On July 9, 1776, General George Washington amassed his soldiers in New York City. They would soon face one of the largest amphibious invasions yet seen. If the British took the city, they’d secure a strategic harbor on the Atlantic Coast from which they could disrupt the rebels’ seaborne trade. Washington thus judged New York “a Post of infinite importance” and believed the coming days could “determine the fate of America.” To prepare, he wanted his men to hear the just-issued Declaration of Independence read aloud. This, he hoped, might “serve as a fresh incentive.”

But stirring principles weren’t enough. By the end of August, the British had routed Washington’s forces on Long Island and were preparing to storm Manhattan. The outlook was “truly distressing,” he confessed. Unable to hold the city—unable even to beat back disorder and desertion among his own dispirited men—Washington abandoned it. One of his officers ruefully wished that the retreat could be “blotted out of the annals of America.”

As if to underscore the loss, a little past midnight five days after the redcoats took New York on September 15, a terrible fire broke out. It consumed somewhere between a sixth and a third of the city, leaving about a fifth of its residents homeless. The conflagration could be seen from New Haven, 70 miles away.

New York’s double tragedy—first invaded, then incinerated—meant a stumbling start for the new republic. Yet Washington wasn’t wholly displeased. “Had I been left to the dictates of my own judgment,” he confided to his cousin, “New York should have been laid in Ashes before I quitted it.” Indeed, he’d sought permission to burn it. But Congress refused, which Washington regarded as a grievous error. Happily, he noted, God or “some good honest Fellow” had torched the city anyway, spoiling the redcoats’ valuable war prize.

For more than 15 years, the historian Benjamin L. Carp of Brooklyn College has wondered who that “honest fellow” might have been. Now, in The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution, he cogently lays out his findings. Revolutionaries almost certainly set New York aflame intentionally, Carp argues, and they quite possibly acted on instructions. Sifting through the evidence, he asks a disturbing question: Did George Washington order New York to be burned to the ground?

The idea of Washington as an arsonist may seem far-fetched. Popular histories of the American Revolution treat the “glorious cause” as different from other revolutions. Whereas the French, Haitian, Russian, and Chinese revolutions involved mass violence against civilians, this one—the story goes—was fought with restraint and honor.

But a revolution is not a dinner party, as Mao Zedong observed. Alongside the parade-ground battles ran a “grim civil war,” the historian Alan Taylor writes, in which “a plundered farm was a more common experience than a glorious and victorious charge.” Yankees harassed, tortured, and summarily executed the enemies of their cause. The term lynch appears to have entered the language from Colonel Charles Lynch of Virginia, who served rough justice to Loyalists.

Burning towns was, of course, a more serious transgression. “It is a Method of conducting War long since become disreputable among civilized Nations,” John Adams wrote. The Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, whose writings influenced European warfare, forbade killing women and children, and judged unnecessary violence in seizing towns to be “totally repugnant to every principle of Christianity and justice.”

Still, in the thick of war, the torch was hard to resist, and in North America, it was nearly impossible. Although Britain, facing a timber famine, had long since replaced its wooden buildings with brick and stone ones, the new United States was awash in wood. Its immense forests were, to British visitors, astonishing. And its ramshackle wooden towns were tinderboxes, needing only sparks to ignite.

On the eve of the Revolution, the rebel Joseph Warren gave a speech in a Boston church condemning the British military. Vexed British officers cried out “Oh! fie! Oh! fie!” That sounded enough like “fire” to send the crowd of 5,000 sprinting for the doors, leaping out windows, and fleeing down the streets. They knew all too well how combustible their city was.

The British knew it too, which raised the tantalizing possibility of quashing the rebellion by burning rebel towns. Although some officers considered such tactics criminal, others didn’t share their compunctions. At the 1775 Battle of Bunker Hill, they burned Charlestown, outside Boston, so thoroughly that “scarcely one stone remaineth upon another,” Abigail Adams wrote. The Royal Navy then set fire to more than 400 buildings in Portland, Maine (known then as Falmouth). On the first day of 1776, it set fires in Norfolk, Virginia; the city burned for three days and lost nearly 900 buildings.

Thomas Paine’s Common Sense appeared just days after Norfolk’s immolation. In it, Paine noted the “precariousness with which all American property is possessed” and railed against Britain’s reckless use of fire. As Paine appreciated, torched towns made the case for revolution pointedly. “A few more of such flaming Arguments as were exhibited at Falmouth and Norfolk” and that case would be undeniable, Washington agreed. The Declaration of Independence condemned the King for having “burnt our towns.”

In Norfolk, however, the King had help. After the British lit the fires, rebel Virginia soldiers kept them going, first targeting Loyalist homes but ultimately kindling a general inferno. “Keep up the Jigg,” they cried as the buildings burned. From a certain angle, this made sense: The fire would deny the Royal Navy a port, and the British would take the blame. In early February a revolutionary commander, Colonel Robert Howe, finished the job by burning 416 remaining structures. The city is “entirely destroyed,” he wrote privately. “Thank God for that.”

A year later, the Virginia legislature commissioned an investigation, which found that “very few of the houses were destroyed by the enemy”—only 19 in the New Year’s Day fire—whereas the rebels, including Howe, had burned more than 1,000. That investigation’s report went unpublished for six decades, though, and even then, in 1836, it was tucked quietly into the appendix of a legislative journal. Historians didn’t understand who torched Norfolk until the 20th century.

This was presumably by design: The Revolution required seeing the British as incendiaries and the colonists as their victims. Washington hoped that Norfolk’s ashes would “unite the whole Country in one indissoluble Band.”

Carp believes that what happened in Norfolk happened in New York. But how to square that with Washington’s renowned sense of propriety? The general detested marauding indiscipline among his men. Toward enemy prisoners, he advocated “Gentleness even to Forbearance,” in line with the “Duties of Humanity & Kindness.” And he deemed British-set fires “Savage Cruelties” perpetrated “in Contempt of every Principle of Humanity.” Is it thinkable that he disobeyed orders and set a city full of civilians aflame?

It becomes more thinkable if you look at another side of the war, Carp notes. In popular memory, the Revolutionary War was between colonists and redcoats, with some French and Hessians pitching in. But this version leaves out the many Native nations that also fought, mostly alongside the British. The Declaration of Independence, after charging the King with arson, indicted him for unleashing “merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

[From the May 2022 issue: Daniel Immerwahr reviews a new history of World War II]

This accusation—that Indigenous people fought unfairly—haunted discussions of war tactics. Redcoat attacks on American towns fed the revolutionary spirit precisely because they delegitimized the British empire, whose methods, John Adams wrote, were “more abominable than those which are practiced by the Savage Indians.”

