Lis Wiehl's "Hunting the Unabomber"

Lis Wiehl is the former legal analyst for Fox News and the O’Reilly Factor, and has appeared regularly on Your World with Neil Cavuto, Lou Dobbs Tonight, and the Imus morning shows. The former co-host of WOR radio's WOR Tonight with Joe Concha and Lis Wiehl, she has served as legal analyst and reporter for NBC News and NPR’s All Things Considered, as a federal prosecutor in the United States Attorney’s office, and was a tenured professor of law at the University of Washington. She appears frequently on CNN as a legal analyst. She lives near New York City.

Wiehl applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Hunting the Unabomber: The FBI, Ted Kaczynski, and the Capture of America's Most Notorious Domestic Terrorist, and reported the following:

Of the hundreds of pages in Hunting the Unabomber, it turns out that page 99 contains the single most significant decision in the dramatic history the book recounts. If that decision had gone another way, then the Unabomber might never have been caught – and this book wouldn’t exist.

The hunt for the Unabomber remains the longest running and most expensive investigation in FBI history. Ted Kaczynski managed to elude detection for nearly two decades, carrying out his reign of terror from a remote cabin in the woods of Montana.

His nearly two-decade spree began in Chicago in May 1975. Nine years and ten attacks later, investigators were still in the dark as to the identity of this serial bomber. In 1987, an eyewitness claimed to have seen the man who had left a deadly package in the parking lot of a computer store in Salt Lake City, Utah, and she was able to provide investigators with their first hard clue. The woman’s description led to the infamous sketch of a hooded man with aviator sunglasses, and breathed new life into the stalled investigation.

But, by 1993, the team of investigators “was no closer to arresting someone than they were six years earlier” -- when the Unabomber sketch had been released to the public. The lack of any real progress in the case prompted some at FBI headquarters to question whether the bureau should continue the investigation. “There was speculation that the Unabomber might never resurface either because he was no longer alive, or he had been arrested or was incarcerated for some other crime.”

Then, in December, FBI Agent Patrick Webb, who had been at the center of the investigation, was asked to organize a UNABOM conference in San Francisco. At that conference, Webb and others working the case learned that headquarters intended to shut down the investigation. But Webb would have none of it.

The entire premise of this book is to go behind the headlines and tell the real story about what it really took to unmask and apprehend the Unabomber. Page 99 concerns the pivotal moment in the case when a decision to disband the FBI’s efforts to catch this serial bomber had been made at the top (at headquarters in D.C.) yet, was turned around by a handful of heretofore unnamed agents in San Francisco, who had been valiantly working the case and who believed this killer would strike again.

Visit Lis Wiehl's website, and connect with her on Facebook and Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gerardo Martí's "American Blindspot"

Gerardo Martí is L. Richardson King Professor of Sociology at Davidson College. Active in several research collaborations, he publishes broadly on religion and social change. His book, The Deconstructed Church: Understanding Emerging Christianity, was awarded the 2015 Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.

Martí applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, American Blindspot: Race, Class, Religion, and the Trump Presidency, and reported the following:

The Page 99 Test on American Blindspot does not encapsulate its broader message, a narrative that traces the long trajectory of profound sociological support for the presidency of Donald J. Trump. Yet the chapter where the page is found, titled “A ‘True American’ Identity”, recounts the crucial history of restrictive immigration policies in the United States, and how nativist assumptions have always guided the criteria by which only certain ethnoracial groups would forever be favored as qualifying to become truly American. Indeed, among the many enthusiastic supporters of the Trump presidency lies a profound conviction that America needs to be protected from dangerous foreign invaders who threaten “our” way of life, “our” religion, and, perhaps most essentially, “our” safety.

The last line of page 99 says, “The implications of granting legitimacy to persons as white, and therefore more truly American, has always translated into various programs for employment, ownership of property, eligibility for loans, access to business capital, and other economic opportunities.” The evidence for allocating privilege to those deemed as “white” is overwhelming. Not only were Africans in America, whether during enslavement or later after becoming freed persons, continually excluded and oppressed, but also the many other groups like indigenous Indian nations whose lands were taken, indigenous Mexican Americans who occupied lands after the Mexican-American War, Asian migrants from China, Japan, and other countries denied citizenship and actively deported, the Irish Catholics demonized, and the Southern and Eastern Europeans who, migrating in large waves toward the turn of the Twentieth century, ultimately provoked the most sweeping immigration restriction acts in American history.

