secret battles between your body’s cells

These secret battles between your body’s cells might just save your life

To fight cancer and ageing, biologists are looking at how cells evict, kill or cannibalize less-fit rivals. 

Kendall Powell Nature 

Yasuyaki Fujita has seen first-hand what happens when cells stop being polite and start getting real. He caught a glimpse of this harsh microscopic world when he switched on a cancer-causing gene called Ras in a few kidney cells in a dish. He expected to see the cancerous cells expanding and forming the beginnings of tumours among their neighbours. Instead, the neat, orderly neighbours armed themselves with filament proteins and started “poking, poking, poking”, says Fujita, a cancer biologist at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan. “The transformed cells were eliminated from the society of normal cells,” he says, literally pushed out by the cells next door.

In the past two decades, an explosion of similar discoveries has revealed squabbles, fights and all-out wars playing out on the cellular level. Known as cell competition, it works a bit like natural selection between species, in that fitter cells win out over their less-fit neighbours. The phenomenon can act as quality control during an organism’s development, as a defence against precancerous cells and as a key part of maintaining organs such as the skin, intestine and heart. Cells use a variety of ways to eliminate their rivals, from kicking them out of a tissue to inducing cell suicide or even engulfing them and cannibalizing their components. The observations reveal that the development and maintenance of tissues are much more chaotic processes than previously thought. “This is a radical departure from development as a preprogrammed set of rules that run like clockwork,” says Thomas Zwaka, a stem-cell biologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.

But questions abound as to how individual cells recognize and act on weaknesses in their neighbours. Labs have been diligently hunting for — and squabbling over — the potential markers for fitness and how they trigger competitive behaviours. These mechanisms could allow scientists to rein in the process or to help it along, which might lead to better methods for fighting cancer and combating disease and ageing using regenerative medicine.

“Cell competition is on the global scientific map,” says Eugenia Piddini, a cell biologist at the University of Bristol, UK, who likens the buzz around this idea to the excitement that helped propel modern cancer immunotherapies. The better scientists understand competition, she says, the more likely it is that they will be able to use it therapeutically.

History repeats

During a blizzard that dumped more than 30 centimetres of snow this past February, biologists from about a dozen disciplines convened at a hotel at Lake Tahoe, California, for the first major meeting devoted to cell competition.

“It was a zoo of researchers,” says co-organizer Zwaka, and included biologists who study flatworms that can regenerate their whole body from a single cell, geneticists attempting to make interspecies chimaeras of mouse, monkey and rabbit embryos, and a keynote speaker who spoke about the terrible battles and cooperative campaigns waged in bacterial communities.

The snowbound attendees, about 150 in all, debated how and why cells size up their competition. And they celebrated the discovery that gave birth to the field.

How secret conversations inside cells are transforming biology

In 1973, two PhD students, Ginés Morata and Pedro Ripoll were perfecting a way to track the various cell populations in a fruit-fly larva that would eventually develop into a wing. Working at the Spanish National Research Council’s Biological Research Center in Madrid, they introduced a mutation called Minute into a few select cells in the larva and left the rest of the cells unaltered.

Knowing that Minute cells grow slower than their unaltered neighbours, the scientists expected to find some smaller cells amid the wild-type counterparts. “Instead, we found that the cells disappeared,” says Morata, now a developmental biologist at the Autonomous University of Madrid in Spain.

On their own, Minute cells can develop into a fly that is normal — except for the short, thin bristles on their bodies that give the mutation its name. But when mixed with wild-type cells in the larva, the cells simply vanished. “Minute cells were not able to compete with the more vigorous, metabolically active wild-type cells,” says Morata. They described the activity as cell competition1. “It was a very surprising and interesting observation,” Morata says. But lacking the molecular tools to follow cell fates more closely, he and his colleagues let the finding simmer.

Twenty-six years later, postdocs Laura Johnston and Peter Gallant observed nearly the same phenomenon. Working with Bruce Edgar and Robert Eisenman, respectively, at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, Washington, they were studying a mutation in another fly gene, Drosophila Myc (dMyc), that also slows cell growth2.

“There was a eureka moment when Peter and I realized that these dMyc mutant cells would disappear,” says Johnston, now a developmental biologist at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City. They eventually showed that the mutant cells were forced to initiate a form of programmed cell death called apoptosis. “It was very clear that this was a competitive situation,” Johnston says.

Their 1999 paper ignited interest among scientists, including Morata. He jumped back into the fray with Eduardo Moreno, and they took advantage of modern molecular tools to repeat the Minute experiments. “The field blossomed from there,” says Johnston.

Myc acts as a master controller of cell growth, and Minute encodes a key component needed for synthesizing proteins — so it’s not surprising that reduced expression of those proteins makes cells less fit. But Johnston’s next finding took people by surprise. She showed that cells with an extra copy of normal dMyc outcompeted wild-type cells3. These fitter-than-wild-type cells came to be called “supercompetitors”.

Johnston’s discovery of supercompetition emphasized that cell competition is about the relative fitness of a group of cells, says Zwaka. If one cell is falling behind, the entire group of neighbours could decide it has to go. But on the flipside, they can also sense that certain cells are better and should survive.

Cell competition wasn’t simply about getting rid of defects; it was about survival of the fittest, with the less-fit ‘loser’ cells dying and the ‘winners’ proliferating. Importantly, competition was seen only when there was a mixture of genetically different cells, a phenomenon known as mosaicism. In this way, cell competition acts like a quality-control system, booting out undesirable cells during development.

Vying for viability

Fujita’s observation of the kicked-out kidney cells was one of the first hints that mammalian cells compete, too4. Soon after that work was published, researchers started to observe competition forcing out mutated cells from various other tissue types such as skin, muscle and gut.

The next most obvious place to look for competing cells was the mammalian embryo. In 2013, Zwaka’s team, and two other laboratories, probed mouse embryos at the earliest stage of development — those that have progressed just beyond a ball of cells. Zwaka’s group made mouse embryonic stem cells (ESCs) with a supercompetitor mutation that lowered expression of p53, an important quality-control protein that normally puts the brakes on cell division. When these cells were put into a mouse embryo, they quickly took over and developed into a normal mouse5. Similarly, Miguel Torres’s lab at the National Center for Cardiovascular Research in Madrid showed that supercompetition could be induced in an early mouse embryo using slight overexpression of the mouse Myc gene.

By artificially creating losers or winners, researchers could force cell competition into play. But Torres’s team, led by then-postdoc Cristina Clavería, also made the striking observation that Myc expression varied naturally in mouse ESCs. Cells in the embryo with approximately half the amount of the protein compared with their neighbours were dying by apoptosis. This was one of the first studies that strongly pointed to naturally arising cell competition6.

Sculpting tissues

The phenomenon also comes into play later on in embryonic development. In a study published this year, postdoc Stephanie Ellis at Elaine Fuch’s lab in Rockefeller University in New York City, looked at mouse skin. During development, its surface area expands by a factor of 30 over the course of about a week. The cells within proliferate wildly — first as a single layer and later as multiple layers.

Ellis injected mouse embryos with a concoction that turns cells into genetic losers. She targeted a few cells present when the embryonic skin is a single layer thick, and added a marker gene that made them glow red. Then she used time-lapse imaging to watch their grim fates: the skin cells popped out from the surface layer, broke up and disappeared. Later, she noticed the winner cells engulfing and clearing the losers’ corpses7.

Repeating the experiment at the multilayer stage, Ellis no longer saw the less-fit skin cells perishing or being engulfed. Instead, the loser cells tended to differentiate and migrate into the outer layers of skin — where they acted as a barrier for a short time before being shed. The winner cells were more likely to remain behind in the bottom layer as stem cells.

This made sense. “Killing a cell is energetically expensive,” says Ellis. A developing tissue, she says, might decide: “Why not just remove losers through differentiation?” Emi Nishimura’s lab at the Tokyo Medical and Dental University in Japan, found that competing stem cells in the ageing tail skin of adult mice used the same pattern of asymmetrical divisions to eliminate stem cells with lower levels of a key structural collagen protein8.

