The Round House and Coincidences

They lived and died too quickly in those years that surrounded the making of the reservation, died before they could be recorded and in such painful numbers that it was hard to remember them all without uttering, as my father did sometimes as he read local history, and the white man appeared and drove them down into the earth, which sounded like an Old Testament prophecy but was just an observation of the truth. And so to be afraid of entering the cemetery by night was to fear not the loving ancestors who lay buried, but the gut kick of our history, which I was bracing to absorb. The old cemetery was filled with its complications. - Louise Erdrich, The Round House

Life is full of some weird stuff. There's a part of me that wanted to use the S word in that first sentence because it's reminiscent of the way a lot of people talk and write and it felt right, but part of me also wonders if writing something because it "feels right," is really just writing something you've heard so many times that it actually has no meaning. Like when people still quote Austin Powers, or tell me that I'm a valuable member of the human race who deserves to occupy space.

Take this set of circumstances, for example: one day at the local library they were having a promotion where they hid book jackets wrapped around a placeholder box. You'd search the library for one of these ersatz tomes and if you found one, you got the book for free. I found LaRose, by Louise Erdrich. I was very pleased by this because if you remember, I loved the last book of hers that I'd read. Just couldn't get enough of it.

Now, there are pretty much only two ways you can trick me into never reading a book. The first is to put a dragon on the cover. Second and only slightly less effective is to place said book in my ownership. See, my nightstand always has at least four full-sized library books in a stack, and those books cry out to me like so many kitties on a Saturday morning when their owners have the temerity to sleep in even an extra five minutes JUST FOR ONE LOUSY MORNING. Each book comes equipped with a burning fuse, like the bomb that is always awaiting Inspector Gadget as he finally, finally turns around Dr. Claw's chair, each marking the passing moments of my life in which their particular date becomes due.

When I return library books, it's with the relief of a man who just made his final payment to the loan shark with the tall collector and the short collector. The short one is quiet, too quiet, but moves with the precision of a leopard. The tall one jokes around and smiles a lot, but you can see that his knuckles are always swollen -- the skin broken so many times as to become an abstract portrait of pain -- and the smile never quite makes it to his eyes. Not today, tall one and short one, I say as the books are consumed by the conveyor belt that always eats but is never satiated. Not ever.

Books I own inspire no such anxiety. They are content only to know that I am nearby. They wait for me like Blue the Dog and Mr. Salt and Mrs. Pepper and their baby Paprika and Side Table Drawer and The Mailbox wait for Steve to return, though we all know Steve is dead. Yea, that man is dead as S word.

The upshot is I hadn't read it yet. Good thing, actually!

Picture it: it's last week, and I've got this trip coming up, one in which I would be traveling by aeroplane to the distant and exotic riverbanks of Bend, Oregon. I already have a library book on hand, but I need a back up. Space is at a premium and I don't want to haul around two books, so I look through the library's digital offerings. Nothing on my to-read list is available, but I do see a little number called The Round House by one Louise Erdrich. Excelsior, I say audibly, not knowing what that means. And then I go through the roughly 18-step process required to check it out.

I won't belabor this any further (only because that would be impossible), but it turns out that all three of the books that I've mentioned make up a loose trilogy. I had no idea! I was maybe 30 pages into The Round House when they mention a lynching in which a 13-year-old Ojibwe (Chippewa) boy was hung. Wait a second, that's totally what The Plague of Doves was about! And so it was. Here we meet another 13-year-old boy, but now it's some 20 years later, and the boy is Joe.

Like The Plague of Doves, The Round House starts with a horrible tragedy. And like that tragedy, the roots of it can be traced back generations. Some of it can be traced back to the very beginning of what is now called the United States of America.

Land speculation is the stock market of the times. Everybody’s in on it. George Washington. Thomas Jefferson. As well as Chief Justice John Marshall, who wrote the decision for this case and made his family’s fortune. The land madness is unmanageable by the nascent government. Speculators are acquiring rights on treaty-held Indian land and on land still owned and occupied by Indians—white people are literally betting on smallpox.

