the philosopher John Locke and the self-emancipated Igbo writer Olaudah Equiano defined slavery as a state of war, but Brown goes further, describing the transatlantic slave trade as “a borderless slave war: war to enslave, war to expand slavery, and war against slaves, answered on the side of the enslaved by war against slaveholders, and also war among slaves themselves.”
Understood as a military struggle, slavery was a conflict staggering in its scale, even just in the Caribbean. Beginning in the seventeenth century, European traders prowled Africa’s Gold Coast looking to exchange guns, textiles, or even a bottle of brandy for able bodies; by the middle of the eighteenth century, slaves constituted ninety per cent of Europe’s trade with Africa. Of the more than ten million Africans who survived the journey across the Atlantic, six hundred thousand went to work in Jamaica, an island roughly the size of Connecticut. By contrast, four hundred thousand were sent to all of North America. (The domestic slave trade was another matter: by the time the Civil War began, there were roughly four million enslaved people living in the United States.)
Jamaica had hundreds of plantations, which grew cocoa, coffee, ginger, indigo, and, above all, sugar. Half the enslaved population labored on sugar plantations, where even a modest operation had a hundred and fifty slaves who worked year-round, planting, harvesting, and refining the crop, which was sold around the world. Brown’s previous book, “The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery,” described the miserable conditions that prevailed in Jamaica after the British seized control from the Spanish, in 1655. Mortality rates were exceptionally high for both Europeans and Africans, not only because of tropical diseases like malaria and yellow fever but also because of poor nutrition and oppressive working conditions. On some sugar plantations, there were twice as many deaths as births; the average slave could expect to survive only seven years of forced labor.
An Anglican missionary observed that the first toy given to white children in Jamaica was often a whip; the overseer Thomas Thistlewood, who managed forty-two slaves in St. Elizabeth Parish, kept a horrifying diary that describes how, in a single year, he whipped three-quarters of the men and raped half the women. When he moved to a different plantation, he threatened to dismember the enslaved men and women under his care, devising tortures and humiliations that included forcing some to defecate into other slaves’ mouths and urinate in others’ eyes, rubbing lime juice in their wounds after floggings, and covering a whipped, bound man in molasses while leaving him for the flies and mosquitoes. Alongside the daily temperature and rainfall, Thistlewood recorded the equally appalling behavior of his slaveowning neighbors. Those were scarce, however, since, by 1760, fewer than one in ten Jamaicans was white. There were so many Africans in Jamaica that the colonial government passed a law requiring plantation owners to have at least one white man for every twenty slaves on an estate. Most planters couldn’t comply, and the ratio was revised to one for every thirty.
The British had already learned how vulnerable white colonists were in Jamaica. Since their expulsion of the Spanish, they had been engaged in intermittent conflict with the Maroons, a population of former Spanish slaves who had fled into the Blue Mountains, in the island’s interior. Their name derived from the Spanish word for “wild,” and they had been imported from Africa to replace the indigenous people, the Arawaks, nearly all of whom had been killed by the Spanish. The Maroons had periodically raided British plantations, stolen supplies, and seized farmland. When the attacks escalated, in what became known as the First Maroon War, the island’s militia began retaliating, and it took more than ten years to reach a peace, in 1739. The British government agreed to recognize Maroon sovereignty in designated areas; the Maroons agreed to capture and return any runaway British slaves. There were other free blacks in Jamaica, too, including women who had been freed in the wills of white colonists who had kept them as concubines, and children who were the products of such unions.
The social hierarchies of the colony were complicated, and would only become more so. Just as many of the colonists who arrived in Jamaica were veterans of the British Army or the Royal Navy, many of the enslaved there had participated in armed conflicts before being forced into bondage. African states engaged in regional warfare long before European interference, and, after the transatlantic trade incentivized the kidnapping of enemies, the kingdoms of Akwamu, Akyem, Asante, Dahomey, Denkyira, and Oyo went to war with one another over territory, minerals, and people. Slaves from certain regions became more highly valued than others, including, for a time, the so-called Coromantee, who came from many different kingdoms on the Gold Coast.