These experiments could provide guidance for scientists looking to harness stem cells to rejuvenate ageing tissues and organs. Cell competition could either help or hurt such therapies: stem cells might outcompete older, less-fit cells, or they might encounter a hostile neighbourhood when transplanted into tissue. Understanding whether and how cell competition happens in adult tissue could help settle this matter.

Piddini admits that she was a little obsessed with the idea, and her group was part of a wave of researchers that proved cell competition does take place in adult organisms. To test the idea, she says, the team “genetically sprinkled” a mutated copy of RPS3, a gene functionally related to Minute, into some cells in the intestine of adult flies. Cells with the mutant copy were outcompeted by their wild-type counterparts. It didn’t matter whether the losers were the stem cells that maintain the gut or differentiated cells: all eventually perished9.

Cristina Villa del Campo, a senior postdoc in the Torres lab, tested for adult competition in the mouse heart by introducing winner cardiac cells at eight to ten weeks of age. Over the course of one year, she tracked the numbers of winner cells and wild-type losers and saw the loser population decline by about 40%10.

“It was a slow replacement in the adult,” says Villa del Campo. “But even highly differentiated functional adult cells can sense the less-fit heart cells and eliminate them.”

Unanswered questions

Even with so many examples of cell competition playing out in different conditions, the field still faces a torrent of unanswered questions. One big puzzle is how cells in a group sense fitness. “Maybe cells are recognizing chemical differences, or physical differences, or differences in cell-membrane composition,” says Fujita, who adds that labs have found evidence for all three.

His filament-poking kidney-cell experiments suggest that cell–cell contact is needed. Others have seen chemical-fitness signals that seem to be short-range, travelling up to eight cell diameters. Exactly which molecules are responsible for this signalling — either secreted chemicals or physical tags — is the subject of intense debate and investigation.

Both Johnston and Zwaka have turned up signals associated with immune surveillance. Johnston’s group identified molecules that typically call immune cells to swarm in and engulf foreign invaders and that were driving death in losers11. Normal cells express low levels of these death signals at all times. But in a competitive mix, winners flooded their loser neighbours with the signal, which pushed them to kill themselves.

Zwaka proposes that cells might assess each other’s health by sniffing out the general signals or debris that cells shed. It’s akin to smelling the steaks that your neighbour is grilling for dinner and concluding that they must be doing well.

Or it could be as simple as seeing which flag your neighbour is flying. Moreno heads his own group now at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Lisbon, Portugal, which discovered a membrane-spanning protein called Flower12. In humans, the protein can take four forms, each displaying its own characteristic structure on the outer cell surface. Two signal ‘I’m a winner’ and the other two signal ‘I’m a loser’ to nearby cells, says Moreno.

Some human cancer cells fly the Flower-winner signals, which might enhance their survival. Experiments in Moreno’s lab showed that silencing the winning flags on tumours slowed the cells’ growth and made them susceptible to chemotherapy13.

Some researchers, however, dispute the importance of the Flower tags. Moreno acknowledges that they are not present in all cell-competition situations.

Healthy competition. Cracking the mechanics of competition will be key if researchers want to use it to improve cell-based cancer or regenerative therapies.

There are tantalizing hints that cell competition might already protect against cancer. Findings made in the past few years reveal that human skin, oesophageal and lung cells show high levels of mosaicism. Approximately one-quarter of skin cells, for example, harbour many precancerous mutations that only rarely turn into tumours14,15.

It is unclear what gives cancerous cells the advantage when tumours do form. If researchers can learn how to subdue supercompetitors or blunt cancer cells’ ability to compete, they might be able to turn that against cancer.

Conversely, stem cells might need to gain a competitive edge if they are to replace aged or diseased tissue for an organ makeover. Villa del Campo says that clinicians are already considering how to enhance patient-derived cardiac stem cells to efficiently replace cells that have been damaged by heart attacks or disease.

What started as modest observations in minuscule fruit-fly larvae has exposed the primal cellular battles that could usher in a new era of cell-based medicine. The process has scientists buzzing, but it remains mysterious.

“Cell competition might be a general process to remove any undesirable cell that should not be there,” says Morata, after returning from a one-day meeting in Lausanne, Switzerland devoted to competition in September.

Now 74, he’s thrilled that work he essentially shelved more than 40 years ago is gaining new life and that the competition is heating up. “It’s really exciting.”

America’s Worst Racial Massacre

The Forgotten History of America’s Worst Racial Massacre

Hundreds of black citizens were killed in Elaine, Ark., a century ago this week.

By Nan Elizabeth Woodruff New York Times

Dr. Woodruff is a historian and the author of “American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta.”

One hundred years ago this week, one of the worst episodes of racial violence in American history unfolded in Elaine, Ark., a small town on the Mississippi. Details remain difficult to verify. The perpetrators suppressed coverage of the events, and the victims, terrified black families, had no one to turn for help. In fact, local police were complicit in the killing of untold numbers of African-Americans.

The Elaine massacre was among the worst instances of racial violence in American history, and it took place in a region, the Delta, that defined itself by its violence and oppression. One African-American, William Pickens, described the region as “the American Congo.” Elaine, though an isolated plantation region, was part of the broader social upheaval following World War I that came in the form of massive strikes and racial confrontations, both at home and abroad.

Elaine sits in Phillips County, on one of the many bends in the Mississippi, roughly 95 miles southwest of Memphis. There, in the early fall of 1919, a different struggle for democracy was taking place. Emboldened by their war experience, African-American veterans returned to the Delta to demand the full rights of citizenship and justice, not only before the law but also in their labors. In Phillips County, this struggle directly challenged planter dominance.

The town was at the center of a rapidly changing lumber and plantation economy known for harsh working conditions. Sharecroppers worked the land for a small share of the crop and were forced to sell their cotton to the landowners, who paid less than market prices. Workers also had to buy food, clothing, household wares, tools, seed and fertilizer at the plantation commissary, which charged exorbitant interest rates. It was a system intended to keep black people in debt and dependent upon planters. Legal disfranchisement stripped them of the vote and an ability to share in any benefits of citizenship.

But World War I brought changes to the Delta, as it did in Northern urban centers. Men and women migrated to Northern factories or joined the military, creating a labor shortage in the cotton fields and lumber mills. Women received domestic allotment checks from men in the military, giving them cash beyond the control of planters. Consequently, plantation owners and lumber mills had to pay higher wages to have the cotton picked or timber milled. Even worse from the planters’ perspective, the much-feared radical Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies, were rumored to be organizing in the fields and mills.

Most Americans, unaware of the killings in Elaine, continued to go about their lives.

The heroism of black soldiers in the war enhanced the struggle for black freedom, causing industrialists and plantation owners to brace themselves for the return of black veterans. As racialized violence spread in both Northern and Southern cities during the Red Summer of 1919, Delta planters were paying close attention. The violence occurred not only in the more familiar urban centers of Chicago and Washington, but also in the hinterlands of Omaha; Charleston, S.C.,; Longview, Tex.; and in the plantation region of the Arkansas Delta.

Late in the evening of Sept. 30, black sharecropper families gathered in the Hoop Spur church near Elaine. They came to discuss membership in an organization called the Progressive Farmers and Household Union, which would help them secure a fair price for the cotton they picked and to buy land. They aimed to hire a lawyer to represent them with the landlords. The 1919 cotton crop was the most profitable in history and they stood to make a good amount of money.

At 11 p.m., a band of white men shot into the church. Black guards returned the fire, killing a white agent of the Missouri Pacific Railroad. News of the shooting quickly reached the county seat of Helena. Soon, word spread that blacks were attacking whites in Elaine. By early morning Oct. 1, the sheriff sent white veterans from the American Legion post to suppress what he deemed an insurrection.

Calls went out to the governor for federal troops. Telephone lines to Elaine were cut. Throughout the day at least 1,000 white vigilantes came from all over the state and from Mississippi to join plantation owners, their managers, sheriffs, deputies and the veterans to put down what they called uprising. It was effectively an invasion. By day’s end, countless black women, men and children had been slaughtered.

