Jessica Willis
April 2012
Introduction
In the three years since the founding of the Juvenile Resource Center (JRC), the Pittsfield Public School district’s new alternative school, the yearbook photographers from the district’s two high schools have never visited the JRC to take pictures of the students. The objective of this intervention was to form a partnership with the high schools and have the yearbook staff visit the JRC and take pictures of the students.
At the same time, the researcher (who is a teacher at the JRC) sought to discover, through interviews and surveys with students, teachers, and administrators, what past and present barriers have prevented the JRC students from being included in their yearbooks. On a deeper level, the study sought to help students become connected to their school, classmates, and community through inclusion in their yearbook.
Interview data suggested that students who spend all or part of the day away from the campuses of their sending schools are unlikely to be represented (either through formal portraiture or informal photos) in their yearbook, and this absence may have negative repercussions for the student. Research suggests that yearbook and school photos provide a connection between the student, the school and community and “[w]ithout a school portrait, a modern childhood, at least as an aspiration, is in a sense incomplete” (Burke & Ribeiro de Castro, 2007, p. 215). At the same time, unflattering or insensitive school photography may also perpetuate stigma toward students with special needs and “[underscore] their status as less than desirable” (see Pfeiffer & Pfeiffer, 2011, p. 50).
The JRC is the campus for 52 high school students and 10 middle school students with moderate to severe behavioral issues from the Pittsfield Public School district. Students attend classes at the JRC for all or part of the school day; part-time students at the JRC return to their sending schools for other classes or go to work and/or volunteer commitments in the community.
The JRC is run by the Berkshire County Sheriff’s Department and the school district and is located in the county’s former House of Correction, a 140-year-old building that still retains much of its visual identity as a jail. The original bars are still on the windows, metal doors still close and lock with a heavy thud, and razor wire remains coiled atop the chain link fence surrounding the schoolyard.
There are fifteen 9th, 10th, and 11th graders currently enrolled in the researcher’s classroom at the JRC. Twelve of those students have Individualized Education Plans (IEPs); eight have a primary disability listed as Emotional; four have Multiple Disabilities.
Method of Intervention and Inquiry
The researcher interviewed three school staff members: one high school principal, one teacher/yearbook adviser, and one veteran special education teacher. Eight students were interviewed: five were from the researcher’s classroom and three were from the dropout prevention program for seniors. All students were interviewed in person at the JRC. The teacher/yearbook adviser was interviewed in person in her classroom; the principal and special education teacher responded to emailed surveys. The special education teacher and the teacher/yearbook adviser were from one sending school and the principal was from the other. All in-person interviews were audio taped and transcribed, and all participants were given pseudonyms to protect their identities. Students were chosen based on their availability and their willingness to be interviewed; every student invited to participate agreed to be interviewed.
The researcher chose to query staff members based on her prior relationship with them: Did she know them? Did she have a prior relationship with them? Did she like them?
During this part of the process the researcher recognized her bias about forming partnerships with her co-workers and realized that she may be missing out on fruitful collaboration experiences because she was hesitant to work with people whom she did not know well (see Canter et al, 2011).
Survey questions were as follows: “What, in your opinion, are the past and present barriers which have prevented the JRC’s inclusion in your high school’s yearbook?” and “Is there a way that the JRC’s programs could be more visible in a positive way in your school?” The last question, aimed at the yearbook advisers, sought to introduce the intervention objective: “Is it possible to schedule a time for you to visit and photograph students at the JRC?” In-person interview questions generated more conversationally but they were based on the survey questions.
Findings: “Off –Site, Out of Mind”
Interview data showed that the staff and most of the students agreed that the JRC should be included in the sending schools’ yearbooks, but staff and students identified different barriers to inclusion. The interviews also generated data about how the students felt they were viewed by others, how students and staff viewed the JRC, and how photography could help – or hurt – the facility’s identity as an alternative school and a former jail.
In addition to the barriers of separation from the sending schools’ campuses, social stigma, and lack of knowledge about the JRC by the school population at large, which were identified by the researcher’s students, three seniors in the dropout prevention program noted that the relatively transient nature of the JRC’s population made it difficult, or even undesirable, to be photographed for their sending schools’ yearbooks. Students enter and exit the programs at the JRC throughout the school year and this emerging theme of transience suggested that some JRC students may not wish to be remembered as being a part of the school. This transient theme was exclusive to the high school senior participants.
“This is my first year in the school [district] so I don’t have many memories,” said Violet, 18. Like the other two 18-year-old seniors interviewed for the study, she hadn’t gotten her senior portrait taken.
When asked if he was disappointed about not having his portrait or any other picture in his yearbook, Virgil shrugged. “I don’t care,” he said. “I don’t lose sleep over it. It’s just a picture. In a stupid yearbook.” Earlier, he mentioned that he had just moved to Pittsfield from out of state. Despite their indifference to their presence in the yearbook, the seniors interviewed said they wouldn’t mind being associated with the JRC in candid photographs. “I would do it,” said Natalie.
