In this excerpt from RIKERS: An Oral History by Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau, staff, visitors, and the incarcerated recount the horrors of their first visit to the New York jail complex.
YUSEF SALAAM, detained 1989 to 1994, Central Park 5 case: I can’t really describe in words this horror and this horrible feeling coupled with that horror, but it had a lot to do with the smell of the place. We’re talking about a place that smelled like death, vomit, urine, feces, and like the bad train stations in New York City all wrapped up in one. And one of the first encounters I had with somebody coming up to me while I was inside the holding cell, they were asking me to check out my watch, and I didn’t realize this, but they were trying to steal the watch from me.
And I remember [the Central Park 5 co-defendant] Antron [McCray] saying, “No, don’t let them check your watch out, man. You know what I’m saying? Like they’re trying to get you, this is a trick, you know?”
KATHY MORSE [detained, 2006]: I just remember how medieval the reception cells were. The toilet didn’t flush, but people were still using it. They were going to the bathroom or to vomit. It was just a mess. I don’t do drugs so I have never been exposed to that. There were women on the floor throwing up, getting violently sick because they were withdrawing. One woman in the cell had crack hidden in her hair, and it fell out. And they all scrambled around the floor, like it was a piñata that had been opened. That was the first time I had ever seen crack in my life. It was just a horrible experience. And the officers were trying to figure out who brought it into the cell. They did take away what they could, but they only got a portion.
In 1999, twin brothers in South Africa cheated in the Comrades, an ultra-marathon. They did it by swapping clothes in a portable toilet halfway through the race. Their actions stunned the country, and their names became synonymous with deceit. But why did they do it?
It’s hard, sometimes, not to read everything that happens in South Africa as a metaphor. This is a country where the jailers handed the keys to the inmates, and everyone was told to forgive. While the whole world watched, Nelson Mandela shook hands with apartheid’s last president, FW de Klerk, and told him, What is past, is past — “Wat is verby, is verby!”
The story of two young men, born into one of the most unequal societies on earth, trying — imperfectly, deceitfully — to find their way out of it also feels like something bigger than itself. It’s a version of what South Africans have been doing for a generation now since the end of apartheid. As Sergio tells me, “Nobody wants to be poor forever.”
For Sergio and Arnold, the past was something they believed they could, quite literally, outrun. It didn’t turn out like that, but it didn’t turn out like that for most Black South Africans either. In the generation since the end of apartheid, inequality has remained stubbornly persistent. The wealthiest 3,500 South Africans own more than the poorest 32 million. Much of the country’s elite is now Black, but so too are nearly all its poorest people.
When Sergio and Arnold cheated, it felt to many like it was saying something not just about them, but about the moral character of Black South Africans generally. Look, they said, this is who you’ve handed our country to. As I sat speaking to Sergio, South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, was fighting for his political life after revelations that wads of cash, potentially ill-gotten, had been stolen from inside his sofa.
Of course corruption isn’t limited to Black leaders, in South Africa or anywhere else. The apartheid regime was shot through with graft. Its first Black government inherited a state that was nearly bankrupt. And a generation, like Sergio and Arnold, came of age promised a world that was, for most of them, never going to materialize.
“You have to be Zola Budd level to get out of here,” Eugene remarked to me, referring to the bare-footed white South African teenager who became a record-breaking runner for England in the 1980s. “People steal millions, and yet this [Sergio] is the guy they want to go after.”
Before he sits down to write, Pravesh Bhardwaj looks for inspiration. Nearly every day, he reads a short story freely available online and shares it on his Twitter thread. Each year he chooses his 10 favorites to share with Longreads readers.
Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You is a collection of interlinked short stories following a Jamaican family living in Miami. “In Flux” is excerpted from this collection.
“Why does your mother talk so funny?” your neighbor insists.
Your mother calls to you from the front porch, has called from this perch overlooking the sloping yard time and time again since you were allowed to join the neighborhood kids in play. Always, this signals that playtime is over, only now, shame has latched itself to the ritual.
