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A Circle, Broken

In a poignant family memoir, veteran journalist Mark Whitaker describes his long road to truth and reconciliation with his parents, a biracial couple brought together by a shared faith and torn apart by their separate frailties.



There is a saying among reporters: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” Few have taken this advice as literally as Mark Whitaker has done in My Long Trip Home. In Whitaker’s poignant family memoir, the veteran CNN journalist and first African American to lead a national news magazine details his journey to discover the unspoken truths, hidden motivations, and deep-rooted hurts that shadowed his upbringing and defined his tortured relationship with his father.

On a superficial level, My Long Trip Home will remind some readers of Barack Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father. Whitaker was born in 1957 to an interracial couple. His mother, Jeanne Theis, was a white, tenured professor at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania; his father, Cleophaus Sylvester “Syl” Whitaker Jr., was the first black student admitted to the doctoral program in political science at Princeton University.

Even as a child, Whitaker was the “spitting image” of his father, he writes. Both shared the same worry lines in their foreheads that creased in moments of seriousness and reflection. “I think Mark, like Syl, has a fundamentally happy and open temperament,” his mother wrote in a letter, “which will probably be quite resistant to sobering influences. We trust he won’t have to meet anything too sobering.”

Unfortunately, Whitaker’s life was more difficult than his mother had hoped. His parents divorced when he was five, and his mother struggled as a single parent to raise him and his younger brother, Paul. He and his father had a tenuous and sporadic relationship, further complicated by Syl’s emerging battle with alcoholism.

To ferret out the complex dynamics of his family’s history, Whitaker relies on the investigative reporting techniques he learned from his three decades of experience as a journalist. Whitaker currently serves as the executive vice president and managing editor of CNN Worldwide. He formerly worked as a reporter and editor at Newsweek and as the Washington bureau chief for NBC News. Whitaker knows how to work a story. Although here he is investigating his own personal history, he approaches it in the same manner he would for any other journalistic assignment: carefully, candidly, and with reasoned prose.

Some of the details, he knew. He knew that his mother was born in Cameroon, Africa, to Protestant missionaries, and grew up in France. He knew his father was born in Pittsburgh, the only son of once-prosperous business owners. Because Syl had rarely mentioned his own father when his boys were growing up, Whitaker believed there had been some kind of friction between the two. He knew that his parents met at Swarthmore, where Jeanne was a professor and Syl was a student. He knew his parents’ marriage as an interracial couple was a brave move in the 1950s, when miscegenation laws remained in effect in many states. He knew his father was a luminary in the field of African studies. And he knew his mother suffered from bouts of depression after his parents’ six-year marriage ended.

Yet, all of this was superficial knowledge. It didn’t get Whitaker very far when he decided he wanted to write a memoir about his father. He needed to delve deeper into the family’s past. “I discovered,” he writes, “that the truth was far more revealing than what I thought I knew and that the story wasn’t just about him, it was about all of us.”

Whitaker began by interviewing family, friends, and colleagues of his parents. He gathered letters, newspaper clippings, diaries, and photographs. He examined his parents’ voluminous scholarly works. And, much to his amazement, he uncovered an illuminating family relic: Cleophaus Sylvester Whitaker Sr.’s autobiography, an eleven-page document crafted in 1973.

In it, Whitaker’s grandfather recounts his life and origins. He was the son of a slave who was “set loose from the plantation” when the Civil War ended. In 1916, at the age of eighteen, Cleophaus headed north from Kansas as part of the Great Migration, a movement of millions of blacks from the Jim Crow South to the urban North, in search of factory jobs and less hostile segregation. He married and fathered three daughters, but his first wife died of tuberculosis. He later remarried and had a son, Syl.

The autobiography was most telling in what it did not mention — the shattered relationship between Cleophaus and his son. Whitaker eventually deduced that Cleophaus physically and psychologically abused Syl. The revelation cleared up a “mistaken assumption” he had about his father, Whitaker writes:

I always thought my father had inherited all of his magnetism from his mother, [a “light-skinned beauty” with an “elegant … and entertaining way of speaking”] …. I had never considered the impact my father’s father had on his life … and for the first time I learned what a force of nature C.S. Whitaker Sr. was in his own right.

Their fierce bickering began in Syl’s teens when he asked his family to stop calling him by his “demeaning” nickname, “Junior.” He insisted upon “Syl,” a shortened version of his middle name. It took months for “Syl” to stick, but his father persisted in calling Syl by his old nickname “out of prideful pique.” Cleophaus’s flagrant philandering strained their relationship even more. Syl saw the anguish his father’s infidelity exacted on his mother, and he became her “champion.” Thereafter, a “bitter chill fell over their relationship.”

It was around this time that Syl was introduced to Quakerism by his Baptist bible school teacher, who encouraged Syl to attend a summer Quaker work camp in Ithaca, New York. The experience changed his life. Syl embraced the religion’s “teachings about simplicity and pacifism and the subtle power of silent prayer, so different from the raucous call-and response of the black church services he was used to.” When it came time to contemplate college, members of the American Friends Service Committee advised Syl to attend Swarthmore, a prestigious liberal arts college founded by nineteenth-century Quaker reformers outside Philadelphia.

Love and Liberation

Mark Whitaker. Pete Williams

In the years before World War II, Jeanne Theis’s family lived in the Protestant village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in central France. Edouard Theis, Whitaker’s grandfather, was the parish’s assistant pastor. After France signed an armistice with Nazi Germany in 1940, Theis learned that the Nazis had banned higher education for girls in the occupied countries. Theis, a progressive thinker committed to a philosophy of “nonviolence and a just social and international order,” wanted his daughters educated. He heard that famed American philanthropist Martha Sharp, who had helped Jewish refugees escape Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, was organizing a boat trip from Europe to New York for children who had American connections. Whitaker’s grandmother was a U.S. citizen, which meant the family could obtain State Department visas. Six of the eight Theis girls were among the twenty-seven refugees that Sharp brought to America several months later. All of the sisters except for fourteen-year-old Jeanne stayed with relatives in Ohio. Jeanne went to live with the Enders family, fellow Protestant missionaries who lived in Swarthmore.

In 1943, Vichy authorities arrested Theis and two of his colleagues for hiding thousands of Jewish refugees in Le Chambon and guiding them to safer locales. The three men were briefly held in an internment camp, but shortly after German forces surrendered to the Russians at Stalingrad, they were inexplicably released. Theis fled underground and joined a resistance group that helped Jews escape into Switzerland. It wasn’t until 1945, when Theis traveled to Swarthmore on a speaking tour, that Jeanne learned of her beloved father’s awe-inspiring valor during the war.

Jeanne’s ardent interest in Syl developed during his junior year at Swarthmore. A French instructor, Jeanne organized a production in the original French of a Jean Giraudoux play about Captain Cook’s arrival in the tropics. The cast needed someone to play the tribal leader, and one person who had the “perfect look for the part” came to mind: Syl Whitaker, one of the few black students at Swarthmore. Syl did not speak French, though. Jeanne became Syl’s coach, and they trained together until he could master a “convincing accent.” During their rehearsals, Jeanne couldn’t help noticing how handsome Syl was, and Syl picked up on Jeanne’s gestures and began “wooing” her.

They started dating secretly, fearful of the fallout within the Swarthmore community if their relationship were exposed. Syl soon “grasped that he had started something that could only be made respectable in the eyes of the college and the broader society of mid-1950s America by giving it the sanctity of an engagement.” Whether or not the twenty-year-old was prepared for a serious commitment, it came barreling at him.

For Jeanne, falling in love with Syl was an “intellectual process” as well as a physical one. Whitaker explains:

She fell in love with the idea of him. He was handsome in a way that … appealed to her, perhaps because she had spent her early childhood in Africa. She respected his bravery in coming to a virtually all-white school like Swarthmore and good-naturedly confronting the racism he encountered in his life. And she was moved that he took his faith so seriously, that coming from such different backgrounds they shared the same commitment to battling the world’s evils by turning the other cheek rather than demanding an eye for an eye.

Syl and Jeanne married in 1956. Jeanne gave birth to Mark, and two years later, Paul. In 1961, the Whitakers moved to Princeton after Syl was offered a teaching-assistant position there. Jeanne gave up her tenured position at Swarthmore and found an unfulfilling, temporary teaching job at Princeton.

The move undermined the family’s structure, and cracks began to show in the Whitakers’ marriage. Much to her chagrin, Jeanne learned how unconventional Princeton was compared to the sedate haven of Swarthmore. The faculty held a “liberated” mindset that rejected the “fuddy-duddy bourgeois morality of early 1960s America.” Syl began drinking often and heavily. He also started cheating on Jeanne and asked her for an open marriage. Heartbroken, confused, and humiliated, Jeanne wondered how Syl could so easily scuttle his marriage vows and abandon their Quaker values.

The following year, UCLA offered Syl a professorship. Thinking that new surroundings in California might patch-up their troubled marriage, Jeanne accompanied Syl and tried to make a happy home life for Mark and Paul. Within a year, the couple divorced.

Sins of the Father

Jeanne retained custody after the divorce, yet “her mind was a horror chamber of regret and self-recrimination,” Whitaker writes. Money was scarce, forcing the family to live a peripatetic lifestyle as Jeanne switched from job to job in pursuit of a lucrative teaching position. Stability came into their lives in 1964, when Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, hired her as an assistant professor.

His father’s visits were intermittent, and oftentimes years would lapse before Syl reappeared in Whitaker’s life. When father and son were together, their arguments and Syl’s immobilizing drunkenness frequently cut the outings short. Syl’s life and career also took on a nomadic routine. Whitaker witnessed his father reach the height of academe when he was asked to return to Princeton to start its first African American studies program and become a fellow at its Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs — only to lose that position, and several more prestigious professorships, because of his erratic behavior. By deftly relating the hapless tumbles that ruined Syl’s reputation as “an exciting new voice” in the field, Whitaker offers an empathetic portrait of his father as a battered and tragic figure.

Meanwhile, the son spent his early life in a “quiet rage.” Whitaker’s sense of abandonment intensified his anger and destabilized his self-esteem. He began to eat compulsively; by the time he entered junior high school, he weighed over 200 pounds. His relationship with his brother deteriorated, leading to physically violent confrontations. Whitaker examines his difficult passage from boyhood to adulthood to fatherhood, caught between the polar extremes of his parents’ moral weaknesses: Jeanne’s “formidable shield of diffidence,” which locked her in a self-made shelter of passivity, and Syl’s self-destructiveness, a “life [that] had come to resemble his father’s more than he ever wanted to contemplate.”