Named for the town of Kormantse, in present-day Ghana, the Coromantee were at first prized by planters for their strength and work ethic. One colonial historian wrote that the Coromantee were “hardy, laborious, and manageable under mild and just treatment,” but warned that they were “fierce, violent, and revengeful under injury and provocation.” The name was more stereotype than anything: many of the people to whom it was applied had little in common except language, and not always that. It soon became the preferred pejorative for any rebellious slave, as if geographic origin were the only possible explanation for why someone would resist enslavement. Eventually, the Coromantee became so feared that colonists in Jamaica actually proposed banning their importation. They were said to have been the leaders of rebellions not only there but in Cartagena de Indias, Suriname, St. Croix, St. John, Antigua, and New York.
Perhaps no one fantasized about slave rebellions more than the whites who benefitted from the subjugation of slaves. Some of those fantasies were driven by fear, but some of them, strangely, stemmed from a romanticized notion of the figure of the rebellious slave. That notion achieved one of its most enduring forms in “Oroonoko,” a 1688 novel by Aphra Behn, about the enslavement of a Coromantee nobleman. Tricked into slavery by the villainous captain of a slave ship, the heroic prince Oroonoko is taken from his African homeland to a West Indian colony, where he stages an unsuccessful revolt, after which he is tortured and executed. “Oroonoko” was adapted into one of the most popular plays of the Restoration era, and its renown endured well into the eighteenth century. The grandson of a king, Oroonoko represented an archetype: the royal whose servitude is a mistake, and whose rebellion is justified because he was wrongly enslaved, not because slavery is wrong. It took decades for audiences to start seeing the play and its source text from an abolitionist perspective, but by the time Samuel Johnson wrote about “Oroonoko,” at the end of 1759, the version being staged featured two additional antislavery scenes.
Around the same time, a Coromantee named Tacky, from the Frontier plantation, in St. Mary Parish, was sneaking away to a coastal cave with a few other slaves to plan their own rebellion. Sometimes spelled Takyi, the name means “royalty”: Tacky was said to have been the chief of his village in West Africa, where he sold Gold Coast rivals into slavery and learned English from the traders who came to buy his prisoners of war. Eventually, he met the same fate, when a warring tribe defeated his; sent to Jamaica, Tacky brought his military knowledge with him. He and a hundred co-conspirators rallied on Easter Monday in 1760. Just after midnight, they attacked Fort Haldane, where a single sentinel guarded all of Port Maria Harbor. They murdered the watchman and made off with four barrels of gunpowder, a keg of musket balls, and forty guns, then used those supplies to make their way southward, raiding estates and burning whatever plantation land they could, disrupting the agricultural economy and, more crucially, recruiting comrades.
By first light, Tacky had attracted hundreds of slaves to his cause, including a significant number of women. Together, they moved onto Ballard’s Valley Estate, a sugar plantation, and surrounded the overseer’s house. The owner of one of the plantations they had already raided happened to be staying there; when he woke to news of the revolt, he went to see the attackers and was startled by a war cry. “Boys, don’t you know me?” he called out to some of the rebels he recognized, thinking they might lay down their arms. They did know him, and they tried to kill him.
That night, though Tacky’s army had no way of knowing it, the insurrection was at its height. They had killed dozens of whites, and they celebrated by roasting an ox and drinking stolen rum and Madeira wine. Obeah men, the spiritual leaders of the Coromantee, who carried out religious ceremonies not unlike those of Santería and vodou, had encouraged the rebels, and now administered oaths to new recruits, drawing blood from every rebel, mixing it with gunpowder and grave dirt, and distributing the mixture to each to drink, promising that it would protect them. Tacky himself was said to have been given the power to capture bullets in his hands and, like the Obeah men, was supposed to be safe from harm by any white man. These religious practices emboldened the rebels and terrified the whites, who later insisted that Tacky’s troops not only murdered servants in their sleep at Ballard’s Valley but drank the blood of those they killed.