The following morning, Gov. Charles H. Brough of Arkansas and a World War I veteran, Col. Issac Jencks, personally escorted 583 soldiers, including a machine gun battalion, from Camp Pike in Little Rock, the state capital, to Elaine. Colonel Jencks sent all of the white women and children to Helena by train, ordered the immediate disarming of everyone and authorized the killing of black insurgents who failed to disarm. Then the real massacre began: For the next five days, Colonel Jencks and his troops, assisted by vigilantes, hunted black people over a 200-mile radius. They scorched and burned homes with families inside, slaughtered and tortured others. The troops were aided by seven machine guns.

On Oct. 7, Colonel Jencks declared the insurrection over and withdrew his troops. He brought the men and women deemed insurrectionists to the Phillips County jail in Helena. On Oct. 31, a grand jury indicted 122 black men and women for offenses ranging from murder to night riding. A jury convicted 12 black men in the murders of three white men, even though two of the deaths had occurred from white people accidentally shooting each other in a frenzy. The “confessions” of the black men had been secured through torture. Black people were thus blamed, sentenced and jailed for their own massacre.

Local officials and businessmen conducted their own investigation of what had transpired in the Elaine area. They produced a predictable narrative that resembled those dating back to slavery. In their view “a deliberately planned insurrection” had occurred, where black sharecroppers had intended to murder the plantation owners to seize the land. The findings blamed outside agitators for stirring up ignorant sharecroppers. The committee’s narrative appeared in newspapers all over the country. Colonel Jencks’s report of his mission supported this view, claiming only two black people and one of his corporals had died. He praised his troops for their restraint in suppressing the rebellion.

The official narrative presented a picture at odds with reality. According to several accounts from white witnesses, both vigilantes and the troops committed acts of barbarism. A local schoolteacher saw “28 black people killed, their bodies thrown into a pit and burned,” and “16 African Americans killed, their bodies hanging from a bridge outside of Helena.”

A Memphis reporter described events on Oct. 2 after the troops had arrived. Troops and vigilantes, he noted, went into the canebrakes in search of “negro desperadoes,” leaving dead bodies “lying in the road a few miles outside of the city. Enraged citizens fired at the bodies of the dead negro's as they rode out of Helena toward Elaine.”

Still others described the barbarism of “cutting off the ears or toes of dead negroes for souvenirs and the dragging of their bodies through the streets of Elaine.” Gerald B. Lambert, the founder of Listerine, who owned 21,000 acres near Elaine, saw white men spread throughout the woods, firing at any suspicious person. “A steel gondola car was hauled back and forth on the railroad track,” he said, adding, “the men inside firing from the shelter of the steel walls of the car,” shooting black people. He also told how soldiers brought a suspected union leader to his company store for interrogation, poured kerosene over his body and tossed a match.

The account that best captured the perspective of the sharecroppers came from Ida Wells Barnett, the legendary anti-lynching crusader and journalist. She had been driven from her home in Memphis to Chicago because of her activism. One of the convicted 12 wrote to her from prison, requesting help. Courageously, she dressed up as a sharecropper and went to Arkansas. There she interviewed the 12 prisoners accused of murder, their wives, and many others, publishing her findings in a 1920 pamphlet.

Ms. Wells Barnett gathered testimonies that described the sheer horror of the massacre from those who endured and lived to tell their stories. One union member, Ed Ware, told her that men had fired into the Hoop Spur church, killing several people, then burned it down the next day with bodies inside. When he returned home, 150 men came to ransack his house, seizing his union meeting minutes and his Masonic lodge books. As they surrounded his house, another man inside, Charlie Robinson, tried to run away. He was elderly and handicapped, and ran too slowly. They shot him and left him to die. They stole Ware’s cow, two mules, one horse, a farm wagon, his Ford car and various household goods. He lost 121 acres of cotton and corn.

Many families described how they had run into the woods for safety from bloodthirsty mobs, hoping to surrender themselves to the federal troops for safety. Instead, the troops either shot or arrested them.

Vigilantes from Mississippi seized another union member, Lula Black, and her four children from her house, knocked her down, pistol whipped and kicked her, then took her to jail. Carrying an ax with their guns, they then moved to another home, where they murdered yet another union member, Frances Hall. In a final act of disrespect, they tied her dress over her head and left her body on the side of the road for several days.

Seventy-nine-year-old Ed Coleman had remained at home with his wife when people fleeing Hoop Spur came to his house and warned them to leave. As they ran from the posse, the Colemans saw his neighbor, Jim Miller, and his family burned alive in their house. After hiding for two days in the woods, the Colemans returned home to find dead bodies of women and children scattered about their community.

Families of union members found no welcome when they returned to their homes. The wife of Frank Moore had hidden for four weeks. When she came back to her neighborhood, a plantation manager, Billy Archdale, told her “if she did not leave, he would kill her, burn her up, and no one would know where she was.” Most of those who survived found their homes emptied of possessions that appeared in white peoples’ homes.

Ms. Wells Barnett provided hard evidence of the massacre, but it took the Supreme Court to expose the truth to national attention. In Moore v. Dempsey, the court in 1923 overturned the convictions of six of the Elaine 12, arguing that the confessions had been secured through torture. The trial had occurred in a setting dominated by a mob spirit, violating the prisoners’ right to due process.

The decision by the justices was aided by two white men involved in the massacre who reversed their previous testimonies. They now verified that the planters had gone to the Hoop Spur church to destroy the union and that the posse had killed their own men, instead of the black people who had been accused. They described the wholesale massacre of hundreds of unarmed and defenseless black people, and the torture used to secure confessions. The murders, thefts, violence and terror continued long after the troops had gone and the convicted men had been released.

It is impossible to establish an accurate death toll. Military reports were intentionally vague. Local authorities blocked press coverage. Many denied the massacre had occurred, leaving accounts of the slaughter to witnesses, reports from Wells Barnett, and stories passed down through families of the victims. Estimates have ranged from 25 to 853, the latter from an Arkansas Gazette reporter who named no source. Walter White, of the NAACP, reported first that more than 100 African-Americans were killed, later changing it to 250.

At least two historians, including myself, have settled on a reasonable estimate of 200, recognizing that the toll was most likely far greater. What is certain is that the massacre cast a long shadow for decades, with fear of reprisals silencing those who witnessed and survived the terror.

The descendants of the massacre have begun to organize to make their stories heard. The Elaine Legacy Center, in conjunction with the Dewitt Proctor Conference, held a Truth Hearing in February where 12 commissioners heard several descendants convey powerful stories of the massacre handed down through their families. Many wept as they told of murder, land theft, forced migration and the legacies of living in a region where fear of retribution silenced people over generations. They seek redress, not in the form of apologies, but in recognition of the harm done, and of the way generations continue to suffer the consequences. The descendants of the wealthier white perpetrators, they insist, have profited, and continue to do so, from the suffering and loss that their families endured in 1919.

Americans have yet to reckon with this horrible past. Elaine was probably the largest massacre of black people in post-Civil War history, yet no federal investigation was ever conducted. This neglect by the government came in the face of people who merely sought to exercise their basic rights to secure a lawyer to defend their property.

America cannot address the inequality, poverty, inadequate education, the racially biased criminal justice system, and the limited life chances of black people that define contemporary society until the nation confronts and acknowledges this history. The obligations of the past weigh heavily upon the present.

The Distinctly American Ethos of the Grifter

NOTES ON THE CULTURE

The Distinctly American Ethos of the Grifter

As stories of theft and deception have come to dominate the cultural conversation, it can often feel like grift is a modern phenomenon — but it isn’t.

By Ligaya Mishan NY Times

EVERY AGE HAS it’s defining minor characters, those who briefly light up the public’s imagination not for their achievements but for how they personify our anxieties and most fervent human desires. Consider the half-Chinese, half-Malay Princess Caraboo, who in 1817 was kidnapped by pirates from her native island of Javasu in the Indian Ocean and sold from ship to ship around the globe until finally she jumped overboard and swam ashore, up the Bristol Channel to the parish of Almondsbury in what is today South Gloucestershire, England. Or so went the story that kindly strangers were able to coax out of the young woman who showed up on a cottage doorstep speaking “gibberish” and wearing a dress “in imitation of the Asiatic costume,” as chronicled in a leaflet published later that year. For 10 weeks, she regaled admirers with reminiscences — of a mother with blackened teeth and a bejeweled nose, and a father of such rank petitioners approached him only on their knees — before she was exposed as a cobbler’s daughter and illiterate servant, born Mary Willcocks in Devonshire. She went on to sustain a living supplying a local infirmary with — poetic justice — leeches. 