In Whitaker’s case, his eventual reconciliation with his family began in high school. As a student at George School, a Quaker academy in Pennsylvania, Whitaker made strides in overcoming his anger and pondering differing ideas about who he was. Interestingly, Whitaker’s progress toward self-knowledge took shape with Syl’s influence, not in spite of it:

One reason I was glad to see my father was that at George School, for the first time in my life, I was reflecting on my racial identity. Until then, I had spent most of my life in small college towns where there were hardly any black people of my age, or any age. During our visits to Pittsburgh, I connected with that part of my heritage, but apart from that I knew only the virtually all-white environments of Norton, and Swarthmore, and Grenoble [France]. Now at George School, I was reading Native Son by Richard Wright, and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, with their bracing portraits of what it was like to be black in places like the South Side of Chicago and Harlem. Although written in a previous generation, they raised powerful questions about whether any black American, of any shade or upbringing, could be untouched by racism, conscious or unconscious.

When I asked my father what he thought, [he said]: “I’ve been wondering how long it would take for you to ask me that …. You won’t believe this, but some of your ancestors looked even less black than you do … and could pass for white. But that doesn’t matter as far as American society is concerned. Mixed-race, light skin, we’re all black. But I want you to know that it will be up to you to decide how you want to be black. That will always be your choice.”

Whitaker’s story becomes less engaging in the latter portion of the book, but he has insightful observations to make about the maturing relationship between Jeanne and her sons. In the 1980s, his younger brother Paul found college life anxiety-provoking. He planned to move to San Francisco to start a new life. Their mother disapproved. Whitaker favored the plan:

When my mother told me how upset she was about the idea of Paul traveling alone to San Francisco, I took his side. At the time, I had a theory about the roles that she had unconsciously assigned the two of us. I was supposed to be the successful son who went forth into the world and earned her reflected glory, while Paul would be the helpless one who was so dependent on her that he would never venture far from home. The differences in the way she treated us bothered me on both of our accounts, and now I found myself rooting for him to escape her fretful orbit.

Paul ended up moving to San Francisco. Eventually, he finished college, earned a doctorate, and built a successful psychology practice in San Diego.

The older brother, too, found his way. In his rise from a humble Newsweek intern to its first African American editor, who oversaw the magazine’s coverage of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the September 11 terrorist attacks, the prisoner abuse at Guantánamo Bay, and the flawed intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq, Whitaker outshone his father’s tragic career. As a loving husband and father, he succeeded in breaking the vicious circle of dysfunctional family anger created by both his father and paternal grandfather. As a forgiving son, he forged a new bond with his mother, free of resentment and misunderstandings, and shed the bitterness he felt toward his father, who died in 2008.

Going to the heart of his remarkable memoir, Whitaker alludes to a French proverb, “Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner” — “To understand all is to forgive all.” “That’s the adage we all know,” Whitaker writes. “Yet if I learned anything from my journey, it’s that sometimes it has to happen the other way around.”

Correction, April 10, 2012: An earlier version of the article implied that the saying, “To understand all is to forgive all,” was invented by Leo Tolstoy. It is actually a French proverb that Tolstoy quoted. The text has been updated to reflect this.

Amy O’Loughlin is a freelance writer and book reviewer whose work has appeared in American History, World War II, ForeWord Reviews, USARiseUp, and other publications. She blogs at Off the Bookshelf.

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"Richard plays with his great-granddaughter, Lemuel.
Cumming, Georgia
Commentary

Learned at My Father’s Feet

I took care of my father near the end of his life, as dementia slowly unraveled the strong and proud man I had known. His memories faded, his body failed him — and yet his heart was full of grace.

By Kae Dickson
The writer's father, Richard Dawsey, playing with his great-granddaughter, Lemuel.

“Daddy, can I help you?”

“Oh, Sugar, I just can’t seem to get my fingers to cooperate.”

“That’s okay. Here, I can do this.” I buttoned his shirt. “There. All set.”

He smiled and patted me on the shoulder. “What would I do without you?”

I heard that loving question hundreds of times. “Oh, you’d do fine,” I would say, but we both knew differently.

“Have you got anything sweet?”

“You know I do. I made chocolate pudding, and you can have these oatmeal cookies if you want.”

“That sounds good.”

“Daddy, how big do you think those birds are?”

We had been watching huge birds, probably American black vultures or the more common turkey vultures, whose wingspan can measure six feet or more, soaring above the trees behind our house. Daddy was always my go-to expert on birds. Before he retired, my father had worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He had loved and studied birds for years.

“I don’t know, Shug.” He smiled wanly. It hurt him not to be able to recall what he had once known so well.

“What do you think? Eight feet?” I asked, trying to keep the conversation going.

“Probably. You know they can soar almost indefinitely like that, as long as the air currents are right.”

Dawsey's portrait from the U.S. Army Air Corps, 1942.

“How do they do that?”

He explained that wherever there are people or animals, there is increased heat. Warmer air rises and creates the air flow that birds use for lift. They can manipulate their height just by lifting one wing or the other to catch the drift of the warm air. “They can go as far as fifteen miles or more without ever flapping their wings,” he added. “They’re fabulous creatures.”

I had witnessed many times how the memories my father thought he had lost would come back to him when tickled with the right questions. This is how we spent our breakfast and lunch every day, looking out on the wonderful habitat that was our backyard and talking about God’s creatures. Daddy was a fabulous storyteller, but these days he often fell into the quicksand of failing memory and depression. I worked hard to bring him back to the surface during these times.

“I hope that tree never gets cut down,” I said of the tallest tulip poplar, which was the birds’ favorite perch.

“That would be a shame,” said Daddy quietly.

I got up and cleared the table, and he shuffled off to fall asleep in his chair in front of the television, where he would stay till I called him to supper.

Such was our life now. I fixed breakfast, sat with Daddy at the breakfast table for two hours or so, cleaned up, prepared lunch, sat at the same table for another two hours, cleaned up, and did it a third time for supper in the evening.

My father was a dementia patient. Strong as an ox, he had the heart of a teddy bear. He smiled when you entered the room and called everyone “Shug,” or more formally, “Sugar.” At some point, what had been my childhood nickname became a generic moniker for the family members and caretakers whose names would escape him.

Daddy was one of the 20 to 40 percent of dementia patients who fall outside the more common box of Alzheimer’s. In my father’s case, we knew the origin of his brain disease. Throughout his life, he had experienced several severe brain traumas.

At Georgia Tech, he played college football at a time when the only head protection was a thin leather helmet. He experienced countless blows to the head, including multiple concussions. Then, in 1939, he had an automobile accident — a head-on collision that should have killed him, but left him in a coma for months. When he finally regained consciousness, he was unable to walk, sit, or stand. His spinal cord was intact, but his brain was so badly bruised that messages intended for his extremities were unable to arrive there.

Released from the hospital with a hopeless prognosis, my father was determined to prove the doctors wrong. Every morning, he was parked under a tree in his wheelchair. Every morning, he threw himself out of the chair onto the ground. Over the next weeks and months he used the tree to pull himself up to first a crawling position, then to standing. He would move away from the tree — first inches, then feet — until he fell to the ground. He would then drag himself back to the tree and do it again and again and again. A man of faith, he never lost hope that he would walk again.

Decades later, my father ran, swam, and played tennis without even a limp.

Lemuel and Richard Dawsey, married in Atlanta, 1945.

My mother was a nurse and was assigned to care for Daddy when he was injured. They fell in love and continued to correspond after he left the hospital. When World War II broke out, she joined the U.S. Army Nurse Corps. My father enlisted in the Army Air Corps. While serving in England, he suffered another head injury when he fell off the wing of an airplane onto the concrete runway.

Daddy recovered again. In 1945, my father and mother were married.

Growing up, I heard the story of “the wreck” many times, but the man I knew was completely whole. He taught me tennis, made me go to church, and was a strict disciplinarian. In all ways, he seemed normal.

Daddy adored my mother. I never knew him to leave the house or come home without kissing her, even if he was just walking to the corner mailbox. There was no doubt that family was the most important thing to both of them.

In 1981, Daddy was involved in another head-on collision. His car landed nose down in a creek bed, and the impact threw his head into the steering wheel, crushing his face. This accident left him with hydrocephalus — swelling and fluid in the brain. A doctor told him that his cumulative head traumas had added ten years to his age.

My father never fully recovered. His personality did not change, but his memory became worse and worse.

The symptoms at first were not so noticeable, and he lived the next ten years in happy retirement. Then my mother died in 1991, and his decline accelerated. My mother had been his world, and without her, life lost its purpose.

It became more and more obvious that my father should not be living alone. My husband Paul and I built a new house and asked him to move in with us.

Daddy had lived in the same home for four decades. Memories of his long, loving marriage reigned in every room. He liked to mow the grass around the flower beds, which had been my mother’s passion. I had to take all this away from him, and he was resistant to the end.

Finally, Daddy moved in. My daughter Julie and her two-year-old daughter were living with us as well, which made ours a four-generation household. My granddaughter called him “Greatdaddy.”

My life revolved around Daddy. After a year and a half, I went to work part-time, but a string of small accidents made me uneasy about leaving him alone. My daughter quit her job and became his caretaker for a year. I left my job so that I could be with him all the time and Julie could go back to work. We had a woman come in three times a week to bathe him, because that was the one thing that neither my daughter nor I could do.

I did learn to take him into the men’s bathroom when we were out, because I had no choice. It was not fun.

He was hospitalized several times in the last years of his life. After he fell trying to get to the bathroom in his hospital room, I stayed there with him all the time, once for three weeks when he had very severe pneumonia. His doctor admitted later that he was surprised my father survived. I never really minded these hospital stays because we had extensive opportunities to hold hands and laugh at silly old sitcoms like The Golden Girls. He wanted me there, and I needed to be there as well, for my own peace of mind.

Dawsey celebrates his last birthday, at ninety-two.

When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, we moved him to an assisted living facility. When I told him about my disease, he said only, “I’m sorry, Shug.” I thought he didn’t understand the severity of what I had told him, but every time I came to see him, the first thing he would say would be, “Are you doing okay?” I think he knew.

I had wanted to bring him home again when I was strong enough, but I didn’t have that chance. A few months after I finished my treatments, he made the final trip home to be with God. He was ninety-two.

While I felt some relief that his suffering was over — he had not been happy for a long time and was now together with my mother — my grief was almost unbearable. I had now lost both my parents, and I will never get over the loss.

And yet I am grateful that I had the chance to take care of my father near the end of his life. His illness never took away his decency — his love of his family, and his deep faith in God. He accepted his condition, and the patience and courage he showed throughout taught me a lot. In the time left to me with my children and grandchildren, I pray I can live my life, and face my death, with the grace learned at my father’s feet.

An Atlanta native, Kae Dickson lives in Cumming with her husband, three dogs, and a cat. Together they have five daughters and four grandchildren. Her love of God, family, and the South is reflected in her poetry, essays, and short stories.

