Thrust: A Novel

(Shall I be jealous of this David?)

Ethnography 2

Most of us came from Guangdong Province. The poverty in Taishan and Xinhui devastated entire families, whole villages. Starvation and disease in waves. Famine. The civil unrest threaded like an electrical current into villages and crops and families and bodies. We were dying. The people in adjacent villages, neighbors for generations, developed new animosities, sudden distrust. When we got on boats to California, or found work cutting sugar-cane in Cuba or mining guano in Peru, we were saving our own lives. When you watch mothers without enough milk in their bodies to feed their own babies, when you see children of your own or your brother’s or your neighbors’ with arms so thin that they seem as if they might snap, when your sisters and brothers and husbands and wives and parents die in front of you wearing more bone than flesh, you’ll get on a boat — any boat — that holds out the possibility of saving them.

Some of us started on the West Coast and worked all the way out to the East Coast. We were paid twenty-five dollars a day for a six-day workweek. And a meager increase if you agreed to work the tunnels. All our work was done by hand. We opened earth and we cracked rock and we laid track. We cleared roads by moving mud and rocks and dirt and snow. We forged iron. And when something needed to be blown up, we handled the explosives. The best money went to those of us willing to be lowered on ropes to plant explosives in tunnels or into the sides of rock walls, holding on to hope — Was it hope? Was it something else? — that we’d be lifted back up before the blast. When we drilled those holes into the mountains, into the gullet of a canyon — when we dangled from precipices in baskets — I don’t know why we ever believed we would not explode along with those rock walls.

Maybe, sometimes, death isn’t death anymore. We learned the difference between being no one in Guangdong and being the raw work force in a country building everything in sight toward the end of creating money. We saw those white workers — mostly Irish — and the money they made: nearly double our take. We saw the money the Chinese accountants made. We saw the money the railroad owners made. We laid their tracks. We created transcontinental trade. But we created no profit of our own.

Still, the story of money got inside us.

Rope

Cruces 3

She slept in pieces.

Before we assembled her, she slept in 350 different pieces of body packed in 214 crates. We thought about those pieces a lot as she slept on the water; we dreamed of her body pieces and felt our own limbs differently.

When she finally arrived, in the belly of a boat, each piece of her was given a number. The pieces were lined up according to the creator’s numerical system, where the pieces needed to fit together. Each piece had rows of holes that needed to be fitted — riveted.

All of this got me thinking. Bodies in the belly of a boat. Packed together like freight or animals, assigned a numerical value.

Once, at a pub back on the city side of the water, Endora cornered me to talk about how I had been sleeping. “You make moaning noises,” she said. “And sometimes you say words… or what I think are words. Do you suffer when you sleep? Does it stay with you when you wake?”

I don’t know how to talk about what it means to be haunted by other bodies, by family stories, by ancestral sorrow. By other experiences from the past. Maybe all of us carry the voices and bodies of everyone who has come before since the dawn of time. Maybe some of us carry them differently. The story of all those bodies my one body carries did not begin, nor will it end, in the belly of a boat meant to make meat of me. I won’t let it. But the weight of the suffering threads through me and beyond.

My body carries crisscrossing narratives from the past, the present, and whatever uncertain future we will face. One such story was that of Henry Moss, a man of African descent who was born in America. Moss made a show of his depigmentation, the story goes; he made a living from it. People were said to be mesmerized by his skin. There are other such stories, of men and women who were used as entertainment for freak shows and circuses: an enigma of black and white confounding the audience after the brutality and bloodshed of the war. Who would we become? Maybe the drunk man on the Frisia meant to make meat of me. Another story concerned a white man who took pity on a child originally from Saint Vincent, a child with vitiligo. The white man loved the orphan boy, the story said, and gave him a home. When the boy died young, the man was so distraught that he buried the boy in a plot he’d secured for himself, having no other children. When the man died, he was entombed with this boy. I don’t know if that was love or something else.