(Bonnie Jo Campbell, Jane Ciabattari, Jennifer Egan, Jane Smiley, Darin Strauss, Isabel Wilkerson) A reading by Bonnie Jo Campbell (AWP Prize, 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist in Fiction), Jennifer Egan (2011 National Book Critics Circle and Pulitzer Prize in Fiction), Jane Smiley (1992 National Book Critics Circle Award and Pulitzer Prize in Fiction), Darin Strauss (2011 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction), and Isabel Wilkerson (2011 National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction and Pulitzer Prize Winner in Journalism).

Published Date: May 16, 2012

Transcription

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the AWP podcast series. This event originally occurred at the AWP Conference in Chicago on March 2, 2012. The recording features Jane Ciabattari, Jane Smiley, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Jennifer Egan, Darin Strauss, and Isabel Wilkerson. Now you'll hear Jane Ciabattari provide an introduction.

Jane Ciabattari:

I always wanted to write and read for a living, and I've done that my whole life. I'm reading and writing and being excited because what I understood very early on with the libraries and the books that were in our home is that words have the power to change our lives. Words have the power to transform us, to connect us and transport us. That's why I've spent the last six years on the Board of the National Book Critic Circle because we are a group of 24 hardworking book reviewers who decided long ago at the beginning of the NBCC in 1974 that books are one of the most important parts of our culture. We give awards every year. The NBCC awards are the only ones given by the critics themselves. We have a year long process. It's not submissions by publishers. There's no fee involved.

Book reviewers on our board divide up into six committees at the beginning of the year and all year long we put nominations on a password protected right board. We discuss, argue, advocate for our favorites on LISTSERVs and in three board meetings a year. At the end of December, we narrow down to a long list of 10 or 12. At the end of January, we announce our finalists, and in March we announce our winners. We honor our finalists equally because by the time you've been through that sort of a vetting process, your work is good. These are some of the best writers alive today. We're very excited to have a group of them reading today. I would like to say, I'm going to introduce them. I don't want to take time from them, so I'm going to introduce them in the order in which they will read and then they will each come individually to the stage.

I hope you will have a chance to pay attention to the coming years winners. You can go to our blog and read reviews of each of the 30 finalists for this year done by board members. Once again, that's www.bookcritics.org. It's a series we call 30 books in 30 days. It's sort of like a countdown to our awards. The first reader today will be Jane Smiley. Her novel, A Thousand Acres won the National Book Critic Circle Award in fiction and the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. Her two novellas, Ordinary Love and Good Will and her novel, Moo, also were National Book Critic Circle fiction finalists.

The next reader is Bonnie Jo Campbell, who's the author of Women and Other Animals, which won the AWP Prize for short fiction and American Salvage, which was a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle Award in fiction and also the National Book Award. She's also the author of the novel Once Upon a River.

Next is Jennifer Egan, author of the novels Look at Me, a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001 and The Keep and author of A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the 2011 National Book Critic Circle Award in fiction and also the 2011 Pulitzer in fiction and may have a real Chicago connection, right Jenny? She's very evolved and spent a lot of time in Chicago.

Darin Strauss is author of the novels Chang and Eng and More Than It Hurts You, among others. His memoir, Half A Life, which won the 2011 National Book Critic Circle Award in autobiography is his nonfiction book. He'll be reading from that today, I believe. Finally, will be Isabel Wilkerson who spent most of her career as a national correspondent and bureau chief at the New York Times. She's the first Black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism and her first book, the Warmth of Other Suns won the National Book Critic Circle Award for nonfiction last year. So first, Jane Smiley.

Jane Smiley:

I guess we're going in order of height. I'm going to read a little bit from a thousand acres. Toward dusk, I began going around and picking up paper plates and I noticed a little group including rows and Caroline, as well as Ty and Pete clustered on Harold's back porch with my father talking earnestly at the center. I remember Rose turned and looked at me across the yard and I remember a momentary inner clang, an instinctive certainty that wariness was called for, but then Caroline looked up and smiled, waved me over. I went and stood on the bottom step of the porch, plates and plastic forks in both hands. My father said, "That's the plan." I said, "What's the plan daddy?" He glanced at me then at Caroline and looking at her all the while, he said, "We're going to form this corporation Jenny and you girls are all going to have shares. Then we're going to build this new slurry store and maybe a harvest store too, and enlarged the hog operation."