We, too, have our cheats and impostors, so many these days that some commentators have cited grift as the ascendant ethos of our time. Those indicted or convicted in the past year include the faux European trust-fund baby peeling off hundred-dollar tips even as her credit cards were denied; the mid-list Hollywood stars accused of bribing their children’s way into college; the party promoter who peddled luxury villas on a white-sand Caribbean beach that turned out to be hurricane-relief tents on a gravel lot; and the Stanford University dropout in a Steve Jobs costume touting a health care revolution via a single drop of blood. It’s easy to see these stories as symptomatic of our general miasma of fakery and doubt. Everyone is on the make; everyone is getting conned. But not all of these cases technically qualify as grift, which in its highest form goes beyond mere fraud to question and undermine the institutions that control us, the systems that keep us from getting ahead — and the world as we know it 

The word “grift” first entered recorded usage nearly a century after the Caraboo caper, in a 1914 dictionary of American underworld slang compiled by Louis E. Jackson and C.R. Hellyer. Its definition is tellingly vague: “an opportunity for plying criminal talents,” suggesting not so much the pursuit of illicit profit as general delight in the act of deceit. (Some of today’s so-called grifters are more bumblers than proper swindlers, making promises that they can’t logistically fulfill.) Note that there’s a distinction between grift and straight-up crime, in terms of goal and scale. Politicians and financiers may be perennially conniving, but they aren’t grifters because they’re part of the system — true practitioners of the art thrive in the margins. Grifters are small-time lawbreakers, not the kind of epic liars who leave the wreckage of lives and nations in their wake. They’re not even bad people, per se: They stand outside morality, defying the social binary of good and evil. They tend to pilfer just enough to disrupt but not devastate. 

Crucially, they operate against the odds, working from the outside in. We don’t cheer when the already privileged con their way into more privilege, like those accused in the Hollywood college-admissions scandal; that’s just plain old cheating. The grifters who enter folklore, whom we revere as near heroes, choose their victims among the otherwise invulnerable: the rich and mighty, whom they bring down, if only momentarily, to scramble with the rest of us. In this, America is perhaps the rightful home of grifters, for where else in the world is so deeply identified with the possibility of transcending humble origins and becoming someone powerful and new? (Princess Caraboo, before her unmasking, twice attempted to run away and hop on a boat to America, likely in hopes of finding a more credulous following.) Ours is a land that exalts opportunity to the point of encouraging its exploitation. As the cultural critic Lewis Hyde wrote in 1998, we embrace the grifter as an embodiment of what is “actually true about America but cannot be openly declared” — like “the degree to which capitalism lets us steal from our neighbors,” or the amount of unfounded faith that the stock market demands. 

GRIFTING IS ARGUABLY a natural, even inevitable byproduct of American democracy. The French diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville, casting a gimlet eye on the brash young nation in “Democracy in America” (1835-40), wrote, “When all the prerogatives of birth and fortune have been abolished, when all professions are open to all and a man’s own energies may bring him to the top of any of them, an ambitious man may think it easy to launch on a great career and feel that he has been called to no common destiny.” But this is a delusion; with the expansion of opportunity comes a corresponding flattening of hopes, as ever more people compete for the same limited number of spots. And because nothing appears to stand in the way of success in this brave new world (at least the utopian vision of it), no acknowledged social or systemic bias, we are expected — nay, mandated — to rise, our worth measured not only by the height but the speed of our ascent. Failure is wholly individual; we are allowed to blame no one but ourselves if we fumble. No wonder de Tocqueville sensed despair in even the wealthiest Americans he met: “It is odd to watch with what feverish ardor the Americans pursue prosperity and how they are ever tormented by the shadowy suspicion that they may not have chosen the shortest route to get it.” 

It’s the shortest route that calls to the grifter, who recognizes that for someone starting from a position of disadvantage, the American dream sometimes requires cutting corners. Even in the archetypal rags-to-riches story, Horatio Alger’s novel “Ragged Dick” (1868), no riches are actually obtained — only the chance to work toward riches. The main character, a teenage bootblack living on the streets, may be frugal and mostly honest (apart from a few small cons, including posing as a tax official to cajole fruit from an apple seller), but he can’t get a “respectable” job until, in a stroke of luck, he rescues a child, who happens to be the son of a benevolent merchant, from drowning. The reward is a foot in the door, a position on the lowest rung of the firm, with years of toil to follow. Ragged Dick is willing to work hard and put his fate in the hands of his social superiors because he trusts the system; the serious grifter does not. For what is a grifter but an ordinary person “living more clearly than the world permits,” as the American writer Patricia Highsmith scribbled in a notebook in 1949, imagining a character predisposed to crime — and foreshadowing the antihero of her 1955 novel, “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” 

In this turbulent era, there’s almost a nostalgic appeal to the grifter, who rejects the raw deal of birth. 

Like Ragged Dick, Tom Ripley starts out as a pretend tax official, reaping ill-gotten gains, and must rely on the kindness of strangers for his entree to a loftier sphere. After a chance encounter on the street, he is recruited by the rich father of Dickie Greenleaf, a distant acquaintance, to go to Europe, all expenses paid, and fetch the wayward scion home. From the beginning, his journey is framed in terms of American myth: On the ship over, he feels possessed of a new life, “as he imagined immigrants felt when they left everything behind them ... left their friends and relations and their past mistakes, and sailed for America. A clean slate!” Money and a mission have cleansed him of his sins — less his petty scams than the greater crime of having been born without means. Once he’s charmed his way into Greenleaf’s company, however, Ripley is reminded of the precariousness of his position, in contrast with his comrade’s dilettantish ease, achieved without effort, simply underwritten by his father’s fortune. No matter how talented Ripley is, he can never have that surfeit of self-belief. When he finally takes on Greenleaf’s identity (having bludgeoned the callow heir to death), he makes an explicit callback to his transformation on the voyage: “This was the clean slate he had thought about on the boat ... This was the real annihilation of his past and of himself ... and his rebirth as a completely new person.” 

Highsmith read de Tocqueville shortly before writing the novel, and in Ripley she plumbed the peculiarly American discontent of the middle-class striver, close enough to poverty to fear it and far enough from wealth to both desire and despise it. The historian Karen Halttunen, in her 1982 study “Confidence Men and Painted Women,” points out that by the 19th century in America, the label “middle class” had come to define not a static, in-between group but those of no fixed class, “suspended between the facts of their present social position and the promise, which they took for granted, of their economic future.” The heyday of grifting, from the 1900s to the stock-market crash of 1929, was a time of preternatural abundance; Herbert Hoover, accepting the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 1928, predicated an imminent “triumph over poverty.” But not everyone benefited: The next year, earners in the top 10 percent took in nearly half of the nation’s income, while those in the top 1 percent took in nearly 15 percent. 

Such statistics are uncannily close to those in our own time, which may explain the resurgence of (or, at least, renewed interest in) the con. Grifters work the gap, and this one keeps getting bigger — because it doesn’t exist by happenstance; it’s a structural flaw in the free-market economy, a perfectly legal and socially sanctioned dynamic: the tendency for wealth to accrete to those who already have it, who can wield the power to generate more. Early American grifters profited from both a weak central government and the speculative nature of America as a country still coming into existence, with unfixed borders and newfangled paper money that was largely symbolic and occasionally worthless, issued by private banks without the bullion to back it up. A similar uncertainty haunts us now, as we attempt to redefine ourselves as a nation. In this turbulent era, there’s almost a nostalgic appeal to the grifter, who so glibly shakes off the shackles of identity and rejects the raw deal of birth. It reminds us of that bygone age of boundless possibility, when the distance between tall tale and reality was shorter, and a poor immigrant boy like, say, Andrew Carnegie could rise from lowly factory worker to industrial titan, eventually becoming, in 1901, the richest man in the world. We still want to believe those stories, now more than ever. 

