128 VANITY FAIR SEPTEMBER 2019
had the best
kind of conversation: we two cousins meet-
ing for the first time, we two writers in the
good fight meeting on furlough, trading
dreams, possibilities, people. Garnering
strength to return to battle, to tell these
essential stories.
That sense of longing moves beyond
couples, as parents long for children, broth-
ers for sisters, cousins for cousins, friends
for friends. Families and communities were
dislocated, sold south for profit as planta-
tions in the upper South failed, and this is
the longing that Coates speaks of that under-
girded millions of lives. This is the great sea
that disoriented them, drenched them, and
drowned them for generations. Slavery was
the antithesis of love. While love sharpens
awareness of humanity, makes us focus on
the beloved’s way of singing to themselves
when they think no one can hear, their way
of holding their head just so when they are
listening intently, their way of crying when
they are angry or laughing when they are
sad, slavery does the exact opposite work.
It dulls awareness of humanity, reduces the
enslaved to object, to tool, and to cash. This
difference is what drove Coates to write. He
began researching slavery and the Civil War
before he knew Hiram, or before he knew that
he would write novels about enslaved people.
Coates has been intellectually wrestling
with the darker aspects of American his-
tory and policy for a long time. He wrote
for the Atlantic for years, and when he
published his standout essay “The Case
for Reparations,” he announced himself
as one of our most essential public intel-
lectuals. While President Barack Obama
was in office, Coates made a study of the
44th president, including interviewing him,
and used that material in the collection We
Were Eight Years in Power, which reflects on
race, America, Obama’s presidency, and
its immediate aftermath. This continuous
intellectual engagement fed his nonfiction
and fiction at the same time.
“I started reading books about the Under-
ground Railroad. It was the individual stories
that got me. I was reading this biography of
Harriet Tubman, and one of the biographies
said something to the effect of, ‘To this day,
we don’t know how she made some of these
escapes.’ I said, ‘Fuck—well, how did she?’ To
me, that’s where myth lives in fiction.”
When Coates was younger, he read com-
ics incessantly. He was obsessed with super-
heroes, with people who secretly possessed
power that could remake the world. Coates’s
youthful obsession with a kind of magic that
gilds the everyday world resurfaces in The
Water Dancer. But because Coates has dis-
avowed magic in Between the World and Me,
explicitly stating that he rejects all forms of
magic, I ask him about that declaration. He
laughs. “I think the true answer is that’s proba-
bly not a true statement. I think myth or magic
has a lot of power.” Popular culture wrestles
with America’s disavowed history in oblique
ways that to many nerds of color feel dishon-
est. We begin to speak about other artists tack-
ling the same time period in America’s history,
including David Benioff and D.B. Weiss’s pro-
posed show about the Confederacy.“A buddy of mine, he says, ‘Listen, there’s
very little American science fiction or fan-
tasy that is not, in fact, aping our shit.’ One
of my favorite movies is the last Mad Max
that came out, Fury Road; God, I love that
movie. How are you going to have a bunch
of runaway slaves and there’s only one black
person? One black person in the whole
movie? This movie is just about slavery.”
So much of sci-fi and fantasy is, he says.
Or take the X-men comic books, “about all
these people who are allegedly special but
are persecuted for it? Well, fuck—I know
about that.” He laughs. “So like, when that
Confederate thing happened, my thing is:
Why do y’all keep telling the same fucking
story? So many people in speculative fiction
have tackled: What if the Confederacy had
won? Why are we going back to this again?
Do you know how many stories to be told
are out there? There are so many things to
speculate about.” His love for speculating,
for creating alternate realities, is evident
in the work he’s done in the Black Panther
universe, where he’s written several fresh
comics for Marvel.
After telling Coates that I, too, am work-
ing on a novel about an enslaved person sold
south, I blurt out that I was scared when I
read the first few chapters of The Water Danc-
e r. I thought: Oh, my God, what if Ta-Nehisi
is telling the same story? Coates shakes his
head and laughs. He is a little less upright,
familiarity allowing him to slouch a bit more.
“You know what’s funny? When Colson’s
book [The Underground Railroad] came out, I
said, ‘Oh, shit, I’m dead.’ I still haven’t read it.
I’m going to. But I didn’t, because I just didn’t
want him in my head. So I just avoided it. But
the thing I quickly realized too: How many
fucking Westerns are there? Nobody’s like,
‘Well, I’m scared I’m going to do this Clint
Eastwood thing again.’ No one says that.”Ta-Nehisi Coates
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 75
on either coast reached out with tentative
“just checking in” emails.
The parents caught up in the scheme
have run the gamut in terms of their reac-
tions to the scandal. Fourteen have pleaded
guilty. Felicity Huffman was one of the first,
stating, “With deep regret and shame over
what I have done, I accept full responsibility
for my actions.” This was followed several
weeks later by a guilty plea from Bucking-
ham, who has made no public statement,
but according to a friend has since “owned
it” and even made self-deprecating jokes
about it. These two women stand in stark
contrast to Lori Loughlin. “No one can
figure out what she’s doing,” says a person
in her social group. She is among 19 other
parents who are fighting the charges and
going to trial. Adam Bass has paid no price
for his involvement with Singer—perhaps
because, as he told Buckley, he had no idea
what Singer was doing; perhaps because
the school successfully stopped an illicit
scheme in its tracks, thus saving him from
himself. Brian Werdesheim remains at
Oppenheimer and on the Buckley board,
despite being Singer’s main champion.
The fates of many of the children remain
up in the air. USC, the school sought by the
majority of Singer’s families, declined to
admit this year’s applicants involved with
Singer. As for those currently enrolled, the
school is examining each student’s per-
sonal culpability. Georgetown has expelled
two students: Isabelle Henriquez, who,
according to the indictment, “gloated,”
along with her mother and the proctor whosuccessfully cheated for her; and Adam
Semprevivo, who’d been cc’d on at least one
of the incriminating emails with Singer. He
has maintained that he didn’t know what
his father was up to and he is suing George-
town in part based on the assertion that
Georgetown should have realized that his
application was false, even as he, allegedly,
did not. Jack Buckingham pleaded his inno-
cence before the admissions office at South-
ern Methodist University and was accepted.
Eliza Bass ended up at Berkeley, no thanks
to her dad. Kate Tobin got an acceptance
from USC and other colleges, according to
a source close to her, but is still weighing her
options. So the rich kids of L.A. will prob-
ably land on their feet. The real challenge
might be recognizing—and rejecting—their
parents’ questionable values. That would be
an achievement.College Scam