From the very beginnings of the American republic, there arose a belief that Americans were a type of new race, a new people that combined the best qualities of the initial European countries that colonized the land, including British, Dutch, French, and German settlers. The prosperity of America would rest on the land being populated with this strong emerging race of civilized and hard-working people, and they would most assuredly be white people. So while this new race—what one famous writer called “the new man”—was ambiguously defined, it always assumed that this new American race was “white.” This racialized assumption of what constituted a “true American” reverberated through the rest of the country’s history, with economic opportunities and political power being allotted along racial lines.

In the broader narrative, American Blindspot reveals the existence, development, and consequences in the United States of racialized and religiously inflected economic and political power. By providing a longer historic context for the Trump presidency, the book draws together race, class, and religious dynamics because they are critical—yet often misunderstood—dynamics implicit to our current political climate.

Learn more about American Blindspot at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marie Mutsuki Mockett's "American Harvest"

Marie Mutsuki Mockett is the author of a novel, Picking Bones from Ash, and a memoir, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye, which was a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland, and reported the following:

Page 99 of American Harvest depicts the one time I visit a mega-church while on the road. The book details a five month long road trip I took with a group of custom harvesters who cut wheat in America, beginning in Texas and continuing to Idaho. The harvesters are Christians who attend church each Sunday--I go with them. And on page 99, the character Juston has suggested we go to a mega-church in Oklahoma which has long intrigued him. I'm curious about anything and everything that makes up the world of the harvesters, and so I go too. We've missed the in person appearance of Pastor Craig, who has numerous franchises around the country; as a result of this, his sermons are always recorded so they can be beamed into the sanctuaries of the branches of his church. On page 99, we are getting the heart of his message that day, just before he does his rapid fire closing speech to get us to be part of his congregation.

I can't say that this page encapsulates the book; it is a small part of the book's experience. It is true that a big part of the book is in trying to understand what evangelical Christianity is--and what it is in America--and if anything about this experience is valid. But while that is one question the book asks, it's really only one facet of a much larger lens. So, no. I don't think it's a great idea to turn to page 99. But I also don't think this page could have been excised, because the mega-church is an American cultural phenomenon and it would not be appropriate to talk about Christianity in the US without at least mentioning mega-churches and how they function and what they do and why people go.

The driving question behind American Harvest was: why do my friends in the city who want to eat organic food also believe in evolution, while conservative Christians believe in Creationism and farm GMOs? When I put this question to the main character, Eric, who is a farmer and a Christian, he told me my question was really about the divide in America. So while I set out on the road to look at farming, God, atheism and US history, I was asking broader questions about the divide. And I was also asking if it was possible, through conversation, to bridge that divide. We have numerous tough conversations in the book that address the concept of the divide pretty head on. And those conversations, I think, are the driving force behind the book. But it's also just a great road trip through some beautiful country filled with coyotes and cowboys and tornados and resplendent sunsets and men who make deadly machines work for our benefit.

Visit Marie Mutsuki Mockett's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennifer Keishin Armstrong's "Pop Star Goddesses"

Jennifer Keishin Armstrong is the New York Times bestselling author of Seinfeldia: The Secret World of the Show About Nothing that Changed Everything; a history of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted; and Sex and the City and Us: How Four Single Women Changed the Way We Think, Live, and Love. She spent a decade on staff at Entertainment Weekly and has since written for many publications, including BBC Culture, The New York Times Book Review, Fast Company, Vulture, and Billboard. She also speaks about pop culture history and creativity.

Armstrong applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Pop Star Goddesses: And How to Tap Into Their Energies to Invoke Your Best Self, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Pop Star Goddesses comes in the middle of my essay about “goddess” Gwen Stefani. In fact, it’s a critical point in the essay that summarizes what’s to come and lays out the case for Gwen’s goddesshood, pointing out her contrasting qualities:

She represents the ultimate girly girl who has spent her career hanging with the boys in her band; she’s sometimes a rock star with a pop accessibility, other times a pop star with a rock edge. She wrote and sang the feminist pop anthem (or as close as we could get to one on mainstream radio in 1995) ‘Just a Girl’ and has rarely been without a steady, high-profile man throughout her adult life in the spotlight. She symbolizes female empowerment, though she has never hidden her adherence to some of the conservative values of Orange County, California, where she grew up—her lyrics long for a settled-down, American Dream life with a husband and kids.