OURS IS A CURIOUS time of both peak cynicism and peak gullibility. News is fake unless it comes from sources that espouse our worldview, in which case even the most preposterous conspiracy theory is seen as ironclad truth. Never have we been so suspicious or more ready to expose and accuse, and yet daily we accept fictions as the basis of reality, from the posturings of bots and provocateurs on Twitter to the radiantly lit, commercially sponsored posts of Instagram influencers for whom there is no distinction between the personal and the corporate, to the seemingly innocuous deceptions of friends who obsessively filter photos and curate their feeds to present a better version of themselves. We live in constant suspension of disbelief, what the American anthropologist Michael Taussig has called “this silly if not desperate place between the real and the really made-up.” This makes us easy prey for — perhaps even complicit with — grifters who play off our communal, mimetic desires. As the linguist David Maurer wrote in his 1940 study “The Big Con,” the grifter is “really not a thief at all because he does no actual stealing. The trusting victim literally thrusts a fat bank roll into his hands.” 

In fact, the best grifts approach performance art. (The critic Luc Sante, in an introduction to the 1999 reprint of Maurer’s “Big Con,” frames the ruse as “a form of theater ... staged with minute naturalistic illusionism for an audience of one, who is moreover enlisted as part of the cast.”) The trajectory of the poseur, Russian-born heiress Anna Delvey, nee Sorokin, who was convicted in April on several felony counts of grand larceny and is currently serving four to 12 years, recalls a 1983 stunt pulled by David Hampton, a middle-class black teen from upstate New York and a rarity in the history of known American grifters, who tend to be white. (This may be because the burden of doubt is still too high for people of color, who often have trouble getting their feet in the door no matter how lofty their credentials; Linda Taylor, a Chicago woman immortalized by politicians in the 1970s as the archetypal “welfare queen,” won notoriety for mining government programs directed toward the poor — in other words, for fitting into a negative stereotype, rather than upending it.) Pretending to be the son of the actor Sidney Poitier, Hampton sweet-talked his way onto elite college campuses, stole a student’s address book and cold-called wealthy white Manhattanites whose names were listed in them. 

He introduced himself as a classmate of their children and said that he’d been mugged. His shining detail: He told his marks that the assailant had stolen not just his money but his thesis — on criminal justice. The gambit didn’t yield much material reward beyond food, temporary shelter and a little cash. But Hampton certainly pranked the sensibilities of the white liberals he targeted, knowing that they would probably be at once suspicious of him and so ashamed of that suspicion — of betraying unconscious racist undertones — that they would overcompensate and welcome him into their homes, wine and dine him and invite him to sleep under their roof. News clippings about him later inspired John Guare’s play “Six Degrees of Separation,” which premiered at Lincoln Center in 1990, prompting Hampton to sue, claiming plagiarism of his life. He lost. 

Grifters, for all our grudging admiration, rarely come to happy ends. Hampton’s tricks were glorified onstage, but he died alone and impoverished at 39, after spending his last days in an AIDS hospice. Sorokin may be negotiating with Hollywood — her shape-shifting is the subject of two upcoming projects from Netflix and HBO (under the helm of Shonda Rhimes and Lena Dunham, respectively) — but she remains in a prison cell, under threat of deportation to Russia for having overstayed her visa. Failure is built into grift; after all, if you get away with it, you’re no longer on the outside — you’re part of the system. What is the ultimate grift but to make good on your unlawful rewards and prove that you deserved them all along? We call that an American success story. We call that leaning in.

Harbor; New Yorker Fiction

Harbor

By Garth Greenwell

Even in the dark I liked to look at it, though the sea was never truly dark, even now in the off-season it caught the light of the moon, which hung high and almost full, and of the signs of the few restaurants and hotels that were open in the new town, so that the whole harbor shimmered with points of light. It had been months since I had seen the sea, a year, and I was hungry for it; I had stepped to the edge of the terrace to check my phone but found myself staring at the sea instead. 

You could lose yourself in it, that was what I liked, it was beautiful but also it was like looking at nothing, the sight of it drowned out thinking like the sound of it drowned out noise, and at first I didn’t hear the others calling me to join them. I smiled as I turned, though I resented being called back, and saw that they were standing in a circle beside the tables where they had been smoking and talking, their glasses empty. Come here, one of the American writers said, we’re playing spin the bottle, and I laughed and took my place. We were choosing partners; there would be a reading to close the festival at the end of the week, and we would read in pairs, one American, one Bulgarian. A Bulgarian writer held one of the wine bottles we had emptied; he crouched in the center of the circle and then stepped back to the periphery once he had set it spinning, which it did crazily over the cobblestones of the patio. 

He was the oldest of us, mid-fifties and handsome, a champion boxer when he was young and now a coach of some sort. All the Bulgarians had other careers, there’s no such thing as a professional writer in Bulgaria, and no writing programs, either, or almost none; they worked in business, or as journalists, one ran a satirical Web site all my students in Sofia loved, one was a priest. And they had all published books, some of them several, so that though the program was for emerging writers it was hard to tell the difference between them and the writers still inside the restaurant, the famous writers. 

That wasn’t true for the Americans, who were younger and less accomplished; most were still in graduate programs for writing, or had just finished. We were boring in comparison to them, I thought, as the bottle came to a stop and, to a chorus of cheers, the boxer stepped forward and shook the hand of one of the Americans. There was something a little sheepish about the pair of them, maybe the erotic overtones of the game caused them to lean away from each other as they shook hands, each staying decidedly in his own sphere. N., who ran the Web site, took the bottle next. He was a bigger man, not quite fat, not quite handsome, the friendliest and funniest in the group; he had made us laugh to tears over dinner and he made us laugh now, when he took his American partner by the shoulders and hugged him close, he was so happy, they would be brothers forever, a toast, he said, taking him to the table and its bottle of rakia.

There were six of us left, and we tightened our circle as another Bulgarian writer, the only woman in their cohort, took the bottle and spun it on the cobblestones. But before it could come to a stop a voice called out in Bulgarian and then a waitress from inside stepped in between us, wagging her finger and snatching the bottle up from the ground. Chakaite, one of the Bulgarians said, hold on, we’re almost finished, but the waitress said Ne, ne mozhe, it’s not permitted, we were being too loud, people lived above the restaurant, and the bottle, what if it broke, what a mess, and then she turned and walked back inside, the bottle cradled against her chest. 

We looked at one another, embarrassed, and then the Bulgarian woman shrugged and turned back to the table. Most of the others joined her, one or two went inside the restaurant, where the writers who taught the workshops were sitting, one Bulgarian and one American, we had had our first sessions earlier that day. I stepped away again, not wanting to join them, I pulled my phone out but put it back in my pocket unchecked. I can’t, R. had said in one of our last conversations, wiping his face, I don’t think I can, I don’t know what I feel, I have to figure out my life. 

He was sitting cross-legged on his bed, his computer open in front of him, he kept leaning toward the screen and back. But Skups, I said, using my name for him, our name for each other, that’s what we’ve been doing, we’re figuring out our lives, you are my life, I didn’t say, but I thought it, for two years he had been my life. Every couple of months I flew to Lisbon to spend a long weekend with him, a week; whenever I had a break I stayed in his tiny student’s room, we slept together in the narrow bed he was sitting on now. I’m trying, I said to him from my own bed in Sofia, turned toward the screen so that we were speaking face to face, as it were; I had been applying for jobs but there were no jobs, or none I could get, it was too expensive to hire Americans, they said, if I had an E.U. passport it would be different. It’s impossible, R. said, you know it’s impossible, we have to accept it, I have to live my life. I had to live my life too, and I wanted a different life, not a life without R. but a life in a new place, I couldn’t keep living the same day again and again, the hours of teaching, I wanted a new life too.

On the patio a plan was forming to leave the restaurant and explore the town. It was a warm night, early June, still a week or two before the shops would open for the summer tourists, with signs in Russian hung out over cheap souvenirs; we would have the streets to ourselves. N. made a quick trip inside the restaurant, to the long table where food had been laid out, and returned with a bottle of wine, which he held low and tight against his body, hiding it from the waitress. Rations, he said, very important. 