“And in case we get tired of football, I brought Scrabble.” Cartoon by Liam Francis Walsh Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
The next day, the colony’s lieutenant governor declared martial law and dispatched sixty soldiers to suppress the rebellion, which had splintered into gangs, some moving along the roads, others retreating into the forests. The colonists managed to capture and hang an Obeah man, apparently the chief oracle, demonstrating that no amount of enchantment could spare a Coromantee the wrath of the whites. After his death, the rebels had a more difficult time recruiting reinforcements, and many of the participants deserted. By contrast, the British, as soon as they alerted the Maroons, had more men for their cause, and ones who could draw on decades of experience tracking and hunting in Jamaica’s interior.
Within a week, the Maroons had flushed Tacky and what remained of his insurgency out of the woods and toward the coast. A Maroon sharpshooter killed Tacky, and some of his followers took their own lives rather than surrender. As evidence of their victory, the Maroons cut off seventeen pairs of ears and decapitated Tacky so that his head could be paraded along the roads of the parish, then placed on a pike in Spanish Town.
But the end of Tacky was not the end of Tacky’s Revolt. Brown argues that the conflict might more accurately be called the Coromantee War, since it was followed by more than a year of rebellions. Whether these were triggered by or organized in tandem with Tacky’s uprising is a matter of dispute. Some claim that Tacky had been part of an island-wide revolt planned for Pentecost, but, after drinking too much one night, he mistakenly launched the attack weeks early. Others have argued that word of Tacky’s actions inspired people to take up arms on their own plantations. Whether coördinated or concomitant, what Tacky did in April, 1760, looks, in retrospect, like a prologue.


newyorker--2020-01-20--The Attack on Exarchia, an Anarchist Refuge in Athens

Before dawn on August 25th , Rafi jolted awake to the sounds of police outside Spirou Trikoupi , a building where he was squatting , in the Athens neighborhood of Exarchia .
A muscular twenty-eight-year-old from Kabul , Rafi had been an interpreter for the U.S. military .
In 2015 , he made the punishing journey across Iran , Turkey , and the Aegean Sea , until he found himself in Exarchia , where anarchists and refugees were transforming abandoned buildings into self-organized sanctuaries .
For two and a half years , Rafi had lived alongside ninety Eritreans , Iranians @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Spirou Trikoupi , “ like a family , ” he said .
That morning , Rafi peered out his window .
Police had massed on both sides of the street .
He sat calmly on his bed , and listened to the clang of the bolt cutters on the locks .
After a few minutes , Greek police , wearing black , with their faces covered , stormed in .
Rafi recalled that when they entered the room , they pointed their guns at his head .
Police herded the residents into vans @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The families waited hours without food ; police demanded money for water .
“ When we asked what the fuck was going on , they told us , ‘ Be quiet !
Sit !
’ ” Rafi said , mimicking their shouts .
Late that night , police took the refugees to a hotel .
After a few more days , they were sent to camps around Greece .
Rafi had been dreading this day since June , when Kostas Bakoyannis , a member of the right-wing New Democracy Party , was elected @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to bring law and order to Exarchia , and after taking power he quickly announced a five-year , ten-million-euro plan to subdue the neighborhood .
Traditionally , police had stuck to Exarchia ’ s periphery , but Bakoyannis stationed police officers at major intersections in the neighborhood .
Then he sent workers , guarded by riot police , to tear down banners , clean graffiti , and plant weedy shrubbery in Exarchia Square .
Other incursions followed : friends told me about the beating of a bartender , and a late-night police raid @ @ @ @ @ @ @ radical social center , that left the windows shattered and the interior filled with tear gas .
Spirou Trikoupi was the first squat that police raided .
Over the next two months , they shut down at least seven more squats in or near Exarchia .
The details of the raid that Rafi described were repeated : doors broken in before dawn , guns drawn , rooms ransacked , families herded onto buses , with the undocumented locked in closed detention centers , and those with papers shunted into far-off camps .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ only the latest development in more than a decade of political reactions and counter-reactions in Greece , beginning with the 2007 debt crisis and the European Union-imposed austerity that followed .
In 2015 , voters cast their ballots for the center-left party Syriza , which promised to stop austerity and stand up to the E.U .