Joe's mother is brutally attacked, and their family's stable and loving life is shattered. His father, Bazil, is a judge in the town, and understands the complexity of the law. The attack happened near the round house, an old place where Ojibwe secretly worshiped when worshiping in their way was against the law.

During the old days when Indians could not practice their religion—well, actually not such old days: pre-1978—the round house had been used for ceremonies. People pretended it was a social dance hall or brought their Bibles for gatherings. In those days the headlights of the priest’s car coming down the long road glared in the southern window. By the time the priest or the BIA superintendent arrived, the water drums and eagle feathers and the medicine bags and birchbark scrolls and sacred pipes were in a couple of motorboats halfway across the lake. The Bible was out and people were reading aloud from Ecclesiastes. Why that part of the Bible? I’d once asked Mooshum. Chapter 1, verse 4, he said. One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth forever.

The round house, it turns out, is a mess of land ownership. Some owned by the reservation, some by the state, some Federal. Each piece carries with it its own complications. See, up until 2015, tribes could not prosecute non-members of the tribe in cases of rape and domestic abuse. That might sound like some weird loophole that probably doesn't apply in many cases, but no.

There are epidemic levels of domestic violence on tribal lands. Three out of five Native women have been assaulted in their lifetimes, and 34 percent will be raped, according to the National Congress of American Indians. Getting to the heart of the VAWA provision, 59 percent of assaults against Native women take place at or near a private residence, and, as of 2010, 59 percent of Native women were married to non-Native men. 

On some reservations, Native women are murdered at a rate more than 10 times the national average.

So let's review. The majority of rape and domestic violence cases against Native women are perpetrated by non-Native men. But tribal police have no jurisdiction over non-Native anybody, even if the crime was committed on tribal land. What happens then? Well, the case gets handed to Federal officers. Except according to a Government Accountability Report, U.S. attorneys declined 67% of sexual assault cases over a period of five years.

The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) was passed in 1994, and has been passed easily every year since except for two occasions: the first was in 2011, when Republicans let it expire because of language protecting undocumented immigrants, LGBT, and Native Americans. Again, in 2013, Joe Biden tried to get the Native American loophole closed, and again Republicans fought the measure, specifically because of the Native jurisdiction issue. It only passed in 2015 when Democrats had a majority. Now, of course, the act is facing defunding, because it doesn't have a gun attached to it.

We starved while the cows of settlers lived fat off the fenced grass of our old hunting grounds. In those first years our white father with the big belly ate ten ducks for dinner and didn’t even send us the feet.

Put yourself back in 1988 now, and you're the son of two very well educated parents. You live in a nice house and there is always food on the table. Your dad is the frickin' judge. And your mom will not leave her room for fear of being re-victimized. Everyone knows who did it, but he walks free because we have a legal system based on centuries of racist precedent. You can run into the man at the grocery store and he'll grin at you.

If you're Joe you want your mom back. And so Joe decides to do something about it.

This so gnawed at him on some nights that he lay awake wondering just how many unknown and similarly inconsequential accidents and bits of happenstance were at this moment occurring or failing to occur in order to ensure he took his next breath, and the next. It gave him the sensation that he was tottering on the tip of a flagpole. He was poised on circumstance.

But this is a book by Louise Erdrich, and so like a Coen brothers movie, there will not be a single wasted character. Joe's friend Cappy, charismatic and loyal. The town priest, and ex-marine not afraid to run down a kid in town straight out of the confessional if he's mad enough. Mooshum, Joe's ancient grandfather who tells legends in his sleep. And Linda, famous for her banana bread, abandoned by her white mother as a twin when it was revealed that she'd probably be mentally disabled. Secretly nursed to health by a Native nurse and then adopted.

While their moral standards for the rest of the world were rigid, they were always able to find excuses for their own shortcomings. It is these people really, said my father, small-time hypocrites, who may in special cases be capable of monstrous acts if given the chance.