Perhaps you’d hoped no one would ever notice. Perhaps you’d never quite noticed it yourself. Perhaps you ask in shallow protest, “What do you mean, ‘What language?’” Maybe you only think it. Ultimately, you mutter, “English. She’s speaking English,” before heading inside, head tucked in embarrassment.
In this moment, and for the first time, you are ashamed of your mother, and you are ashamed of yourself for not further defending her. More so than to be cowardly and disloyal, though, it’s shameful to be foreign. If you’ve learned anything in your short time on earth, you’ve learned this.
Two grieving siblings must take a road journey in this dark and complex story by Lauren Groff.
He woke to an angry house and darkness in the windows. Aunt Maisie had packed his suitcase the night before and left it near the front door, and so he dressed himself without turning on the light and came out and dropped the pajamas on top of the suitcase. She was in the kitchen, banging the pans around.
Buddy, she said when she saw him, set yourself down and get some of this food in you. Her eyes were funny, all red and puffy, and he didn’t like to see them like that. When he sat down, she came up behind him and hugged his head so hard it hurt, and her hands smelled like soap and cigarettes and grease, and he pulled away.
He ate her eggs, which were like his mother’s eggs, though her biscuit was not like his mother’s biscuit; it was too dry, and there was no tomato jam. When he was finished, she took his plate and fork and washed them.
Ken Liu’s disturbing story is told by the family members of a young woman killed in a mass shooting. The story is included in Ken Liu’s collection The Hidden Girl and Other Stories.
So you want to know about Hayley.
No, I’m used to it, or at least I should be by now. People only want to hear about my sister.
It was a dreary, rainy Friday in October, the smell of fresh fallen leaves in the air. The black tupelos lining the field hockey pitch had turned bright red, like a trail of bloody footprints left by a giant.
I had a quiz in French II and planned a week’s worth of vegan meals for a family of four in family and consumer science. Around noon, Hayley messaged me from California.
Skipped class. Q and I are driving to the festival right now!!!
I ignored her. She delighted in taunting me with the freedoms of her college life. I was envious, but didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of showing it.
In the afternoon, Mom messaged me.
Have you heard from Hayley?
No. The sisterly code of silence was sacred. Her secret boyfriend was safe with me.
“If you do, call me right away.”
I put the phone away. Mom was the helicopter type.
As soon as I got home from field hockey, I knew something was wrong. Mom’s car was in the driveway, and she never left work this early.
The TV was on in the basement.
Mom’s face was ashen. In a voice that sounded strangled, she said, “Hayley’s RA called. She went to a music festival. There’s been a shooting.”
“In a Jar” comes from Morgan Talty’s collection Night of the Living Rez. The story is set in Maine on the Penobscot Indian reservation where young David finds a jar of teeth which might be a curse left by someone wishing David’s family ill.
On those steps I wasn’t playing for too long before I lost one of my men to a gap between the stairs and the door. It was a red alien guy, and although he wasn’t my favorite, I still cared enough about him to go get him. Looking behind the steps, my knees were wet when I knelt in the snow, and my hands were cold and muddy when I pulled myself up. The sun warmed my neck, and a sliver of sunlight also shone behind the concrete steps, right at the perfect angle, and in the light I thought I saw my toy man. But when I reached into the slush I grabbed hold of something hard and round instead. I pulled it out.
It was a glass jar filled with hair and corn and teeth. The teeth were white with a tint of yellow at the root. The hair was gray and thin and loose. And the corn was kind of like the teeth, white and yellow and looked hard.
‘Mumma,’ I said. ‘What is this?’
‘David,’ she said from inside the shed. ‘Can you wait? Please, honey.’
I said nothing, waited, and examined the jar. My hand was slightly red from either the hot glass sitting in the sun all afternoon or from the cold snow I crawled on.
Mom came out of the shed, squinting in the bright light.
‘What’s what, gwus?’ she said. Little boy, she meant.
I held the jar to her and she took it. I watched her look at it, her head tilted and brown eyes wide as the jar. And then she dropped it into the snow and mud and told me to pack up my toys. ‘No, no, never mind,’ she said. ‘Leave the toys. Come on, let’s go inside.’