He looked at me, "You girls and Ty and Pete and Frank are going to run the show. You'll each have a third part in the corporation. What do you think?" I licked my lips and climbed the two steps onto the porch. Now I could see our neighbor, Harold, looking through the kitchen screen, standing in the dark doorway grinning. I knew he was thinking that my father had had too much to drink. That's what I was thinking too. I looked down at the paper plates in my hands, bluing in the twilight. Ty was looking at me and I could see in his gaze a veiled and tightly contained delight. He'd been wanting to increase the hog operation for years. I remember what I thought. I thought, "Okay, take it. He is holding it out to you and all you have to do is take it."

Daddy said, "Hell, I'm too old for this. You wouldn't catch me buying a new tractor at my age and anyway, if I died tomorrow, you'd have to pay $700,000 or $800,000 in inheritance taxes. People always act like they're going to live forever when the price of land is up." Here he threw a glance at Harold, "But if you get a heart attack or a stroke or something, then you got to sell it off to pay the government." In spite of that inner clang, I tried to sound agreeable. It's a good idea. Rose said, "It's a great idea." Caroline said, "I don't know." When I went to first grade and the other children said that their fathers were farmers, I simply didn't believe them. I agreed in order to be polite, but in my heart I knew that those men were imposters as farmers and as fathers.

In my youthful estimation, Lawrence Cook defined both categories. To really believe that others even existed in either category was to break the first commandment. My earliest memories of him are of being afraid to look him in the eye, to look at him at all. He was too big and his voice was too deep. If I had to speak to him, I addressed his overalls, his shirt, his boots. If he lifted me near his face, I shrank away from him. At the same time, his very fearsomeness was reassuring when I thought about things like robbers or monsters and we lived on what was clearly the best, most capably cultivated farm. The biggest farm, farmed by the biggest farmer. That fit or maybe formed my own sense of the right order of things.

Perhaps there is a distance that is the optimum distance for seeing one's father, farther than across the supper table or across the room, somewhere in the middle distance. He is dwarfed by trees or the sweep of a hill, but his features are still visible. His body language still distinct. Well, that is a distance I never found. He was never dwarfed by the landscape, the fields, the buildings, the white pine windbreak were as much my father as if he had grown them and shed them like a husk. Trying to understand, my father had always felt something like going to church week after week and listening to the minister we had, Dr. Fremont, marshal the evidence for God's goodness or omniscience or whatever. He would sort through the recent events, biblical events, moments in his own life, things that people had told him and make up a picture that gelled for the few moments before other events that didn't fit the picture had a chance to occur to you.

Finally, though, the minister would admit, even glory in the fact, that things didn't add up, that the reality was incomprehensible and furthermore, the failure of our understandings was the greatest proof of all, not of goodness or omniscience or whatever the subject of the day was, but of power, and talk of power made Dr. Fremont's voice deepen and his gestures widen and his eyes light up. When my father turned his head to look at Caroline, his movement was slow and startled, a big movement of the whole body reminding me how bulky he was, well over six feet and 230 pounds. Caroline would've said if she dared that she didn't want to live on the farm, that she was trained as a lawyer and was marrying another lawyer, but that was a sore subject. She shifted in her chair and swept the darkening horizon with her gaze.

Harold turned on the porch light. Caroline would've seen my father's plan as a trap door plunging her into a chute that would deposit her right back on the farm. My father glared at her. In the sudden light of the porch, there was no way to signal her to shut up, just shut up. He'd had too much to drink. He said, "You don't want it, my girl, you're out. It's as simple as that." Then he pushed himself up from his chair and lumbered passed me down the porch steps and into the darkness. Caroline looked startled, but no one else did. I said, "This is ridiculous. He's drunk." Thank you.

Bonnie Jo Campbell:

Shoot. I wanted you to keep on reading, Jane. It's such an honor and a pleasure to be up here reading with these folks. I'm going to read something from my book that was the finalist, American Salvage, and I don't have a copy of the book, but I have a temporary tattoo on of it. So anybody wants one of these, I will personally apply it on you after the reading. I like to handle people.

I'm going to read a very short story from the book and it's the story of a man who has a problem with a woman who has a problem with methamphetamine. It's called The Solutions to Brian's Problem. Solution number one, Connie said she was going out to the store to buy formula and diapers. While she's gone, load up the truck with the surround sound home entertainment system and your excellent collection of power tools, put the baby girl in the car seat and drive away from this home you built with your own hands. Expect that after you leave, Connie will break all the windows in the living room, including the picture window, as well as the big mirror over the fireplace, which you've already replaced twice. The furnace will run and run.

