Massachusetts Review

APRIL MAY BE THE CRUELEST MONTH, but summer has its own cruelties. It’s a season associated with vacation, sun, and relaxation, but, increasingly, it’s also a time of brutal heat waves and devastating fires. And from the long, hot summer of 1967 to the summer rebellions of 2020 in the aftermath of George Floyd’s lynching and so many other police killings, summer has also been a political boiling point for the colonized and the oppressed.

No breezy beach reads here, this issue instead encourages readers to think deeply about the political valences of leisure, recreation, desire, and reading itself. While waves and water somehow seem to elude the inexorable pull of history, Celeste Henery’s account of her lifelong love of swimming is interwoven with the story of her father’s complicated relationship to the water, a story that is also about the preciousness of family, the slipperiness of memory, and the segregation of both education and swimming facilities in the United States. Rhonda Mitchell’s “We Were a Practiced Act” dovetails beautifully with Henery’s essay, discussing her father’s illiteracy in the context of his denial of an education in the agricultural Black Belt of 1940s North Carolina, his undiagnosed dyslexia, and the damaging legacies of “bootstrap ideology” for African Americans then and now. Mitchell and Henery’s essays both return us to the scene of Jim Crow America, shadowed by the history of enslavement, reminding us of how racial dispossession and discrimination in the U.S. has often been facilitated by unequal access to public infrastructure and services, with lasting effects on future generations. But as Jina Kim notes in her recent book, Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-of-Color Writing, people can be infrastructure too. Indeed, Henery and Mitchell write of fathers whose love, wisdom, and resilience constructed crucial infrastructures for their families in the face of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “organized abandonment” by the state. As Mitchell powerfully closes, “My father didn’t just make his own boots and straps; he then stitched mine and my brother’s. We had to make our own before we could pull ourselves up. We are not victims. We are the proof.” These fathers also modeled forms of vulnerability that held countless lessons for their daughters.

Speaking of people as critical infrastructure, with this issue we say goodbye to Pam Glaven, who has served as MR’s production designer and art director for the past several decades. While no one (including Pam) will tell me, the relative newbie around here, exactly how long she has been with the magazine, I know that her contributions have been numerous: In addition to meticulously designing every print issue of MR, she has, in collaboration with Mario Ontiveros, selected art that beautifully represents MR’s vision, with a special interest in featuring emerging artists whose work is blazing important new pathways for-ward in the art world. She was also responsible for MR’s redesign in 2022. In a recent meeting, members of our editorial collective had the chance to thank Pam and to reflect on the significance of her contributions. They spoke of the clarity of her vision, called her an amazing ally, and mentioned her great taste and keen eye. I’ll add here that Pam is so cool and wickedly funny, and we will miss her terribly. I close here with some paraphrased words from translation editor Corine Tachtiris, who noted that Pam has been a fierce defender of what MR stands for; at the same time, she is unflinchingly forward-looking, an innovator who has never let us rest on our laurels but instead pushes us forward. We will be at a bit of a loss without you, Pam, but we will do our best to forge ahead into and in the name of a future that matters.