To watch a 2000 Georgia Tech alumni interview with Kae Dickson’s father, James Richard Dawsey, click here.

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Freed, but Scarred

Best of In The Fray 2012. When he is feeling overwhelmed, Fernando Bermudez lies down in his son’s bedroom. After spending eighteen years in prison for a murder he did not commit, he finds the confined space soothing. For exonerated prisoners like Bermudez, the struggle to rebuild their lives goes on, long after the reporters and cameras are gone.

By Francesca Crozier-Fitzgerald
Photos by Dana Ullman
Fernando Bermudez at his home in Danbury, Connecticut.

It was dark when Fernando Bermudez stepped off the Metro-North commuter train in Connecticut. He had spent a long day in New York visiting friends and family. As he walked through the parking lot of the Danbury train station, Bermudez looked around with growing horror. He didn’t recognize the street names. The storefronts and intersections were foreign to him.

He was lost and confused, with no idea where to go, sweating and growing more anxious each minute.

It was not because Bermudez had gotten off at the wrong stop. He was less than ten minutes from home. He had walked home from this very train station many times. But tonight he couldn’t remember the way.

Several months earlier, Bermudez had been released from prison after serving eighteen years for a murder he did not commit. Even now, after being exonerated and released, walking alone down the street terrified him. Prison had conditioned him to believe that his freedom did not belong to him.

Half an hour passed. Bermudez was panicking. But he didn’t want to stop a car on the street and ask for help; people might think something was suspicious and call the cops. He was afraid to ask a store clerk for directions; they would be skeptical about why he was walking aimlessly around downtown Danbury.

Finally, Bermudez called his wife, Crystal. He broke down. Here he was, a forty-year-old man, helpless in a place where he had lived for months. Crystal knew he couldn’t have been more than ten blocks away, but he wasn’t able to tell her where he was.

After an hour of being lost in his own city, Bermudez reached a recognizable street sign. His wife walked him home over the phone.

Before he went to prison, Bermudez was a different kind of man. Tall, with amber eyes and a striking smile, he had an easy confidence. Growing up in the Bronx, he was chased by girls, revered by peers, and doted on by his mother. When he was twenty-one, he enrolled in Bronx Community College to study medicine.

In August 1991, one month before he would have started class, detectives arrived at Bermudez’s door. They arrested him for the murder of a boy he’d never met, killed at a nightclub he’d never been to. Bermudez was convicted and sentenced to twenty-three years to life.

Doubts about his conviction remained. Five of the witnesses to the shooting of sixteen-year-old Raymond Blount later recanted their testimony, saying in sworn affidavits that they had been pressured by the police and prosecutors to identify Bermudez as the shooter. After ten failed attempts to overturn his conviction, Bermudez’s lawyers finally succeeded in 2009. In his decision, Justice John Cataldo wrote that there was “no credible evidence” connecting Bermudez to the murder. He was a free man.

The day he walked out of Sing Sing prison, Bermudez was ecstatic. “What was going through my body was an exorbitant amount of palpitations,” he told a New York Times reporter, “joy and happiness to a level that I’ve never known before in my life.”

But Bermudez and his wife Crystal did not anticipate just how hard his transition from prison to ordinary life would be. Like many families of exonerated prisoners, they figured the worst was over. “You had a lot of lawyers who were excited he’s out, you have family members that were excited that he’s out,” Crystal says. “Everyone thinks the problem is over.

“No, the problem’s not over. It just got started.”

Making Up for Lost Years

Fernandoz Bermudez plays with his ten-year-old daughter Carissa and six-year-old son Fernando after picking them up from school.

Since 1989, 289 people have been exonerated using DNA evidence. (Many more have had their convictions overturned through other means.) Their average length of incarceration is thirteen years. These years have been lost. Exonerees are released, but prison has left them incapacitated.

Even getting compensated for the state’s mistake in imprisoning them is far from certain. A report by the Innocence Project, a New York-based legal clinic that exonerates wrongfully convicted individuals through the use of DNA evidence, notes that 40 percent of DNA exonerees do not receive any compensation. Depending on their state, exonerees may have to sue, and the many legal hurdles to overcome, such as proving that intentional government misconduct landed them in prison, mean that only 28 percent of DNA exonerees have won lawsuits.

Even in the twenty-seven states that have enacted laws to offer financial assistance to exonerated prisoners, the process can drag on for years, and the amount of compensation varies wildly — from a lump sum of $20,000, regardless of the time spent in prison, in New Hampshire, to $80,000 per year of imprisonment in Texas. (Under New York’s law, a court decides the amount of compensation on an individual basis.) Only five states routinely give awards that match or exceed the federal standard of up to $50,000 per year incarcerated, and only ten states offer social services targeted at exonerees.

Yet the need is great. “Nobody’s situation is the same,” says Karen Wolff, a social worker at the Innocence Project. “Each exoneree is different. Each exoneree’s needs are different, each exoneree’s state is different, each exoneree’s family situation is different …. So it’s very difficult to figure out what a fix is.”

Nonprofits have tried to compensate for the lack of government help. The Life After Exoneration Program, a national organization, focuses on advocacy and outreach to help exonerees after their convictions have been overturned. Similar groups scattered across the country include Life After Innocence in Chicago, Resurrection After Exoneration in New Orleans, and the Wisconsin Exoneree Network. Exonerees can turn to caseworkers at organizations like these for help with finding jobs, housing, and health care, applying to schools, obtaining driver’s licenses and insurance, and setting up bank accounts.

But the few programs that do exist to help exonerated prisoners tend to be understaffed and underfunded. The Life After Exoneration Program, for instance, had to start turning away clients in 2008, as their funding, which came solely from individual contributions, was too low to support the large pool of exonerees seeking help. “Funding just became impossible,“ says Dr. Lola Vollen, founder of the program. While the program still offers emergency financial help and advises the groups treating exonerees, it no longer provides social services, she says.

Meanwhile, many exonerees are struggling to rebuild their lives. In 2005, the Life After Exoneration Program surveyed sixty exonerees around the country. About half found it difficult to afford basic living needs such as food and housing. Twenty-five percent were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and two-thirds were not financially independent.

Exonerated prisoners cope with the trauma of not only their years in prison but also their abrupt release into a changed world. In telling their stories, I decided not to describe their time incarcerated — a continued source of pain for them, even years later — but instead focused on their reintegration. Like Bermudez, many of these men and women at first underestimate the difficulties they will face adjusting to their newfound freedom, and they are slow to seek help. Sometimes their symptoms appear in the weeks right after their release. Sometimes they show up after months or years.

A Bittersweet Homecoming

Jeffrey Deskovic in the Manhattan office of the Jeffrey Deskovic Foundation for Justice, which he established after his exoneration.

Jeffrey Deskovic remembers sitting in a courtroom in 1990, his mother’s arm around his back, his hands folded in prayer, as a jury read his verdict. The seventeen-year-old had been charged with the rape and murder of Angela Correa, a friend and classmate at their high school in New York’s Westchester County. Under police interrogation, he had falsely confessed to the crime.

The blood drained from his face as the jury pronounced him guilty. Deskovic was sentenced to fifteen years to life.

In 2006, Deskovic was exonerated, cleared by DNA evidence and the jailhouse confession of the real killer. On his last day in Sing Sing prison, Deskovic cleaned his four-by-four cell, packing up the belongings he had chosen to keep, giving away the rest to his fellow inmates when the guards looked away. He walked out of prison, his home for half his lifetime, with two bags holding everything he owned.

Sixteen years older, Deskovic had a long beard and mustache. The hair on his head had thinned.

Deskovic’s first night home was not what he had expected. As he talks about it, his eyes become glassy and he takes many long pauses. “I wish I could say that I came home to a huge party with all my relatives, and lots of food and lots of dancing,” he says. “But that would not be the truth.”

Home at last, Deskovic sat at a table with his mother, aunt, and cousin. This was their first real chance to talk, an opportunity to start renewing the relationships that had frayed over those years of incarceration. But no one had anything to say. Deskovic realized that he knew his fellow inmates better than he knew these people.

In the back of his mind, Deskovic heard a faint voice telling him, “You don’t belong here.” He stood up from the table and walked out to the backyard. “I had wanted to sit down and feel the air and not have someone tell me to go back in,” Deskovic recalls. He lay down on a bench and went to sleep. “And that was how I spent my first night.”

After several days, Deskovic had to leave his aunt’s home and find his own place. The initial elation of being out of prison had given way to the anxiety of being without a home, job, or car. Deskovic immediately applied for compensation from the state of New York, but there was a long wait. Meanwhile, the stress was getting to him. He felt he was going to have a breakdown. Desperate, he called the Life After Exoneration Program. He told them he needed therapy. The woman on the other end of the line informed him that they couldn’t help him. The program had stopped taking new cases.

Had Deskovic been an ex-convict, rather than an exoneree, he may have found it easier to get help, advocates say. For felons released on parole, state parole systems keep watch to ensure that their reentry into the outside world is smooth and efficient. Government grants go to nonprofits that assist ex-offenders, such as the Fortune Society, a New York-based social service and advocacy organization that helps former inmates find housing, job training, addiction counseling, and psychiatric services.

The availability of these programs for ex-convicts makes a difference in terms of reduced rates of recidivism and other positive outcomes, advocates for exonerated prisoners say, and they would like to see the same levels of government funding extended to their programs. Some reentry programs for former inmates cover exonerated inmates as well, but the wrongfully convicted need their own programs, Vollen argues. Her organization’s nationwide survey of exonerees found that exonerees did not want to be treated like ex-cons. “They wanted to be acknowledged for what their experience was,” Vollen says. “And they wanted services with people that were confident with dealing with the type of circumstances that they had.”

To pull himself out of his financial hole, Deskovic eventually turned to another program for exonerated prisoners: the Innocence Project’s Exoneration Fund, which assists exonerees in need of immediate income assistance upon release — which is most of them. The fund covers necessities such as food and utility bills, and provides a stipend to help pay for medical or psychological treatment. Currently, the fund is able to provide each exoneree with $10,000 to $15,000 during their first year after release, and a lifetime of counseling assistance. While he waited for the state of New York to compensate him for his wrongful conviction, Deskovic lived off this financial support.

A Stolen Identity

Kian Khatibi at Manhattan’s Dorian Gray Tap and Grill, where he works as a server and event promoter.

Yet private-sector efforts can only go so far in filling the gaping holes in the safety net for exonerated prisoners, advocates say. Karen Wolff of the Innocence Project argues that government could do more to meet the needs of people who were in jail for no fault of their own — for one thing, by offering them housing, health insurance, income assistance, and food stamps immediately upon release.

