Multiply/Divide. Wendy S. Walters
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© 2014 by Wendy S. Walters
FIRST EDITION
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Walters, Wendy S.
[Essays. Selections]
Multiply/divide: on the American real and surreal / Wendy S. Walters.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN 978-1-941411-08-7
1. City and town life--United States--21st century. 2. United States--Social conditions--21st century. 3. United States--Race relations--21st century. 4. Sex discrimination--United States--21st century. I. Title. II. Title: American real and surreal.
E169.12W343 2015
306.097309'05—dc23
2014047727
Cover by Kristen Radtke.
Interior by Kirkby Gann Tittle.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary organization.
The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports Sarabande Books with state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
CONTENTS
Cleveland
Manhattanville, Part One
In Search of the Face
Multiply/Divide
The Personal
Post-Logical Notes on Self-Election
Cowboy Horizon
Procedural
Manhattanville, Part Two
When the Sea Comes for Us
Norway
Acknowledgments
The Author
The subtitle of this book—On the American Real and Surreal—marks an important distinction. Some of the essays herein are based entirely on fact: carefully reported and researched, they stand as nonfiction. Others are works of fiction. Some are a mix of the two. To avoid confusion, I have noted below the genres of each work in the collection.
“Lonely in America,” “Manhattanville, Part One,” “Manhattanville, Part Two,” “The Personal,” and “When The Sea Comes for Us” should be considered nonfiction as they are works of reportage and/or memoir.
“Cleveland,” “Multiply/Divide,” “Cowboy Horizon,” “In Search of the Face,” and “Norway” are fictional scenarios that, in some cases, are based on characters and events from history and/or the present.
“Chicago Radio” and “Post-logical Notes on Self-Election” are lyric essays—a form that blends poetry and prose, memoir and reportage, actual and imagined events—with the goal of making an argument.
I make the above categorizations because I think they are important. But I also make them with a bit of pause, because the border between nonfiction and fiction—while seemingly clear as black and white—is often porous enough to render the distinction irrelevant. Take, as a hypothetical example, the writer who pens a memoir about a life with her parents, but leaves out the complicated relationship with her siblings, omitting for the reader a complete understanding of her family dynamic. Her memoir is “nonfiction.” But that doesn’t make it true. Conversely many works of fiction, precisely because they take liberties with fact, can depict a world that is better designed than our own to reveal truth. One could make a similar case about the distinction between the surreal and the real.
These works are my attempt to address such nuances as they unfold place by place, argument by argument, and story by story.
Wendy S. Walters
December 2014
New York, NY
I HAVE NEVER BEEN particularly interested in slavery, perhaps because it is such an obvious fact of my family’s history. We know where we were enslaved in America, but we don’t know much else about our specific conditions. The fact that I am descended from slaves is hard to acknowledge on a day-to-day basis, because slavery does not fit with my self-image. Perhaps this is because I am pretty certain I would not have survived it. I am naturally sharp-tongued, suffer from immobility when I am cold, and am susceptible to terrible sinus infections and allergies. My eyesight is poor. Most of the time I don’t think about how soft the good fortune of freedom has made me, but if I were to quantify my weaknesses of body and character I would guess that at least half the fortitude my enslaved ancestors must have possessed has been lost with each generation in the family line, leaving me with little more than an obtuse and metaphorical relationship to that sort of suffering.
I resist thinking about slavery because I want to avoid the overwhelming feeling that comes from trying to conceive of the terror, violence, and indignity of it. I do not like to think of it happening in my hometown, where I work, in my neighborhood, or near any of the places where I conduct my life. My cultural memory of slavery, which I don’t think is so unlike that of many other Americans, suggests that it was primarily a Southern phenomenon, one confined to the borders of plantations, which if they haven’t been transformed into shopping complexes or subdivisions, exist now only as nostalgic, sentimentalized tourist attractions. The landscapes associated with slavery, however, extend far beyond the South.
My home is in New England and in the winter my house feels slight against the wind as its windows tremble with every blustery gust, which makes me want to stay in bed, though I am not at all the type of person who likes to linger there once awake, unless circumstances are such that I am not alone, and then, even in that rare case, I can be restless and ready to set forth at sunrise. In the winter of 2006, I was not working at my regular job, which might have been a good thing had I not been prone to a melancholy obsession over recent personal disappointments. I began to notice pains in my body I had never felt before: a tendon pulling across the length of my leg when I sat down, a sharp twinge in my side when I stood up, and sometimes when I’d shower my skin was so sore I could barely stand to feel the water on it. I knew these pains were