This provides a great snapshot of the book, which explores 35 “pop star goddesses” in terms of what their careers and public narratives represent to fans. It aims to be substantive and smart, but also fun, which comes across here. I chose the goddesses carefully, looking for artists with not only catchy hit songs but also unique narratives that resonate with fans. The concept of the book was born of the fact that we regard our female pop stars very much like traditional goddesses: We want to emulate their strengths, and we look to their stories to find inspiration in our own hardships. I named Gwen the Goddess of Following Your Muse because she has consistently defied expectations of what she should be doing, saying, and believing. Just because she has a rock-tinged style doesn’t mean she has to be a rebel. Just because she wrote a feminist song doesn’t mean she can’t long for a husband and kids.

Like the most powerful goddesses—pop star goddesses and traditional goddesses—Gwen has also found her strength through her worst public trials, which included the breakup of her widely admired marriage to fellow Rockstar Gavin Rossdale. This echoes other such trials endured by fellow goddesses Adele, Ariana Grande, Beyoncé, Britney Spears, Celine Dion, Demi Lovato, Jennifer Lopez, Kesha, Mariah Carey, Miranda Lambert, Rihanna, and Taylor Swift. And like the greatest of the goddesses, Gwen has survived the business for 25-plus years, a true testament to goddesshood.

Visit Jennifer Keishin Armstrong's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John G. Turner's "They Knew They Were Pilgrims"

John G. Turner is professor of religious studies at George Mason University and the award-winning author of Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty, and reported the following:

On page 99, I narrate the aftermath of a massacre, in which the Pilgrims treacherously murdered the pnieses Wituwamat and Pecksuot near a small English colony on Massachusetts Bay. In all, the Pilgrims, led by their military captain Miles Standish, killed six Native men. Afterwards, the Pilgrims knew they would face recriminations for their actions, prompting Mayflower passenger Edward Winslow to prepare a defense for publication in England.

Here’s a taste:

Standish and his company sailed their shallop back to Plymouth, where the settlers placed Wituwamat’s head on top of their fort. William Bradford explained that the severed head served ‘for a terror unto others.’ The decapitation and display were conventional English punishments for traitors, vile criminals, and military enemies. Within a culture of violent punishment, what the Pilgrims did was brutal but in many respects unexceptional.

As it turns out, this test works very well for my book. One of my goals is to write an unvarnished history of Plymouth Colony, one that does not lionize the Pilgrims as saints but also does not impugn them as sinners. In this chapter, the Pilgrims find themselves confused by Native politics and relationships that they understand very dimly. Readers should recognize their very human fears. At the same time, they clearly wanted to establish themselves as the foremost military power in the region and were glad that their operation terrorized other Natives.

This episode gives readers a fair taste of what the book is about and the style in which I’ve written They Knew They Were Pilgrims. My expectation is that readers will find many of the narrative episodes in this book compelling. Most readers do not know much about the history of Plymouth Colony after the “First Thanksgiving.” Elsewhere they’ll read about other conflicts between English and Natives, and they’ll also read about contentious debates within Plymouth Colony about both religious and political liberty. I want to help readers approach seventeenth-century history on its own terms, to think through what liberty meant to various groups of English settlers, to reckon with the reality of servitude and slavery, and to imagine themselves alongside parents who grieved an infant’s death or rejoiced at their child’s baptism.

Visit John G. Turner's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Margaret K. Nelson's "Like Family: Narratives of Fictive Kinship"

Margaret K. Nelson is the A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Sociology Emerita at Middlebury College in Vermont. She is the author of Parenting Out of Control: Anxious Parents in Uncertain Times and the co-author, with Rosanna Hertz, of Random Families: Genetic Strangers, Sperm Donor Siblings, and the Creation of New Kin.

Nelson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Like Family: Narratives of Fictive Kinship, and reported the following:

Page 99 is the last of five pages of introduction to a type of fictive kin relationships examined in this book. Page 99 finishes the characterization of relationships between what I call “unofficial children” and “informal parents” – better understood as relationships between children who have their own parents but spend much of their time (and sometimes live) with people who are not their parents. On this page I make three points: a) that these relationships “involve adults and children who live in different social class settings when they first meet; b) That “[m]any of these relationships cross lines of race/ethnicity as well”; and c) that “relationships between informal parents and unofficial children have the most uncertain and varied trajectories of the three sets of fictive-kin relationships.”

I don’t like to think that this page is a good representation of my book. It only deals with one type of fictive kinship. The other two I examine are relationships between peers or “like sibling” relationships and short-term relationships between “guest children” and “host families.” Even more unfortunately, the tendentious and boring parts of the book are found in its various introductory materials (as on page 99) where I categorize and explain these relationships rather than in the case studies where these relationships come to life.