On an even more basic level, many exonerees leave prison without the kind of official paper trail they need to restart their lives in today’s society. “Some of that stuff can be done for them by the government right away, so they have it and they don’t have to wait months and months and months without, literally … an identity,” Wolff says. Yet because of bureaucratic carelessness, many exonerees end up unable to open a bank account right away, she adds, because they don’t have any identification other than their prison ID.

Some of them don’t even get that.

Kian Khatibi served nine years in prison for a near-fatal stabbing, framed by his brother, who later confessed to the crime. In 2008, Khatibi’s conviction was overturned and he was released from the Hudson Correctional Facility in upstate New York. Before they put him on the bus home, corrections officers stripped him of his prison photo ID. They told him that it was “state property.”

Back in his hometown in Westchester County, Khatibi visited the local welfare office. He explained his situation, but the staff there demanded some form of identification before they could help him. Khatibi went to the DMV to apply for a driver’s license, but he had no way of proving his identity there, either. All the other benefits and services he needed — Medicaid, bank accounts, credit cards — required a photo ID.

After his release, Khatibi spent weeks tracking down old files and painstakingly reconstructing his legal and financial identity. Meanwhile, he walked around with whatever cash he had in his pocket, storing it under his pillow at night. (One thing Khatibi didn’t have to worry about was housing: his sister let him sleep on her couch.)

The stress and frustration of the constant bureaucratic battles only aggravated Khatibi’s state of constant anxiety — the psychological scarring that had accumulated over almost a decade of being locked up. “Many people come out and say ‘I’m not angry,’ and this and that,” Khatibi says. “But there are certain days where the world is just overwhelming.”

Exonerated prisoners like him “pretty much need therapy,” he adds — “just like people that are coming back from war.”

Khatibi’s caseworker at the welfare office suggested a place to get counseling. It quickly became obvious that group counseling wouldn’t work in his case — how many other people know what it’s like to be wrongfully convicted? — and so Khatibi started seeing a therapist individually.

In therapy, Khatibi learned that he was struggling not only with post-traumatic stress disorder from his prison experience, but also with resentment toward relatives for not supporting him during his incarceration. “We agreed that he had this inner core of anger that he needed to extinguish … to be able to gain some balance in his life,” says Dr. Ross Fishman, his therapist.

Khatibi also needed to shake off his “prison mentality.” Upstate in Hudson, he had developed a hypersensitive survival instinct, which pushed him to react to any perceived danger with an immediate attack. In prison, if someone looked at you the wrong way, the expected response was to assert your dominance — “Let’s settle this” — or face the grim consequences of being perceived as weak. This mentality made perfect sense in the prison courtyard, but it was now making Khatibi impatient and agitated in harmless, everyday situations. One day, he was in a neighborhood deli when the man behind the counter looked at him in a way he didn’t like or trust. It was actually an innocent look, but it triggered an aggressive response from Khatibi. “Is there a problem?” he barked. The store clerk, alarmed, said nothing.

Incidents like this one pushed Khatibi to seek anger management counseling. With his therapist’s help, Khatibi has made substantial progress over the past four years. He graduated from New York University in 2010 with a bachelor’s degree in communications. He is currently working toward a law degree at Yeshiva University.

These days Khatibi seems optimistic and at peace with himself, his outward appearance betraying no sign of his incarceration. On a recent visit to his home, a single-bedroom apartment filled with books in the East Village, Khatibi is dressed smartly in jeans and a collared polo shirt. His dedication to exercise has kept him toned and fit. He walks with a calm, steady gait — another goal he has worked steadily to achieve. (When he first left prison, his sisters taught him how to lose the “prison strut”; he knew it wasn’t good for social situations or meeting nice women.) If he tells new acquaintances about his experiences in prison, he is often forced to back up his claims with newspaper articles.

Khatibi recognizes that he is one of the lucky ones. Unlike other exonerees, he is only in his early thirties and has been able to salvage his social life. He dates and socializes with friends old and new. He claims to have made at least one great friend in every one of his college classes.

“I’ve been really blessed,” Khatibi says. “But at the same time, not everybody is like me.” When he left prison, he was lucky enough to link up with effective organizations like the Innocence Project and Innovative Health Systems in Westchester. Other people lack the knowledge or wherewithal to seek out the right kind of help, he adds. “These are the people that are probably really getting lost when they get let out of jail after all this time.”

It makes Khatibi mad that the state hasn’t done more to help exonerees like him. After all, they bear some blame in all this, he says. “It’s not like a freak accident — it’s not like you just got hit by lightning.” The state erred and caused great harm, he points out; they should make up for it. “Why do they kick you out the back and close the door?”

Yet then there are the people like Jeffrey Deskovic, who have suffered so much damage in prison that psychological services and financial boosts don’t seem enough to help them. Khatibi has spoken with him many times, and he worries that Deskovic will continue having a hard time breaking out of his funk.

‘Not Really Participating’

Jeffrey Deskovic on the day of his release in September 2006, surrounded by family and his legal team from the Innocence Project. Photo courtesy of Jeffrey Deskovic.

In a small diner underneath the Parkchester subway stop in the Bronx, Deskovic orders his breakfast in an authoritative tone. “I’ll have the corned beef hash and scrambled eggs, no toast, and bacon. I want the bacon on the side.” Since leaving prison, Deskovic has learned that he must be confident and straightforward to avoid confusion. But even simple interactions can exasperate him. He reminds the waiter, pointedly, of his order. “You heard me say no toast? And I want the bacon on a side plate.” At the end of the meal, he appears frustrated with the service. “This waiter is not going to get a good tip, I’ll tell ya that much,” he grouses. “Service was horrible.”

In some ways, things are looking up for the ex-Sing Sing inmate. After five years of waiting, Westchester County finally agreed to settle his federal civil-rights lawsuit, paying him $6.5 million in compensation for his wrongful conviction. Deskovic is currently working toward his master’s degree at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He has launched his own organization to advocate on behalf of exonerated prisoners, the Jeffrey Deskovic Foundation for Justice.

But today Deskovic finds it hard to put up a façade of positive thinking. He is agitated and curt, fixated on his tight schedule of meetings and appointments in the city. As Deskovic talks over breakfast, it becomes clear that more is bothering him than his workload. He is thirty-eight years old, and his life isn’t working out the way he hoped. He is exhausted with the unhelpful therapy sessions, tired of constantly going home to his apartment, feeling all the more discouraged and lonely.

“Sometimes I get really depressed and frustrated just thinking, and I ask myself, you know, ‘Where’s my life going?’” He pauses for several long moments. “Sure, I have my advocacy work and my nonprofit, but my personal life’s a mess. That’s what is really debilitating.”

During the years that he was locked in his cell, most boys and girls his age were falling in love for the first time and forming lasting relationships, he points out. Had he not been imprisoned, “my life would have developed in the normal cycle of life,” Deskovic says. “I would have friends from college, and friends of friends.”

He asks many people, sometimes strangers, what they would suggest he do. He has tried bars, chess clubs, ping-pong clubs, gyms, sports teams, and dating websites. He feels he has exhausted every option. “I still want to throw a ball around, go to a water park,” he says. But no one wants to go with him. “I am trying to put a social life together. How do you do that from scratch?”

On some days the anxiety and depression weigh down on him so much that he can’t bear sitting in his living room alone. He retreats to his parked car, where he will brood for three or four hours, just wondering if he should turn on the ignition. If he does, he is not sure where he would go. There is no place for him to go.

“There’s going to come a time that I’m significantly older and I’m going to realize that there’s not really that much more time to live,” Deskovic says. “And I’m going to regret the amount of time since I’ve been home … that I wasn’t really participating.”

Overwhelmed by the World

Fernando Bermudez with his son Fernando. When he is feeling overwhelmed, Fernando lies down in his son’s bedroom, the smallest in their home. It reminds him of his prison cell.

The transition to civilian life has been hard on Fernando Bermudez, too, but at least he has his family. In the weeks after his murder conviction was overturned, everything was exciting for him. He could finally lie in bed next to his wife, feel the warmth of his young son’s body cuddling on the couch, eat a home-cooked meal.

Eventually, Bermudez and his family moved from New York to Danbury, Connecticut. It was a smaller, more tranquil community, an hour-and-a-half drive from the city. Here, Bermudez would be able to focus on his advocacy work and finish his college education.

Three years after his release, Bermudez does not have a regular job. He completed his bachelor’s degree in behavioral science last December at Western Connecticut State University, and is considering returning for his master’s degree. In the meantime, Bermudez continues to do public speaking about his wrongful conviction at colleges and law schools around the country. He works hard at marketing himself and occasionally brings home checks from his speaking engagements, but it is not a career. He has filed a lawsuit seeking compensation for his wrongful conviction, but is waiting, too, on that outcome.

Bermudez contributes to the family in other ways, such as driving his ten-year-old daughter Carissa and six-year-old son Fernando to school in the morning, washing the car, and shoveling the front walk when it snows. But it is rare that Bermudez can manage all those things in one day. The stress and anxiety accumulate throughout the day and often leave him exhausted. He is not used to the speed of technology. The intricacies of simple household appliances fluster him. He doesn’t understand his children’s infatuation with texting. Driving often makes him very tense, and so Crystal drives for him. She has noticed that even small things, like composing an email, can sometimes push her husband to need a nap. Crystal recalls a family outing to the mall shortly after his release. “We went to Macy’s and he became overwhelmed by trying to find a shirt,” she says. “He didn’t know how to use money.”

His years in prison clearly traumatized Bermudez, who to this day cannot let go of the regimented prison routine. On some days, he leaps out of bed at 5 a.m., ready for the morning count. Wide awake, he paces the room endlessly, just as he used to do in his cell. The only way he can fall sleep again is by placing a T-shirt over his face, just as he used to do in his prison bunk. If Crystal is able to coax him back into bed, she rubs his back and reminds him he is home now.

Because he is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Bermudez has difficulty controlling his emotions. Crystal says that at times the confusion and frustration build up to the point that her husband, a grown man, will cry in front of her.

It took Bermudez several months to starting seeing a therapist. “I needed psychological help at first, and nothing was forthcoming,” he says. He didn’t have health insurance and was piggybacking on his wife’s plan to receive temporary counseling. It wasn’t until he became a student that Bermudez qualified for an individual health plan. He still suffers from the same symptoms of PTSD, and occasionally sees a therapist. He says he finds the therapy helpful, and now that he has finished school, he hopes to attend sessions more regularly.

There are days that Bermudez feels great. But on other days, the panic attacks return. Crystal knows when her husband is feeling overwhelmed. He goes to his favorite spot in the apartment, his son’s bedroom, to lie down. “Fernando likes being in that room because it’s small,” Crystal says.

“It’s like he has a prison room with a window — like he’s fortunate enough to have a window.” The confined space soothes him, his wife notes. “He’ll lie here for hours.”

See Dana Ullman’s companion piece, Life after Innocence, for photos of the three men profiled in this article.