Though Syriza won the election , it failed on both counts .
Meanwhile , more than a million migrants and refugees arrived in boats and rubber rafts on the beaches of Grecian islands ; around seventy thousand @ @ @ @ @ @ @ after Bakoyannis won in Athens , New Democracy dominated snap national elections , after running on a series of simple promises : to fix the economy , bring back law and order , and halt the arrivals of refugees .
The new Prime Minister , Kyriakos Mitsotakis ( an uncle of Bakoyannis ) , has vowed to deport ten thousand people by the end of 2020 .
In his first week in office , Mitsotakis banned immigrants from receiving social-security numbers and merged the Ministry of Migration with the Ministry of Citizen Protection @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the party posed an immediate threat .
“ When New Democracy came to power , they wanted to separate people , ” Rafi told me .
“ They broke community.
” In Athens , the neighborhood of Exarchia is synonymous with solidarity .
For nearly a century , artists , writers , and activists have made their homes there , drawn by the nearby Polytechnic University .
In 1941 , the communist National Liberation Front was founded on Mavromichalis Street to resist the Nazi occupation .
In 1944 , these same guerrillas @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the bloody days of the Dekemvriana , when the United Kingdom sought to suppress the rise of communism in newly liberated Greece .
In 1973 , an uprising at the Polytechnic University helped take down Greece ’ s military junta .
In 2008 , police murdered a teen-ager named Alexandros Grigoropoulos at the leafy intersection of Mesolongiou and Tzavella Streets ; the neighborhood riots each year on the anniversary of his death .
Rocks fly one way , tear-gas cannisters the other .
Today , Exarchia is a graffiti-bedecked anarchist stronghold , home @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and social centers—to the self-managed Navarinou Park , where , in 2009 , anarchists wrested gardens from a broken concrete parking lot , and to Steki Metanaston , the twenty-year-old bar founded by leftist organizers and immigrants .
Because police seldom ventured beyond Exarchia ’ s outskirts , and anti-fascist groups have made the neighborhood a no-go zone for members of the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn , Exarchia ’ s streets have also long been an oasis for immigrants without papers .
After the mass arrival of refugees in 2015 , anarchists teamed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ refugees with a roof over their heads while they waited for smugglers to help them reach the German promised land .
In the years since , thousands of refugees lived in squats in and around the neighborhood .
Walid , an undocumented Afghan man , told me , “ Exarchia is a super-nice place .
It is peaceful for me here—there is no one to arrest me.
” Recently , drug cartels began to take advantage of this freedom .
Cartel leadership was largely European , but many of the dealers who worked @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Africa and the Middle East .
Ecstasy , weed , and cocaine were the drugs of choice , sold to European tourists by youths with frayed nerves and elaborately jelled hairdos .
When I stayed at a hotel off the square last year , fights between rival gangs woke me up most nights .
Conservative media blurred together the figures of anarchist , refugee , and dealer into a spectre of degeneration .
An article in EleftherosTypos , written after the Spirou Trikoupi raid , described raids on squats and raids on drug @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to “ limit the phenomena of delinquency and drug trafficking .
”

Before dawn on August 25th, Rafi jolted awake to the sounds of police outside Spirou Trikoupi, a building where he was squatting, in the Athens neighborhood of Exarchia. A muscular twenty-eight-year-old from Kabul, Rafi had been an interpreter for the U.S. military. In 2015, he made the punishing journey across Iran, Turkey, and the Aegean Sea, until he found himself in Exarchia, where anarchists and refugees were transforming abandoned buildings into self-organized sanctuaries. For two and a half years, Rafi had lived alongside ninety Eritreans, Iranians, Afghans, and Kurds, at Spirou Trikoupi, “like a family,” he said.
That morning, Rafi peered out his window. Police had massed on both sides of the street. He sat calmly on his bed, and listened to the clang of the bolt cutters on the locks. After a few minutes, Greek police, wearing black, with their faces covered, stormed in. Rafi recalled that when they entered the room, they pointed their guns at his head. Police herded the residents into vans, and then into police headquarters. The families waited hours without food; police demanded money for water. “When we asked what the fuck was going on, they told us, ‘Be quiet! Sit!’ ” Rafi said, mimicking their shouts. Late that night, police took the refugees to a hotel. After a few more days, they were sent to camps around Greece.
