The Nation, DECEMBER 16, 2020
The Most Vital Transition Is Ours
Reading revives historical memory in the flat Zoom time of pandemic.
By Peter Linebaugh
ANN ARBOR, MICH.—We’re at a historical pause far deeper than the
interregnum between Trump and Biden. Amid planetary warming, the
pandemic has forced us to slow down if not to stop in our tracks.
Locked in, I read a lot. So when JoAnn Wypijewski, author of a terrific
new book about gender, sex, and silences, What We Don’t Talk About When
We Talk About #MeToo, asked for a dispatch on the pandemic and Michigan
from my experience this year, it was books I had to write about.
First, about pandemics then.
At the end of the 1790s, Charles Brockden Brown wrote Arthur Mervyn; Or,
Memoirs of the Year 1793. It tells the tale of the yellow fever epidemic
in Philadelphia in the context of merchant capitalism. While the
“founding fathers” evacuated the diseased capital city, Absalom Jones
and Richard Allen, formerly enslaved men, nursed the sick and buried the
dead. They were “essential workers” of the day, the “heroes.” From their
deeds the AME church was formed, the chief good that resulted from that
year, unless you accept the installation of the Cult of Reason and the
revolutionary calendar in France. Otherwise in the USA that year, the
Fugitive Slave Act made it a crime to help a slave escape to freedom,
and cotton mill owners found the small hands of compliant children to be
profitable resources. Slave labor and child labor went together as a new
mode of production, industrial capitalism, spun bonds of global servitude.
On Michigan—so much in the news, so divorced from history—I asked a
friend (he’s in his 80s) what I should read. With the libraries closed,
he went to his garage and picked a couple of volumes. The first,
Michigan: A Guide to the Wolverine State, was compiled by workers of the
Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration during the
Depression. These writers, the book’s introduction says, were “forgotten
men—slightly frayed and sometimes hungry.” They had pencil stubs and
wastepaper to record what they learned. “Thinly clothed and with belts
pulled in,” they were without cars and “thumbed their way to their
rendezvous with their source materials.”
What is a Michigander? The worker/writers hitchhiking and writing with
pencil stubs in the mid-1930s couldn’t really tell. Michigan consists of
two peninsulas amid the Great Lakes and is without uniform statewide
geographic characteristics. If the WPA guide was only lightly touched by
history from below, it was bold in another radical sense, its
materialist periodization of history. This matters for us today.
The land was taken, stolen, over a cask of rum. “The dignity of the
savage,” write these frayed, forgotten men, “was shaken by the white
man’s most potent bargaining asset”—booze—and “the rape of the Michigan
forests was on.” The joists and rafters, the posts and beams of the big
Midwest cities were composed of Michigan lumber, from which timber
barons amassed vast fortunes. Meanwhile, wood lodged deep in the
cultural consciousness, evoked by the Mackinaw plaid shirt and the smell
of a fireplace. The economy based on wood went, and the state’s next
economy “for contribution, exploitation, and, perhaps, error was in its
minerals.” I like that choice of words, “perhaps, error.”
The material basis of capitalist dynamics, or its human and ecological
catastrophes called “investment/development,” was first in the fur
trade, then in timber, third in minerals, fourth in automobiles. We can
see aspects of these different property regimes stretching from the
communal life of indigenous folk in the 17th century to the lumber camps
for the expropriation of the forests of the 19th century to the boarding
houses of remote mining towns to the massive mechanics of the auto
assembly line in Dearborn, River Rouge, Detroit in the 20th century.
The working-class composition in each of these periods was different as
far as the work was concerned (trappers, lumberjacks, hard rock miners,
auto workers). It was also different as far as its reproduction was
concerned: In the 17th century bands of indigenous Ojibway and
Potawatomi; in the 18th century colonial settlers from New York and New
England; migrants from Scandinavia, Ireland, and southern and Slavic
Europe in the 19th century; African Americans in the Great Migration
from the South in the 20th. Just as one period was replaced rather than
destroyed by another, so it was with the composition of the
Michiganders. After these constellations of the labor market pass away,
their experience as culture and ideas may persist. What’s left over is
Hemingway’s subject.