The researcher had more time and access to the students in her own program, allowing for more in-depth interviews. The researcher’s students identified barriers that were different from those identified by the seniors. Carl, a 16-year-old 9th grader who was enrolled in the researcher’s full-time program, said that one barrier to inclusion in the yearbook was the JRC’s relative invisibility to the school population at large: “Most of the regular students haven’t even heard of programs like this,” he said.
At the start of the interview, Carl expressed his hesitation about being photographed for a product that didn’t matter much to him. “The yearbook is just a means … to reflect on what happened over the year and who your peers are,” he said. “It’s not a big thing to me but I’m … not much of a people person.” He suggested that the yearbook was for students who were “more attached to what the school does.”
Although Carl suggested that he wasn’t “attached” to his school, he became intrigued with the idea of having a photographer from both high schools visit and take pictures for the yearbook, noting that the JRC’s separateness (both physically and philosophically) had kept it out of the camera lens. Inclusion in the yearbook, Carl said, would be a way to “get our program out to the rest of the school,” and he “would actually find that interesting, seeing as how we’re a different program from what it normally would be. I haven’t heard of anybody actually taking pictures of a program like this.”
Carl also said that he had negative experiences with being photographed for school. During the interview, he pulled his school ID out of his pocket and showed his picture to the interviewer. “The photographer was telling me to do this special pose, like sit up straight,” he said with a laugh. “I don’t know why every single picture taken of me looks mean. He wanted me to sit up and look proper.” In the photograph, Carl is slumped over and scowling. When asked if the photo was a fair representation of him, he said, “half the time, yes.”
This exchange about Carl’s annoyance about being asked to do a “special pose” was reminiscent of the themes in “School Picture Day and Self-Concept” (Pfeiffer & Pfeiffer, 2011), where the authors’ son, normally a child with a “wide smile and twinkling eyes” was not encouraged to smile in his school photograph; instead, he started vacantly into the lens “with an expression that screams DISABILITY.” The authors also noted that these bad photographs become “permanent records of the student and class identities,” (2011, p. 50), thereby furthering the permanently negative views of students with disabilities. Studying his glum expression on his school ID, Carl said:
I’ve actually been referred to as like a ‘special ed person’ and that actually offended me. I’m not really special ed. I’m perfectly capable, it’s just harder for me in certain situations. Like with … a classroom full of people, I’m not too comfortable with that. The school system is just attempting to put labels on us. It’s just not fair.
Other students who took part in the study echoed Carl’s desire to be photographed if it would be a positive form of public relations for the JRC. “I wouldn’t care [about being photographed],” said Samantha, a 17-year-old junior and part-time JRC student. “I would just sit here and smile if someone were taking a picture of me.”
Samantha said she liked being a student at the JRC but she was uncomfortable with being in a former jail. “[The bars on the windows] don’t make me feel comfortable here,” she said. “It just reminds me we’re in a jail and we can’t get out.” Carl also mentioned that being “wanded” by sheriff’s deputies and having to pass through a metal detector hen he entered the building made him “feel like [he] was being treated like a criminal.”
Another student, 15-year-old Kevin, felt that yearbook photography wouldn’t help the JRC’s identity. “Pictures aren’t going to change anything,” he said. Then he added, “the bars on the windows ain’t cool. Don’t let them take pictures of the bars.” This last comment suggested that the building (and its students) were vulnerable to being photographed in an unflattering way if they (outsiders unfamiliar with the JRC) were insensitive to how the JRC students wanted to be seen.
In contrast to the students, the high school principal felt that the JRC’s primary barriers to inclusion in the yearbook were related to access, namely, a “lack of communication with the JRC regarding picture day and a lack of access to JRC students.” In addition, the principal reported that “if [JRC students] do not participate in extracurriculars at [the high school], it is highly unlikely they will be photographed.”
Anne, the teacher/yearbook adviser (who also acts as the main photographer), echoed the principal’s statement that a lack of access and non-participation in extracurricular activities contributed to the JRC’s absence from the yearbook. Anne has been the high school’s yearbook adviser for the past 22 years, and in that span of time, more and more off-campus programs have been created. As more and more school programs are located in different parts of the city, it has become a “challenge” to find all of the 210 seniors in the graduating class and managing the yearbook requires “a little bit of detective [work].”
Even the on-campus students who were enrolled in vocational study and didn’t have time to take part in extracurricular activities often were excluded from the yearbook, according to Anne. “They spend three periods a day in their shop,” she said. “They’re not even passing by at bell time. They’re not being seen.” The JRC’s invisibility to on-campus life, compounded by its geographical separation (the JRC and Anne’s school are 2.5 miles apart), made it even more unlikely that the JRC or its students would be included in the yearbook (1).
“I know [the JRC] exists but I don’t know a great deal about it,” she said.
When the researcher mentioned that her students “felt like they have been forgotten,” Anne was candid.
“And they have!” She exclaimed. “To be honest we kind of … yeah, that’s very true. It’s very clear like every single day, whether I can keep up with it or not, what events are going on here. You know and that keeps us busy.”