Solution number two, wait until Connie comes back from the store, distract her with the baby and then cut her meth with Drano so that when she shoots it up, she dies. Solution number three, put the baby to bed in her crib and sit on the living room couch until Connie comes home. Before she has a chance to lie about where she's been, grab her hair and knock her head hard into the fireplace that you built from granite blocks that came from the old chimney of the house your great-grandfather built when your family first came to this country from Finland, blocks you gathered from the old foundation in the woods behind your mother's house. Don't look at the wedding photos on the mantle. Don't look at Connie's wide wedding day smile or the way her head tilts to the side to show the little scar above her eyebrow. Don't let the blood stop you from hitting her one final time to make sure you have cracked her skull. Put her meth and her bag of syringes and blood smeared needles in her hand so the cops find them when they arrive.

Solution number four, just go. Call your mother and then head south to where it's warm. Contact the union about getting a job with another local. Pretend not to have a wife and baby. When put to the test, Connie might well rise to the occasion of motherhood. Resist taking any photographs along with you, especially the photographs of your baby at every age. Wipe your mind clear of memories, especially the memory of your wife first telling you she was pregnant and how that pregnancy and her promise to stay clean made everything seem possible. The two of you kept holding hands that night. You couldn't stop reaching for each other, not even in your sleep. She lost that baby and the next one, and although you suspected the reason you kept on trying.

Solution number five, there are seven solutions. Solution number five, blow your own head off with the 12 gauge you keep behind the seat of your truck. Load the shotgun with shells, put the butt against the floor, rest your chin on the barrel and pull the trigger. Let your wife find your bloody corpse in the living room. Let her scrape your brain off the walls. Maybe that will shock her into straightening up her act. Let her figure out how to pay the mortgage and the power bill.

Solution number six, call a helpline. Talk to a counselor. Explain that last week your wife stabbed you in the chest while you were sleeping, that she punches you too, giving you black eyes that you have to explain to the guys at work. Explain to the counselor you're in danger of losing your job, your house, your baby. Tell her Connie has sold your mountain bike and some of your excellent power tools already, that you have been locking everything of value in your truck, which you park a few blocks away from the house now, a different spot every day. Tell the counselor it's the little things, too, that you found your financial files in the refrigerator and the food in the basement. You had to throw away the milk and the hamburger. Try to be patient when the counselor seems awkward in her responses when she inadvertently expresses surprise at the nature of your distress, especially when you mention that Connie's only five-foot tall. Expect the counselor to be even less supportive when you say, "Hell yes, you hit her back."

Then realize that the counselor probably has caller ID, hope that the counselor doesn't call social services because a baby girl needs her mama. Assure the counselor that Connie is a good mama. She's good with the baby and the baby is in no danger. Solution number seven, make dinner for yourself and your wife with a hamburger in the fridge, Sloppy Joes maybe or goulash with the stewed tomatoes your mother canned. Your mother, who liked the rest of your family, thinks your wife is just moody. You haven't told them the truth because it's too much to explain and it's too much to explain that yes, you knew she had this history when you married her, but you thought you could kick it together. You thought that love could mend all broken things. Wasn't that the whole business of love?

Mix up some bottles of formula for later tonight when you'll be sitting in the living room feeding the baby, watching the door of the bathroom behind which your wife will be searching for a place in her vein that is not hardened or collapsed. When she finally comes out, brush her hair back from her face and try to get her to eat something. Thank you.

Jennifer Egan:

Well, I want the tattoo. It's a delight to be here and I'm so grateful for this award. I think the moment of finding out that I had won it is one that I really will always remember. It was incredible. I'm going to read the beginning of a chapter of A Visit from the Goon Squad called Selling the General. Dolly's first big idea was the hat. She picked teal blue, fuzzy with flaps that came down over The General's, large dried apricot ears. The ears were unsightly, Dolly thought, and best covered up. When she saw The General's picture in the times a few days later, she almost choked on her poached egg. He looked like a baby, a big sick baby with a giant mustache and a double chin. The headline couldn't have been worse, "General B's, Odd Headgear Spurs Cancer Rumors, Local Unrest Grows." Dolly bolted to her feet in her dingy kitchen and turned in a frantic circle spilling tea on her bathrobe.