Perhaps, but Adams’s compatriots, at least when fighting Indians, weren’t exactly paragons of enlightened warfare. A month after the Declaration of Independence complained about burned towns and merciless savages, the revolutionaries launched a 5,500-man incendiary expedition against the British-allied Cherokees, targeting not warriors but homes and food. “I have now burnt down every town and destroyed all the corn,” one commander reported.

This was hitherto the “largest military operation ever conducted in the Lower South,” according to the historian John Grenier. Yet it’s easily overshadowed in popular accounts by more famous encounters. The Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Rick Atkinson, in his painstakingly detailed, 800-page military history of the war’s first two years, The British Are Coming, spends just a paragraph on it. The Cherokee campaign was, Atkinson writes, a mere “postscript” to Britain’s short and unsuccessful siege of Charleston (even though, by Atkinson’s own numbers, it killed roughly 10 times as many as the Charleston siege did).

But the Cherokee campaign was important, not only for what it did to the Cherokees but for what it revealed about the revolutionaries. Washington brandished it as proof of how far his men were willing to go. The Cherokees had been “foolish” to support the British, he wrote to the Wolastoqiyik and Passamaquoddy peoples, and the result was that “our Warriors went into their Country, burnt their Houses, destroyed their corn and obliged them to sue for peace.” Other tribes should take heed, Washington warned, and “never let the King’s wicked Counselors turn your hearts against me.”

Indigenous people did turn their hearts against him, however, and the fighting that followed scorched the frontier. In one of the war’s most consequential campaigns, Washington ordered General John Sullivan in 1779 to “lay waste all the settlements” of the British-aligned Haudenosaunees in New York, ensuring that their lands were “not merely overrun but destroyed.” Sullivan complied. “Forty of their towns have been reduced to ashes—some of them large and commodious,” Washington observed. He commended Sullivan’s troops for a “perseverance and valor that do them the highest honor.”

It’s hard, looking from Indian Country, to see Washington—or any of the revolutionaries—as particularly restrained. In the 1750s, the Senecas had given him the name “Conotocarious,” meaning “town taker” or “town destroyer,” after the title they’d bestowed on his Indian-fighting great-grandfather. Washington had occasionally signed his name “Conotocarious” as a young man, but he fully earned it destroying towns during the Revolutionary War. “To this day,” the Seneca chief Cornplanter told him in 1790, “when that name is heard, our women look behind them and turn pale, and our children cling close to the neck of their mothers.”

Carp acknowledges but doesn’t linger over what the revolutionaries did on the frontier. As he shows, there’s enough evidence from Manhattan itself to conclude that the New York conflagration was intentional.

To start, this was perhaps the least surprising fire in American history. Rumors swirled through the streets that it would happen, and Washington’s generals talked openly of the possibility. The president pro tempore of New York’s legislature obligingly informed Washington that his colleagues would “chearfully submit to the fatal Necessity” of destroying New York if required. The fire chief buried his valuables in anticipation.

When the expected fire broke out, it seemed to do so everywhere simultaneously. Those watching from afar “saw the fire ignite in three, four, five, or six places at once,” Carp notes. He includes a map showing 15 distinct “ignition points,” where observers saw fires start or found suspicious caches of combustibles. The fire could have begun in just one place and spread by wind-borne embers, but to those on the scene it appeared to be the work of many hands.

As the fire raged, witnesses saw rebels carrying torches, transporting combustibles, and cutting the handles of fire buckets. Some offenders allegedly confessed on the spot. But, as often happens with arson, the evidence vanished in the smoke. The British summarily executed some suspects during the fire, others fled, and those taken into custody all denied involvement.

Months elapsed before the British secured their first major confession. They caught a Yankee spy, Abraham Patten, who’d been plotting to torch British-held New Brunswick. On the gallows, Patten confessed, not only to the New Brunswick scheme but also to having been a principal in the conspiracy to burn New York. “I die for liberty,” he declared, “and do it gladly, because my cause is just.”

[Amy Zegart: George Washington was a master of deception]

After Patten’s execution, Washington wrote to John Hancock, the president of the Continental Congress. Patten had “conducted himself with great fidelity to our cause rendering Services,” Washington felt, and his family “well deserves” compensation. But, Washington added, considering the nature of Patten’s work, a “private donation” would be preferable to a “public act of generosity.” He’d made a similar suggestion when proposing burning New York. Washington had clarified that, if Congress agreed to pursue arson, its assent should be kept a “profound secret.”

It’s possible, given Carp’s circumstantial evidence, that New York radicals conspired to incinerate the city without telling the rebel command. Or perhaps Washington knew they would and feigned ignorance. Yet, for Carp, Patten’s confession and Washington’s insistence on paying Patten’s widow under the table amount to “a compelling suggestion that Washington and Congress secretly endorsed the burning of New York.”

Whoever burned the city, the act set the tone for what followed. As the war progressed, the British incinerated towns around New York and in the southern countryside. The rebels, for their part, fought fire with fire—or tried to. In 1778, Commodore John Paul Jones attacked an English port hoping to set it aflame, but he managed to burn only a single ship. Other attempts to send incendiaries to Great Britain were similarly ineffectual. British cities were too fireproof and too far for the revolutionaries to reach with their torches.

Vengeful Yankees had to settle for targets closer at hand: Native towns. In theory they were attacking Britain’s allies, but lines blurred. Pennsylvania militiamen searching for hostile Lenapes in 1782 instead fell on a village of pacifist Christian Indians, slaughtering 96 and burning it to the ground. If against the British the war was fought at least ostensibly by conventional means, against Indigenous people it was “total war,” the historian Colin G. Calloway has written.

That war continued well past the peace treaty signed in Paris—with no American Indians present—on September 3, 1783. Andrew Jackson’s arson-heavy campaigns against Native adversaries helped propel him to the presidency. Burning Indigenous lands was also key to William Henry Harrison’s election, in 1840. He won the White House on the slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too”: Tyler was his running mate; “Tippecanoe” referred to the time in 1811 when Harrison’s troops had attacked an Indigenous confederacy and incinerated its capital.

Native Americans deserved such treatment, settlers insisted, because they always fought mercilessly, whereas white Americans did so only when provoked. Crucial to this understanding was a vision of the Revolution as a decorous affair, with Washington, venerated for his rectitude and restraint, at its head.

The legend of the pristine Revolution, however, is hard to sustain. The rebels lived in a combustible land, and they burned it readily, torching towns and targeting civilians. Like all revolutions, theirs rested on big ideas and bold deeds. But, like all revolutions, it also rested on furtive acts—and a thick bed of ashes.

This article appears in the March 2023 print edition with the headline “Did George Washington Burn New York?”