Rafi had been dreading this day since June, when Kostas Bakoyannis, a member of the right-wing New Democracy Party, was elected mayor of Athens. Bakoyannis had promised to bring law and order to Exarchia, and after taking power he quickly announced a five-year, ten-million-euro plan to subdue the neighborhood. Traditionally, police had stuck to Exarchia’s periphery, but Bakoyannis stationed police officers at major intersections in the neighborhood. Then he sent workers, guarded by riot police, to tear down banners, clean graffiti, and plant weedy shrubbery in Exarchia Square. Other incursions followed: friends told me about the beating of a bartender, and a late-night police raid on K-Vox, a squatted café and radical social center, that left the windows shattered and the interior filled with tear gas.
Spirou Trikoupi was the first squat that police raided. Over the next two months, they shut down at least seven more squats in or near Exarchia. The details of the raid that Rafi described were repeated: doors broken in before dawn, guns drawn, rooms ransacked, families herded onto buses, with the undocumented locked in closed detention centers, and those with papers shunted into far-off camps.
The rise of anti-immigrant politics in Athens was only the latest development in more than a decade of political reactions and counter-reactions in Greece, beginning with the 2007 debt crisis and the European Union-imposed austerity that followed. In 2015, voters cast their ballots for the center-left party Syriza, which promised to stop austerity and stand up to the E.U. Though Syriza won the election, it failed on both counts. Meanwhile, more than a million migrants and refugees arrived in boats and rubber rafts on the beaches of Grecian islands; around seventy thousand remain in the country. A month after Bakoyannis won in Athens, New Democracy dominated snap national elections, after running on a series of simple promises: to fix the economy, bring back law and order, and halt the arrivals of refugees. The new Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis (an uncle of Bakoyannis), has vowed to deport ten thousand people by the end of 2020. In his first week in office, Mitsotakis banned immigrants from receiving social-security numbers and merged the Ministry of Migration with the Ministry of Citizen Protection. For refugees and immigrants in Greece, the party posed an immediate threat. “When New Democracy came to power, they wanted to separate people,” Rafi told me. “They broke community.”
In Athens, the neighborhood of Exarchia is synonymous with solidarity. For nearly a century, artists, writers, and activists have made their homes there, drawn by the nearby Polytechnic University. In 1941, the communist National Liberation Front was founded on Mavromichalis Street to resist the Nazi occupation. In 1944, these same guerrillas traded bullets with the British Army during the bloody days of the Dekemvriana, when the United Kingdom sought to suppress the rise of communism in newly liberated Greece. In 1973, an uprising at the Polytechnic University helped take down Greece’s military junta. In 2008, police murdered a teen-ager named Alexandros Grigoropoulos at the leafy intersection of Mesolongiou and Tzavella Streets; the neighborhood riots each year on the anniversary of his death. Rocks fly one way, tear-gas cannisters the other.
For nearly a century, artists, writers, and activists have made their homes in Exarchia.
Today, Exarchia is a graffiti-bedecked anarchist stronghold, home to squats, cafés, bookstores, and social centers—to the self-managed Navarinou Park, where, in 2009, anarchists wrested gardens from a broken concrete parking lot, and to Steki Metanaston, the twenty-year-old bar founded by leftist organizers and immigrants. Because police seldom ventured beyond Exarchia’s outskirts, and anti-fascist groups have made the neighborhood a no-go zone for members of the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn, Exarchia’s streets have also long been an oasis for immigrants without papers. After the mass arrival of refugees in 2015, anarchists teamed up with migrant activists, to provide refugees with a roof over their heads while they waited for smugglers to help them reach the German promised land. In the years since, thousands of refugees lived in squats in and around the neighborhood. Walid, an undocumented Afghan man, told me, “Exarchia is a super-nice place. It is peaceful for me here—there is no one to arrest me.”