I fear a reader who started here would put the book down without moving on to the next page. On that next page, a young woman with the pseudonym Nicole Evans tells her story. That story begins when she was a young girl, and a wealthy couple stepped in both to “save” her from negligent care and to offer her advantages well beyond those her parents could ensure. The chapter then explores Nicole’s deep ambivalence about being “rescued” in this way. In the following chapter, Nicole’s “informal parents” – whom I call the Nowaks – describe their own understanding of their complex relationship with Nicole. There’s lots to intrigue a casual reader in the description of the dynamic interactions between Nicole and the Nowaks.

Although many scholars have assumed that only marginal peoples engage in relationships in which they treat people who are not family members as if they were family, I argue that these kinds of relationships can be found among the white, middle class as well. The book provides ample evidence for this argument, in the examples among the seventy-five people I interviewed and in my reanalysis of other studies. In my conclusion I discuss how insights into relationships in which people think of each other as being “like family” help us understand the meaning and significance of kinship within a broad swath of the U.S. population.

Learn more about Like Family at the Rutgers University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Parenting Out of Control.

--Marshal Zeringue

Feisal G. Mohamed's "Sovereignty"

Feisal G. Mohamed is Professor of English at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where he also serves as coordinator of The Program in Global Early Modern Studies. His previous books include In the Anteroom of Divinity: The Reformation of the Angels from Colet to Milton (2008) and Milton and the Post-secular Present: Ethics, Politics, Terrorism (2011). He is a past recipient of a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship, which provided second-discipline training in law.

Mohamed applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Sovereignty: Seventeenth-Century England and the Making of the Modern Political Imaginary, and reported the following:

As it happens, page 99 does reveal a thing or two about Sovereignty, even if it also thrusts us into the middle of details requiring some explanation. Here I point to the First Earl of Bridgewater’s worries about the future of the court over which he presided, that of the Council in the Marches of Wales. The court was wrangling over jurisdiction with the ecclesiastical courts and the common law courts, and the four English counties of the Marches were clamoring to be removed from the Council’s jurisdiction altogether. More generally, because the Council was a prerogative court, like Yorkshire’s Council in the North, it was seen as over-extending the crown’s powers in a way impinging upon the liberty of the subject. All of this meant that Egerton feared losing the bulk of the court’s revenue, leaving him unable to maintain Ludlow Castle.

We have never recognized this as an important context for John Milton’s Maske, which Egerton commissions to celebrate his installation and which is first performed at Ludlow Castle in 1633. Milton is celebrating a somewhat embattled judge, and at the same time can be seen as defending a controversial branch of royal prerogative. That is especially surprising in that we often view Milton through the lens of his later anti-Stuart sentiment, so visible in his defenses of the regicide and the English republic established in its wake.

Re-evaluating Milton’s political engagements contributes to one of the major themes the book, which aims to decenter the royalist-republican divide from analyses of the period’s political culture and to emphasize instead the question of sovereignty: over his career, Milton’s affinity for unitary sovereignty could attach itself to the crown, to Parliament, or to Oliver Cromwell in his role as Lord Protector. In its theoretical moments, the book argues that unitary sovereignty is one of the basic postures of modern political thought.

Below is the main text of the page. I do hope that Ford Madox Ford would have been moved to turn to page 100.

Adding to Egerton’s headaches on the status of his Council was its association with the Council in the North, led by the not-yet notorious Thomas Wentworth, later Earl of Strafford. Egerton recognized that his fate was shackled to that of his counterpart in Yorkshire, who enjoyed little popularity. In a letter of 1633, he complains to Strafford that a litigant in Star Chamber had “cast out words of disrespect” toward the Council in the North, and makes clear his fear that he might “receive prejudice by being ... wounded through [Wentworth’s] sides.” Resentment of the two councils did not abate, and objectors seized the opportunity to eliminate them with the advent of the Long Parliament in 1640, led by MPs from the four English counties under the jurisdiction of the Council in the Marches. Parliament considered the fate of the two Councils alongside that of Star Chamber. All of these, the argument ran, denied freeborn Englishmen the right of access to common law courts. And the two Councils in particular rankled as the kind of obtrusive exercise of royal prerogative to which Charles was prone.

