Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2020 i Vanity Fair

LAST YEAR CHICAGO POET Eve L. Ewing published 1919, a volume that channels her city’s Red Summer into blues. It is a magical work. The voices of housekeepers and stockyard hands are summoned. The thoughts of trains carrying black people north are conjured up. The doom of a black boy is told to the rhythm of a jump rope. The centerpiece of this bracing work is “True Stories About the Great Fire,” a poem inspired by the belief among white Chicagoans that the first Great Migration to the city was “the worst calamity that had struck the city since the Great Fire” of 1871, which took hundreds of lives and burned out the heart of the city. The implications of this equation are haunting. Once a people become a “calamity,”…

I’M A LITTLE tickled by the mural on the boarded-up windows of Kitchen Window, a gourmet cooking store in Uptown, Minneapolis. I’m stuck giggling at the three MLK quotes talking back to me about peace and hope and silence. Uptown is maybe the first place I ever understood to be “nice” growing up in the cities. Uptown’s forever mood is semi-bougie, cool, and young; artists’ vibes at corporate prices; very call-the-cops-on-you-while-“Fuck tha Police”-drips-heavy-from-the-rooftop-bar. I do sorta like Uptown. For the lake, the food, the better bars, the bookstore, but it always kinda feels like you’re visiting, you know? Like your welcome is brief and expensive and was never really a welcome. Very Midwestern. Sometimesy. Kitchen Window, I don’t know them people, but there’s something about standing under 15-foot MLK quotes…

MY BELOVED DIED in January. He was a foot taller than me and had large, beautiful dark eyes and dexterous, kind hands. He fixed me breakfast and pots of loose-leaf tea every morning. He cried at both of our children’s births, silently, tears glazing his face. Before I drove our children to school in the pale dawn light, he would put both hands on the top of his head and dance in the driveway to make the kids laugh. He was funny, quick-witted, and could inspire the kind of laughter that cramped my whole torso. Last fall, he decided it would be best for him and our family if he went back to school. His primary job in our household was to shore us up, to take care of the…

ROBERT F. ORR, a retired associate justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, has been a conservative his whole life. He realizes his politics might seem at odds with his vehement objection to the NCAA, a position that’s blossomed over the last decade. In 2010, when University of North Carolina fullback Devon Ramsay was under investigation for alleged academic impropriety, Orr advised him and his family as they dealt with the NCAA’s appeals process. Ramsay was a little-known player when his team became infamous that year. Several star players were investigated and suspended for receiving improper benefits from agents, a scandal followed by more allegations, this time of academic malfeasance. The school’s probe resulted in Ramsay being accused of plagiarism and withheld from competition. “I had a call with the…

In 2013, Chloe and Halle Bailey went viral when they posted a cover of Beyoncé’s “Pretty Hurts” on YouTube, from their childhood home in Atlanta. A week later, the superstar’s Parkwood Entertainment reached out to sign the sisters. Since then, Chloe x Halle have dropped two albums, performed at the Obama White House, and starred on Kenya Barris’s sitcom Grown-ish. The release of their new album, Ungodly Hour, coincides with their branching out even further—Chloe (22) produced many of the album’s songs herself, and Halle (20) stars as Ariel alongside Melissa McCarthy and Javier Bardem in Disney’s upcoming live-action remake of The Little Mermaid. THE BAILEY SISTERS caught the performance bug at a camp talent show at ages five and seven. “We sang ‘Summertime,’ ” remembers Halle. “After hearing all…

Shortly after midnight March 13, strangers shot and killed Breonna Taylor in her own home. The strangers claimed to be investigating a drug case. The strangers found no drugs in Breonna Taylor’s home. The strangers left their incident report almost totally blank. Tamika Palmer is Breonna Taylor’s mother. What follows is her attempt to illuminate the life that was taken. To grapple with the nature of strangers. To fill in the blanks. KENNY CALLS ME in the middle of the night. He says, Somebody kicked in the door and shot Breonna. I am dead asleep. I don’t know what he’s talking about. I jump up. I get ready, and I rush over to her house. When I get there, the street’s just flooded with police—it’s a million of them. And…

George Floyd, 46, is killed while being arrested by four Minneapolis police officers on Monday, May 25. Bystander footage of the incident later shows Officer Derek Chauvin pin his knee to Floyd’s neck for more than eight excruciating minutes. ANDREA JENKINS member, Minneapolis City Council I’m sitting up watching Netflix, and the message was, “Have you talked to the mayor yet?” That’s all it said. I looked at it but I didn’t answer. Then I take the call from the mayor, and he goes, “There’s been a police-involved death, but there were no guns involved.” As if to say, “The police didn’t shoot anybody.” He explained that he thought that it had to do with some kind of forgery. STE PHEN JACKSON former NBA player, Houston-area native, longtime close friend…