Recently, drug cartels began to take advantage of this freedom. Cartel leadership was largely European, but many of the dealers who worked Exarchia Square were impoverished men from North Africa and the Middle East. Ecstasy, weed, and cocaine were the drugs of choice, sold to European tourists by youths with frayed nerves and elaborately jelled hairdos. When I stayed at a hotel off the square last year, fights between rival gangs woke me up most nights. Conservative media blurred together the figures of anarchist, refugee, and dealer into a spectre of degeneration. An article in EleftherosTypos, written after the Spirou Trikoupi raid, described raids on squats and raids on drug dealers as part of a single effort to “limit the phenomena of delinquency and drug trafficking.”
I first visited Exarchia in 2012, to illustrate a book about the protest movement that had emerged in response to the Greek financial crisis, then kept coming back. The neighborhood had latched itself onto my heart. Of course, it was easy to romanticize a polyglottal island of misfit toys, its walls covered with murals, and its cigarette stalls that carried copies of Angela Davis in Greek. But Exarchia felt like a place where people had created a way to live together, in defiance of all that was stacked against them. One night, I balanced on a ladder with the Afghan activist Nasim Lomani and wheat-pasted posters of a Puerto Rican poet onto the neighborhood’s walls. Another afternoon, after a counter-protest to a nationalist demonstration, I walked back to Exarchia with a friend. A few blocks away, protesters clashed with police, and our eyes smarted from the far-off wafts of tear gas. The clashes drew closer. Police darted forward. Chunks of pavement flew. Then the restaurants opened, and the neighborhood went about its day.
Once some E.U. borders slammed shut in 2016, refugees who had hoped to eventually reach Berlin, or Stockholm, or London, were in Athens indefinitely. The squats became more than waystations; they represented the first stability that refugees had known in years. Refugee children went to school, and their parents worked, shopped, and socialized in the neighborhood. I sketched kids in Jasmine School, a squat near Exarchia, that had been shut in the latest round of raids. The building was a leaky Beaux-Arts wreck, without reliable power or water, but volunteers had provided piles of food, clothing, and medicine, and the residents cooked a collective lunch to the sounds of the Lebanese diva Fairuz. Spirou Trikoupi had a bar, a library, children’s classes, and weekly assemblies. “Ninety people were building a common life together, in a community that was alive,” one activist told me. “Day by day, we were becoming better by learning from our mistakes.”
Walid, a law-school graduate from Kabul who had spent almost two years in Trikoupi, spoke about his time there with a sense of loss. He had spent ten days sleeping on the streets with his wife and his child when a friend told him about the squat. Once installed, he took easily to the anarchist model of boss-free self-organization. Trikoupi “was like a village, but with different nationalities,” he told me, smiling gently. There were weekly assemblies, residents’ committees to clean and protect the building. “I learned many things about how to live, to help each other,” he said. “We had rules: no sexism, no racism, no fascism, no violence.”
When Walid heard the police outside Trikoupi’s door, he knew he had to run. He led a group of Eritrean girls to a nearby balcony, where they hid for hours under the hot sun, with only dirty water to drink. “They destroyed everything and showed video to media. The media says anarchists use refugees, that they put us in a bad place that is dirty. Not true!” Walid said, his voice rising with indignation. After the raid, he had nothing but the clothes he had worn. He has been staying at a space belonging to friends, along with the other refugees who escaped the raid. On social media, activists posted photos of a hastily built camp, in Corinth, where many of those who were caught were sent—white tents marooned in a mud field. “My friends in the camps miss Trikoupi a lot,” Walid told me. “We want to come back.”


newyorker--2020-01-20--Slide Show: New Yorker Cartoons January 27, 2020

“ These are payments for babysitters , but it ’ s more exciting to pretend I ’ m a drug @ @ @

“These are payments for babysitters, but it’s more exciting to pretend I’m a drug dealer.”
Cartoon by Amy Hwang


newyorker--2020-01-20--The Same-Sex Lives of the Animal Kingdom

As a male box crab , I ’ m very wary of being crab-shamed .