On the afternoon of February 8, 2018, more than two dozen law-enforcement officers crowded into a conference room in the Henry County Sheriff’s Office, on the outskirts of Atlanta. They were preparing to execute a no-knock warrant at 305 English Road, the home of a suspected drug dealer who had been under investigation for almost two years. The special agent leading the briefing told the team that 305 English Road was a small house with off-white siding and several broken-down cars out front, showed them an aerial photograph of the house, and gave them turn-by-turn directions to get there.

When the officers arrived at their destination, the house described in the warrant—305 English Road, run-down, off-white, with cars strewn across the yard—was right in front of them. But they walked past it to a different house, a tidy yellow one, 40 yards away. The house at 303 English Road looked nothing like the house described in the briefing and in the warrant. Yet, less than a minute after getting out of their cars, the officers set off flash grenades and used battering rams to smash open all three doors of the home.

Inside, they found Onree Norris, a 78-year-old Black man who had lived there for more than 50 years, raising his three children while he worked at a nearby rock quarry. Norris was no drug dealer. He had never been in any trouble with the law; he’d never even received a traffic ticket.

Onree Norris was watching the evening news in an armchair in his bedroom when he heard a thunderous sound, as if a bomb had gone off in his house. He got up to see what the commotion was and found a crowd of men in military gear in his hallway. Norris was more than twice as old as the target of the search warrant, but the officers pointed assault rifles at him anyway and yelled at him to raise his hands and get on the ground. When Norris told the officers that his knees were in bad shape, an officer grabbed Norris, pushed him down, and twisted his arm behind his back. Norris’s chest hurt, and he had trouble breathing. He told the officers that he had a heart condition—he’d had bypass surgery and had a pacemaker put in—but they kept him on the ground for several minutes. Norris was eventually led outside in handcuffs. When the officers realized they had blasted their way into the wrong house, they turned their cameras off one by one.

Whatever one believes about the job of policing—whether it’s that well-intentioned officers often must make split-second decisions that are easy to criticize in hindsight, or that the profession is inherently corrupt—there is no doubt that police officers sometimes egregiously abuse their authority. The videos that have filled our screens in recent years—most recently the surveillance footage of officers in Memphis fatally beating Tyre Nichols—offer horrifying evidence of this reality.

People who have lost loved ones or have themselves been harmed by the police often say that they want the officers involved to be punished and an assurance that something similar won’t happen in the future. Yet justice for victims of police misconduct is extremely difficult to achieve.

What happened in Memphis last week—the swift firing and arrest of the five officers who beat Nichols, and the murder charges they face—is highly unusual, a result of immediate public attention to an inconceivably barbaric attack. Although officers can be criminally prosecuted and sent to prison, they seldom are: Police are charged in less than 2 percent of fatal shootings and convicted in less than a third of those cases. Police departments rarely discipline or fire their officers.

Typically, victims’ only recourse is a civil lawsuit seeking money or court-ordered reforms. In 1961, the Supreme Court ruled that people could sue officers who violated their constitutional rights under a federal statute enacted 90 years earlier, during the bloody years of Reconstruction. That statute, known then as the Ku Klux Klan Act and referred to as Section 1983 today, was meant to provide a remedy to Black people across the South who were being tortured and killed by white supremacists while local law enforcement either participated in the violence or stood idly by.

After that 1961 decision, the number of police-misconduct suits filed shot up. But so did concerns about the suits’ potentially ruinous effects. Settlements and judgments would bankrupt officers and cities; no one in their right mind would agree to become a police officer; the very fabric of our society would become unwound. These claims were exaggerated, if not simply false. But they have nevertheless been relied upon by courts, legislatures, and government officials over the past 60 years to justify the creation of multiple overlapping protections for officers and police departments that regularly deny justice to people whose rights have been violated.

The best-known of these protections is “qualified immunity.” When the Supreme Court created qualified immunity, in 1967, it was meant to shield officers from liability only if they were acting in “good faith” when they violated the Constitution. Yet the Court has repeatedly strengthened the doctrine. In 1982, the Court ruled that requiring officers to prove good faith was too much of a burden. Instead, they would be entitled to qualified immunity so long as they did not violate “clearly established law.” Over the years, what constitutes “clearly established law” has constricted. The Roberts Court, invoking the importance of qualified immunity to “society as a whole,” has emphasized that the law is “clearly established” only if a court has previously found nearly identical conduct to be unconstitutional. What began as a protection for officers acting in good faith has turned into a protection for officers with the good fortune to have violated the Constitution in a novel way.

It was qualified immunity that dashed Onree Norris’s hopes of getting justice. In 2018, Norris sued the officers who had raided his home, seeking money to compensate him for his physical and emotional injuries. But in 2020, a federal judge in the Northern District of Georgia granted the officers qualified immunity and dismissed the case; in 2021, a panel of three judges on the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the ruling.

The three appeals judges recognized that officers who execute a search warrant on the wrong home violate the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution unless they have made “a reasonable effort to ascertain and identify the place intended to be searched.” In fact, the very same court of appeals that heard Norris’s case in 2021 had ruled five years earlier that it was unconstitutional for an officer who executed a warrant on the wrong house to detain its residents at gunpoint—almost exactly what had happened to Norris. But that earlier court decision was not enough to defeat qualified immunity in Norris’s case, because it was “unpublished”—meaning that it was available online but had not been selected to be printed in the books of decisions that are issued each year—and the Eleventh Circuit is of the view that such unpublished decisions cannot “clearly establish” the law.

Just as George Floyd’s murder has come to represent all that is wrong with police violence and overreach, qualified immunity has come to represent all that is wrong with our system of police accountability. But, over the past 60 years, the Supreme Court has created multiple other barriers to holding police to account.

Take, for example, the standard that a plaintiff must meet to file a complaint. For decades, a complaint needed to include only a “short and plain” statement of the facts and why those facts entitled the plaintiff to relief. But in 2007, the Supreme Court did an about-face, requiring that plaintiffs include enough factual detail in their initial complaints to establish a “plausible” entitlement to relief.

This standard does not always pose a problem: Norris and his lawyer knew enough about what had happened during the raid of his home to write a detailed complaint. But sometimes a person whose rights have been violated doesn’t know the crucial details of their case.

Vicki Timpa searched for months for information about how her son, Tony, had died while handcuffed in Dallas police officers’ custody in August 2016. Department officials had body-camera videos that captured Tony’s last moments, but they refused to tell Timpa what had happened to her son or the names of the officers who were on the scene when he died. Timpa sued the city, but the case was dismissed because her complaint did not include enough factual detail about those last moments to establish a “plausible” claim.