She looked wildly at The General's picture and then she realized the ties they hadn't cut off the ties under the hat as she'd instructed and a big fuzzy bow under The General's double chin was disastrous. Dolly ran barefoot into her office bedroom and began plowing through fax pages, trying to unearth the most recent sequence of numbers she was supposed to call to reach Arc, The General's human relations captain. The General moved a lot to avoid assassination, but Arc was meticulous about faxing Dolly their updated contact information. These faxes usually came at around 3:00 AM, waking Dolly and sometimes her daughter, Lulu. Dolly never mentioned the disruption. The General and his team were under the impression that she was the top publicist in New York, a woman whose fax machine would be in a corner office with a panoramic view of New York City as indeed it had been for many years, not 10 inches away from the foldout sofa where she slept.

Dolly could only attribute their misapprehension to some dated article that had drifted their way from Vanity Fair or In Style or People, where Dolly had been written about and profiled under her then moniker, La Doll. The first call from The General's camp had come just in time. Dolly had hawked her last piece of jewelry. She was copy editing textbooks until 2:00 AM, sleeping until 5:00 and then providing polite phone chit-chat to aspiring English speakers in Tokyo until it was time to wake Lulu and fix her breakfast, and all of that wasn't nearly enough to keep Lulu in Ms. Rutger's school for girls. Often Dolly's three allotted hours of sleep were spent in spasms of worry at the thought of the next monstrous tuition bill. And then Arc had called. The General wanted an exclusive retainer. He wanted rehabilitation, American sympathy an end to the CIA's assassination attempts. If Gaddafi could do it, why not he? See this is already dated.

Dolly wondered seriously if overwork and lack of sleep were making her hallucinate, but she named a price. When the first installment appeared in her bank account, Dolly's relief was so immense that it almost obliterated the tiny anxious muttering voice inside her, "Your client is a genocidal dictator." Dolly had worked with shitheads before, God knew. If she didn't take this job, someone else would snap it up. Being a publicist is about not judging your clients. These excuses were lined up in formation ready for deployment should that small dissident voice pluck up its courage to speak with any volume, but lately Dolly couldn't even hear it.

Now as she scuttled over her frayed Persian rug looking for The General's most recent numbers, the phone rang. It was 6:00 AM Dolly lunged praying Lulu's sleep wouldn't be disturbed. "Hello," but she knew who it was. "We are not happy," said Arc. "Me either," Dolly said. "You didn't cut off the..." "The General is not happy." "Arc, listen to me. You need to cut off the..." "The General is not happy. Ms. Peale." "Listen to me, Arc." "He's not happy." "That's because look, take a scissors." "He's not happy. Ms. Peale."

Dolly went quiet. There were times listening to Arc's silken monotone when she'd been sure she'd heard a curl of irony around the words he'd been ordered to say, like he was speaking to her in code. Now there was a prolonged pause. Dolly spoke very softly. "Arc, take a scissors and cut the ties off the hat. There shouldn't be a goddamn bow under The General's chin." "He will no longer wear this hat." "He has to wear it." "He will not wear it. He refuses." "Cut off the ties, Arc." "Rumors have reached us. Ms. Peale." Her stomach lurched, "Rumors?" "That you are not on top as you once were and now the hat is unsuccessful." Dolly felt the negative forces pulling in around her, standing there with a traffic of 8th Avenue grinding past beneath her window, fingering her frizzy hair that she'd stopped coloring and allowed to grow in long and gray. She felt a jab of some deep urgency.

"I have enemies, Arc," she said, "Just like the general." He was silent. "If you listen to my enemies, I can't do my job. Now take out that fancy pen I can see in your pocket every time you get your picture in the paper and write this down. Cut the strings off the hat, lose the bow. Push the hat farther back in The General's head so some of his hair fluffs out the front. Do that Arc and let's see what happens." Lulu had come into the room and was rubbing her eyes in her pink pajamas. Dolly looked at her watch, saw that her daughter had lost a half hour of sleep and experienced a small inner collapse at the thought of Lulu feeling tired at school.

She put her arms around her daughter's shoulders. Lulu received this embrace with the regal bearing that was her trademark. Dolly had forgotten Arc, but now he spoke from the phone at her neck. "I will do this, Ms. Peale." It was several weeks before the general's picture appeared again. Now the hat was pushed back and the ties were gone. The headline read, "Extent of B's War Crimes May Be Exaggerated. New evidence Shows." It was the hat. He looked sweet in the hat. How could a man in a fuzzy blue hat have used human bones to pave his roads?