The restaurant was near the hotel, at the tip of the little peninsula that formed the southern side of the harbor, and the street we walked along was like all the others in the old town, cobbled and lined on both sides with unpainted wooden houses in the National Revival style, two- or three-story buildings, oddly off-kilter and asymmetrical, with elaborate wooden beams buttressing upper floors jutting out over the foundations. They were in varying stages of upkeep, some renovated, others barely shacks, even here along the most desirable streets near the shore, where buildings jostled for a glimpse of the sea. Most of them were empty, shuttered hotels and vacation homes, but occasionally the sound of a television reached us from inside, or light spilled through the slats of the wooden shutters, a few people lived here all year long. 

I was walking with another American, a graduate student in a program he hated in the South. He was younger than I was, and fit; in the mornings he ran along the sea, on the path that led to the new town, where the shops were open, he said, it was a real city, not just a museum. He was friendly and I tried to match his friendliness, it was why I was here, I told myself, to meet people, to make friends. But I didn’t trust myself, I was too eager, I caught myself looking at him, at almost every man I passed, with a kind of hunger R. had shielded me from, I mean the thought of R. It might be possible, I thought about the other writer, he looked at me sometimes in a way that made me think maybe I could have him, or he could have me, we could have a little romance, though really that wasn’t what I wanted; I wanted something brutal, which was what frightened me, I wanted to go back to that world R. had lifted me out of. It was a childish feeling, maybe, I wanted to ruin what he had made, what he had made me, I mean, the person he had made me.

We were trailing behind the others, we could hear them ahead of us in the dark, their occasional bursts of laughter. We were walking up Apolonia, the main thoroughfare, though it wasn’t until we reached the center of town that there were any real signs of life, some open shops, a restaurant, a man at a table outside, hunched over a slice of pizza. 

We caught up with the others in front of a convenience store, and waited until N. and the priest emerged with new bottles of wine and a stack of plastic cups. N. handed these out as the priest busied himself with one of the bottles, cutting the foil at the neck with a pocketknife attached to his keys, working at it slowly, with the deliberateness of drunkenness. He had arrived after the rest of us, driving in from Veliko Tarnovo. We had all been curious to meet him, but there was nothing especially priestly about the man who appeared dressed all in black, not in a cassock but in jeans and a T-shirt he wore tucked in, tight on his thin frame. He had a young man’s beard, scraggly and unkempt, a sign of laziness more than devotion, I might have thought. Only his hands marked him out, the fingers long and thin, a scholar’s hands, with the weird sliding grace of someone accustomed to ritual. Or maybe I had this impression because of the way I had seen him raise his hand to a man’s lips earlier in the evening, when the distinguished Bulgarian writer, elderly and reclusive, asked for a blessing before he read. He had become priestly in that moment, he had stood solemn while the writer pressed his lips to the third joint of the second finger of his right hand, and then he made the sign of the cross over the writer’s bowed head. It had surprised me, it was a gesture I hadn’t seen in years, not made in earnest, not since the year I had played at conversion in graduate school, when I had made it myself or had it made over me at the rail of a church in Boston, where I stood with my arms crossed over my chest, my mouth sealed by my disordered life, as I thought of it then.

There was nothing solemn about the priest now. Once he had opened the bottle he made a direct line for D., the youngest American, who from the first had been the object of greatest interest for the Bulgarian men. This was especially true of the priest, whose attentions had gone quickly from charming to comic and then, as they persisted, become disquieting. For most beautiful first, he said, pouring wine into her cup, his English almost nonexistent, and she smiled and looked away, cringing a little. He came around to each of us then, gallant as he filled our cups, though he refused to meet my gaze, as he had all day, my attempts to speak with him defeated by the odd way he spoke Bulgarian, very fast and with a tripping enunciation that made him impossible for me to understand. It was the accent of his region, one of the other Bulgarians said to me, selski aksent, a village accent. But it wasn’t his accent that made him distant with me, I thought, though maybe it was uncharitable of me to assume he shared the views of his colleagues, or some of his colleagues, like the priest who had called, the previous summer, for all decent people to line the route of the Pride parade and throw stones at the queers.

I took advantage of the pause to check my phone again. We were taking a break, that was how R. had left things, but though I tried not to think it I knew the break was final. For the past two weeks we hadn’t had any contact, stopping our Skype chats and e-mails, which had become essential to the structure of my day, even as they had also begun to seem like a trap, taking me away from writing, keeping me up too late. He never wanted to hang up, I’ll be so bored, he would say, I’ll be so lonely, and the next day I would struggle to make it through class. They had come to feel like a trap but without them I found the evenings intolerable, there was too much time for thinking, too much time for remorse. It wasn’t really true that we had no contact, we still looked at each other’s Facebook pages; the night before I had posted photos of the drive from Sofia to Sozopol, of our group beside the sea, probably that was what had spurred him to send, very early that morning, the message I had worried over all day. It was full of regret and self-recrimination, I’ve broken the best thing, he wrote, he didn’t know why he had done it, it was just the same thing again and again, he said, it’s like I hate my own happiness, which was a phrase I had repeated to myself all day. 

This had been the worst part about distance, the helplessness I felt when he was anxious or sad, as he often was, when nothing I could say would comfort him. Sex could comfort him, or just the presence of my body beside his, he wanted physical comfort, and it was terrible to think of him in his room alone. I know I can’t fix it, he said, I know it’s too late, we can’t go back, he spoke of it as if it were the distant past, and this made me angry, since what was the point of his message then, why had he sent it to me, why had he drawn me back to him, drawn me back but only so far.

The priest had finished making his rounds, he had emptied one bottle and carried another that was half full, which he lifted to his mouth and drank from deeply, thirstily. He started singing as we walked on, following the road as it opened up, past the houses of the old town, into a kind of plaza beyond which extended a tree-lined avenue up to the highway. I couldn’t understand the words of his song but the melody was familiar, and after a moment I realized it was the anthem of one of the football teams, I had heard groups of men singing it in the streets, Bulgarian flags draped across their shoulders. No one else took it up now, though he didn’t seem bothered, he walked ahead singing, swinging the wine bottle to punctuate his phrases.

N.stepped onto a bench at the edge of the plaza, trying to get our attention. Dami i gospoda, he said, repeating it in English, ladies and gentlemen, and we gathered around him, except for the priest, who kept walking into the darkness, singing his song, until the Bulgarian woman ran to catch him by the shoulder and turned him back to us. Oh, he said, dipping his head in apology, and then he took a place at the back of the group, his hands crossed at his waist, holding the bottle low, an image of meekness. Ladies and gentlemen, N. said again, spreading his arms wide like a politician and making all of us laugh. 

He was from Burgas, a city some twenty or so kilometres away, and of all the Bulgarians he knew Sozopol best. I worked as a tour guide here when I was young, he said, and now I would like to tell you, American friends, a few things about my country. This is the most old town in our country, he said, its name is Greek, it means—and here he paused, groping—spasenie, at which a couple of the Bulgarians said salvation, which he repeated, nodding, salvation. Once this was Greek, there are still many Greeks here, they build many little churches we still have, and it was true, everywhere you looked there were tiny chapels, places to pray for fishermen out at sea. There was one of these across from our hotel, facing the water, and I had entered it very early that morning, as I set off to stroll through the town on my own. It had been restored, every inch of the walls had been covered in bright blues and golds, portraits of the Virgin, the saints, and on the ceiling a large, intricate painting of the sun, multiple spoked disks laid atop one another like a complicated set of gears. The remnants of candles stuck up from trays filled with sand in front of the image of the Virgin; a pile of these candles, very long and thin, sat next to a donation box at the door. 