Nobody does this like Erdrich does. She weaves together these families and these generations deftly. Nothing happens without the seeds of that thing being planted centuries before. Dreams come true. That visions are real and ghosts exist is taken for granted. Not even a game of Bionic Commando is without deep meaning.

For years our people have struggled to resist an unstoppable array of greedy and unstable beings. Our army has been reduced to a few desperate warriors and we are all but weaponless and starving. We taste the nearness of defeat. But deep in the bowels of our community our scientists have perfected an unprecedented fighting weapon. Our bionic arm reaches, crushes, flexes, feints, folds. It pierces armor and its heat-seeking sensors can detect the most well-defended foe. The bionic arm combines the power of an entire army in itself and must be operated by one and only one soldier who can meet the test. I am that soldier. Or Cappy is that soldier. The Bionic Commando.

 This just in, Bionic Commando references get you an extra star. Six stars, this book.

Capcom

So says Nathan "Rad" Spencer, so says us all

I Will Send Rain and The Potato Metaphor

We know everyone we love is going to die, but we don't know it, can't possibly believe it, she thought, or long ago I would have gone andd started digging until I had a hole big enough to lie down in. - Rae Meadows, I Will Send Rain

Well. There are a lot of directions I can take this thing. Let's start with this article. 

In the 1910s and 1920s, another land boom spread across the Plains, luring a new generation of farmers unaware of the previous century’s drought disaster. Tractors that could rip through thick native grasslands replaced the old plows. Bullish news stories on generous rainfall, war-inflated wheat prices and farm subsidies helped bring tens of thousands of settlers. When wheat prices collapsed, farmers with large mortgage payments responded by tearing up even more of the grasses that had evolved over thousands of years to hold the Earth together in dry times. Early ecologists warned of the need for a conservation ethic. Most farmers never heard those warnings. Those who heard them did not believe. 

The next great drought settled in around 1930 and seared for a decade. Summer temperatures passed 115 degrees. Thousands died from the extreme heat. When hot prairie winds met stripped ground, they kicked up violent black dust storms. These storms really did follow the plow. Rather than rain, they carried millions of pounds of dirt. After riding out blinding blizzards in Oklahoma on Black Sunday in 1935, AP reporter Robert Geiger dubbed the region “the Dust Bowl.” In response, writes environmental historian Donald Worster, chambers of commerce formed “truth squads” that worked systematically “to deny, and to repress, the Dust Bowl label.” But the winds would not be censored. They blew five more years of dust and death.

The main point of the article is that for as long as there have been businesses, American business interests have been telling us that that thing that science says is killing us really isn't that bad. Take, for example, the gasoline and paint industry.

On October 26, 1924, the first of five workers who would die in quick succession at Standard Oil’s Bayway TEL works perished, after wrenching fits of violent insanity; thirty-five other workers would experience tremors, hallucinations, severe palsies and other serious neurological symptoms of organic lead poisoning. In total, more than 80 percent of the Bayway staff would die or suffer severe poisoning. News of these deaths was the first that many Americans heard of leaded gasoline–although it would take a few days, as the New York City papers and wire services rushed to cover a mysterious industrial disaster that Standard stonewalled and GM declined to delve into.

Seriously, read that article. It's long, but interesting. It says that industry actively fought to cover up the impacts of lead gasoline and paint on public health, with the help of the United States Surgeon General and a series of tactics to obfuscate science that are still used today. The upshot is that in spite of the Bayway deaths in 1924, the United States didn't start phasing out leaded gasoline until 1975, and tanks still offered "leaded" as an option until 1986. A lot of us remember pretty clearly as kids seeing it as an option. A CDC study showed that blood-lead levels declined from 1978 to 1991 by 78%.

The amount of deaths caused by this intentional cover-up are essentially incalculable, but in just under 10 years, street soil already found a massive increase in lead.