La Doll had met with ruin on New Year's Eve two years ago at a wildly anticipated party that was projected by the cultural history minded pundits she'd considered worth inviting to rival Truman Capote's Black and White Ball, the party, it was called or the list, as in is he on the list? A party to celebrate what? In retrospect, Dolly wasn't sure the fact that Americans had never been richer despite the turmoil roiling the world. The party had nominal hosts all famous, but the real hostess as everyone knew was La Doll, who had more connections and access and juju than all of those people combined. And La Doll had made a very human mistake or so she tried to soothe herself at night when memories of her demise plowed through her like a hot poker causing her to rive in her sofa bed and swill brandy from the bottle.

She thought that because she could do something very, very well, namely get the best people into one room at one time, she could do other things well too, like design. And La Doll had had a vision, broad translucent trays of oil and water suspended beneath small brightly colored spotlights whose heat would make the opposing liquids twist and bubble and swirl. She'd imagined people craning their next to look up spell spellbound by the shifting liquid shapes and they did look up, they marveled at the lit trays. La Doll saw them do it from a small booth she'd had constructed high up into one side so she could view the panorama of her achievement. From there, she was the first to notice as midnight approached that something was awry with the translucent trays that held the water and oil. They were sagging a little, were they? They were slumping like sacks from their chains and melting in other words, and then they began to collapse, flop and drape and fall away, sending scalding oil onto the heads of every glamorous person in the country and some other countries too.

They were burned, scarred, maimed in the sense that tear shaped droplets of scar tissue on the forehead of a movie star or a small bald patches on the head of an art dealer or a model or a generally fabulous person constitute maiming. But something shut down in La Doll as she stood there away from the burning oil. She didn't call 911. She gaped in frozen disbelief as her guests shrieked and staggered and covered their heads, tore hot, soaked garments from their flesh and crawled over the floor like people in medieval altar paintings whose earthly luxuries have consigned them to hell.

The accusations later that she'd done it all on purpose was a sadist who had stood there delighting as people suffered were actually more terrible for La Doll than watching the oil pour mercilessly onto the heads of her 500 guests. Then she'd been protected by a cocoon of shock, but what followed, she had to witness in a lucid state. They hated her. They were dying to get rid of her. It was as if she weren't human, but a rat or a bug and they succeeded. Even before she'd served her six months for criminal negligence, before the class action suit that resulted in her entire net worth never nearly as large as it had seemed, being distributed in small parcels to her victims, La Doll was gone, wiped out. She emerged from jail, 30 pounds heavier and 50 years older with wild gray hair. No one recognized her and the world where she'd thrived had shortly proceeded to vaporize. Now even the rich believed they were poor.

After a few gleeful headlines and photos of her new ruined state, they forgot about her. When the headlines relating to General B had definitively softened, when several witnesses against him were shown to have received money from the opposition, Arc called again. "The General pays you each month a sum," he said, "This is not for one idea only." "It was a good idea, Arc. You have to admit." "The General is impatient, Ms. Peale," he said. And Dolly imagined him smiling. The hat is no longer new. That night The General came to Dolly in a dream, the hat was gone and he was meeting a pretty blonde outside a revolving door. The blonde took his arm and they spun back inside, pressed together. Then Dolly was aware of herself in the dream, sitting in a chair watching The General and his lover thinking what a good job they were doing, playing their roles. She jolted awake as if someone had shaken her. The dream nearly escaped, but Dolly caught it, pressed it to her chest. She understood. The General should be linked to a movie star. Thank you.

Darin Strauss:

These are hard acts to follow. It's really an honor and it was an honor to win the award obviously. It was amazing and it's an honor to read with these great women and I realize that I'm the only man and so I guess I'm cast in the Rush Limbaugh role, so I have to argue against women's reproductive rights, I guess. So I refuse to do that though. So I'm going to read just from the opening of my book and I'll just read for a short time and all you need to know is that it is unfortunately a true story.

Half my life ago, I killed a girl. I had just turned 18 and when you drive in new post adolescence, you drive with friends. We were headed to shoot a few rounds of putt putt. It was May 1988. The breeze did its open window work on the hair behind my neck and ears. We had a month before high school graduation. I was at the wheel. Up ahead on the right shoulder, a pair of tiny bicyclists bent over their handlebars. The horizon was just my town's modest skyline done in watercolors. We all shared a four lane road. The bicycles traveled in the same direction as my car, bare legs pedaling under a long sky. I think I futzed with the radio, "Hey, what song is this? So turn it up."