When the Court set out the “plausibility” standard, it explained that, if filing a case were too easy, plaintiffs with “a largely groundless claim” could “take up the time” of defendants, and expensive discovery could “push cost-conscious defendants to settle even anemic cases.” But this rule puts people like Timpa in a bind: They are allowed discovery only if their complaints include evidence supporting their claims, but they can’t access that evidence without the tools of discovery.

(Timpa did eventually get the information she sought after she filed a public-records request and sued the city for not complying with it. Only with that information in hand could she defeat the motion to dismiss. But then her case was dismissed on qualified-immunity grounds because she could not point to a prior case with similar facts. That decision was overturned on appeal in December 2021, and Timpas’s case is set to go to trial in March, almost seven years after Tony was killed.)

The Supreme Court has also interpreted the Constitution in ways that deny relief to victims of police violence and overreach. The Fourth Amendment protects against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” But in a series of decisions beginning in the 1960s, the Court has interpreted the “reasonableness” standard in a manner so deferential to police that officers can stop, arrest, search, beat, shoot, or kill people who have done nothing wrong without violating their rights.

On a July night in 2016, David Collie was walking down the street in Fort Worth, Texas, headed to a friend’s house, when two officers jumped out of their patrol car and yelled for Collie to raise his hands. The officers were on the lookout for two Black men who had robbed someone at a gas station. Collie was at least 10 years older, six inches shorter, and 30 pounds lighter than the smaller of the two robbery suspects. But he, like the suspects, was Black and was not wearing a shirt on that warm summer evening. Collie raised his hands. Just seconds later, and while standing more than 30 feet away, one of the officers shot Collie in the back. The hollow-point bullet entered Collie’s lung and punctured his spine. He survived, but was left paralyzed from the waist down.

When Collie sued, his case was dismissed by a district-court judge in Texas, and the decision was affirmed on appeal. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals called the case “tragic,” and a prime example of “an individual’s being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” but concluded that the officer had not violated Collie’s Fourth Amendment rights, because he reasonably—though mistakenly—thought he had seen a gun in Collie’s raised hand.

The Supreme Court has undermined the power and potential of civil-rights lawsuits in other ways: It has limited, for example, plaintiffs’ ability to sue local governments for their officers’ conduct and to win court orders requiring that departments change their behavior. Any one of the barriers, in isolation, would limit the power of civil-rights suits. In combination, they have made the police all but untouchable.

Even when people are able to secure a settlement or verdict to compensate them for their losses, police officers and departments rarely suffer any consequences for their wrongdoing.

The Supreme Court has long assumed that officers personally pay settlements and judgments entered against them. That is one of the justifications for qualified immunity. But officers’ bank accounts are protected by a wholly separate set of state laws and local policies requiring or allowing most governments to indemnify their officers when they are sued (meaning that they must pay for the officers’ defense and any award against them). As a result, vanishingly few police officers pay a penny in these cases.

Police departments typically don’t feel the financial sting of settlements or judgments either. Instead, the money is taken from local-government funds. And when money is tight, it tends to get pulled from the crevices of budgets earmarked for the least powerful: the marginalized people whose objections will carry the least political weight—the same people disproportionately likely to be abused by police.

Officers and officials could still learn from lawsuits, even without paying for them. But most make little effort to do so when a lawsuit doesn’t inspire front-page news or meetings with an angry mayor. Instead, government attorneys defend the officers in court, any settlement or judgment is paid out of the government’s budget or by the government’s insurer, and the law-enforcement agency moves on. In many cases, it does not even track the names of the officers, the alleged claims, the evidence revealed, the eventual resolution, or the amount paid.

Fundamental questions remain about what we should empower the police to do, and how to restore trust between law enforcement and the communities it serves. But no matter how governments ultimately answer these questions, they will almost certainly continue to authorize people to protect public safety. And some of those people will almost certainly abuse that authority. We need to get our system of governmental accountability working better than it does, no matter what our system of public safety looks like.

The fact that so many barriers to justice exist means that there is something for officials at every level of government to do.

The Supreme Court should reconsider its standards for qualified immunity, pleading rules, the Fourth Amendment, and municipal liability. But this seems unlikely, because a majority of the justices have demonstrated a durable hostility to plaintiffs in civil-rights cases.

Congress could remove many of the obstacles the Supreme Court has devised. And at least some members of Congress have shown an appetite for doing so. A bill to end qualified immunity, among other reforms, was passed in the House soon after the murder of George Floyd. But following 15 months of negotiations in the Senate, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act was abandoned. Republican Senator Tim Scott described the bill’s provision ending qualified immunity as a “poison pill” for Republican lawmakers.  

In the face of intransigence at the federal level, states have stepped in. Since May 2020, lawmakers in more than half of the states have proposed bills that would effectively do away with qualified immunity; these bills would allow people to bypass Section 1983 claims altogether and, instead, bring state-law claims for constitutional violations where qualified immunity could not be raised as a defense. State legislatures have additionally proposed bills that would limit police officers’ power to use force—prohibiting choke holds and no-knock warrants.

A bill enacted by Colorado in June 2020 is, in many ways, the gold standard. It allows people to sue law-enforcement officers for violations of the state constitution and prohibits officers from raising qualified immunity as a defense. The law also requires local governments to indemnify their officers unless they have been convicted of a crime, but allows cities to make officers contribute up to $25,000 or 5 percent of a settlement or judgment if the city concludes that the officer acted in bad faith. And the law bans officers from using choke holds, creating a bright-line limit on police power. Similar bills have passed in New Mexico and New York City, and are on the legislative agenda in other states. But other police-reform bills have failed in California, Washington, Virginia, and elsewhere.

I’ve testified in legislative hearings for bills in several states, and each has been frustratingly familiar. The people speaking against the bills threaten that if police officers cannot raise qualified immunity as a defense, they will be bankrupted for reasonable mistakes, and frivolous lawsuits will flood the courts. These assertions are just not true. Nevertheless, they have led lawmakers to vote against legislation that would take tentative but important steps toward a better system. Their inaction has left us with a world in which Onree Norris could receive nothing more than a few repairs to his doors after officers busted into his home and forced him to the floor; a world in which the Dallas Police Department could hide information about Tony Timpa’s death and then argue that his mother’s complaint should be dismissed because she did not have that information; a world in which David Collie could be shot and paralyzed from the waist down by a police officer, and require medical care for those injuries for the remainder of his life, but receive nothing, because the officer mistakenly thought Collie had a gun.

We need to stop being scared of unfounded claims about the dangers of too much justice, and start worrying about the people who have their lives shattered by the police—and then again by the courts.

This essay was adapted from the forthcoming Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable.