In New York City, at least, Charles Norris decided to prepare for the health and environmental problems to come. He suggested that the department scientists do a base-line measurement of lead levels in the dirt and debris blowing across city streets. People died, he pointed out to his staff; and everyone knew that heavy metals like lead tended to accumulate. The resulting comparison of street dirt in 1924 and 1934 found a 50 percent increase in lead levels – a warning, an indicator of damage to come, if anyone had been paying attention.

It took another 50 years after that study before lead was banned, and the number of drivers in the US increased exponentially. Some estimates say that there is enough accumulated lead in our soils to account for 68 million cases of toxic levels of lead in children, and an annual 5,000 adult deaths of lead-induced heart disease.

The men who got rich off of leaded gasoline in the US are dead now, and they couldn't take their billions of dollars in blood money with them, but every day people die because of their greed and corruption. The politicians who manipulated the message in order to get more campaign contributions are dead, too. But we still live with the results. There is a compelling correlation between lead levels and violent crime that suggests that the steady drop in crime the United States has experienced since the late '70s is the result of the phasing out of leaded gasoline.

So Nevin dove in further, digging up detailed data on lead emissions and crime rates to see if the similarity of the curves was as good as it seemed. It turned out to be even better: In a 2000 paper (PDF) he concluded that if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America. Toddlers who ingested high levels of lead in the ’40s and ’50s really were more likely to become violent criminals in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.

We hear a lot about Flint, where city officials knew there was a problem but did nothing about it. Or there's Maryland's secretary of housing, community and development, who:

dismissed the never-ending lead crisis in Baltimore by callously suggesting that it might all be a shuck. A mother, he said, might fake such poisoning by putting “a lead fishing weight in her child’s mouth [and] then take the child in for testing.” Such a tactic, he indicated, without any kind of proof, was aimed at making landlords “liable for providing the child with [better] housing.” Unfortunately, the attitudes of Holt and Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan have proven all too typical of the ways in which America’s civic and state leaders have tended to ignore, dismiss, or simply deny the real suffering of children, especially those who are black and Latino, when it comes to lead and other toxic chemicals.

Hey Howie? It looks like so far you're just filling out a blog post with quotations and very few of your own words in between. Did this work for you in college?

I don't know. Maybe? I want to keep making this case, though. We're still using lead in bullets, which is messing up birds, including bald eagles, but hunters are fighting to overturn an Obama directive to stop it. Also, let's not forget the rest of the world. "While Americans cruise their freeways burning exclusively unleaded gasoline, as of 1996, 93 percent of all gasoline sold in Africa contained lead, 94 percent in the Middle East, 30 percent in Asia and 35 percent in Latin America."

According to the World Bank, 1.7 billion urbanites in developing nations are in danger of lead poisoning, including neurological damage, high blood pressure and heart disease from airborne lead, 90 percent of which is attributable to leaded gasoline. Excessive exposure to lead causes 200,000-500,000 cases of hypertension in the Third World, with 400 deaths per year attributable to lead exposure in the late eighties. In Mexico City, one of the world’s most polluted (and populous) cities, 4 million cars pump an estimated 32 tons of lead each day into the air. In Jakarta, one and a half tons enters the atmosphere every twenty-four hours. A research scientist with the Canadian National Water Research Institute performed roadside-dust analyses in Nigeria that revealed as much as 6,000 parts per million of lead. In the United States, lead dust is considered hazardous to children at 600 ppm.

I was in a conversation (argument ((fight)) once about climate change in which I was told that God would not let us ruin the Earth to the point of it becoming uninhabitable. This was news to me. The God I was raised to believe is in fact kind of famous for letting us make mistakes and then live with the consequences. That's kind of His whole deal. I can definitely ruin my backyard, as my next-door neighbors have so aptly pointed out. A city can ruin a park, a state can overgraze to the point of complete ecosystem conversion, and an entire region can tear up the grass that keeps soil in place and create a 300,000 ton dust storm, so dense that farmers put ropes between their houses and their outhouses in case they needed to venture out in a cloud of dirt so dense they couldn't see their hands in front of their faces. All because the phrase "the rain follows the plow," was just so dang catchy.