There’s a feeling such places accrue, a residue of use, and I considered taking one of those candles and saying a prayer of my own, something to do with R., that he be happy, that we both be happy, together or apart. Now, in the plaza, as N. continued to speak I looked at the priest, who stood quietly, still calm, his hands crossed at the waist, the bottle dangling, his head slightly bowed. He could almost have been praying himself, though he wasn’t praying, he was drunk, or maybe he was praying too, I don’t know. It was a posture—the bowed head, the apparent meekness—I remembered from the man I had got to know that year in Boston, the priest in whose office I had sat nearly every week; it was the posture with which he met my zeal or desire for zeal, which seemed to bemuse him, as if he found it both sincere and unreal, which it was. I don’t recognize the person I was then, when I read my journal from that time, or the handful of poems I wrote. I wanted to unmake myself, it seems to me now, I wanted to fit my life into a system that would deform it so entirely it would be unrecognizable.

But now N. interrupted his lecture, saying here he was, explaining the town to us, it was hard work, and he was a professional, he shouldn’t work for free. I want money, he said, making us laugh, American money, does someone have a quarter, and someone did, it was fished out of a pocket and handed over. George Washington, he cried, a sudden change of tone, I love George Washington, he is my favorite person. We laughed again and he looked up, Why are you laughing, he asked, which made us laugh more. Look, he said, holding up the coin, it says here Liberty, it is the most beautiful thing, most beautiful word, it is for this I love George Washington. He fights for freedom, like us, Bulgarians fight for freedom too. For five hundred years we are slaves to Turks, but now we are free. It is the most important thing, Liberty. Hear hear! someone said, an American, and we all raised our cups to N., though most of them were empty already. He seemed pleased by this, he gave a quick bow, at which our toast turned more raucous, Nazdrave, we cried, the Bulgarian toast, Nazdrave. He hopped down from his perch, motioning us to be quiet, We are not drunk Romanians, he said. Then he held the quarter up, looking at it anew, and with a tone of real wonder asked What do I do with this money, which set us laughing again. Keep it, D. said, from the back of our circle where the priest stood too close to her, it means someone in America loves you. Ah, N. said, beaming at her, pleased beyond words, and he slid the coin into his breast pocket and cupped his hands over it. I keep it forever, he said.

Then the priest said something I didn’t catch, pointing with his bottle, and N. said Yes! The beach! I take you there, and we followed him across the square. I was eager to be festive with these people, to distract myself from the grief I had felt since receiving R.’s message, my own grief and grief at the thought of him alone in his room in Lisbon—though I didn’t know where he was, of course, he had sent his message hours before and might already have recovered from his spasm of regret, who could know. I hung back a bit, as we reached the other side of the square, to look at the structure we were passing through, something like a covered patio between two buildings, while the others were descending the wooden staircase to the sea. 

There was a set of wooden counters, what looked like a sizable bar, but all of it was abandoned now, strewn with trash and empty bottles. It must come alive in the season, I thought, though there was a kind of finality to its disuse, it was difficult to imagine that in a few weeks it would be transformed, packed with young people. I felt uneasy, and suddenly I realized I wasn’t alone; a man, who must have been watching us as we passed, was leaning against the wall. He took a long drag from a cigarette, the tip flaring red in the dark, and met my eyes briefly before lowering his gaze. I almost thought he was there to cruise, that maybe it was a place men used, but he had an air of belonging, leaning against the wall, and I decided he must be something like a guard, keeping an eye on the place until it came to life again for the summer. Maybe he would stand there all night, I thought, but I didn’t see any television or radio to keep him company, anything at all, there was nothing but the sea to mark the time. Or maybe there was an office or a booth he would retreat to once we had passed, maybe he had only emerged on hearing our approach. I nodded to him as I moved toward the stairs, murmuring Dobur vecher, but he just raised his eyes again and flicked his spent cigarette to the ground.

There was a wooden platform at the bottom of the stairs, beside which the others had piled their shoes. I could see the whole coast, stretching from the old town, where we had eaten, which was quiet and dark, to the new town with its high-rise hotels, their windows facing the sea. One restaurant was still open there, brightly lit in red and blue, and I could hear music, Balkan pop, the uneven drums and pipes, a woman’s voice singing restlessly around them. I couldn’t make out the words but they were always the same: something about love, I thought, something about loss. 

The beach was artificial, someone had told us, they trucked tons of sand in to this particular cove; the rest of the coast was rocky, there was nowhere to bathe, though young men, despite the posted warnings, climbed the rock walls each summer to jump into the sea. The Roman wall along the old town was perpetually lit by floodlights bolted to the rocks beneath it. I had walked beside it earlier that day, with a friend who had travelled from Burgas so we could spend an hour or two together, and he had shown me where the original wall ended and modern reconstruction began, a thin strip of metal running between them. Only the lowest stones were ancient, and I knelt to lay my hands on them, jagged and pocked from the salt air, imagining the hands that had placed them there. It had been a major port once, this city, the Romans had dedicated it to Apollo, setting a great statue of the god like a guard against the sea, though the statue had been removed long ago, and never replaced.

From where I stood now I could see the path we had taken, my friend and I, and I remembered too how he had pointed to this beach, telling me that in summer very late at night you could find men here, that there were sheltered places in the rocks where you could go with them. I wondered if I would want that now, if there were men to be had. Shortly after R. had told me he wanted to end things between us, I had gone to the city center, seeking I don’t know what. For almost two years I had been with no one but R., and for the past three months I hadn’t been with anyone at all; I went out in search of feeling, I suppose, or maybe the absence of feeling. I descended the flights of stairs to the bathrooms at the National Palace of Culture, though for so long I imagined I had left them behind, that I had been lifted out of them, as I was in the habit of putting it to myself, into a new life. I had thought that before, when I sat in that room in Boston with the priest, I had thought in precisely those terms, I am being lifted out of it, not by my own agency but by some intervening force: God, love, I thought, edno i sushto, one and the same. But we are never lifted out of such places, I think now, and so I went back to the bathrooms beneath N.D.K., I had never stopped thinking about them; even as I lay with R., flooded with love, there was a part of me untouched by him, a part that longed to be back there. My hands shook as I undid my belt at the urinals, out of excitement or dread, I felt I could hardly breathe. Almost immediately a man stepped up next to me, nineteen or twenty perhaps, very beautiful, his large cock already hard. Possibly he was a hustler, he was so eager, though he didn’t make any demands as I reached over and took him in my hand, feeling the thick warmth of him as I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, trying to discern what I wanted, knowing how easy it would be to take him into the neighboring room with its stalls. I heard him whisper Iskash li, do you want it, and though I did want it I let him go, I hid away my own hardness and fled.

It was a beautiful night, the nearly full moon casting its light upon the water, and I wanted to be with them now, these people I hardly knew who seemed so at ease with one another. I took off my shoes and walked up to N., our erstwhile guide, who was smoking a cigarette, standing well away from the surf where the others were wading, letting the waves brush their ankles and calves, shouting and laughing. Hi, he said, smiling at me, speaking in English though my Bulgarian was better, it is beautiful here, no? And I said it was, very much so, prekrasno. 

He asked me about the morning’s workshop, and I told him it was fine, that they were interesting writers, I liked them very much. And how was the Bulgarian group, I asked, and he turned to me, smiling widely, and said Today we talked about the G-spot of the story, how it is like with a woman, it is difficult to make the story come. Ah, I said, taken aback, I see. And then, after a pause, But I don’t understand, I said, why should the story be a woman? It was a fair question, I thought, but he looked at me with blank incomprehension, even though I had spoken in his language. Couldn’t it be a man, I asked, would it change anything, and I thought he was going to say something in response, but then our attention was claimed by a commotion farther down the beach. What’s that, I said, as we started walking toward the others, who had gathered now in a circle, what’s going on, and then, as we heard whistles and catcalls and voices chanting strip, strip, N. told me that the priest had said he wanted to swim in the sea.