Then one of the bike riders did something. I remember only that, a glitch on the right. My Oldsmobile stayed in the far left lane. After a wobble or two, the bicyclist eased a wheel into the road maybe 30 feet away. My tires lapped up the distance that separated us. Next, the bicycle made a crisp turn into the left lane and my sudden car, dark blonde hair appeared very clearly in my windshield. I remember a kind of mechanical curiosity about why this was happening and what it might mean. This moment has been for all my life, a kind of shadowy giant. I'm able to tick by talk to remember each second before it. Radio, friends, thoughts of mini golf, another thought of maybe just going to the beach, distance between car and bicycle closing. Anything can still happen, but I am powerless to see what comes next. The moment raises a shoulder, lowers its head and lumps away, and then it's too late.

My forearm hooks to protect my eyes. The front seat passenger shouts. I picture my foot disappearing under the dash kicking down for the brake straining farther than any real leg can go. Yet the hood of my Oldsmobile met Celine Zilke at 40 miles an hour. Her head cracked the windshield. I remember the yellow reflector from her spokes, a useless spark kicking up the glass incline and over the roof. My car bumped onto the grassy median and then I must have done all the normal driver things, put on the clunking hazards, rolled to a stop, cut the engine. I must have stepped onto the grass in my T-shirt and shorts. I simply have no memory of how I got there.

Celine Zilke, the girl I killed was 16 and always will be 16, and I knew her. Celine went to my school. She was an 11th grader. I see her playing field hockey in blue gym shorts. Celine had been that lively athletic type when always imagined in shorts or I see her settled in beside friends on the concrete benches just outside the cafeteria or ticking off notes in the earth science class we took together. Celine sat by the window. When I look back now, she strikes me most of all as young. I walked to where Celine lay on the road. I didn't know who I'd hit or even that we'd had a serious collision, I thought in terms of broken arms and getting in trouble with my parents. Then I reached her and noticed the peculiar stillness of her face. This stillness transformed her. I didn't even recognize her. The eyes were open, but her gaze seemed to extend only an inch or so.

This openness that does not project out is the image I have of death, everything present, nothing there. She lay on the warm macadam and oblique angles arm bent up and out, foot settled under a knee. In the skin between her eyebrows, there was a small imprinted purple horseshoe of blood. "I think maybe she's hurt," said my friend Dave. Her face looked relaxed as if she were lost in thought. Maybe she's hurt might pass for an obvious statement when you hear it now, but it didn't as we stood over Celine on that morning.

I could feel my own breathing rev up and that's all I felt. A tragedy's first act is crowded with supporting players, witnesses crimping their faces, policemen scribbling in pads and making radio calls. EMS guys unfolding equipment, tubes and wheels. I must have managed to ask how Celine was doing because at some point, a policeman told me that she was unconscious, but holding on. I remember talk of cardiac arrest, of a medevac helicopter coming to take her to the hospital. I had a somewhat thickheaded sensation that everyone was responding appropriately to what was clearly a crisis, but I still didn't think there was any reason to freak out. This was something fixable. It was being fixed. Still, I've been careful not to stand any place where I could see Celine again, her face a semblance of musing calm, her unnatural position.

The police had suspended traffic on the highways two sides. My friends made cameo appearances as standers, mullers, back rubbers. I thought how strange it was that in normal life we all touch so rarely. Traffic, I now understood. I'd started to think abstractly. Traffic is a kind of stream, crowded with fish, a rush of momentum and we'd been yanked to the side of the brook and forced to dry in the sun. I'd become one of those sites I'd driven past a hundred times in the expressway, the locust of a thousand strangers curiosity.

That's the thing about shock. You can have these clear and selfish perceptions as you circle without looking at the truth lying alone on the street. The most embarrassing memory of that day came when two teenage girls materialized from one of the stopped cars nearby. I heard the thunk of doors closing and next, the young women came walking over the grass. They were sexy and not from my school. Both wore shorts and white sleeveless undershirts. One smelled optimistically of suntan oil. "Hey," she said, "You in that crash?" Her voice, a mix of apprehension and prying. I told her I was. "You all right?" "Yeah," I said, "I am thanks," and walked off.