To those who possess the divine faculty of hope—the optimists of our times—it will always be a source of pleasure to understand that the Creator never imposed a perpetual desert upon the earth, but, on the contrary, has so endowed it that man, by the plow, can transform it, in any country, into farm areas. 

That's the scenario one finds oneself transported to when reading Rae Meadows' I Will Send Rain. We meet the Bell family in 1934 Mulehead, Oklahoma. There's Annie and Samuel, the parents, and their two kids: teenage daughter Birdie and young Fred, who is like 8 or something? I can't remember. I'll be honest, the family is the least interesting thing about the book.

“Stay calm,” the mayor said, though it was unnecessary. They were calm, resigned to the storms that had, over these months, worn them thin. How fast a new normal took hold.” 

Like, I feel like I've read this story one million times now. Annie is middle-aged and pretty but sad, and has a crush on the mayor. Birdie is 15 and has a crush on a boy. Fred is very smart and sweet but has bad lungs (guess what that doesn't go well with dust storms). Samuel starts having dreams that he thinks may be visions from God. Everything that you think is going to happen eventually happens. For some reason we're supposed to interpret Birdie's young love as naive and irrational, but Annie's adult fascination with the city mayor with his nice shoes as a very serious awakening of super great self-discovery. This is how people behave in literature, the author says. I know because I've read a lot of it.

As the darkness grew, and with Samuel gone, Annie thought she’d join her children upstairs, but she stopped outside the door when she heard Birdie mention Cy’s name. Since he’d left, Birdie spoke to her in short angry sentences, as if Cy’s leaving were Annie’s fault. She wished she could hold her and say she understood. She had more in common with Birdie than she could admit. But she knew how trying to talk to her would go. They were each spinning in the dark, like flies in a glass of water, flapping around for something to latch onto.

See, that's good prose. Meadows is a very good writer. The setting is especially evocative. I just would have loved to be surprised even once. There are side characters who I loved, and moments that were beautiful:

Pastor Hardy’s wife had been the organist back in Arkansas, and he missed her acutely whenever Mrs. Turner—her small spidery hands—would play the opening chords of “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” or “Abide with Me.” A warmth would travel up his spine and then fly off, leaving him more lonesome than ever. In front of his flock, he sometimes could feel the abyss of despair open beneath him. He feared these moments and felt the hand of the devil in them.

These people have faith, and struggle with God and His apparent abandonment of hard-working people. They waste their money on snake oil salesmen who shoot dynamite into the clouds. They get the band together and dispense lemonade while rounding up and clubbing jackrabbits to death. There is so much meat here, and yet it feels like the book wants to spend all of its time describing the mashed potatoes. Like, I've had mashed potatoes. They're fine. But if you're going to focus on them, they better be frickin life changing. Instead they're from a Pinterest recipe already shared by Kate Chopin and Tennessee Williams and Flannery O'Connor and Henry James. They are, in short, just potatoes.

That dang dust bowl, though. We just don't learn, do we? Nowadays just 90 companies account for 63% of air pollution. And half of that took place after 1988, when NASA testified to congress that climate change was no longer theoretical. And yet we're the only developed country to actively withdraw from a cooperative agreement to reduce its effects. I wonder what percentage of campaign donations those 90 companies account for? If only there were some way of finding out...

I'm not pretending that these companies don't provide jobs and livelihoods to a lot of people. Nor am I saying that I don't use the products they create. We're all sharing the blame on this thing, just like in the end the farmers' lands were coated and crops were choked by the same dust they ultimately sent into the air due to their farming practices. But there's a big difference between me filling up my very fuel efficient car with the only fuel source available to me, and an industry actively manipulating the market and the policy-makers who supposedly represent us and calling it freedom.

We've had those potatoes before, too, you guys. Those are what we call dumpster potatoes. They have lead and mercury in them and Big Potato is calling it a superfood. Wow this potato metaphor really went places.