But the fate of the Councils in the Long Parliament is a later development. The moment with which we are concerned is that of the performance of Milton’s masque, roughly two years after Egerton is appointed president of the Council in the Marches. Even at this earlier juncture, Egerton was cognizant of the precarious position of his Council. Mixed in with papers from the first year of his tenure as president are detailed demonstrations of the Council’s jurisdiction over the four English counties. A 1632 letter from Charles suggests that the king was not insensitive to Egerton’s plight, and that he was willing to press for the jurisdiction of the Council.

Learn more about Sovereignty at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Martin Jones's "History’s Fools"

David Martin Jones is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Queensland, and Visiting Professor in War Studies, King's College London. His works include Sacred Violence: Political Religion in a Secular Age. He is a contributor to The Daily Telegraph, War on the Rocks, The Australian and The Spectator (Australia).

Jones applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, History's Fools: The Pursuit of Idealism and the Revenge of Politics, and reported the following:

Page 99 of History’s Fools discusses the growing tension between US and European approaches to just war, international law and multilateral institutions after 9/11 and particularly after the Iraq War (2003). It observes that a hitherto neglected unilateralist tradition in United States’ foreign policy reasserted itself after 2001. It clashed with the dominant liberal or Wilsonian approach to foreign policy during and after the Cold War that promoted international institutions, liberal norms and human rights to advance an enlightened conception of both the national interest and the global order. This liberal tradition accommodated and endorsed the evolving European Union approach to international affairs, as that federation came to define itself after 1993. This liberal institutional perspective, premised on the need for negotiated consensus before resolutions could be passed, or actions taken, morphed in the last decade of the twentieth century, into an idealist practice to advance universal norms and international law.

This page captures a dominant theme in the book, namely how a progressive worldview transformed politics, economics and international relations after 1990. This evolving orthodoxy assumed that history was driven, by the West, in a coherent direction where ideological conflict abated and liberal democracy constituted the best possible solution to the human problem. History had ended with the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and a new world order founded on liberal secularism, economic globalization and international law would regulate an increasingly borderless and enlightened secular future. Or so it seemed.

Thirty years later, this progressive vision, premised on shared norms, open markets, open borders and an abstract commitment to social justice lay in tatters. The post-historical order that lay before us, lay like a land of dreams, mutated after 2016 into a darkling plain where an exhausted West struggled to contend with ignorant armies and new geopolitical forces clashing by night.

History’s Fools examines the economic preconditions of this idealist vision, its political and international lineaments and the challenges in the form of new political religions and financial crises that it dismissed, but which ultimately undermined it. It also considers the resources the West might have to revive in order to live with particularism and contingency in a new age of anxiety.

Visit David Martin Jones's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Scott Newstok's "How to Think like Shakespeare"

Scott Newstok is professor of English and founding director of the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment at Rhodes College. A parent and an award-winning teacher, he is the author of Quoting Death in Early Modern England and the editor of several other books. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee.

Newstok applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, How to Think like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Religious instruction was often staged in the form of a catechism: Make questions and by them answer. Think of Falstaff ’s skeptical turn on “honor,” rephrased here in a Q&A:

Q. Can honor set to a leg?

A. No.

Q. Or an arm?

A. No.

Q. Or take away the grief of a wound?

A. No.

Q. Honor hath no skill in surgery then?

A. No.

Q. What is honor?

A. A word.

Q. What is in that word, “honor” What is that honor?

A. Air. A trim reckoning!

Q. Who hath it?

A. He that died o’Wednesday.

Q. Doth he feel it?

A. No.

Q. Doth he hear it?

A. No.

Q. ’Tis insensible, then?

A. Yea, to the dead.

Q. But will it not live with the living?

A. No.

Q. Why?

A. Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it. Honor is a mere scutcheon. And so ends my catechism.

Our internal dialogue—our conscience (“thinking with”)—is rhetorical too, according to Isocrates:

The same arguments which we use in persuading others when we speak in public, we employ also when we deliberate in our own thoughts; and while we call eloquent those who are able to speak before a crowd, we regard as sage those who most skilfully debate their problems in their own minds.

A good motto for this period would be Erasmus’s audacious modification of the opening words of the Gospel of John: In principio erat sermo.

Page 99 comes from my short—deliberately short—chapter on “Conversation.” I open with Emerson’s assertion that Conversation is the laboratory and workshop of the student, then examine how deeply Shakespeare’s education was suffused with dialogue—and how ours should be, too.