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Elections have consequences. Florida’s governor has decided to root out wrong-think at one of Florida’s public colleges, and his harebrained meddling will likely harm the school, but he has every right to do it.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Republicans’ 2024 magical thinking March 2023 cover story: We’ve lost the plot. Montana’s Black mayor

Florida’s Soviet Commissars

Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has set out to ruin one of Florida’s public colleges. He’s appointed several board members to the ideologically progressive New College of Florida with, apparently, a mandate to somehow rebuild it and thus save it from its dreaded wokeification. Helpfully for the cause of screwing up a college, most of the new overseers aren’t from Florida and don’t live there; one of them, in fact, is Christopher Rufo, a young man from the Manhattan Institute who has no actual experience in higher education but does have a genuine talent for rhetoric that he seems to have gained at the Soviet Higher Institute of Pedagogy somewhere in Moscow or Leningrad circa 1970.

Bristling at criticism from the Harvard professor Steven Pinker, Rufo fired back on social media. “We’re in charge now,” he tweeted, adding that his goal was “constitutionally-mandated democratic governance, to correct the ideological corruption of *public universities.*”

As they would have said during those old Party meetings: The comrade’s remarks about implementing the just and constitutional demands of the People to improve ideological work in our educational collectives and remove corruption from the ranks of our teaching cadres were met with prolonged, stormy applause.

Rufo is part of a new generation of young right-wing activists who have managed to turn trolling into a career. Good for him, I guess, but these self-imagined champions of a new freedom are every bit as dogmatic as the supposed leftist authoritarians they think they’re opposing. Their demands for ideological purity are part of an ongoing hustle meant to convince ordinary Americans that the many institutions of the United States, from the FBI in Washington down to a college in Sarasota, are somehow all scheming against them.

But Rufo is absolutely right about one thing: If Ron DeSantis wants to put him in charge of a “top-down restructuring” of a Florida college, the governor has every right to do it.

Elections have consequences. If the people of Florida, through their electoral choices, want to wreck one of their own colleges, it is within the state’s legitimate power to do so. In fact, Florida could decide tomorrow to amend its own constitution and abolish state universities entirely. There’s no national right to a college education, and if Florida wants to unleash a battalion of Guy Montags on its own state colleges and their libraries—well, that’s up to the voters.

But something more important is going on here. At this point in any discussion of college education, we are all supposed to acknowledge that colleges have, in fact, become ridiculously liberal. There’s some truth to that charge; I included some stories of campus boobery when I wrote about the role of colleges in America some years back. And only a few weeks ago, I joined the many people blasting Hamline University for going off the rails and violating basic principles of academic freedom while infantilizing and overprotecting students.

Fine, so stipulated: Many colleges do silly things and have silly professors saying silly things.

But the Sovietization of the New College isn’t about any of that. Something has changed on the American right, which is now seized with a hostility toward higher education that is driven by cultural resentment, and not by “critical race theory” or any of the other terms that most Americans don’t even understand. College among conservatives has become a kind of shorthand for identifying with all kinds of populist grievances, a ploy used even by Republicans with Ivy League educations as a means of cozying up to its non-college-educated and resentful base.

GOP attitudes about education have changed fast. As recently as 2015, most Republicans, by a wide margin, thought of universities as a positive influence on the United States. Four years later, those numbers flipped, and nearly 60 percent of Republicans saw universities as having a negative impact on the country.

It doesn’t take a lot of sleuthing to realize that those four years tracked with the rise of Donald Trump and a movement whose populist catechism includes seething anger at “the elites,” a class that no longer means “people with money and power”—after all, Republicans have gobs of both—but rather “those bookish snobs who look down on our True Real-American Values.” The Republican message, aided by the usual hypocrites in the right-wing entertainment ecosystem (such as Tucker Carlson, a prep-school product who told kids to drop out of college but asked Hunter Biden for help getting his own son into Georgetown), is that colleges are grabbing red-blooded American kids and replacing them with Woke Communist Pod People.

This is a completely bizarre line of attack: It posits that a graduate student making a pittance grading exams is more “elite” than a rich restaurant owner. But it works like a charm, in part because how Americans measure their success (and their relative status) has shifted from the simple metric of wealth to less tangible characteristics about education and lifestyle. Our national culture, for both better and worse, has arguably become more of a monoculture, even in rural areas. And many Americans, now living in a hyperconnected world, are more aware of cultural differences and the criticism of others. Those self-defined “real Americans” partake in that same overall national culture, of course, but they nonetheless engage in harsh judgment of their fellow citizens that is at least as venomous as what they imagine is being directed by “the elites” back at them.

Which brings us back to DeSantis—a graduate, he would apparently like you to forget, of Harvard and Yale. DeSantis is now a “populist,” much like Trump (Penn), Ted Cruz (Princeton and Harvard), Josh Hawley (Stanford and Yale), and Elise Stefanik (Harvard and the Ferengi  Diplomatic Academy). He has tasked Rufo (Georgetown and Harvard) to “remake” a school meant for the sons and daughters of Florida’s taxpayers not so that he can offer more opportunity to the people of his state, but so that he can run for president as just one of the regular folks whom reporters flock to interview in diners across the mountains and plains of a great nation.

Look, I live in New England surrounded by excellent public and private institutions, and I candidly admit that I couldn’t care less what kind of damage Florida does to its own schools. If Florida parents really don’t want Ron DeSantis appointing ideological commissars to annoy deans and department chairs, then they should head to the ballot box and fix it. But in the meantime, faux populists, the opportunists and hucksters who infest the modern GOP, are going to undermine education for the people who need it the most: the youngsters who rely on public education. And that’s a tragedy that will extend far beyond whatever becomes of the careers of Ron DeSantis or Christopher Rufo.

Related:

How Ivy League elites turned against democracy The professors silenced by Ron DeSantis’s anti-critical-race-theory legislation

Today’s News

A sixth Memphis police officer has been suspended from the force during the investigation of Tyre Nichols’s death. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office is starting to present evidence to a grand jury in its criminal investigation into Donald Trump. The evidence focuses on Trump’s role in paying hush money to an adult-film star during his 2016 campaign. The Ukrainian air force warned that it would not be able to defend against Iranian ballistic missiles, should Russia obtain them.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf collects reader perspectives on how to improve policing. Famous People: Lizzie and Kaitlyn attend a party with a very specific heart- and belly-warming theme. The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal explores how coffee became capitalism’s favorite drug.

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Evening Read

Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman during HBO Films Pre Golden Globes Party Inside Coverage at Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, California (Jeff Kravitz / FilmMagic / Getty)

The Luxury Dilemma

By Xochitl Gonzalez

Behind vine-covered walls on a modest hill overlooking Sunset Boulevard sits the decidedly immodest Chateau Marmont. The hotel was inspired by a French Gothic castle and, at 93, it is easily the oldest thing in Los Angeles that’s still considered sexy.