Francesca Crozier-Fitzgerald is a freelance journalist and recent graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Currently, she is living in her hometown of Philadelphia.

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Bahía Honda, Cuba
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The Road Less Traveled

Best of In The Fray 2012. With a pack, a duffel bag, and a handful of Spanish words, I had hitched my way up the road to Cuba’s northern coast. But now it was getting dark, no more cars were stopping, and I needed to find a place to sleep.

By Lita Wong
A fifties-era Buick parked on a street in Cuba’s westernmost province, Pinar del Río. October 1999. Alastair Smith

Second in a two-part series. Click here for the first part.

Today would have to be a lucky day for hitching. Waking up in San Diego de los Baños, an out-of-the-way resort town 130 kilometers southwest of Havana, I didn’t know exactly how I’d get back to the capital — only that I would.

The fastest way was the highway linking Pinar del Río, the eponymous capital of the province I was visiting, to Havana. But I didn’t want to miss the smaller towns along the northern coast.

I decided to head to Soroa, thirty-five kilometers to the east. Nicknamed the “Rainbow of Cuba,” it is known for heavy rainfall, orchids, and tall trees. Because there was no long-distance bus or train to reach it, and I had no car, the only way there was to hitch or take several buses.

People must have been looking out of their houses every minute, because I had hardly gotten far on my way to the bus stop before a young man appeared to help me with my bag. It was the same man who had given me a ride here on his bike the previous day. He carried my bag to the bus stop, then left.

After waiting forty-five minutes for a bus that never came, I left, too. “Lejos,” people at the bus stop said, as if I intended to walk all the way to Havana.

Soon a young woman carrying a pail came alongside me on the road. “Where are you going?” she asked in English.

“Candelaria,” I said, naming the larger town just below Soroa.

“It’s a long way,” the English student said.

A middle-aged man on a bicycle had stopped, and the two talked. She then turned to me and said, “You can go with him.”

I looked at him and the bike and pointed at my heavy bag and backpack. “Noooooo,” I said, shaking my head.

“This is my father,” she said, as if that would suffice. I almost started to laugh, thinking I would be the person who would give him a heart attack.

“It’s okay?” I asked incredulously.

“Yes,” she said. “He’ll take you to the next town.”

I positioned myself sidesaddle on the bike rack, but her father had trouble pedaling because I was tipping the bike over. “It’s better if you put each leg on each side of the bike,” the woman mused.

Would wedging my big duffel bag against her dad’s back make him uncomfortable? I asked.

“Don’t worry about it. No problem,” she said, without asking him.

With that, I put a leg on each side of the bike and held my bag between the two of us. Chug chug chug … we were off.

And the man’s daughter waved.

At one point, my bag fell, its strap nearly choking me to death until the man caught the bag and placed it in front of him. He told me I could hug his stomach to keep balanced. It occurred to me that this probably wasn’t his first time traveling this way.

The man took me to the next town. There was a slab of rock on the side of the road. As the day was beautiful, I lay down on it to nap, waiting for my first vehicle.

There were, in fact, two. A sputtering tractor pulled up just as a truck passed by.

I was about to tell the tractor driver where I wanted to go when he pointed ahead. The truck had also stopped for me, and it was headed for Soroa, the very town I wanted to visit.

It was barely one o’clock. I could not believe my good fortune.

When I arrived at Soroa’s Orquideario, home to 350 orchid species, a guard allowed me to stow my bags with him during my visit. Feeling particularly ambitious, I decided to climb a craggy hill for a view of the valley.

By the time I finally left the orchid garden, it was five in the afternoon. Now I just had to hitch nine kilometers south to Candelaria, where I could take a direct train to Havana, another ninety-five kilometers away.

Or — I could take the road north and travel a more scenic route along the coast. After all, I’d been lucky so far.

I decided to leave it up to fate. The decision maker would be the first car that stopped for me.

North or south. Coast or train.

It wasn’t long before a a car driven by a middle-aged couple came along. They were headed north, toward the coastal town of Bahía Honda. They stopped to pick me up — and then their engine died. As I sat in the back seat, the man took two wires near the steering wheel and crossed them to get a charge. He tried a combination of pedal work and gear-shifting as the engine groaned, then roared back to life.

We had not traveled far before I noticed the sky in the distance turn gray and stormy. Still, the land was beautiful, with palm trees scattered across the countryside, the road winding its way through the hills. The car often slowed down to avoid the potholes.

We passed the couple’s house, and within a mile we reached a crossroads: Bahía Honda lay to the west, Havana to the east. Any further north, and you were in the ocean. The couple told me Havana was far — lejos — and pointed to the setting sun. Sí, I said.

A tractor pulling a cart was waiting, headed east to a nearby village. I climbed in with two local men who were also hitching a ride. We all rode standing, gripping the sides of the wagon, as the tractor jolted along the road. The wind made the air nippy. Darkness was approaching quickly.

We got off at the village. A bus had been scheduled to depart further east but appeared to have broken down, its passengers heading home for the night. There would be no more buses for now. Some cars and trucks passed, and I waved at them futilely. At one point, my wave turned into an angry middle finger.

By now, darkness had completely fallen. Never again be ambitious after 3 p.m., I thought, as I sat on the road, resting on my bag.

A man passed several times, just staring at me. “What?” I wanted to snap at him. I felt like an alien dropped down from outer space, abandoned by its spaceship. Another person walked by and asked me where I wanted to go. “Havana,” I answered. “Lejos, lejos,” he said, waving his hand toward the horizon.

No kidding, asshole, I muttered. I was so tired of that word.

No more cars came by. At one point, my patience wearing thin, I yelled, “OH MY GOD!” After all, nobody was around, just a few houses nearby.

The first man returned. It was as if he had decided in the middle of dinnertime to take a stroll. He walked while he ate, his fork scraping food from his metal plate. He asked me where I was from.

“China,” I lied, not wanting to betray my American identity.

He asked me if I was hungry. When I said yes, he told me to come with him. “Brother,” he said.

We went a little ways down the road, and he knocked on the door of a modest house. He explained to someone inside that he had found somebody from China on the street. She was sola. Could she have some food? he asked.

The brother let us in. He and his young wife took me into their living room and turned on the television. “Siddown! Siddown!” the two men said, gesturing with large up-down arm motions for me to sit. To make sure I was feeling comfortable, the brother turned up the TV volume — even though it was obvious, no entiendo español.

Their mother came into the room and tried to communicate with me in sign language. You’d think she was mute or I was deaf. They asked me if I wanted to take a bath — the brother rubbing himself with an imaginary bar of soap to get the question across. I tried to tell them I didn’t need a bath, but whatever I told them made them laugh instead.

Meanwhile, the brother’s wife had gone all out in making dinner. I was ushered into the kitchen, where a bowl heaped with rice and plantains was waiting for me. On another plate were chicken and slices of cold ham on bread.

I was starving. I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. I began to shovel forkful after forkful until I noticed something black, with legs, in my rice. The ant was alive. And then, as I began to pick through the rice, I saw more. Ants were also on the chicken and crawling on the ham, perhaps two or three on each piece.

The brother looked closely at my plate and noticed an ant just when I did. He muttered something to his wife. Her back was to us, and she showed no reaction, but I think she was embarrassed. The eggs she was cooking for her husband were crackling in the oil, and they smelled good.

The brother pointed to the wall, where many ants were crawling. He laughed and told me that those ants were the same as the ones on my food. No problem, I said. The food was good. I didn’t want to eat the ants, but I wanted to seem as if I were cleaning off my plate. At the same time, leaving behind only those portions with the ants would make them all the more obvious. I did the best I could.

Afterwards, seeing me wipe my mouth with my fingers, the brother vigorously rubbed his hands together to ask me if I wanted to wash my hands. I said yes. He and his wife took me to the little bathhouse next door and brought a kettle of boiling water, which they poured into a pail for me to wash with. The wife gave me a soft, blue towel. Its newness contrasted with her sweater, which was tattered at the sleeves, and her husband’s T-shirt, which had holes.

When I needed to use the toilet, the wife gave me a shard of cotton from her bag. It did the trick. Later, I noticed in the trashcan that the same kind of shard also doubled as a sanitary napkin.

My hosts let me sleep in a big bed off the living room. The white sheets smelled like laundry, and I felt guilty about climbing into them with my dirty, dusty body. As tired as I was, the mosquito bites all over my legs kept me awake, long after everyone else had gone to sleep.

The young wife stayed up later than her husband. She was busy in the kitchen, probably preparing formula for their baby, whom I heard gurgling in the background.

Later, during the night, the baby cried. And outside, a man hollered, sang at the top of his lungs, and banged on pans. He chanted something indistinguishable, and I wondered if it was indistinguishable in Spanish as well. The husband stirred in the next room. I thought he would get up to tell the crazy man to be quiet, but he did not.

I wondered if this was normal. Perhaps it was a religious ceremony.

As I pulled the sheet over me and drifted into a fuller sleep, I thanked the man who had found me alongside the road and taken me to the home of his brother. Girberto Veltia and his wife, of the village Brail in Bahía Honda, had given me shelter, food, and a big bed, most probably their own.

Luck was on my side.

November 3, 1999

Second in a two-part series. Click here for the first part.

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Prague
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Havel: An Authentic Life

Best of In The Fray 2012. Long before he was a dissident or president, Václav Havel was a playwright. His plays offer the fullest picture of the late Czech writer’s moral vision, which cast aside ideology in favor of a more authentic, more personal “truth and love.”


Václav Havel and his favorite painting, 1992
Václav Havel in front of his favorite painting, Master Theodoric’s portrait of St. Matthew, at Prague’s National Gallery in 1992. Pavel Štecha

One has to be careful quoting Václav Havel’s plays: his characters lie through truths. The meaning of what they say invariably depends not on the words themselves, but who says them, in what circumstances. “The word is insidious,” Havel writes in his comments to the 1972 play Conspirators. “One moment it means a lot, an instant later it means nothing. There are people in whose mouths even the most beautiful word may mean the ugliest thing. The more a person loses his self, the more deftly he can transform truth into lie, and—paradoxically—through truth … deceive the world and himself.”

Havel’s state funeral last month at Prague’s St. Vitus Cathedral resembled, as the Czech foreign minister Karel Schwarzenberg had anticipated, “a grotesque situation” from one of the writer’s absurd plays. Presiding over the memorial was none other than Václav Klaus, the current Czech president and Havel’s political nemesis.

Grief over Havel’s death had brought the country to a standstill, as anyone who approved of the changes in 1989—the Velvet Revolution that brought a peaceful end to communist rule over Czechoslovakia—suddenly realized the degree to which Havel personified those changes and the once inconceivable possibilities they had opened. Into this national outpouring of warmth and nostalgia stepped Klaus, who had not said a good thing about Havel in fifteen years.