My friend’s second recommendation was Ernest Hemingway’s The Fifth
Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories. During the summers of his first
20 years (1899–1920), this son of a Chicago doctor vacationed in
Michigan’s north woods. His Nick Adams stories, published in 1938, tell
about it. These coming-of-age tales were part of my own adolescent
reading back in the 1950s. One of them, “Up in Michigan,” I thought,
taught me about sex, though 66 years later the stories are a testament
to growing up with the privileges and silences of a white man during
successive recompositions of capitalist relations. Prison, the hobo
jungle, the woods, the prize ring, are the locations where lost,
wandering, traumatized people meet in transition times.
In “The Light of the World,” a couple of guys thrown out of a bar go
down to the train station waiting room, “five whores waiting for the
train to come in, and six white men and four Indians.” Two of the women
argue about who slept with the champion African American boxer Jack
Johnson. “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” contrasts views on private
property of white man and Ojibway:
“Well, Doc,” [the Ojibway hired hand] said, “that’s a nice lot of timber
you’ve stolen.”
“Don’t talk that way, Dick,” the doctor said. “It’s driftwood.”
Nick Adams learns a way of love, and why not to kill a rival, from an
Ojibway woman. His neighbors called her “skunk.” Hemingway’s style works
by what the characters don’t talk about. The woman’s name is Prudence
Mitchell. She breaks his heart. Suddenly, the famous declarative
reticence of the prose bursts with seeds of possibility. In the last
story, “Fathers and Sons,” he writes:
Could you say she did first what no one has ever done better and mention
plump brown legs, flat belly, hard little breasts, well holding arms,
quick searching tongue, the flat eyes, the good taste of mouth, then
uncomfortably, tightly, sweetly, moistly, lovely, tightly, achingly,
fully, finally, unendingly, never-endingly, never-to-endingly, suddenly
ended, the great bird flown like an owl in the twilight, only it was
daylight in the woods and hemlock needles stuck against your belly. So
that when you go in a place where Indians have lived you smell them gone
and all the empty pain killer bottles and the flies that buzz do not
kill the sweetgrass smell, the smoke smell and that other like a fresh
cased marten skin.
The cascade of adverbs falls into a disappearing world. The tragedy of
this intersectional intercourse was, to express it in the lazy slang of
the present, that it was not sustainable, not transparent, not
resilient. But pay attention to what he says.
Skunk, marten, beaver, wolverine: These are creatures from that first
period of Michigan history, that early phase. Even now, they’re not
quite finished off. Anishinabekwe botanist and writer Robin Wall
Kimmerer explains the fragrance of sweetgrass in her scientific and
spiritual book, Braiding Sweetgrass:
Its scientific name is Hierochloe odorata, meaning the fragrant, holy
grass. In our language it is called wiingaashk, the sweet-smelling hair
of Mother Earth. Breathe it in and you start to remember things you
didn’t know you’d forgotten.
Yes, that would be the commons. The earth to share, with delight, not
ravage yet again in the sequence of error: That is what Hemingway’s
love-making was trying to get at. Talk about “what we don’t talk about”!
Hemingway had a geological reference for orgasm, “the earth moves.”
Actually, he violates the known laws of physics when he writes, “time
having stopped and he felt the earth move…” You find that in For Whom
the Bell Tolls, his novel of “premature anti-Fascism,” as he’d later
say. In adolescent insecurity I learned from the mystery of such phrases
and later learned to mock them.
As yet another catastrophe looms, a new era is laboring to birth some
world that might avert it. This is the vital interregnum. A couple musty
treasures from a friend’s garage spark remembrance in the flat Zoom time
of pandemic. What new composition of our “we” can make the earth move?
We start by talking it. The soulful descendants of Richard Allen,
Absalom Jones, Prudence Mitchell, and those forgotten, “with belts
pulled in,” have something to say.
Scenes From a Pandemic is a collaboration between The Nation and
Kopkind, a living memorial to radical journalist Andrew Kopkind, who
from 1982–94 was the magazine’s chief political writer and analyst. This
series of dispatches from Kopkind’s far-flung network of participants,
advisers, guests, and friends is edited by Nation contributor and
Kopkind program director JoAnn Wypijewski, and appears weekly on
thenation.com and kopkind.org.
Peter Linebaugh, a historian, is the author, most recently of Red Round
Globe Hot Burning: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons & Closure, of
Love & Terror, of Race & Class, and of Kate & Ned Despard (University of
California Press).
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