Lucky Boy and The End of Jokes

But no matter what, strangers never disappointed, because she expected nothing from them. It was the people she knew, who liked and even loved her, who could let her down most cruelly. - Shanthi Sekaran, Lucky Boy

If this thing ever takes off and people want to buy shirts, one of the shirts is going to say "I remember when Howie's Book Club had jokes in it." It's going to be a very multi-layered thing because on the one hand it's debatable if Howie's Book Club ever had jokes in it in the first place so there's the irony there, and also because it will be made of fabric so thin and cheap you'll need to wear more than one layer just to meet the very basic standards of decency.

Anyway, it's hard to write jokes when you've just read, back-to-back, two of the most emotionally draining books to grace your nightstand in the last maybe decade, and you read them both in the same week. And also you read the most recent one in two days (brag). Holy crap I read Lucky Boy in two days. Also in that week my best cat ever died. And we went camping, with three smallish children. OK but where are the jokes, Howie?

Ugh, they're in here somewhere. We'll see what happens. See, Shanthi Sekaran's Lucky Boy is one of the most beautiful books I've ever read. It's also one of the toughest. But there are jokes in there, mostly in the way of clever banter between maybe the best married couple I've ever had the pleasure of meeting on the written page, but there's also just plain old observational humor.

At the farmers' market the week before, a little girl had fallen and scraped her knee. As she stood sobbing, inconsolable, her mother knelt down beside her. Here, sweetie, have some kale. The little girl had taken it, chewed on the tough, primordial leaf, and stopped crying. The stakes were high in Berkeley. The toddlers were eating their cruciferous greens.

There's so much to talk about. It's hard to know right after finishing a book if it will stick with me by the end of the year and beyond. I can't imagine ever forgetting this one, though. I imagine we as a society have covered every version of the beauty comes from adversity metaphor, what with our every rose has a thorn and our ancient, gnarled, windswept trees. But I'll be darned if I don't come up with my own.

When I was camping we had some Hershey bars in the cooler for s'mores. Now I don't get s'mores myself. I don't think I've even asked for s'me, let alone more, but I am also well-renowned for my self-control. Anyway, when you camp, you're supposed to bring the fixins or the camp host will dig through that metal tube until they find the envelope with your fee in it and they will tear it up in your face and throw the scraps in the fire. I've seen this happen and it's demoralizing to all parties.

We actually forgot to bring graham crackers (which if you need jokes, the origin of the graham cracker is the best one you'll read on this blog), but that has nothing to do with this metaphor and is just the set-up to this picture, which is amazing and good:

Anyway, I was looking at Hershey's bars and thinking about how amazing it must have been for soldiers during World War II to bite into the milk chocolate in their D-rations. Oh, what sweet joy to bite into that little taste of home, and how much sweeter it must have been given the hardship.  "Imagine," I said, while we looked into the fire and my daughter visibly vibrated from a sugar high. "Imagine being in a foreign land and scared for your life and tasting something so American as Hershey's chocolate."

Then I told my own experience away from home.I served a 2-year Mormon mission in Mexico, and while the food and drink there was amazing, there was just one thing missing: root beer. Mexicans hate root beer like we hate candy with chili in it and their music and also soccer. They think it tastes like medicine and now that I think about it, it kind of does. I hadn't had root beer in over and year and one day while walking through a street market I did a double take. There at a stand was a man selling A&W by the can. I bought it and lo, even at room temperature it was a little slice of home if you could slice a newtonian liquid.

Being a missionary isn't as hard as being a soldier, but it's dang hard. In real life I only kind of like root beer, but like how raisins can be almost barely tolerable if you're on a very long hike, plain chocolate or root beer seem like exotic delights when the going is particularly tough.

Furthering the metaphor, this is the ending screen for the unreleased California raisins game.
Were the costs too great? The rewards too sweet? Let the player decide.

A new life would begin--possibly a very good or even better life--but before it did, he and Kavya would have to journey there; they would cross a no-man's-land of uncertainty, parched and dark and crawling with vigilantes. The possibility of emerging unscathed felt slim. The search for a child would take them through stifling obscurity, and already Rishi was finding it hard to breathe.