DAY 1 22 AMERICANS ARE DEAD from coronavirus, and Donald Trump tweets, “We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on CoronaVirus.” I hear from Joe Osmundson, writer, friend, and scientist, that I should not attend the Association of Writers Programs, a conference I say I am too tired to attend, a conference where I will not be paid for attending. “The government is way behind on this,” Joe writes. “Experts in our community are the best we have. I’ve been talking to a lot of friends working on this, and I trust them a lot.” “Should I fly, fam?” I ask him. “It’s not ‘US’ we’re doing this for,” he texts back. “The risk for you is still low, but it’s…

TO HEAR LETITIA WRIGHT tell it, her role in Small Axe, the ambitious new miniseries helmed by 12 Years a Slave director Steve McQueen, owes a little something to providence. She was on a beach in Trinidad and Tobago when she got an email. McQueen wanted to talk to her about playing real-life Black Panther and activist Altheia Jones-LeCointe—a native of the very Trinidad whose shores Wright was currently enjoying. A coincidence, maybe, but Wright ran, didn’t walk, at the chance. “So I finished my holiday,” she tells me over a comfortably chatty Zoom call this summer, “and as soon as I got off the plane, I went home, got dressed, got prepared, and literally went to meet with McQueen that afternoon.” Small Axe, which was made by the BBC…

FOR MORE THAN 20 years, Amy Sherald has been putting the narratives of Black families and Black people to canvas. In 2016, she became the first woman and first African American to win the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, which led to her painting Michelle Obama for the National Portrait Gallery in 2018. That oil-on-linen portrait was her first commissioned work—until Breonna Taylor. Taylor is an “American girl, she is a sister, a daughter, and a hard worker. Those are the kinds of people that I am drawn towards,” says Sherald, who is immunosuppressed and has been unable to participate in protests. She calls this portrait a contribution to the “moment and to activism—producing this image keeps Breonna alive forever.” Sherald’s process typically begins with taking a picture of her subject.…

CIVIL RIGHTS LEADER Patricia Stephens Due adored scary stories, which baffled her family since she had experienced so many real terrors. While crusading against Jim Crow laws and segregation in the 1960s, she’d been threatened, dragged away, and arrested, and her eyesight had been permanently damaged when police threw a tear gas canister directly into her face. Still, she loved tales of killers, monsters, and restless spirits, and purchased her daughter, the future novelist and scholar Tananarive Due, her first Stephen King book. “My dad thought it was kind of weird, but now I’ve come to think that she liked horror because she was a civil rights activist,” says Due. “There was something about horror—that thrill and anxiety when you’re watching something on a screen that isn’t real—that I believe…

TODAY I AM tired as a bruise from too many years of too much explaining. Want to sink my mind into another kind of rising, which is a deeper form of rest, by remembering everything and everyone that got us here. Today I want to remember how we see the ones that came before, how we carry them on our backs and on our shoulders. In our arms. How the past remains a deep and bleeding wound in the present. And yet, a balm. Strange how we know this—that we have survived and continue to survive because as artists and activists, as storytellers and change-makers of all kinds, we know that no matter how crazy and deadly a moment seems, we continue to stare the future down in order to…

AVA DuVERNAY: I was reading an interview in which you talked about something that’s been on my mind quite a bit lately. It’s about this time we are in that I’ll just call a racial reckoning. Do you feel that we could have encountered this moment in as robust a manner as we’ve felt it this summer without the COVID crisis having been the foundation? Could one have occurred with this much force without the other? ANGELA DAVIS: This moment is a conjuncture between the COVID-19 crisis and the increasing awareness of the structural nature of racism. Moments like this do arise. They’re totally unpredictable, and we cannot base our organizing on the idea that we can usher in such a moment. What we can do is take advantage of…

What is your idea of perfect happiness? Being surrounded by my friends and family. Just listening to them interacting, laughing, sharing. It is the culmination of everything I could have hoped for. What is your greatest fear? Years ago, before I had my current manager, I was taken advantage of by people I’d trusted with my finances. That’s made me especially sensitive to the prospect of financial ruin. I’m constantly advising young athletes to be vigilant when it comes to whom you trust with your finances. Which living person do you most admire? Barack Obama has shown us how to be a politician guided by intelligence, integrity, and compassion. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Laziness. After 30 years of being a disciplined athlete with an intensely…