As a born-and-raised New Yorker without a driver’s license, I found the hotel the perfect place to park myself for a day of meetings in the era before Ubers and WeWorks and Soho Houses. I used to go there in the 2000s, back when I was a wedding planner. It was like a celebrity safari; stars would walk by, within arm’s reach. You could “do Los Angeles” without ever needing to move. I never could have afforded a room there, but I knew by reputation that at night it offered entertainment of a different sort: luxury and licentiousness and debauchery, unbounded by any rules.

In more recent years, I’ve returned to Los Angeles in a different career—as a screenwriter traveling on someone else’s dime. Naturally, I didn’t want to just take meetings at the Chateau; I wanted to stay there, to be a fly on the wall where the wild things were. Only I couldn’t.

I was told, in early 2021, that the hotel was not taking any new bookings.

Read the full article.

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SNL is excelling in one particular way. Photos: the snow monkeys of Nagano Dear Therapist: Can I cut my mom off from my children if she won’t seek therapy?

Culture Break

Mia Goth and Alexander Skarsgård sit together in "Infinity Pool" (Neon Films)

Read. “Poem Beginning With a Sentence From My Last Will & Testament,” by Donald Platt.

“Lucy, when I die, / I want you to scatter one-third of my ashes among the sand dunes / of Virginia Beach.”

Watch. Infinity Pool, in theaters, is a gory, existential horror film with a premise deliciously nasty enough to keep you invested—even if it can’t quite keep up with its initial hook.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I usually take this final word in the Daily to direct you toward something fun or interesting, often derived from my admittedly oddball taste in pop culture. Today, I’m going to ask for your indulgence as I offer you something that I wrote yesterday in our Ideas section.

Some years ago, I wrote about the young losers and misfits among us who suddenly explode and commit mass murder. Even before the recent shootings in California (which actually are outliers in the general pattern of attacks by younger men), I’d decided to revisit this question. I wanted to think more about why America—and, yes, other nations as well—has produced so many lost young men who turn to performative and spectacular acts of murder or terrorism. I think the growth of narcissism is one of the answers, but I discuss it all at more length in this article, which I cannot say is pleasant reading but, I hope, offers a path toward more productive discussions about how to prevent such tragedies.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

The principal of Richneck Elementary School in Virginia has been reassigned within Newport News Public Schools, according to a spokesperson for the district.

Two inmates who had escaped from a Virginia jail were captured after authorities found them hiding in a Tennessee barn, officials said.

                       
                       Lucy, when I die,
I want you to scatter one-third of my ashes among the sand dunes
                       of Virginia Beach.

Here I’ve come every summer for three and a half decades.
                       Here you and Eleanor
learned to swim in the ocean waves and bodysurf.

                       Here your mother
and I once walked hand in hand for miles and made love among
                       warm sand dunes

by starlight when we were young. We grew apart. Argued or kept silent.
                       Your grandmother and grandfather
died here. Until the end, they could hear the surf breathe and sigh

                       as wind does
through deciduous trees. Seagulls crying. I keep inhaling the healing
                       salt air

and tasting the salt of saltwater. After I leave this spindrift life,
                       the Atlantic Ocean
will continue. Children will keep chasing its waves

                       as the surf withdraws.
They will run from the waves as the surf comes thundering in. They play
                       tag with infinity.

Middle-aged couples will walk their black labs and golden retrievers on these
                       sands that the surf pounds
flat like a drunken fist pounding a smooth oak bar to underscore

                       some obscure
convoluted point that neither the fist nor the bartender
                       can truly grasp.

For the truth is far beyond our reach. The truth is that on the day I die
                       a man will be flying
a kite in the shape of a red Chinese dragon. It will fly so high

                       he can barely
see it. Baby spotted sharks with their leopard skin wash up
                       dead on the shore,

their gills clogged with sand after storms. Teenage boys
                       keep hurling
footballs back and forth as if their muscled bodies are metronomes

                       for the music
the ocean makes. Shy teenage girls will keep singing their pop songs,
                       so full of unfulfilled

desire, to the doo-wop, doo-wah of the surf. They will dye
                       their hair pink
or pale blue as cotton candy. All of it will continue as it always

                       does, almost
the same. When I die, families will still keep pitching their pastel-colored
                       awnings, shade tents,

and sun umbrellas like giant dahlias and make their nomad
                       encampments
on the sand. They will stay a week or two and then depart

                       for more permanent
shelters inland. Lucy, I like nothing better than walking with you
                       for hours on the beach.

First, north as far as Fort Story’s No Trespassing signs.
                       Then south
three miles from 81st Street toward the boardwalk and hotels.  

                       A boy holds
a girl, whose long legs wrap around him. He carries her into
                       the surf while she

screams ecstatically as the cold waves buffet them. He staggers
                       but does not fall.
You are recovering from twenty-eight-hour shifts during surgical rotation

                       at medical school. You tell me
that your sole patient yesterday had cancer. It has metastasized
                       to lungs, kidney,

spleen, spine, brain. “It is inoperable,” you say. “There’s nothing
                       I can do,
except make her comfortable.” You mean more oxycontin,

                       then morphine.
Yard-high letters in the sand spell STEPH HEARTS
                   DOLLY. All

our thousands of naked footprints crisscross the sand.
                       A sandcastle
stands with terraces, towers, winding staircases, a moat,

                       and the most
delicate of arches over the moat. Nothing is all the more beautiful
                       because it is

fragile. The tide is either coming in or going out.
                       I don’t know
which. With its bent, outstretched wings, a lone brown pelican

                       dive-bombs
the ocean, skims low, only a few inches above the waves,
                       looking for fish.

Ali Shukri Amin, a Virginia man who pleaded guilty in 2015 to providing support to ISIS, is accused of violating his release conditions after allegedly meeting multiple times with John Walker Lindh, the so-called "American Taliban" who served 17 years in prison for supplying services to the group.

President Joe Biden is scheduled to speak at a union hall in northern Virginia Thursday afternoon, attempting to cast himself as a defender of the middle class by leaning into his economic accomplishments and contrasting them with the Republican proposals he says would be catastrophic for Americans' pocketbooks.

New Year’s resolutions had barely been resolved before parents across the nation started thinking ahead to summer. The scramble to sign kids up for summer camp begins in January, because limited slots and huge demand have led to a highly competitive environment that verges on absurd. Case in point: Rachael Deane, a mother in Richmond, Virginia, has a summer-camp spreadsheet. She joked to me that it is “more sophisticated than a bill tracker” she uses to follow legislation in her work at a children’s-advocacy nonprofit; the spreadsheet is color-coded, and registration dates are cross-posted onto her work calendar so she can jump into action as soon as slots open.