She got on the phone and called somebody, whose voice on the other end I could hear and sounded familiar. ‘I’ll be by,’ he said. ‘I can get there soon. Don’t touch it, and don’t let him touch anything.’
Karnoor, a poet, translator, and novelist writes some memorable women characters in this short story.
Rituparna had been an ideal student. She hung on to Sameer’s every word and spent long hours with him in the studio. She was also a good guest – she not only helped with the chores but took on some of the household responsibilities upon herself and was always thanking Aruna for allowing her to stay. ‘This is not an internship, this is the continuation of the guru-shishya tradition,’ she would say and jokingly call Aruna her ‘guru-ma.’ After this, there was no way Aruna could have been threatened by the proximity of her husband to this sultry, curly-haired woman nearly 15 years their junior. Moreover, Aruna was herself every bit the shade of monsoon clouds with a cascade of ringlets like the falling of nights that held the promise of laughter in them. She had turned many a head in her time and though slightly heavier under the chin now and with some grey peeking out at the temples, she was aware of her charm. That’s why she noticed nothing when a month later, stylishly unkempt Sameer began paying special attention to his grooming. And that’s why she noticed nothing when guru and disciple began going on long walks into the hills to discuss art history. She was just happy to have the house to herself and enjoy the peace of solitude. She noticed nothing when something furtive crept into Sameer’s behaviour and Rituparna began avoiding eye contact. That’s why it took her a couple of hours before realizing something was amiss when one day she came home from shopping for supplies to find them both missing and his car gone.
Mieko Kawakami’s novel Heaven was short-listed for the International Booker Prize in 2022.
It took only thirty minutes to cut down the wisteria tree. Its roots, abandoned on the dirt, resembled arms that grasped at something in midair. The excavator crushed everything, mixing the laundry pole, the flowerpots, and the stones. It trampled the porch and bulldozed through the house, mercilessly clawing through the furniture and screen doors. So that’s how you destroy a house, I thought, half-amused and impressed. The old two-story house that had stood majestically in the corner lot diagonally across the road was being destroyed, and I was watching the spectacle from my second-floor kitchen window.
An old woman had lived there. I would sometimes see her. When we moved into the neighborhood six years ago, we tried to pay a visit to the house a few times, but no one ever answered the door. Every once in a while, I would pass the old woman on the street as she walked slowly around the house in the morning and evening hours, leaning against a cart. We never exchanged greetings, and yet I felt strangely serene in those moments. She always wore a black blouse with a black cardigan draped over her shoulders, and in the spring evenings, I would see her walking slowly out of the rusted gate onto the sidewalk with a broom and dustpan in her hands. When the wisteria tree shed its flowers, the gray asphalt would be covered in shades of white and pale purple, and every time the wind blew, the petals would dance in the air. The old woman would spend a long time sweeping up those petals from one corner of the road to the other. The petals fell even on seemingly windless nights, and the following day, the old woman would emerge slowly with her broom and dustpan again. This would continue until the flowers were gone. But I had not seen her recently. When was the last time I saw her?
A bank teller falls in love with an easygoing older customer who doesn’t want to have an exclusive relationship.
“What is your name, dear?” he asked carefully, pulling out his wallet and putting it down on the counter.
“Angela,” she said.
“Angela, my name is Thomas.” He handed over his bank card. “Could I please have three hundred dollars in cash from my savings account?”
She rolled her eyes slightly, but as soon as she did she regretted it. She liked the man, and even if this was something that could have been done at the A.T.M. she shouldn’t have rolled her eyes. She was simply so used to disliking her customers, and she immediately apologized. “I’m sorry I rolled my eyes. It’s just habit.”
“A lot of things are habit,” he agreed, and didn’t seem offended.
“I have lots of bad habits,” she said.
“I do, too,” he said. “It takes a lifetime to get rid of them, and even then that is not enough time.”
As she counted out his money, she asked, “What habits have you overcome and which do you still have?”
“I no longer smoke or drink, but I tell little white lies. In fact, I do smoke and drink sometimes. No, I guess I haven’t overcome any.”
“I forget to exercise, and I eat junk food all the time.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Your body knows what it needs better than you do, better than all the magazines do, better than the doctors do, better than your girlfriends do. You just keep eating your junk food and lazing around.”