In the passage above, we meet Rishi and Kavya, both second-generation Indian immigrants. Rishi works for an Amazon-like Silicon Valley company and Kavya is a chef for a sorority. Kavya is desperate for a baby, and that want comes across in a way that is very effective and heartbreaking for the many people I know who would love to have kids and have struggled. They start to look at other ways, including adoption and foster care. Rishi is imagining the sweetness of finally being a father, in spite of all of the obstacles in the way.

It reminded me a lot of when we started having kids. It's scary but you get pregnant anyway (ok I did not get pregnant) because even though there are hardships and terrible and gross things in between that first thing and the last, the rewards are good enough.

That is this book, you guys.

See, the other main character in Lucky Boy is Solimar Castro Valdez, who leaves her tiny village in Oaxaca because she is made out of pure potential. The economically depressed and near-vacant town has nothing for her, so she contacts her cousin Sylvia and departs for Berkeley, CA. Soli is 18 years old. The journey is rough, but would be so much rougher if she didn't meet Checo, who rescues her from shady coyotes.

It sounds like I've told the whole story but that's just how it begins. She makes it to Berkeley, and then things get nuts. I don't want to get into it more, but the stories of Kavya and Rishi and Soli become inextricably connected.

There's lots of stuff here. The beauty of motherhood. The way fathers sometimes don't feel like fathers until something happens and they realize how vital their part in their child's life can be if they let it. Kavya and Rishi are lovely together and it's so refreshing to see a healthy relationship for once. The stress they are under is sometimes immense and they screw up, but they talk to each other because they actually love each other and want it to work.

There's also the microaggressions that immigrants feel, both Indian and Mexican. Soli gets a great job as a housekeeper and nanny, and her hyper-liberal employers are mostly lovely but also very white about the whole thing. It's rough, but Soli is resourceful and hyper-intelligent and lovable. She has a tiny baby.

Then things get so bad.

Here's the thing about how we treat immigrants in detention centers: it's monstrous and horrible and each one of us will have to answer for it when our kids and grandkids learn how bad it is. We cannot treat human beings like this and call ourselves Judeo-Christian. We just can't. You can talk about obeying the law of the land and how we are a nation of laws and about jobs and about social security all day long and I'll have that conversation, but the treatment of undocumented immigrants in the United States is obscene.

Call them "illegals" all you want, but if you think that makes them less than human, but remember that every gulag, concentration camp, slave plantation, and internment camp in our world's history has been founded on dehumanizing people who feel emotions just as strongly as we do. They were all run by people who were "just doing their job." All these justifications may help them sleep at night, but history has never once looked kindly on the people in charge who perpetrate it.

Because such men occupied the public spaces, they kept the women locked in their rooms. Women were treated like criminals, while thieves roamed the yard like bison, and men were as free as children to play and fight. Soli was no angel. She was fairly sure she wasn't a criminal, either.

But these are criminals, you may say. Dangerous people who pose a threat to our women and children. Hmm. Let's consider the case of high school student Marco Coello, who was arrested during a peaceful protest in Venezuela and tortured: beaten with golf clubs and shocked with a car battery. He fled to the United States where he applied for asylum. While waiting for his interview he was apprehended by ICE and put in a detention center. At the same center was one Denis Davydov, an HIV positive gay man who fled Russia, where homosexuals are put into literal concentration camps. Coello is still waiting on his asylum request. Davydov has been sent back to Russia.

Guadalupe García de Rayos didn't commit a crime in 2008 when she was put in handcuffs in front of her boy. Jackie, her daughter, remembers waking up at 4 AM to visit her mom at a detention center far from her home. Lupita was in the detention center for 6 months, including Christmas. She was returned to live with her family. This year, however, Lupita attended Mass before meeting with her immigration attorney. She was apprehended outside of the immigration office and put on a deportation bus. She had lived in the United States since she was 14 years old. She lived here for 20 years. But Howie! She lived here for 20 years, was she just too lazy to become a citizen? Hardly.