The first words of remembrance spoken at Havel’s funeral came from the mouth of his old foe. “Undoubtedly much is leaving with Václav Havel,” Klaus said. “At the same time, and in particular thanks to his consistent attitudes in life, there is much that is not leaving, and it is now incumbent upon us not to let it go. What is not leaving is the idea that freedom is a value worth sacrificing for, and that it is meaningful to engage in a struggle for truth, when one is convinced of it, even if it includes personal risks.” (A reader of Havel could not help but detect in Klaus’s eulogy echoes of the death speech delivered in his 1987 play Revitalization, conventionally translated as Redevelopment, an allegory about architects charged with the task of bringing an unplanned historic town in line with ordered modernity. “For only we can breathe meaning into this death by interpreting it as a challenge,” goes the sincere but self-deluded lament of the chief architect, Bergman—an exceptionally dubious character on Havel’s long roster of loathsome protagonists.)

It was left to Karel Schwarzenberg, Havel’s former chief of staff, to question the ways that the playwright’s own “struggle for truth” was, in death, being twisted to fit other agendas. His eulogy, which followed Klaus’s, was a deliberate answer to the current president. “Václav Havel, of course, knew that the word ‘truth’ can have a very narrow sense,” Schwarzenberg said. “He also knew that truth, seen in a narrow, self-centered way as the one and only truth, is the cause of discord and intolerance. That is why he took ‘Truth and Love’ as his motto, as only love can make us listen to the truth of another person, to the truth of others. Such love teaches us to be humble, and Václav Havel had more humility than we all do.”

‘Truth Will Touch Us’

Ever since the Czechs came together as a modern nation, the significance of the word pravda—truth—has been pitched to the life and death of Jan Hus, a Czech priest and scholar who sought to reform the Catholic Church a century before Martin Luther. “Truth … will prevail,” the last words Hus uttered before being burned at the stake, became the motto of the newly born nation of Czechoslovakia in 1918 and are still inscribed on the presidential banner of the Czech Republic. While staring down the communist regime at the end of last century, Havel and his fellow revolutionaries took to the streets with the chant, “Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred.” Unlike most of his compatriots, Havel knew firsthand of the martyrdom that came with speaking truth: in 1977, his mentor and fellow spokesman for the dissident Charter 77 movement, the philosopher Jan Patočka, died from a stroke following a protracted police interrogation.

Havel saw love and truth not just as political slogans, but as principles of everyday conduct. His ability to listen with empathy to people of divergent opinions allowed him to draw together disparate groups and individuals opposed to the collaborationist regime that enveloped Czechoslovakia following the 1968 Soviet invasion. The nonpartisan Charter 77 movement, which Havel unassumingly led, began as a defense of the right to freedom of expression— specifically, a defense of the Czech rock group Plastic People of the Universe, put on trial essentially for having long hair and being apolitical. In that campaign, Havel found a platform for everyone: when one person’s freedom is violated, everyone’s freedom is violated. Many of Havel’s associates at the time criticized him for reaching out to staunch communists, who, following a takeover by the more pragmatic members of the party, found themselves ostracized for their beliefs. Havel fundamentally disagreed with those beliefs, but some of the communists, such as the writer Pavel Kohout, became Havel’s closest friends. On the other hand, colleagues of a similar political persuasion who compromised themselves for the sake of career became “former acquaintances.” (For a generation that came of age in the 1980s, kariéra had become the Czech word tinted with the most negative of connotations.)

As his friend Schwarzenberg pointed out, love in this way allowed Havel the dissident leader to listen to the truth of other people and build a broad-based movement. But what did an abstract term like “truth” actually mean to Havel? His decades of published writings provide some answers.

“It has been eighteen years since The Memorandum was first staged. I have not read it since then,” writes Havel in a 1983 note on the opening of his play at Vienna’s Burgtheater.

The Memorandum is, of course, not a play about Czechoslovak history, but a broader parable that aspires to say something about the human being and society in general. It is, however, rooted in—what else than?—the experiences that its author had in this tiny part of the world into which he was born and in which he was destined to live. That he at the same time—without suspecting this—predicted the future is not the work of his clairvoyance, but issues from the very miracle of what we mean by art, literature, drama, in which the author is always only the medium through which—in certain fortunate constellations—something speaks that is beyond him: that is to say, truth. The author does not discover this truth; truth reveals itself. He only opens himself to truth’s revelation by serving his cause. He allows himself to be carried by its inner logic and does not attempt to brazenly dominate it. It is therefore not the gift of absolute confidence, but more of stunned resignation that gives us the chance that we will touch truth, or, to be more precise, that truth will touch us.

According to Havel, chance and humility determine whether an author will be touched by truth. The two coincide. Not only does a writer need to be blessed with “fortunate constellations,” he also has to be humble enough to surrender himself to chance, to give up the consistencies he imposes on his subject, to be instead “carried by its inner logic.”

Truthful art must also arise from experience. What Havel does not stress here, but what seeps through his early writings, is his belief in the authenticity of that experience. Havel the young playwright idealized the heroic artist who was uncompromising in deed, word, and character, living his life boldly, with a deep knowledge of self. (Not surprisingly, Walt Whitman was Havel’s poet of truth in his teenage years.)

Havel clarified what he meant by artistic authenticity in his 1957 remarks on Bohumil Hrabal, later to become one of the greatest Czech novelists, but at that time an unpublished writer. Hrabal had a law degree, but had gone on to work all sorts of industrial jobs—at a railroad, a steel mill, a recycling plant. Havel was among the first to discern that Hrabal was blazing a new path for other Czech writers to follow, and he credited it to Hrabal’s authentic way of life:

Hrabal is not a writer who lives a rich life so that he has something to write about, but, on the contrary, a writer who writes because he is living this life, and this life again and again urges him to write. Hrabal is an ordinary person who writes, not a writer who lives like an ordinary person…. What sets him apart from other railroad or steel mill workers is the intensity with which he lives his life…. And this intensity of existence demands that he be distilled to the grain [projadřovat, a neologism] through writing.… [Hrabal] is not a writer-spectator … not a social novelist … not a beatnik … not a Hemingway type who deliberately and at great expense seeks out dangerous, make-or-break situations so that he can verify in them the authenticity of art. He is a type of artist … who realizes all his singularity in the intensity with which he carries out his fate.

Havel, who was born into a family of daring and wealthy entrepreneurs penalized by the communist regime for their success, never had a chance to be an ordinary person. He was a child of privilege, a writer-critic at heart, propelled by circumstances into (not so) ordinary walks of life—in other words, precisely everything that Hrabal was not. But Hrabal’s intensity, a stark contrast to the timidity of the country’s establishment writers, made an impression on Havel and a few others of his generation. Twelve years later, when he had become an enemy of the communist state and public channels of expression were closed to him, Havel would recast himself as an ordinary (and herein lies a crucial difference) citizen who writes. The writer’s vision shaped—and fortified—the ordinary citizen seeking justice.

The Devil’s Truths

The conduit through which Havel opened himself to truth was absurd drama. In 1963, his play The Garden Party, hailed by critics as the first Czech absurd play, premiered at the avant-garde Theater on the Balustrade, where Havel then worked as a stagehand. In a postscript to the published play, Jan Grossman, the theater’s artistic director, explained the appeal of absurd theater:

Absurd theater unmasks evil in its wider context, as an evil that is more dangerous because it has become “ordinary.” It filters into life without warning, furtively; it works through, at first sight, trivial means—the habitualized template, stock phrase, convention, dogma.… Absurd theater is analytical, and, if you want, coldly diagnosing. By principle it does not provide solutions. But this adherence to principle, I would say, does not stem from the certainty that a solution does not exist, but more from the conviction that a solution will never and nowhere, by nobody and by no means, be given. If theater aims to be a physician, it does not want to cure through conventional recipes, but by confronting the patient in the most drastic way with his always feasible annihilation. Not to conjure this annihilation, but to prevent it.… It assumes the role of the devil’s advocate. It takes the devil’s side, so that it may uncover the devil “who has concealed himself.”

In Temptation (1985), Havel’s agonizingly personal variation on the Faustus legend, the devil hides in plain sight. Foustka, a scientist at a research institute, comes to suspect that Fistula, a limping pensioner, is actually a visitor from the netherworld—one clue is the old man’s stench. Fistula explains that he suffers from athlete’s foot, which he treats with sulfur, and on each visit to Foustka’s home ostensibly changes in and out of slippers, which he brings along in a paper bag. Foustka never fully accepts this explanation. Bit by bit he arrives at the conclusion that Fistula’s disturbingly detailed knowledge of his personal dealings is due to preternatural powers, rather than utterly mundane connections. Yet the true cause of Foustka’s eventual downfall is not the devil’s trickery, but his failure to recognize and hold onto the one true relationship in his life. He begins to suspect his lover Vilma, a colleague at the institute, of divulging details from earlier conversations to their boss, who is bent on destroying Foustka. By doubting Vilma’s loyalty, Foustka loses her, the game, himself.

In Havel’s plays, the devil deceives through truth. Characters fixate on the abstractions of various pedestrian “truths” while forgetting their moral obligations to themselves and other people. “These are all truths that have ceased to be human truths—somebody’s truths,” he writes in a commentary on his play Conspirators.

These are truths which are not the result of authentic human realization and of authentic human experience, and which are therefore also not existentially guaranteed by the credibility and identity of their carriers, and by their courage to stand behind them even when they are not in accordance with immediate interest. These are all simply deadened, conventionalized “truths in themselves”—that is to say, truths in which contact with reality has been replaced by something more important: contact with ideological convention.

For people who embrace these external truths, Havel continues, “life moves from the real world of human existence into the semifictional world of stock phrases.” In this politicized environment, “words do not serve reality; reality serves words.” Human communication deteriorates to become a soulless exchange of “ideological stands,” and the flesh-and-blood human being, Havel concludes, ultimately transforms into a “thesis.”

(While his analysis here drew from his experiences living under totalitarianism, Havel saw communism as only a particularly obvious incarnation of the kind of modern society that corrodes moral principles. Consumerist culture, too, was one of his targets.)

In Havel’s view, truth in its fullest sense does not reside in objective facts, or logical propositions, or political ideologies. It is deeply personal: a way of life that upholds the authentic parts of our identities. Love, in turn, is how we authentically relate to other human beings. It is therefore the foundation of truth, rather than a consequence of it. If we as individuals are not rooted in a stable core of belief and relationships, we become caricatures of human beings—not unlike the characters in Havel’s plays.