Having acknowledged my own centrality and drama and sensing the girls were still watching, I dropped to my knees and covered my head with my hands, fingers between the ears and temples like a man who's just won the US Open. This plagiarized "emotional" reaction acted out for girls I'd never see again is one more stomach turning fact of that afternoon.

"Awe," the girl said coming over to me, "You know it wasn't your fault." I didn't even nod. I just got up and showboated away from them, shoulders back. I went to the bustle around Celine, the important bustle from which these girls were excluded. I can only explain it like this. There was still a disconnect between me and the realness of what was happening. I've come to see our central nervous system as a kind of vintage switchboard, all thick foam wires and old-fashioned plugs. The circuitry isn't properly equipped. After a surplus of emotional information, the system overloads, the circuit breaks, the board runs dark. That's what shock is. Thank you.

Isabel Wilkerson:

It's such an honor and a joy and delight to be in Chicago. This is where I spent much of my journalism career. I saw this very view of Chicago and of the lake, so it brings back many memories for me. I have been asked to read passages from references to Chicago in this book. It's nonfiction and it involves three different cities, three different protagonists, and so I don't generally read specifically about Chicago, but I will be doing that here. I'm delighted to do so. I'm going to start with the epigraph to the book, which has Chicago connections. And it reads, I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown. I was taking a part of the South to transplant an alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns and perhaps to bloom.

Chickasaw County, Mississippi, late October 1937, Ida Mae, Brandon Gladney. The night clouds were closing in on the salt lakes east of the Oxbow lakes along the folds in the earth beyond the Yalobusha River. The cotton was at last cleared from the field. Ida Mae tried now to get the children ready and to gather the clothes and quilts and somehow keep her mind off the churning within her. She had sold off the turkeys and doled out in secret, the old stools, the wash pots, the tin tub, the bed pallets. Her husband was settling with Mr. Ed over the worth of a year's labor and she did not know what would come of it. None of them had been on a train before, not unless you counted the clattering local from bacon switch to Okolona, where by the time you sit down you're there, Ida Mae used to put it. None of them had been out of Mississippi or Chickasaw County for that matter.

There was no explaining to little James and Velma the stuffed bags and chaos and all that was at stake or why they had to put their shoes on and not cry and bring undue attention from anyone who might happen to see them leaving. Things had to look normal like any other day they might ride into town, which was rare enough to begin with. Ms. Theenie stood watching. One by one her children had left her and gone up north. Sam and Cleave to Ohio, Josie to Syracuse, Irene to Milwaukee. Now the man Ms. Theenie had tried to keep Ida Mae from marrying in the first place was taking her away too. Ms. Theenie had no choice but to accept it and let Ida Mae and the grandchildren go for good. Ms. Theenie drew them close to her as she always did whenever anyone was leaving.

She had them bow their heads. She whispered a prayer that her daughter and her daughter's family be protected on the long journey ahead in the Jim Crow car. "May the Lord be the first one in the car," she prayed, "And the last out." When the time had come, Ida May and Little James and Velma and all that they could carry were loaded onto her brother-in-law's truck and the three of them went to meet Ida Mae's husband at the train depot in Okolona for the night ride out of the bottom land, a thin light far away. In the winter of 1919 when Ida Mae was trailing her father out to the field, George and Pershing were learning to crawl and the first wave of migrants was stirring to life, an astronomer made a startling discovery. The astronomer named Edwin Hubble working out of the University of Chicago, looked out through one of the most powerful telescopes of his time.

What he saw would eventually become the most significant astronomical find of the century and would come to parallel the awakening of an isolated people in his own country. It would confirm what for generations had been whispered of, but dismissed as impossible. It occurred near the start of a long pilgrimage of Americans seeking to escape their own harsh known world. Hubble identified a star that was far, far away and was not the same sun that fed life on earth. It was another sun and it would prove for the first time in human history that there were galaxies other than our own, that the universe was much larger than humans had ever imagined, that there were, in fact, other suns.

Chicago, 12th Street Station, October 1937. This is just a few blocks from here, Ida Mae, Brandon Gladney. The leaves were the color of sweet potatoes and of the summer sun when it sets. They had begun to fall from the branches and settle in piles at the roots of the elm trees. The leaves had begun to fall when Ida Mae and George walked into the cold light of mourning for the very first time in the North. Ida Mae and her family had ridden all through the night on the Illinois Central and had arrived stiff and disheveled in a cold hurrying place of concrete and steel.