In a book thick with quick, brief quotations, this page reproduces a comparatively long passage from Falstaff’s dialogue with himself. So it’s not characteristic; more typical would be a flurry of some dozen different authors cited in that same space. Throughout, I’ve stitched together an almost endless collection of scattered thoughts and observations into a kind of patchwork, or cento, of passages that have inspired me. Be forewarned: quotations come “swift as thought,” as Homer used to say. I do this precisely because thinking like Shakespeare means thinking with each other’s / harvest. And I’m eager for this eclectic chorus of voices to be the cause that wit is in other[s] (to cite Falstaff again!).

Visit Scott Newstok's website and learn more about How to Think like Shakespeare at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Morris Ardoin's "Stone Motel"

Morris Ardoin earned a bachelor’s in journalism from Louisiana State University and a master’s in communication from the University of Louisiana. A public relations practitioner, his work has appeared in regional, national, and international media. He divides his time between New York City and Cornwallville, New York, where he does most of his writing.

Ardoin applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Stone Motel: Memoirs of a Cajun Boy, and reported the following:

Sweet and Sour

I had a chuckle when I turned to page 99 to see what it would indicate for this test, fully expecting something random and not terribly indicative of what’s in the book. But in fact the page seems a pretty perfect way to get browsers right into the story – telling of a typical summer afternoon of my childhood in the 1970s growing up at a roadside motel in rural Louisiana, and neatly mentioning the four key characters of the book. While the page gives the flavor of the innocence and clumsiness of adolescence, it also reinforces the central theme of my memoir: memories can be sweet, but they can also be marred by things perfectly sour.

Here’s what’s on Page 99:

I mounted the big bike, crunching the grocery bag closed against the right side of the handlebar. Down the road twenty or so yards in the opposite direction of home stood the little yellow and white Catholic church, built in the footprint of a large cross. On Sundays, the white parishioners sat in the long nave; the black parishioners sat in the two little sections that straddled the altar and made up the crosspiece.

Parked in the grass near the church parking area was a beat-up green pickup truck. I recognized one of the parishioners, a middle-aged black man in baggy khakis, a white shirt, and a floppy straw hat. He was propping up a big hand-painted sign that read “Sugartown Watermelons 4 for $1.”

“Four for a dollar. Hmmm,” I said to myself, pedaling down the blacktop towards home. It was another hot July day, and I was lost in a daydream of all those watermelons chilled and sliced open to expose their beautiful, sweet red flesh. I pedaled onward, still clutching the paper bag against the handlebar, and building up a sweat in the heat that at once radiated from above and bounced back up to me from the blacktop. Just a little more than halfway home, totally unaware that the condensing half-gallon of milk was saturating the fibers of the paper bag, I stumbled in disbelief when the wet carton finally tore through the bag and fell, bursting onto the hot asphalt, sending milk all over the road, the bike, and my legs. The Evangeline Maid bread had been mashed on one side, but the unfazed loaf was already expanding itself back into recognizable form, and Mr. Bed-nah’s carefully wrapped baloney parcel was still immaculate.

“Dammit!” I screamed out to the universe. I gathered myself, hammocked the baloney and bread into my tee-shirt, then picked up the busted milk carton and what was left of the paper bag. The milk spreading over the road was already steaming as it seeped into the blistering asphalt. With all that going on—the sun beating down, the baloney and bread scooped up into my shirt held in place with one arm pressed against my belly, and the busted carton and obliterated grocery bag clutched in that same hand—I managed to right the bike.

Still in a state of disbelief, I walked the bike and myself the rest of the way home.

An hour later, after I had gotten home and rinsed myself and the bike off with the garden hose under the big pine tree in the front yard, I was on the bike again, but this time Glenda was pedaling and I was riding double on the handlebar. We were accompanied by Gilda and Dicky, doing the same on Gilda’s bike, all of us heading back down the road towards Mr. Bed-nah’s and the church to get ourselves four watermelons and another half-gallon of milk.

Page 99 is the last page of the chapter “I bet I know what y’all want,” which is the refrain that the proprietor, a Mr. Bernard (in Cajun, pronounced “Bed-nah”) greeted my siblings and me with each time we entered his little store, just down the road from our motel. The second half of that sentiment was always, “Y’all want some can-dih!” and we typically did indeed want some candy. This is one of my favorite chapters in the book because the sour (that bit about the busted milk carton) isn’t nearly as sour as a couple of the other examples I write about elsewhere - of truly sweet memories fully spoiled by unspeakable ugliness. I will leave it at that - so as not to "sour" the browser's interest!

Visit Morris Ardoin's website.

--Marshal Zeringue