Deane’s intense approach reflects the state of modern parenthood. The lack of universal child care is a pain point for parents throughout the year, but the summer is a unique headache. As with after-school care, parents have to navigate a confusing patchwork of options, but in the summer, they need a plan for all day, every day, for three months. And society leaves them largely on their own to figure it out: A 2019 survey from the Center for American Progress found that for three-quarters of parents, securing summer care was at least a little bit difficult. The system is essentially a competition that has winners and losers, and rests upon a willful ignorance of the reality of most American families—only one-fifth of all parents are stay-at-home. Change is long overdue.

I believe part of the problem is that in the U.S., education is a right for kids, and a responsibility for the state, while care outside schools, despite being just as vital for child development, is seen as solely the parents’ responsibility. So when the academic calendar ends, the government bows out. As Amanda Lenhart, a researcher who has studied summer care, told me, “We’ve made a decision culturally to push the burden of caring for kids during the summer fully onto parents, and forcing them to manage. It’s in some ways a throwback to an idealized family setup and work setup that never existed for most people anyway.” Indeed, the system’s assumption that one parent (read: the mother) should be available to watch the kids is a prime example of what the historian Stephanie Coontz calls “the way we never were.”

[Read: America’s child-care equilibrium has shattered]

Although some people wax nostalgic about lightly supervised summers spent mainly by themselves or with friends, the landscape has shifted since the 1980s, and this is no longer a viable option for many families. The sociologist Jessica Calarco explained in an interview with the writer Anne Helen Petersen that several factors led to the change. These included new laws about the minimum age at which children can be home alone, and a desire among certain parents for specialty camps to give their kids a leg up in college admissions. In parallel, the economic challenges of running camps drove a decline in options and an increase in prices.

The lack of affordable summer care leads to very different choice sets for parents in different income brackets. The mid-winter dash for summer-camp spots occurs mostly, though not exclusively, among wealthier, more educated parents. Lenhart’s research found that about one-third of parents in 2018 were sending their kids to camp; another study concluded that the kids of college graduates had an attendance rate seven times higher than that of kids whose parents had only a high-school diploma or less.

Parents who go this route face a logistical puzzle: Few summer programs run for multiple weeks, cover the hours when parents are working, and are reasonably affordable. Although many municipal parks-and-recreation departments valiantly try to provide inclusive low-cost options, there simply aren’t enough slots to go around. Making matters worse, camp sign-ups tend to be first come, first served, provoking a page-refreshing scrum more appropriate to acquiring Taylor Swift tickets than securing care for one’s children. I was discussing this topic with my literary agent, Laura Usselman, and she told me that in her small Georgia city, camp registration opens at 9 a.m. on one day in January, and “many of the camps are full by 9:03.”

Lower-income parents, for whom camps are often entirely out of reach, sometimes have to shape their entire work lives around the need for summer care. The Center for American Progress survey found that, to accommodate summer-care needs, more than half of families had “at least one parent [plan] to make a job change that will result in reduced income.” Calarco explained that in her research interviews with mothers, “quite a few have talked about how they made their own career decisions around the fact that their kids would be home in the summers and after school”—choosing a lower-paying job because it was closer to family who could help, for example, or taking part-time gig jobs.

The most obvious solution to this problem—year-round school—has never really gained traction in the United States. A mere 4 percent of U.S. schools have year-round schedules, and these still have substantial breaks. Summer vacation’s place in the American cultural mindset is deeply entrenched; there is also a fair case that children need opportunities for open play and creativity through an extended summer break to complement academic study.

Other countries have different approaches that preserve summer vacation without leaving parents scrambling every year. Municipalities in Sweden, for instance, are required by law to offer parents slots in programs known as fritidshem, or “leisure-time centers,” until their children turn 13. These centers provide both before- and after-school supervision and care during school breaks. In Germany, children have a legal right to day care; although there isn’t a corresponding policy for school breaks, some towns and cities organize comprehensive holiday programming, often in partnership with local schools. It’s not free, but the costs are moderate and financial aid is generally available.

Approaches like these in the U.S. would, of course, require funding, and maybe even legislation. Sadly, this country has shown time and again that it is unwilling to commit major resources to child care, laying the problem at parents’ feet instead. A cultural shift is needed to smooth the path for potential policy shifts. The summer scramble seems unlikely to end unless U.S. society moves its philosophy away from “every family for itself” and toward an understanding that school, work, and child care are all interconnected.

[Read: Why child care is so ridiculously expensive]

There have been recent glimmers of possibility. Although it was interrupted by the pandemic, two New York City council members introduced legislation in early 2020 to offer free summer camp for all youths in the city. Last year, several school districts across the country used pandemic-relief funding to temporarily provide free summer programming. Yet the fact that such policies are new and notable underlines the absurdity of America’s inconsistent ideas about when and where families deserve support. As Lenhart told me, “We’ve decided culturally and politically that the care of very young children, and the care of children in one season [of the year], is a burden to be borne by the family as opposed to spread across the community.”

Child care shouldn’t be a luxury good that the wealthy fight over, the middle class squeezes to acquire, and low-income folks do without. But that’s what it becomes every summer when parents’ options are shelling out for expensive camps, fighting for limited slots in affordable programs, or nothing. Until action is taken, forcing parents to sprint to sign up for summer camp in the dead of winter is a not-so-subtle message about how the nation really feels about them.

Almost every day since the beginning of 2020’s COVID-19 lockdown, I have texted with my friends Suzanne and Kate. We’re not all that similar. I am Black, and they are white. We live in different parts of the country. They are in long-term, child-free relationships. I am married and have a child. But we are all writers who share a deep connection with the natural world. And our writing reflects our frustration at the way many people’s stories are erased from books held up as masterpieces of environmental literature.

Some years ago I edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. One of the anthology’s most remarkable statements was that Black people write with an empathetic eye toward the natural world. Because of erasures from so many narratives about the great outdoors, the idea that Black people can write out of a personal relationship to nature and have done so since before this nation’s founding comes as a shock to many people. Conducting a review of more than 2,000 poems included in key nature-poetry anthologies and journals published from 1930 to 2006—80 years of the environmental literary canon—I found only six poems by Black poets.

This article is adapted from Dungy’s forthcoming book.

But that doesn’t mean Black people weren’t writing these poems. Like so many writers who wander out into nature to find themselves, Black writers also find peace in connections to nature. Just as strong as the pull of legacies of trauma that this nation inflicted—and inflicts—on Black people is the self-recognition some of us find in stories of hope and renewal that grow out of the wild world.