“Thank you,” she said. “No one has ever said that.”
“You do whatever you want. It really doesn’t matter.”
When her promising career is halted by the betrayal of a childhood friend, a young woman finds it difficult to reconcile her new situation or with the childhood friend who faces eviction. “Tumble” is one of eight interlinked stories in Sidik Fofana’s debut collection Stories From the Tenants Downstairs.
Usually, they give you time. You might see a notice on someone’s door for the whole year. Now, several units were getting one on the same day.
So less than a week into my time as a building liaison, Emeraldine hands me a printout of Banneker tenants who got notices in the past month—twentysome in all. She does it with this attitude like she’s waiting for me to object, but I just take the list and act like the new worker who’s happy to get work.
We gonna start setting those folks up with the Citizens Legal Fund, she goes.
I hold up the list doing my best to murmur the names. Michelle Sutton, Darius Kite, Verona Dallas. Then I get to one that cold knocks me out. I move it close to my face to make sure it’s not a mistake. Kya Rhodes.
Tochi Eze’s story about two sisters announces the arrival of another promising writer from Nigeria.
I was six years old when Kambili was pink and soft. Dad and Mum were loud with their joy—after five years of trying again, waiting again, Kambili was their prize at the end of those frantic years. Daddy’s trophy. Mummy’s answered prayer. Mine to watch and care for.
Mummy had returned from the hospital that Sunday after mass while Daddy fried yams and egg sauce in the kitchen. I could still taste the hot honeyed Lipton tea stinging my mouth when Daddy waltzed out to the parlor, swaying to highlife music from Oliver De Coque, his happiness hung on his neck and lips, on the bridge of his nose. I wanted to pull his neck to my chest, hear his laugh close to me, tickling me till I was bouncing and laughing too. I reached out, my arms wide open in their endless regard for him, wanting, even at six, to be picked up and lifted in the air. But then the gate rattled, the car honked, and Daddy and I knew that Mummy was back. She stepped out of Baba Kunle’s yellow taxi, with grandmama behind her, both of them smelling of white powder and fresh baby.
When Kambili was five months old, I snuck into her room as Mummy fried akara in the kitchen and I pierced her tiny baby shoulder with a razor. I watched her baby blood spurt into the sheets, and I screamed, and she screamed, and I ran to fetch Mummy.
Ursa Story Company, helmed by Dawnie Walton, Mark Armstrong*, and Deesha Philyaw, offers audio and web versions of their stories. “Happy Family” is set in a Chinatown restaurant in a bygone era.
When the real estate business was failing, and my parents’ marriage was also failing, my mother and my stepfather took out a second mortgage and opened a restaurant. This was on Grand Street, on the other side of Chinatown. My parents christened it “Ga Hing” for “Happy Family,” which didn’t make sense to me at the time because we were barely a family, and nowhere near happy. My stepfather wasn’t happy because he played mahjong, and had accumulated the kind of debt that was so impossible to pay off, he was convinced that turning back to the game could save him. My mother wasn’t happy because she said that she already knew what it was like to be poor, and that being poor again was worse because it was now entangled with bitterness and regret. I wasn’t happy because I somehow understood, even then, that there were things that I would never be able to get back. I was fourteen; I was about to start high school. In short, it was the end of my childhood.
It was expected of me to work at Ga Hing, to contribute for the good of the family. And while my classmates could spend their afternoons at the Ice Cream Factory, or roam the halls of Elizabeth Center for anime action figures and keychains and fancy pens, I had to work at the restaurant, and at most, wish that I could be elsewhere. One wouldn’t think that at such a young age, I could learn how to take orders, serve dishes, or even work the register. But when push came to shove, I found that I could learn rather quickly.
On first mention, the idea sounds great: Turning the tables on phone scammers. Both karma and catharsis, it’s a huge part of the reason Arsion Kulik and Ashton Bingham’s videos have garnered hundreds of thousands of subscribers. But there’s something far less great lurking here too — something that this Rest of World profile-slash-investigation deftly exposes.