We could see him now, already bare-chested, his bearded face bright in the light of cell-phone cameras brought out of pockets. Immediately, catching sight of him, I felt myself in that strange state of vibrancy and stasis, like a flame submerged in glass, sealed off as always when I feel desire I shouldn’t feel. Not that he was so desirable: he was thin and pale, with a silver cross glinting on his chest. His hand drifted to his jeans and he paused, letting the encouragement rise, looking around the circle until he found D., eager as the rest, hooting and calling take it off, and with a look that seemed to dedicate the act to her, the whole evening, the night and the sea, he undid the buttons of his fly and stripped. There was an eruption of cheers, and he began playing to the crowd, lifting his arms and flexing, smiling at the flashing lights; he was entirely one with them now, I thought, all his sanctity was gone. He wasn’t naked, he was still wearing a pair of tight black briefs, and I was surprised to see they were a designer brand, sleek and European, not at all what I would have expected. He posed for a moment, balanced on his skinny legs, and then he turned his back to us and ran for the water, splashing at first awkwardly and then diving in, fully submerged. Jesus, I said to no one in particular, it must be so cold. He’s crazy, N. said beside me, and then, three weeks ago he is in Israel, the Holy Land, and he swims in the River Jordan. It is forbidden to swim, but he doesn’t care, he swims anyway. We watched him for a while before most of the group lost interest, turning to other pursuits, pouring the last of the wine. D. and the Bulgarian woman climbed the tall lifeguard’s platform together, waving to us below. But I kept watching him, visible in the moonlight; he was a good swimmer, he seemed at home in the water, I thought, like a creature reconciled to what it was. I kept waiting for him to turn, to swim back, but he didn’t, and finally in the dark I could hardly make him out at all. He’s kind of far, isn’t he, I said aloud, again to no one in particular, shouldn’t he be turning around, and then N., who hadn’t been paying attention, said Idiot, it’s dangerous at night, and both of us shouted for him to come back. He didn’t hear us at first, he kept swimming, and then the others were shouting too, in English and Bulgarian, and all of us were waving our arms. He stopped finally, and waved one of his own arms in response, and then he began swimming toward shore, more slowly, I thought, as though there were some force pulling back at him, some element working to bear him out farther still. ♦

Kay Ann Johnson, 73, Who Studied China’s One-Child Policy

Kay Ann Johnson, 73, Who Studied China’s One-Child Policy, Dies

By Richard Sandomir NY TIMES

After adopting an abandoned infant from an orphanage in China, she began researching the lives of birth parents who had been forced to give up their children.

ImageKay Ann Johnson in 2016, the year she published “China’s Hidden Children: Abandonment, Adoption, and the Human Costs of the One-Child Policy.”CreditCreditHampshire College

Kay Ann Johnson, an Asian studies scholar whose adoption of an infant girl from China led her to spendyears researching the impact of the country’s one-child policy on rural families, died on Aug. 14 at a hospital in Hyannis, Mass. She was 73.

Her husband, Bill Grohmann, said the cause was complications of metastatic breast cancer.

Professor Johnson, who taught at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., was working on an oral history of a village in North China in 1991 when she adopted a three-month-old girl, Tang Li (who became known as LiLi), from an orphanage in Wuhan, a large city in Hubei Province in Central China. She and Mr. Grohmann already had a biological son.

China was more than a decade into enforcing its one-child policy, a draconian effort by the Communist government to curb the country’s population growth. The rule required families to make painful decisions about whether or not to keep their children.

They would pay stiff fines to keep children born “out of plan”; hide them from authorities; abandon or relinquish them; or find friends and relatives who could surreptitiously adopt them. In a culture that generally values boys over girls, those decisions were even more complicated for families when the child was a girl.

“Like most adoptive parents, I wondered about the people who gave birth to my daughter and apparently left her on the streets of a big city,” Professor Johnson wrote in “China’s Hidden Children: Abandonment, Adoption, and the Human Costs of the One-Child Policy” (2016), a study of the fear and grief felt by desperate parents in China.

Image“Johnson’s extraordinary book,” one reviewer wrote, “conveys the intense suffering of ordinary people struggling to build families against the will of an implacable bureaucracy.”CreditUniversity of Chicago Press

Professor Johnson wanted LiLi — whose full name is Lee Helen Tang Li Johnson — to learn about the plight of parents in China and understand how she came to be among the first of 120,000 Chinese children to be adopted internationally.

“Such understanding, I imagined,” Professor Johnson wrote, “could help mitigate feelings of bitterness against her birth parents, and above all help assuage a young child’s often unspoken worries about ‘what was wrong with me,’ ‘what did I do wrong to lose my parents,’ worries that my daughter articulated when she was only 3 years old.”

For more than 20 years, Professor Johnson focused her research on Chinese villages where birth parentsfound themselves in a lopsided clash with a state bent on controlling population. The policy was also applied in cities, but villagers were usually more daring about trying to resist it. Professor Johnson presented her research in often painful case studies based on interviews with birth parents who described facing the ruthless policy.

One of those parents, Jiang Lifeng, already had a son when she became pregnant. She planned to keep the child and hoped to have a daughter. She avoided detection (and possibly forced sterilization) during pregnancy tests imposed by the authorities by using a friend’s urine. She delivered a girl, Shengshi. But nine months later the infant was taken from her bedroom by seven men, presumably government representatives, and driven away in a van.

Ms. Jiang recalled that “she ‘felt the sky fall down’ on her as she staggered after them, shocked and aghast at what had just happened,” Professor Johnson wrote. Ms. Jiang somehow caught up to the van and rode with the men and Shengshi to a local birth planning office, where she and her husband, Xu Guangwen, pleaded for the girl’s return. Officials refused.

The couple were told that they could adopt her after she had been taken to an orphanage. But that, Professor Johnson said, was a lie.

“The government had taken their baby, stripped them of their parental rights, and left them heartbroken and powerless to do anything about it,” she wrote. “It had been nothing short of a kidnapping by the government, leaving them no recourse.”

In his review of “China’s Hidden Children” in Foreign Affairs magazine, Andrew J. Nathan, a professor of political science at Columbia University, praised Professor Johnson for debunking the myth that Chinese parents did not value girls, and for outlining the often terrible consequences of the one-child policy.

“Johnson’s extraordinary book conveys the intense suffering of ordinary people struggling to build families against the will of an implacable bureaucracy,” Mr. Nathan wrote.

Kay Ann Johnson was born on Jan. 21, 1946, in Chicago. Her father, D. Gale Johnson, was an agricultural economist and the chairman of the economics department at the University of Chicago. Her mother, Helen (Wallace) Johnson, was a homemaker who volunteered at the University of Chicago Hospitals.

Professor Johnson received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In 1976 she earned her Ph.D. there; her thesis was about women’s rights and family reform in China. Along the way she learned to speak Chinese fluently.

“She had a critical consciousness and always did deep research,” Edward Friedman, who was Professor Johnson’s thesis adviser at Wisconsin, said by phone. “There were other, more popular books about the subjects she wrote about, but if you want seriously sourced books, you’d go to her.”

She taught political science at the University of California, San Diego, for five years. In 1979 she joined Hampshire, where she was a professor of Asian studies and political science. For the last few years she ran Hampshire’s Luce Initiative on Asian Studies and the Environment, which gave students and faculty members the chance to do field research in China and Thailand.

Professor Johnson’s first book, “Women, the Family and Peasant Revolution in China” (1983), was adapted from her thesis. Her second, “Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son: Abandonment, Adoption, and Orphanage Care in China” (2004), was her first exploration of the abandonment and adoption of children in China during the government’s crackdown on overpopulation.

“China’s Hidden Children” was published in 2016, soon after China ended its one-child policy — in part to increase its labor supply — and officially announced that married couples would be allowed to have two children.

In addition to her husband and her daughter, Professor Johnson is survived by a son, Jesse Johnson; a stepdaughter, Elena Ritter; and a brother, David Johnson.

Professor Johnson’s adoption of LiLi (pronounced LEE-lee) was among the first of a Chinese infant in the United States. Shanti Fry had heard about the adoption from a friend, which led her to adopt an infant from the same orphanage as LiLi, and to become the founding president of the New England chapter of a support group, Families With Children From China.

“Kay really opened the door, and word quickly spread in the Massachusetts community that this could be a viable option,” Ms. Fry said by phone. Professor Johnson had advised her group and two agencies that subsequently arranged adoptions from China.

“I imagine Kay going to China,” said Ms. Fry, who adopted a second girl there, “figuring a way to adopt a child, forging her way through Chinese bureaucracy and then giving us the confidence to let us adopt.”