So I ’ ve worded my online dating profile to read “ Ryan , able to lie motionless for hours to avoid predators , but not you .
Looking for stimulating conversation , snails to snack on ( because they can ’ t run away ) , and heavy non-stop male-on-male action after I ’ ve buried my female partner in the sand.
” But I ’ m not a sex crustacean—I ’ m just me .
And if that means using my genetically enlarged @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for a last-ditch attempt at romance in a tank at Red Lobster , so be it .
And , yes , I ’ m comfortable using the term “ ocean bottom.
” Would I like to settle down , maybe in a high-end aquarium , or shellacked in a natural-history-museum diorama ?
Sure , but right now I ’ m young , and , when I get a late-night text from Liam or Cody or any of those crabs I partied with last summer in the silt near Provincetown , I ’ m @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the melted butter .
Of course , I have other interests , including being a decorative accent on Hamptons coffee tables , scrolling through Instagram shots of wedding buffets to see if I went to school with any of the shrimp , and hoping that someday Netflix will become more genuinely diverse and create content about a queer crab who ’ s just a crab and gets torn apart and devoured by a well-fed Midwestern tourist wearing a plastic bib , just like anyone else .
Some folks say that , because social @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the macaques are more mature and relationship-oriented .
For example , my friend Olivia is a macaque who ’ s working on a memoir about picking lice out of the fur on her mom ’ s head .
Olivia met Taryn , another macaque , at a screech-and-skim book club , where they were pawing through the latest Cubist-structured novel about a baboon trying to find meaning as a product manager at Google .
Olivia and Taryn started seeing each other , met the other fifty-eight macaques in their habitats , binge-watched a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a weary Welsh detective , and found a fabulous tree to share near a game preserve and a vegan café , all in the span of eighteen hours .
I loved watching Olivia and Taryn blossom into a caring , supportive , and fun-positive couple as their tree became a magnet for macaques like Ember , who ’ s directing a documentary for Animal Planet about a macaque startup that sells propeller beanies made from hemp .
They also mentored Delia , who ’ s choreographing an awesome dance-theatre piece about chimps reclaiming @ @ @ @ @ @ @ form of self-expression .
Sadly , Olivia and Taryn broke up a few days later , and they no longer bare their teeth at each other or share papayas , because , as Olivia confided , “ it still hurts too much.
” Taryn ’ s healing process includes ripping the pages out of a bound journal with her feet and eating them .
And I ’ d just like to go on record saying that Olivia and Taryn ’ s coupling was completely monogamous , no matter what you ’ ve heard @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she ’ s so evolved because she got a MacArthur after publishing a poetry collection about redefining butchness , called “ Monkeywrench , ” and being named by National Geographic as one of the Ten Macaques Under Thirty to Watch Through Binoculars .
Of course , everyone has an opinion about male field crickets : Are their mating songs and dances just annoying all-night raves , designed to make older crickets move indoors , “ away from that racket ” ?
Or are today ’ s crickets an entirely new species that subverts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ noise that sounds like Ariana Grande duetting on a Christmas hit with a Dyson cordless vacuum cleaner ?
I believe that TikTok is the ideal app for crickets , since they have an average life span of just one week .
As my cricket friend Arlen likes to say , “ Sing , dance , and leave behind something that makes human beings scream when they step on it because it crunches.
” Arlen ’ s an actor , and he ’ ll soon be starring in an unauthorized bio-pic about Jiminy Cricket @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is also releasing a fifteen-hour album of his own music , which he says is aimed at “ crickets , locusts , praying mantises , and anyone who ’ s been called a Biblical plague.
” I ’ ve watched field-cricket-mating videos , which are like a cross between something you ’ d find stuck in a screen door after a tornado and a really great episode of “ Glee.
” I guess that , when it comes to L.G.B.T.Q .
animals , we all live our own best lives and gnaw on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , or rubber .
But at least we ’ re not mindless sheep—unless , of course , we are mindless sheep , who are great .
♦

Male field crickets perform mating songs and dances for each other. Female Japanese macaque monkeys pair off into temporary but exclusive sexual partnerships. Pairs of male box crabs occasionally indulge in days-long marathon sex sessions.