People clipped past them in their wool finery and distracted urgency, not pausing to speak, people everywhere, more people than they had maybe seen in one single place in their entire lives, coming as they were from the spread out, isolated back country of plantations and lean-tos. They would somehow have to make it across town to yet another station to catch the train to Milwaukee and cart their worldly belongings to yet another platform for the last leg of their journey out of the South. Above them hung black billboards as tall as a barn with the names of connecting cities and towns and their respective platforms and departure times. Sioux Falls, Cedar Rapids, Minneapolis, Omaha, Madison, Dubuque, footfalls, redcaps, four-faced clocks and neon arrows pointing to arrivals and track numbers.

The trains were not trains but Zephyrs and Hiawathas. The station itself feeling bigger and busier than all of Okolona or Egypt or any little town back home or anything they could possibly have ever imagined before. They would have to ride the La Crosse and Milwaukee Railroad for three more hours to get to their final stop in their adopted land. They could not rest easy until they had made it safely to Ida's Mae sister's apartment in Milwaukee. In the end, it would take multiple trains, three separate railroads, hours of fitful upright sleep, whatever food they managed to carry, the better part of two days, absolute will, near blind determination and some necessary measure of faith and just plain grit for people unaccustomed to the rigors of travel to make it out of the land of their birth to the foreign region of essentially another world.

The great belching city she passed through that day was the first city Ida Mae had ever laid eyes on. That first glimpse of Chicago would stay with her for as long as she lived. "What did it look like at that time, Chicago?," I asked her half a life later. She said, "It looked like heaven to me then."

And finally, Chicago, August 1997. South Shore is in police beat 421, ward seven, state representative district 25 and state senate district 13. The office holders of the latter two districts rarely figure into the daily concerns of most people in Chicago. The state legislators are just low enough on the political food chain to go unrecognized focused as they are on approving budgets and legislation. They are just lofty enough, however, to be seen as of little help in an immediate crisis as when, say, a drug dealer sets up shop in front of your house.

It could be argued that many people could not name their state legislator off the top of their heads. As for state senators, there are 59 of them. They meet in Springfield and they are not usually household names as would be the mayor or even one's alderman. So when in 1996 a young constitutional lawyer and community activist from Hyde Park ran for the Illinois State Senate seat in district 13, Ida Mae, a member of that district, voting her usual straight democratic ticket would become among the first people ever to have voted for the man. She would not have to give it much thought. He did not have Chicago roots and the name was unusual, Barack Obama. But he was running unopposed, having edged out the woman who had asked him to run in the first place before changing her mind. His wife, Michelle, had grown up in South Shore in the more stable section of bungalows further to the west, so Ida Mae in an overwhelming majority of the Democratic stronghold of predominantly South Shore, voted him into office as their state senator.

On August 14, 1997, exactly one month before Alderman Beavers, her alderman, shows up with cameras and lights at Ida Mae's beat meeting, Barack Obama makes an appearance. He is introduced as the state senator for the district, which not everyone in the room would be expected to know as he had only been in office since January. He's tall, slight of build, formal in speech and attire, looks like a college student and he arrives without lights, cameras, or entourage as had Alderman Beavers. He stands before them and gives a mini lecture to these bus drivers, secretaries, nurses aides, and pensioners about what state legislators do. He says that while the state legislature is not responsible for the police department, it passes laws that the police have to enforce. He describes the role of the legislature in education policy and in healthcare, and he invites those assembled to call his office anytime.

"Sometimes a call from the senator's office," he says, like the professor he once was, "May be helpful in facilitating some issues that you may have concerns about. Sometimes a call from my office will be answered much more quickly so that we can move through more of a bureaucracy a little faster." Ida Mae and the rest of the people listen politely and with appreciation, but as this is just another meeting, they sit in anticipation of the reasons that they are here tonight. The discussion with police officers about the latest shootings, stabbings, and drug deals, the immediate dangers they would face just getting back home. The 36-year-old freshman state senator finishes his presentation to beat 421. The people clap with gratitude as they always do, and then turn back to their hot sheets with the lists of drug deals and break-ins. That night as he bounded up the steps and out of the church basement, nobody in the room could have imagined that they had just seen the man who a decade from now would become the first Black President of the United States. Thank you.

Jane Ciabattari:

I want to hear another round of applause for Jane Smiley, Jennifer Egan, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Darin Strauss, Isabel Wilkerson, remarkable writers. Do they not restore your faith in language and storytelling if it was shaken? Thank you all.

Speaker 1:

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