All of this would be bad if the detention centers were nice, but they aren't. They're awful. Inspectors at the Theo Lacy Facility in Orange County, CA found moldy showers and meat that detainees had to rinse off before eating. They found that high risk prisoners were mixing freely with low-risk detainees, putting people innocent of all crimes aside from undocumented entry into the country at risk. They found that phones were regularly down and broken, preventing detainees from having access to lawyers and family.

People die in these things. All the time. For reasons that were easily preventable.

Manuel Cota-Domingo, detained at Eloy Detention Center, died of untreated diabetes and pneumonia after numerous delays, including a policy that placed restrictions on which staff could call 911, resulted in eight hours passing between the moment he started to have trouble breathing and his arrival at an emergency room. Tiombe Carlos died by suicide in York County Prison after being detained for two-and-a-half years. The mental health care she received was deemed “woefully inadequate” by an independent expert. Santiago Sierra-Sanchez, detained at Utah County Jail, died of a staph infection and pneumonia. A correctional health expert said of the care he received, “Medical staff essentially abandoned this patient by not properly assessing him or following up.”

In Texas and Pennsylvania, over 2,000 women and children as young as five years old are shuffled around detention centers, sometimes in shackles. One teen's mom had her gall bladder removed, she was sent back to the general population the next day with no follow up care.

Then there's this:

The OIG (Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General), tasked with investigating government wrongdoing, started categorizing “sexual abuse” complaints in 2014, and since then the agency received at least 1,016 reports — primarily from the division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — according to the complaint based on several Freedom of Information Act requests.
"That’s an average of more than one complaint of sexual abuse per day," said CIVIC Executive Director Christina Fialho.

Yet, OIG ignored almost 98 percent of those, deeming them unsubstantiated or referring them back to the agency accused of the abuse with no follow-up, she said.
In addition to those complaints of sexual abuse reported by people in detention, there were 402 complaints of "coerced sexual contact," 196 complaints of "sexual harassment," and 380 complaints of "physical or sexual abuse" lodged against ICE, according to the complaint.

I say all this not because I want to rail against what I consider the worst human rights violation taking place in the United States, well, mostly not because of that. Every Sunday I hear someone shaking with rage that gay people can marry. That transgender people can have their own bathrooms. They grimly say that this is a sign of the end of the world. It's harder to be a Christian in America, one says, than any other group of people. This while women cower in fear of the men who are paid to protect them, but who instead treat them like objects.

The real reason I put this all together is because I want you to read Lucky Boy. I want everyone to read it. I wish there was a way to prop up our lawmakers in the machine from Brazil with their eyes peeled open and personally hold each page up to them so long that they have to read each page just because there is literally nothing else to do. I want it to be read to them by women who have spent years in detention centers. And when you read it, I want you to remember the sources I cited. That this is the tip of the iceberg and there is so much more. The story is fiction, but everything in this book has happened to someone who loves and has been loved, who has hopes and fears, who has sacrificed their own well-being to give their children a better chance than they had.

And before you smugly say this is a Republican problem, that we can solve this by voting back into power the boys and girls in blue. Lucky Boy is set in 2013, and exhaustively researched. Every one of Soli's trials takes place under a Democratic president. And so, also, do the majority of the examples I've cited. We are all guilty.

And good intentions? These scared him the most: people with good intentions tended not to question themselves. And people who didn't question themselves, in the scientific world and beyond, were the ones to watch out for. 

There were times when I thought I couldn't stand it any longer. That I needed to know that it didn't end tragically. These people have been through too much. There's a tendency in contemporary, serious fiction to end novels in the worst possible way. To burn it all down. The reason I think Sekaran is a great writer, and why this book will stick with me, is that she knows that things often do turn out in a way that is--if not what we wanted--then something that we can live with. I certainly could have come up with a happier ending, but Sekaran came up with the right ending, which is so much better.