—The Times.
As a male box crab, I’m very wary of being crab-shamed. So I’ve worded my online dating profile to read “Ryan, able to lie motionless for hours to avoid predators, but not you. Looking for stimulating conversation, snails to snack on (because they can’t run away), and heavy non-stop male-on-male action after I’ve buried my female partner in the sand.” But I’m not a sex crustacean—I’m just me. And if that means using my genetically enlarged right claw to attract other interested singles for a last-ditch attempt at romance in a tank at Red Lobster, so be it. And, yes, I’m comfortable using the term “ocean bottom.”
Would I like to settle down, maybe in a high-end aquarium, or shellacked in a natural-history-museum diorama? Sure, but right now I’m young, and, when I get a late-night text from Liam or Cody or any of those crabs I partied with last summer in the silt near Provincetown, I’m there, especially if someone else brings the melted butter. Of course, I have other interests, including being a decorative accent on Hamptons coffee tables, scrolling through Instagram shots of wedding buffets to see if I went to school with any of the shrimp, and hoping that someday Netflix will become more genuinely diverse and create content about a queer crab who’s just a crab and gets torn apart and devoured by a well-fed Midwestern tourist wearing a plastic bib, just like anyone else.
Some folks say that, because social groups of macaque monkeys are matriarchal, the macaques are more mature and relationship-oriented. For example, my friend Olivia is a macaque who’s working on a memoir about picking lice out of the fur on her mom’s head. Olivia met Taryn, another macaque, at a screech-and-skim book club, where they were pawing through the latest Cubist-structured novel about a baboon trying to find meaning as a product manager at Google. Olivia and Taryn started seeing each other, met the other fifty-eight macaques in their habitats, binge-watched a BBC series featuring a female macaque as a weary Welsh detective, and found a fabulous tree to share near a game preserve and a vegan café, all in the span of eighteen hours.
I loved watching Olivia and Taryn blossom into a caring, supportive, and fun-positive couple as their tree became a magnet for macaques like Ember, who’s directing a documentary for Animal Planet about a macaque startup that sells propeller beanies made from hemp. They also mentored Delia, who’s choreographing an awesome dance-theatre piece about chimps reclaiming roller-skating in satin bloomers as a dignified form of self-expression.
Sadly, Olivia and Taryn broke up a few days later, and they no longer bare their teeth at each other or share papayas, because, as Olivia confided, “it still hurts too much.” Taryn’s healing process includes ripping the pages out of a bound journal with her feet and eating them. And I’d just like to go on record saying that Olivia and Taryn’s coupling was completely monogamous, no matter what you’ve heard from Persimmon, that macaque who thinks she’s so evolved because she got a MacArthur after publishing a poetry collection about redefining butchness, called “Monkeywrench,” and being named by National Geographic as one of the Ten Macaques Under Thirty to Watch Through Binoculars.
Of course, everyone has an opinion about male field crickets: Are their mating songs and dances just annoying all-night raves, designed to make older crickets move indoors, “away from that racket”? Or are today’s crickets an entirely new species that subverts gender and body-image issues by making a noise that sounds like Ariana Grande duetting on a Christmas hit with a Dyson cordless vacuum cleaner? I believe that TikTok is the ideal app for crickets, since they have an average life span of just one week. As my cricket friend Arlen likes to say, “Sing, dance, and leave behind something that makes human beings scream when they step on it because it crunches.”
Arlen’s an actor, and he’ll soon be starring in an unauthorized bio-pic about Jiminy Cricket called “Behind the Spats.” He is also releasing a fifteen-hour album of his own music, which he says is aimed at “crickets, locusts, praying mantises, and anyone who’s been called a Biblical plague.” I’ve watched field-cricket-mating videos, which are like a cross between something you’d find stuck in a screen door after a tornado and a really great episode of “Glee.”
I guess that, when it comes to L.G.B.T.Q. animals, we all live our own best lives and gnaw on our own bits of leather, wood, or rubber. But at least we’re not mindless sheep—unless, of course, we are mindless sheep, who are great. ♦