“Thank you,” one Black poet told me when I requested poems for Black Nature. “I have been writing this way my entire life, but no one has ever seen me in this light.”

People are part of the natural world. And yet, loads of canonical nature writing excludes people. Such writing spends so much time in solitary meditative observation that the writers ignore nearly every human experience outside their own. During the early days of the shut-in, in March, I texted Kate and Suzanne about some books I’d recently reread, including Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, about the passage of a year in Roanoke Valley. “Why,” I asked my friends, “had Dillard felt the need to erase the messiness of both mundane domestic undertakings and complex national politics from her book about the world?” Dillard expressed doubt that people would want to read a memoir by “a Virginia housewife,” so she left that part of her own story out. Her book also deletes the daily experiences of many other people in her direct vicinity. Around the time she was writing, some of the most significant integration struggles of the civil-rights era roiled just beyond her door, but Dillard’s book maintains a segregation of focus and care. Such books don’t only erase Black neighbors. They erase nearly everyone.

[Read: The Thoreau of the suburbs]

“Dillard adopts the whole ‘man-alone-in-the-wilderness (or in her case the pastoral)’ trope,” Suzanne added to our text thread. “I mean, Edward Abbey was generally with one of his four wives out there in the desert, but they never show up. It’s pure fantasy.”                                                             

“That’s part of why I like Amy Irvine’s Trespass so much,” wrote Kate, referring to the wilderness activist’s 2009 memoir. “She’s so fucking honest.”

Published in 2018, Irvine’s next book after Trespass is the contrarian meditation Desert Cabal. That book deals with the implications of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Abbey’s Desert Solitaire—the same Abbey who stayed in the desert as frequently by himself as with one of his wives and their children, though you wouldn’t know about his family from what he wrote in that seminal book. In this case, there could be no more appropriate descriptor than seminal, a word often used to laud the unmatchable genius of an individual man.

Why disappear the people who people your world?

“Irvine doesn’t get that level of love for Trespass,” I wrote to my friends. “Partially because she was so busy raising her kid that she couldn’t do the promotional work. But partly because nature dudes like a certain kind of story.”

The nice thing about texting is that I can carry on a conversation while vacuuming or stirring risotto. Sometimes seconds pass between messages. Sometimes long days. The flow of thoughts can meander as well. “It’s noteworthy that Dillard wanted to write in a ‘genderless’ way (read: presumably male),” I continued, “but they wouldn’t let her publish the book as A. Dillard.”

Suzanne, who had been offline, came back to tell us some of the phrases an editor used to replace the simple dialogue tag I said in her manuscript. Many of the substitutions magnified a kind of servile femininity: I pleaded, I confessed, I admitted, I bustled, I apologized. “As in,” Suzanne wrote, “‘I’m sorry,’ I apologized.”

“Every time the word bustle comes up,” wrote Kate, “we’re doing a shot of tequila.”

“I need to read Trespass,” wrote Suzanne.

In Desert Cabal, Irvine writes about the precautions she takes as a woman, including giving careful thought to what she drinks and with whom. She writes about the ways her life—the life of a white, culturally and economically privileged woman—is often in jeopardy in the wild. Especially when she’s in the company of men.

I returned to an earlier moment in our conversation—“There’s so little quotidian honesty in nature writing during that generation”—and started my own contrarian environmental-lit list. Several books by contemporary writers do pay significantly more attention to the realities of domestic life than I’ve seen in previous generations. For The Book of Delights, Ross Gay wrote small daily essays about things that delighted him in the everyday world. At some point, he even describes someone doing the dishes. And I know of at least two places in Deep Creek where Pam Houston shares her shopping lists, including what she planned to prepare for her housemates at dinner. Gay and Houston write of lives surrounded by both nature and people. Though they are sometimes prone to ecstatic reveries, they also deliver instruction on how to live in the occasionally brutal landscape of our world. In Gay’s case: in a Black man’s body. In Houston’s: as a white woman and survivor of childhood abuse.

[Read: Environmentalism was once a social-justice movement]

“Maybe what I’m missing particularly is the parenting aspect,” I told Kate and Suzanne. “Child-free writers versus mothers.” The routine tasks that consume a parent. I wasn’t reading about what keeps me from writing one small essay a day.

I’m not judging the reasons a person might not be a parent, or why they might not write about motherhood even if they do have a child. I’m being honest in my own writing about that for which I hunger.

Even though they aren’t mothers themselves, Suzanne and Kate admitted an interest in such stories. “I think Ellen Meloy and Eva Saulitis both write with quotidian honesty,” wrote Suzanne. “But as you say, both were childless. You have me running to my bookshelves!”

We have to deliberately search out these books, because the environmental imagination we were trained in did not admit children, or the women who raise them, into the canon of work about the wild. Just as something in that same imagination had not admitted Black writers.

But it’s not hard to find writers who defy such limiting narratives. In more than one of her nonfiction books, Barbara Kingsolver writes about the family garden and her children. Jamaica Kincaid’s My Garden (Book), which she published in 1999, begins with a gift of gardening tools she received on Mother’s Day. In 2013’s Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer reimagines the ways we might interact with the greater-than-human world. She also writes about lessons she learns as a mother. And in World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments, published in 2020, Aimee Nezhukumatathil writes about the family she creates with her husband almost as much as she writes about her own childhood and family of origin. Still, what’s the old saying? The exceptions prove the rule.

I didn’t write anything else to Kate and Suzanne about books that followed or resisted the limitations of this genre, because I got caught up preparing and serving my family’s dinner. Then the nighttime rituals: combing and braiding my daughter’s hair; asking, “Did you brush your teeth and wash your face?”; removing still-unfolded laundry from the bed so she could sleep. The thicket of human happenings—a different kind of woods. Suzanne wrote, “Nothing more natural in humans than the messiness of giving birth. She bustled.”

“Drink up, sister!” wrote Kate.

I may or may not have had a drink that night. I didn’t write it down. What I know is that in the rush before picking my daughter up the next day, I threw a handful of fruit into a smoothie, without turning off the blender’s blades.

Next in the text chain: a photo of my cabinets coated in vegetal goo. Instead of following up on ideas I shared with my friends or cutting back the winter scrabble that wilded our March garden, I focused on cleaning the kitchen walls and cabinets and floors.

I couldn’t draft a text in the same way as so many old, white, mostly male nature writers. Not on a morning like that. I couldn’t look away from the messiness. I wouldn’t want to erase the goo, or my girl, or my Black hands scrubbing our kitchen from my account of the wild world I so deeply love.

This essay has been adapted from Camille T. Dungy’s forthcoming book, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden.

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