Trilogy’s pursuit of vigilante justice has proved a hit with their many fans, whom they refer to as “the squad.” But for some, their antics lay bare an uncomfortable power dynamic in which YouTubers in Los Angeles gain viral fame at the expense of Indian call center workers, physically harassing people whose situation they may know little about.
A high school English teacher in Georgia delivers a withering critique of the conservative crusade to undermine public education. Ian Altman suggests that what drives the effort is fear of enlightenment — and fear of being found out:
The current horde of book banners and goons at education board meetings (not a new thing in this country) could be seen as evidence of how education fails, thanks to teachers dutifully following instructions and carefully avoiding the touchy political matters that lie at the heart of any serious study of literature and history. These adults’ caterwauling grew out of the wholesome compliance and deference to rules and decorum they learned in school, though without seeming to have paid much attention to what they read. We do not need to look beyond ostensibly respectable classics to see the irony that almost anything worth reading and studying will be filled with morally ambiguous and repugnant characters, narrate foolish or appalling behavior, and cause us to engage with discomfiting ideas. The desire to avoid good literature — or to teach it badly, as though it were somehow safe — comes at the cost of intellectual and moral stunting.
It is not unusual, for example, to find antiheroes in American war novels: Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage has Henry Fleming fleeing the battle and seeking to overcome his shame; in Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Frederic Henry takes shrapnel while eating a piece of cheese, saying that words like courage are obscene, and escapes summary execution from his own allies; Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 identifies not the Nazis but the U.S. Army bureaucracy as Yossarian’s enemy. As for family values, recall Mercutio teasing Romeo with an image of anal sex, Edna Pontellier’s adultery and suicide in The Awakening, Odysseus and Telemachus torturing Melanthius to death and feeding his genitals to dogs. And race cannot be sidelined: the tragedy of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! is caused not by incest but by the threat of miscegenation, and Richard Wright’s Native Son spins a doomed web with an executioner at its heart. We don’t need any theory, critical or otherwise, to justify teaching these books. This is the work of a public school teacher. Teachers didn’t invent the subversion threaded throughout canonical literature or the thorns and complexity of history. Reading anything worthwhile means discovering those ideas, as I did when a student’s comment about the theft of Black Americans’ history caused me to rethink how I taught August Wilson’s play The Piano Lesson. As I thought about what he said, it became clear to me how different it is merely to have history than to possess it, with all the ethical and political weight that possession carries. Teaching that through the play’s symbolism gave students a new way to interpret some facets of America’s twentieth century. Perhaps some adults are frightened not of what students will learn about themselves but of what they’ll learn about their parents and older generations.
Those who trouble over this could learn something from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. In it Ivan dreams that the Grand Inquisitor arrests the risen Christ to preserve happiness and the security of not having to choose good over evil, arguing that having the power of choice does not help the church, that moral freedom is too awful a burden for most people to bear. We wouldn’t be wrong to detect Lucifer’s pride in the inquisitor’s arguments. For all their talk of liberty, those who would threaten and abuse teachers and proclaim which books are evil seem awfully afraid of their children having the power to choose virtue.
In this piece, Kate Evans explains just how unique and magical nautiluses are. Be prepared to find yourself fascinated by an animal that has often been labeled a “dumb snail.”
Number 3 was the teacher’s pet. Number 13 was always trying to break out of her car seat. Number 9 lived the longest in captivity, 10 years, and he was Basil’s favorite: “Oh, he was a prince.” He would curl his tentacles around her finger when she reached into the water, and when he got old, Basil gave him a “retirement tank” and his favorite food—lobster carapaces she scrounged from fancy New York restaurants.
This is a lovely essay exploring the writer’s bond with some sanctuary wolves. They keep calling to her over great distances, and for many years, displaying the importance of the connection she found. Eventually, she finds peace with where she is, but the wolves remain unforgotten.
I found my stride when the cool spring winds blew during long summer days. Somewhere between the crunch of earth beneath my feet; the sun on my cheeks; the fur in my hands; the labor, stillness, and isolation; the caw of ravens; the march of tarantulas; and the lock of golden wolf eyes, I was forged into someone new.