Their lack of a vital sense of self does not prevent Havel’s characters from seeking out other, ersatz versions of love and truth to sustain them. But these attempts only further their estrangement. In the 1968 play The Increased Difficulty of Concentration, Huml is an inveterate womanizer, married with a mistress and lusting after more, unable to be true to any one relationship. Like Foustka, he is a scientist, but he rejects the scientific validity of an experiment to isolate the essence of the human being. In Huml’s view, science cannot quantify the human heart:

And I am afraid that the key to a genuine comprehension of the human self does not lie in a better or worse understood complexity of man as an object of scientific inquiry, but only—and only—in his complexity as a subject of human approximation, because the infinity of our own humanity is so far the only thing that can—however imperfectly—approximate the infinities of others. In other words, the personal, human, unique relationship that arises between two human selves has been up to now the only thing than can reveal—at least partly—the enigma of those mutual selves, while values such as love, friendship, empathy, compassion, and the unrepeatable and unsubstitutable human resonance—or, conversely, dissonance—are the only tools that this human touch employs. Through everything else we can more or less explain the human being, but we can no more than partly understand it, and therefore, no more than partly comprehend it.

Huml understands that the only truth worth knowing about another human being must be found through love, and yet his flawed nature prevents him from doing so.

Havel the playwright also knew to take a break from serious truths, should they become an obsession. He poked fun at himself in his plays—for example, in Audience (1975), through his alter ego, Ferdinand Vaněk, a dissident writer forced to work at a brewery (Havel had worked for a year rolling barrels at a small-town brewery). The brewmaster promises Vaněk a better job if he will write reports on himself to the secret police in the brewmaster’s name. The absurd situation culminates in this exchange between the two:

Vaněk: Sir, I am really thankful for all you did for me. I appreciate it because I know how rare such a stance is today. You, as they say, pulled a thorn out of my heel. I really don’t know what I would do without your help. That posting in the storage room would be a bigger relief for me than you may think, but I—excuse me—I surely cannot report on myself—

Brewmaster: What reporting? Who the hell is talking about reporting here?

Vaněk: It’s not about myself—it cannot hurt me—it’s about principle! Out of principle I surely cannot participate in …

Brewmaster: In what? Just say it! In what can’t you participate?

Vaněk: In a practice that I disagree with.

(Short, intense pause)

Brewmaster: Hmm. So you can’t. In the end, you can’t. That’s great! Now you really showed yourself! Now you proved yourself! (He gets up and excitedly walks around the room.) And what about myself? You will dump me in this, won’t you! You will sneeze in my face! I can be an asshole! I can waddle through the mud, I am not important, I am only your typical brewery idiot—but his lordship, he cannot participate. I can dirty myself, so that his lordship may remain clean…. Principles! Principles! … You always have a chance, but what chance do I have? No one will look after me, no one is afraid of me, no one will write about me. I am only worth being the dung from which your principles grow, looking for well-heated posts for your heroism, and, in the end, being ridiculed for all this! One day you will return to those actresses of yours, you will be bragging there about how you were spinning barrels, you will be a hero, but what about me? Where can I go back? Who will notice me? Who will appreciate what I did? What do I have from life? What awaits me? What?

Havel recognized the privilege that set him apart, the talent that made him more than just an “ordinary citizen.” To the end of his life he railed against the dangers of an inauthentic, estranged existence: his last play, Leaving (2007), skewered the cloistered egotism of politicians.

The idea that so inspired the martyr Jan Hus and his fourteenth-century followers was the heretical realization that each human being has an intrinsic capacity to know what a just, free, and beautiful life is. Six centuries later, Václav Havel used the medium of absurd plays to explore what happens to a human being who rejects the guidance of this inner compass. That real people all too often come to resemble characters in those plays, while their author was catapulted by life into roles he had not scripted, “issues from the very miracle of what we mean by art.”

Correction, March 31, 2012: Revised several passages in the essay, to clarify and correct the descriptions of the plays Revitalization and Temptation, to remove a claim that Havel wrote the “truth and love” motto “in homage to Hus,” to insert a brief discussion of the anti-career sentiment of Havel and his generation, to correct the timeframe when Havel became an “enemy of the communist state,” and to improve a few word choices. We regret the errors.

Jan Vihan is a contributing writer for In The Fray.

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Playing the Streets

Big John plays chess for a three-dollar donation. C bets customers five bucks they can’t beat him. John plays days. C works the chessboard until 5 a.m. John has a family, an apartment, a job. C hustles to survive. These are New York’s street players.


He rocks in his chair from excitement, and it creaks under his weight. Finally, Cameron, a young man who goes only by “C,” moves his white bishop across the board. He takes his opponent’s knight, smashes the button on the timer with the same hand, and taunts, “How you like that?”

The opponent, Big John, calmly takes C’s bishop with a pawn. It is an even exchange in terms of the pieces’ values, but it leaves John in a better position, controlling more of the center of the board. C stares at the board intently, and — for a moment, at least — is quiet.

Big John about to make his move.

C has dark skin, bright eyes, and a neatly trimmed black beard. He is wide around the middle, and his loose-fitting clothes make him seem even larger. Every pound of C is filled with energy. He rattles off his words rapidly, and often berates opponents for poor moves (“What was that, what you thinking?”).

John Hill, forty-nine, who goes by “Big John” or just “John,” is a tall man with wide shoulders, whose grayish white stubble stands out against his dark face. He is soft-spoken and purposeful. He speaks unhurriedly, drawing out each of his words, even as he cracks lighthearted jokes. John reminds me of one of Tolkien’s Ents (the towering, mythical, tree-like creatures who are never rushed), while C brings to mind a 200-pound hummingbird.

John asks for a three-dollar donation for every game played, while C hustles, betting customers five dollars on the game’s outcome. John plays during the day, while C arrives in the park — New York’s Union Square — later in the afternoon, often playing until5 a.m.

John works the night shift as a security guard, his primary source of income. After work he might stop by home for a nap, but he then goes to the park to play chess, and does so on many weekend days as well.

C does not have a steady job, though he certainly does work. He plays chess in Union Square almost full-time. On days when the forecast predicts rain, C brings a large gym bag full of cheap umbrellas, which he hawks on the sidewalk. (“I got to get my money. It’s a recession! I got to get every nickel and dime. Every nickel and dime.”)

A few seconds pass before C decides on his next move — and is back to trash-talking. “You’re my fish, you’re my fish!” he yells, slamming the timer.

Playing street chess in union square
The under-the-table cash economy is vital to the street chess scene.

“No, you’re my fish.” John almost never goads an opponent, but C’s exuberance can be contagious.

“I’ve got you, I’ve got you. I’ve got you hooked,” continues C, moving a piece.

“Yeah, yeah — keep talking,” John answers, unruffled.

The onlookers, many of them street players or regular customers, watch with interest, grinning at the banter but keeping silent. Only after John wins do they begin commenting — “Oh, John, I thought you had him here when the pieces were like this,” or “Hey C, why didn’t you move here when he did this?”

After the game, C talks loudly about how in a real game John would have lost by a technicality — John had advanced his pawn to the last line of squares, but did not announce that he was promoting it to queen. John does not seem to pay C any mind. He just relaxes in his chair, triumphant.

The Game

Chess is one of the oldest board games in the world, originating in India about 1,500 years ago. In the centuries that followed, it was a game of kings, a pastime associated with high culture and martial strategy, played in royal courts in the Middle East and Europe.

But there is little that is regal about the men — and it is almost entirely men — who hold court today in Union Square and elsewhere, playing street chess for money. These men are public figures, who choose places of high visibility to sell chess games. In New York, they can be found in many parks or places of social gathering. They are a diverse group. Some are homeless, and some have jobs, apartments, and families. For some, chess is a vital — perhaps only — source of income. For others, the game is a hobby that provides additional cash. Some ask for straight donations. Others gamble, betting on the game’s outcome.

Big John has an apartment, a family, and a job, but he also spends hours every day outside, playing chess and smoking Newport cigarettes. He spends as much time in Union Square as one would spend at a full-time job. Street chess provides him with a small supplementary income, but he insists that he plays it in the parks because he loves the game. “Chess is the only sport — and I consider it a sport — that anyone of any height, weight, race, nationality, or even eyesight can do. It’s a level playing field,” he says. “Chess makes us all equal. It’s one of the things I love about it so much: that anyone can play.”

John has played chess ever since a childhood accident kept him home from school for a few years. As he grew up, he continued playing. For years he played in public parks — as a customer, playing against street players. As he began beating them, he decided to set up his own spot outside, to allow his “hobby to pay for itself.” He tried different places, including Washington Square Park and Times Square, but they didn’t have the right atmosphere. Finally, two years ago, John settled on Union Square.

The Cash Box

It is a sunny Saturday just before noon, the first clear day after a week of rain and snow. John has just arrived at Union Square and is setting up. He places a huge clipboard — the kind that art students use — on top of a cardboard box, to make a table. He drapes newspaper over upside-down plastic milk crates to make chairs. As he works, John leisurely starts to tells a story from his Brooklyn childhood, when he and some friends sneaked into an abandoned apartment building in their neighborhood.

Out of his gym bag John pulls a rolled-up mat with white and green squares. He straightens out the chessboard and clips one side of it to the clipboard. He takes a roll of tape from his bag, and slowly begins taping down his board.

It’s a new board, one that John recently bought from the Village Chess Shop, an iconic store in Greenwich Village that has catered to chess players for more than three decades. It is open all night and lets people play each other for $2.50 per hour. There you can find players of all kinds — grandmasters and children, street players and tourists. “It’s an equalizer — chess,” says Michael Propper, the shop’s owner. “You have a guy worth a million dollars, and you’ve got the guy with no home. And the big shot is the guy with no home, ’cause he’s a great chess player. And if he comes in here, he’s got authority, he’s got respect.”

Street players go to the chess shop mostly at night or when the weather is bad, especially during the winter. It provides a warm place indoors, but then their games are not as profitable, because they have to pay the house and because gambling is against the rules. (“There’s some subtle gambling that we overlook, that we know takes place, where they play for a couple of dollars against each other,” Propper says. “We have people who come here for thirty hours straight, and they’re clearly gambling.”)

Whether or not a street player chooses to play at the Village Chess Shop, he will still usually shop there. The chess shop, which also sells a $400 rosewood board, does steady business selling no-frills $8.50 chess sets to the park crowd.

John bought his new chessboard and set of pieces for twenty-five dollars, spending extra money to get heavier pieces that wouldn’t blow away in the wind and that wouldn’t break if stepped on. The color of John’s old set had also started to wear off, the white pieces turning beige from so much cleaning. Many street players make do with beat-up sets — one player uses a soda cap instead of a lost pawn, and C mixes pieces from different sets. But John says he’s aiming to attract customers. “Out here you always want to present something that’s desirable — new set, shiny pieces,” he says. “It just made more sense to go ahead and invest in a new set.”

