A story from the tropics (bonus Saturday edition!)
A few months ago my mother sent me an article, which had itself been sent to her by my aunt. It was about my grandfather – not her father but the father of my own father, her husband, both of them now passed into memory.
My grandfather, the Very Right Reverend Stephen F. Bayne Jr., aka “Pops,” was an Episcopal clergyman, Bishop of the Diocese of Olympia in western Washington, the first Executive Officer of the Anglican Communion, and for a hot second Dean of the General Theological Seminary in New York City. I barely knew him but he looms large in my family’s mythology.
He was a man who in 1959 the New York Times called “one of the Protestant Episcopal Church’s brainiest priests.”He was a prolific and brilliant writer, argued strenuously against segregation and (the Timesagain) had “little regard for his church’s reputation as a wealthy clique.” In the 1960s he was instrumental in creating a document that could have radically reshaped the role of the Church in the world, had it been adopted; one that reframed the colonial project of mission work in Africa, Asia, and Latin America as something mutually sustaining, reciprocal, and affirming. (This was the subject of the article my mom sent; I found it fascinating.)
He baptized me and my sister Emily, as well as all of our then-extant cousins, and for years my parents cherished a scratchy cassette recording of Christmas Eve 1972 (?) at our house in Seattle when, Pops and Grandma Lu in town for a rare visit, all the grownups sit around and talked while Emily and I marvel at the rare sight of falling snow out the window. Throughout, in the background, choral music soars and the grownups cough, as the ice tinkles in their drinks.
An enthusiastic lifelong smoker, Pops's health started to fail in his early 60s. He contracted pneumonia (I think) in 1973. Once he was on the mend he and Grandma Lu took a trip to St. Martin to recover. There, he relapsed, and was airlifted to Puerto Rico for care. He died January 18, 1974, in a hospital in Santurce, one day after my sixth birthday. The decorations for my birthday party were still up when my parents returned from funeral services in New York a week later, Emily and I having been rapidly packed off to my mother’s parents, my beloved Grandma and Grandpa, who lived 30 minutes away and who I saw all the time. My younger sister, Charlotte, was born nine months later and to this day complains bitterly whenever anyone brings up the legendary cassette recording of Christmas 1972.
“It’s not FAIR to talk about that. I wasn’t born yet!”
Luckily for Charlotte, the tape has been lost or simply disintegrated, another part of the story slipped away to time.
I’m in Santurce right now, not far from the hospital where Pops died. The power has been out since early yesterday, for how long who knows, and so instead of working on my research project I am thinking about him. Every time I come to Puerto Rico I think about him, this man I barely had a chance to know, who is part of my biology and my story. He was a white man in power traveling the developing world at a time when his right to do so was unquestioned. He was the patriarch of a family of four sons and one daughter – and not just the patriarch, he was, in essence, the voice of God. What did that do to my father, growing up? What rights and expectations of his own role in his family did he internalize? What ideas about entitlement and agency – where I could go, who I could be and where and who I couldn’t – did he pass on to me? (And shout out to my Aunt Lydia, my godmother, the only girl in this family of boys, who went to med school in her 30s, and who fought tooth and nail to make her own place in the world.)
My father died in 2015 and to be frank I don't think I was able to actively engage with this question until he was gone. Now, I think about it all the time, as I try to find ways to be ethically in the world as a writer and reporter, in a profession that’s barely holding together at the seams let alone by any shared faith and creed. Is it fair to force your own narrative on someone who feels marginalized by it? Of course it’s not. (Sorry, Charlotte.)
I have this book coming out next month and so I’ve been doing some interviews around it, and they’ve been, to me, surprisingly great, because I have struggled with how to talk about this book – like, who the hell am I who did not even grow up or go to school in Chicago to try and tell, or even assemble, stories about this city? It was a real crisis for a while. But these interlocutors have been open, engaged, so smart. It's been an amazing reminder that the creative project has agency of its own; that your work may fly free in the world untethered to both your own expectations and your own doubts. It’s given me faith that there’s room for multiplicities of stories, authors, tellers, readers, whoevers.
Faith.
A friend here in Puerto Rico and I have talked about faith – and the difference between faith and hope. Hope, we hazard, may be a lost cause. Hope is driven by outcomes; if those do not come to pass, where does your hope go to live? It gets stuck in the impossibility of resolution.
But to have faith is a choice that you have to keep actively choosing every day. Faith is open ended. It simply, ontologically is. My grandfather was a man of capital-F-Faith by profession but he was also a man prone to, I’m told, many dark nights. He chose to have faith, day after day. Perhaps because it was expected of him but perhaps it worked. Perhaps because he longed for the chance to shed the skin of authority and lean into the unknown and unknowable. My own faith is muddled and lower-case; a faith in other people, in, haltingly, myself, in the implacable persistence of nature, in mystery and in change.
Here in Puerto Rico, one month after the massive demonstrations that shut down highways and forced the resignation of the governor, people still protest. They gather together in public assemblies, in the plazas outside city halls, to listen and communicate and build together a better world. Not in the hope of a certain outcome but in the faith of their own agency. This is the choice that they’re making over and over, after being told by big daddy U.S.A. for more than a century that agency and self-determination was not something to which they were entitled; not something to which they should bother to aspire. That they should sign on to someone else’s story and be grateful to have a story at all.
Well capital-F that.
You can’t sit around and hope for change, hope that the power will come back on. You just have to keep being and doing, and have faith that it will.
***
I have nothing to promote! Or, I guess I do but eh it can wait a week or two. In the meantime, if you're in Chicago you can go to the final evening of Veggie Bingo at the Hideout on Wednesday, August 28. I won't be there, but it should be a good time. I wasn't there on August 14 either (I was in Gary) but a man named Dave McClure was and he wrote this totally great account of his trip to VB on his blog, Dave in the Shack. Here's a snippet:
We tend to believe small towns have an edge on creating community. And that may be true to some extent. But community is not defined by city limits. Community is the bond you feel to others through relationships and membership in groups. Community gardens; the people who plant and tend them, and the people who support them, are an example. Who would think a sliver of Chicago dwellers would be bound together by kale and zucchini? The feeling in the pop-up bingo parlor in the backroom at the Hideout that night, even the Hideout itself, was of shared values and enjoyment.
Community is where you find it, and if you look closely you will find that community abounds in Chicago and other big cities. You may have to look for it in unusual places, but don’t ever think its not there. The crowd at Vegetable Bingo was young and hungry. Hungry for vegetables, but also hungry for a sense of belonging. I think they found both inside that beat up old building on Wabansia.
***
On the plane the other day I read My Year of Rest and Relaxation and it was everything I wanted to read right then, on the way to the tropics, at the end of a summer that did not go I had hoped (does it ever?) but that I have faith will in time become a new season, full of its own potential and mysteries. Highly recommend! Next up: Oval, which my friend Robin won’t stop talking about. More soon.