Once his board is taped flat, John turns his attention to his cash box, the cardboard container that holds the day’s earnings. He tapes the bottom so it will hold, and he tapes down each of the four cardboard flaps so they will not be in the way. Then he reaches into his gym bag and retrieves yet another piece of cardboard. It’s a sign with John’s writing in blue pastel: “If you take a photo of the chess players please leave a donation.”

He tapes the sign to his cash box at an angle, so that the sign can flip down. That way, it can act as a lid and cover the contents of the box if a park ranger walks by. (While the authorities generally tolerate street players, gambling on chess is technically illegal, and players have been known to be hassled or fined wherever money overtly changes hands.) The cash box itself can be disassembled and reassembled fairly easily — if, for instance, skateboarders keep bumping against it.

John reaches into his bag again for a piece of purple checkered fabric, which he uses to line the bottom of his cash box. He dumps a handful of his own dollar bills into the box; this will encourage other people to donate. It’s one of the many tricks that John has picked up over the years to increase his chess income. But he does not live on what he earns in the park, nor could he. “I tend to do okay: maybe forty, fifty bucks,” he says. “A great day for me would be around eighty dollars.” But that’s just “once in a blue moon,” John adds. “This in no way is like a great windfall. You eek out a few dollars here or there.”

One reason that John makes less than some of the other players is that his prices are so low. Most players charge five dollars for games, but John charges just three dollars — to “make it inviting,” he says. “You make it affordable, where someone can actually enjoy the game if their game is not that good — someone who plays for, like I said, the love of the game.”

Finally, John pulls out his new set of weighted chess pieces, along with a sleek digital chess clock. As he meticulously puts each piece in its place, he nears the end of his story, too — this now twenty-minute chronicle of John when he was eight years old, exploring an empty apartment in Brooklyn with his friends. They were poking innocently around the rooms, John says, when suddenly his world turned upside down.

“I didn’t know what happened,” he says. “And then my friend looks at me, and he starts screaming.”

Putting down the rook he’s been holding, John whips off his cap. His silver hair is cut short, almost to the skin, making his head look like a grizzled coconut. He takes my hand and runs it along a deep groove in his skull — a scar from where a falling brick embedded itself in his head decades ago. After his accident, John remained housebound for a few years. Stuck inside, he would look out the window at kids playing outside and wish he could join them. This was the time of his life when he learned chess.

I find myself wondering where this story started: what question had I asked to provoke the twenty-minute tale? It was like John Nash in A Beautiful Mind, taking twenty minutes to answer, “Would you prefer coffee or tea?” Then I remember: earlier I had marveled that John was not tired, coming straight to the park from his graveyard shift as a security guard. His story, throughout which the mantra “enjoy life” was repeated, was an elaboration of his answer: “I like the sunshine.”

John finishes setting up his pieces. Nearby, other street players are yelling their catch phrase — “Do you play, sir?” — to passersby. But John just leans back on his crate. Behind him, the park’s performance acrobats have drawn a large crowd, their stereo blasting pop reggae. John bops his shoulders to the beat, grinning.

Chess players intentionally choose public places, like New York’s Union Square, to ply their trade.

The Players

A few hours later, John is still in good spirits. He has played a few games against the pedestrians who have dribbled in through the afternoon, and is now sucking a lollipop and playing Mike Koufakis. Mike is an eight-and-a-half-year-old whose feet dangle from his milk-crate seat, inches off the ground.

“Oh, heeeeey. He’s got me now. That’s not nice, that’s not nice.” John makes a show of mock defiance. “They sent me a ringer.”

Mike is playing well, but making mistakes. At one point he takes John’s bishop, leaving his own white queen in jeopardy. John slowly puts his bishop back where it was and taps the white queen to alert his opponent to the danger.

“How long has he been playing?” John asks Mike’s father.

“Two years,” replies Steve Koufakis.

“He’s good. He rushes, though.” As John waits, he scratches a lottery ticket with a dime. “Most of his mistakes are because he rushes.”

After John checkmates Mike and shakes his tiny hand, Mike’s father throws three dollars into the cardboard box by the table. As Mike gets up, a twenty-something man sits down. This customer is a regular.

“ I do now have a small gallery of repeat customers, ’cause I’ve been here a little while,” John says. “Most of them work in the office buildings, so they’ll take their lunch when their business is done.”

Regular customers are a vital part of street chess, but can also be a source of tension: poaching customers sometimes causes conflict. Once, another street player yelled at John for playing a steady customer. “He goes, ‘Traitor, traitor!’” John says. “It’s like, ‘Oh, you play with me.’ And it’s like, ‘Well, you know, you don’t own anybody.’”

Street players are protective of their regular customers and encourage them to come back. John asks a lower price of his regulars — two dollars instead of three. Another way that street players ensure steady business is to let their regulars win occasionally. Not everyone does this, but many do. John says that letting regulars win keeps up their morale, encourages them to keep playing chess, and ultimately teaches as well. “It’s a customer-by-customer judgment,” John says. “I enjoy this, so I try to make it enjoyable for the people I’m playing.”

For players like C who bet five dollars on a game’s outcome, letting a regular customer win once in a while is seen as a cost of doing business. After “I beat them enough where they get frustrated,” then C will consider throwing a game, he says. “Sometimes you have to give a little to make a lot. I give them five bucks, but I’ve won fifty, sixty from them.” On the other hand, some regulars are so good that they don’t need to be given wins. But hustlers like C cannot afford to play too many players like these.

Besides repeat customers, John also has repeat onlookers he recognizes. “He’s a professional watcher,” John jokes after one man refuses a game but hangs around anyway. Half-circles form around particularly intriguing or lively chess matches. These are mostly composed of interested street players, friends of customers currently playing, and customers waiting for a match. If a child is playing, this draws a particularly large crowd. John does not mind onlookers because they might evolve and “become customers,” and also because crowds cause curiosity and generate business. John compares having a crowd of onlookers to “advertising.”

The crowd is also good for any nearby street players. As Big John plays, the player next to him — also named “John,” but smaller — asks the onlookers if any of them would like to play. This is one of the reasons that chess players who are friendly with each other congregate together at the park. Another reason is security: John often asks adjacent players to watch his things if he has to run across the street to use the bathroom at Whole Foods.

Big John often teaches younger children the finer points of the game.

Rules of the Game

In the afternoon Big John is quietly engrossed in a match when a booming voice behind him announces, “The General has returned.”

“I’m back, I’m back!” C whoops, making his entrance.

“Heeeeeaaay,” John drawls, shaking C’s hand. “Where ya been?”

“Oh, you know, you know — around,” replies C, slapping hands and doling out one-armed hugs to the other players. C grabs a seat next to “Little John,” and the two begin playing.

C plays other street players, which is rare in their world. “It’s not that they have anything against each other, it’s just that some people don’t want to tip their skill level to the other player,” John explains. “If you have a bunch of people who have tables set up, one may be better than the other, a couple might be better than the rest. If you begin to play each other, then the other people know, ‘I’m better than him, I’ve played him.’ And a rivalry will begin like that. A lot of people can’t take a loss.”

When he was a street chess customer, John played all of the Union Square players. But after he set up his own spot in the park, the rules of social interaction changed — he could no longer play against other street players. “That’s like bothering someone’s other stand,” John says, motioning to the nearby Union Square vendors selling art and souvenirs. “You have a stand and you’re working. Tend to your business and let him tend his.” The only street player John will play is his friend C — and only when there are no paying customers. “Yesterday me and him played most of the day because it was real slow — I think I had like two participants all day.”

When C does play street players, he is very conscious of the difference in roles. If playing on his own board, he may stop a game at a moment’s notice if a customer shows up. But if C is playing another street player on that person’s board, he is even more hyper-aware of potential customers. Normally C might try to solicit a game from every fourth or fifth passerby, but when taking up a customer’s seat, C will ask almost every lingering pedestrian, “Do you play?”

“Do You Play?”

C looks up from his match with Little John. A young couple with cameras is watching the game.

“Do you guys play?” he asks them.

The woman shakes her head, and the man walks away. C shrugs and returns to the game. Less then a minute later an old man pauses as he walks by, and C immediately yells out, “You play, sir?”

As a means of soliciting customers, “Do you play?” is significant in that it is designed not to close conversation. If a passerby answers “Yes,” then the chess player invites that person to sit and only then — once it is more awkward to refuse — brings up money. But even if the potential customer answers “No,” the lines of dialogue remain open.

As a young woman in a college sweatshirt walks by, C asks, “Do you play?”

“No,” she answers, smiling.

“Want to learn?”

She shakes her head and walks away. But C’s follow-up question is fairly standard for street players. Dozens of times a day, the player switches roles — from a worthy adversary offering a challenging and fun match, to a patient teacher willing to impart his expertise.

Street players often do teach chess; during the summers John has parents who pay for weekly lessons for their children. But John points out that he is still learning, too. Even though they play chess for hours every day, he and other street players still actively try to improve their game. C says he occasionally pays for a chess tutor, and John keeps his skills sharp by playing bullet chess with one of his regular customers, for a reduced price. Bullet chess is an especially intense form of speed chess where each player has just one minute on the clock. (In most speed games played on the street, players have between three and ten minutes.)

When business is slow, street players pair off for a game of chess or cards.

The Endgame

It’s around eight in the evening, and John is putting away his set. He places all the black pieces in one Ziploc bag and all the white pieces in another, and wraps both baggies in a cellophane grocery bag that he stows in his gym bag. Then he slowly removes the tape holding his chessboard to the clipboard. He rolls up the mat into a tube, secures it with a rubber band, and puts it in another cellophane bag. He takes out his Walkman CD player, wraps the headphones around it, and places it in his jacket pocket. As he puts his things in order, John talks in his meandering way about how the cost of movies has risen since he was a child.

John turns his attention to his cash box. He scoops out all the dollar bills and stuffs them into his pants pocket. “I usually don’t count till I get home,” John says. “I find it’s bad etiquette.” But he guesses it was a fairly average day, netting about forty to fifty dollars.

John removes the cloth lining from the bottom of the box, and several coins clink free. (Some tourists, seeing the sign asking for donations in exchange for photos, drop loose change instead of dollar bills.) John sighs as he reaches down to pick up a nickel, a dime, and several pennies. “I used to have a dollar sign on the box,” he says. “I might put it back up.”

He folds the cash box flat, while keeping the sign attached to it. Then he lifts the clipboard off the larger cardboard box that made the table, and folds that, too.

He shakes hands with the other street players who remain, and gathers up the two folded boxes, the clipboard, and the two plastic milk crates. He walks to the west side of the square, and slides the boxes and clipboard snuggly between a wall and a recycling bin. He hides the milk crates behind a statue.

Big John adjusts the strap of his gym bag, then stretches out his large hand. “I’ll see you when I see you.”

As he walks away he turns and says, over his shoulder, “But, you know I’ll be out here tomorrow.”

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