Anne also mentioned that a lack of time to go off-campus and photograph other programs was a barrier. “To be perfectly honest, I don’t go out to the other places where the students are. I don’t have the time, I’m a teacher,” she said. Anne did try to visit the JRC on one occasion to take photographs, but she had to cancel her visit because she could not get a substitute teacher.
Discussion: The Border Crosser
In “The School Photograph: Portraiture and the Art of Assembling the Body of the Schoolchild” (2007) authors Burke and de Castro make the point that school photography is a “ubiquitous marker of schooling,” and its familiarity makes it “easily overlooked,” thereby hiding its importance (2007, p. 214).
The observations of Carl and Kevin indicated that the two youngsters understood the importance of their photographed presence in their school’s yearbook; Kevin in particular, with his plea to not let them take pictures of the bars, suggested an understanding of the risks involved: Risk to his identity, his classmates’ identity, his school building’s identity, and how he will be seen in perpetuity.
Carl’s comment that photographing him and his classmates would be “a ... way of getting it out there” suggests that the JRC students want recognized and connected to other schools and to the community. At the same time, the students feel conflicted about the JRC’s identity as a former jail. Despite this conflict – or perhaps because of it -- the students are willing to partner with the school and try to “get it out there.” School photography is emblematic of that connection between school, home, self, and the community:
It seems that the school photograph and in particular the embodiment of school in the annual portrait that finds its place in the home is neither public nor private but straddles the two domains acting as a border crosser encouraging emotional investment in the notion of school. Crucial here is the inexorable order, regularity and persistence of form and style generating assurance and belief and indeed hope in the effects of education on generations of children (Burke & de Castro, 2007, p. 216).
Conclusion
The JRC’s absence from the high school yearbooks is seen by the district staff as a fault of geographics, lack of access to students, and time constraints; the JRC students see it as the fault of continued stigmatization. Although these views are different, everyone interviewed for this project agreed that the JRC should be a presence in the yearbooks of the city’s two high schools.
Taking the next step – a visit from the yearbook staff for candid and group pictures – has yet to happen. This project, like many partnerships, has no clear end in sight. Anne’s busy schedule has prevented her from visiting the JRC and taking pictures, but she recently made this remark, via email, to the researcher: “Why don’t you take your own photographs and send them to me. Just about any [electronic] format will work. There’s still time.”
The suggestion that we (the JRC population) take responsibility for our own images is a new and welcome development in this study and will make it much easier for the JRC to become part of the yearbook – on the JRC students’ own terms. However, presence in the yearbook is only the beginning of the process of helping the students forge a positive connection to the JRC and their community.
References and Notes
Burke, C. & de Castro, H. (2007). The School Photograph: Portraiture and the Art of
Assembling the Body of the Schoolchild. History of Education, 36 (2), 213-226.
Canter, et al. (2011). School librarians: The forgotten partners. Teaching Exceptional
Children 43 (5), 14-20.
Pfeiffer, M.A., & Pfeiffer, K.T. (2011). School Picture Day and Self-Concept. Teaching
Exceptional Children 43 (3), 50-54.
All in-person interviews took place on February 29th, 2012 and March 6th, 2012.
(1) At this point in the conversation, I asked Anne if she thought that the increasing popularity of social media Web sites (like Facebook) has decreased the yearbook’s significance among modern high schoolers. Are students more apathetic about the yearbook now? “A little bit. I think so,” Anne replied. “And I think it’s because we have so much more access to images now. I mean if you were in a yearbook years ago … that’s what you got. It’s kind of an old fashioned thing in a way. I mean, kids want them, but as far as the excitement of it …” The possible connection between the increased use of social media and the decrease in the popularity of the yearbook warrants further study.
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Monday, January 16, 2012
There was perfection in the severance of whatever we called union
This was the time where dew beaded on her forearm hairs and reminded her of cobwebs or silver mail. Waves of heat were visibly coming off her body, distorting the grass and trees. She thought of a start corral at a winter race; the bodies packed together made a similar blur of heat throbbing just above their heads. A thermopolis. Raza shivered. That was years ago, when just the sight of great clumps of runners could change the weather or at least her mood.
She spit her remaining saliva into the dirt to show it didn’t matter that she was under siege. They were down to eating rats but they threw the last of the meat over the castle walls to show their attackers that it didn’t matter. Thoughts were doing that pearls on the parquet thing again. She had run, and then walked, and then limped, and then crouched, coughing and sighing, only to stand up – head rush – to begin running again. There was severance in the perfection of whatever we called union with whatever we called God, she thought, then, no, that isn’t right, you’ve missed it again.
The perfection comes from the union and the separateness together, she thought, slowing to a shuffle. The perfection comes from being with God and then being cut off. In that order precisely. The not happy ending and being okay with it. That’s what made Tereza a saint, she figured: Oneness, or whatever, and then her failure, her loss, the dark space, the white arm without dew reaching into darkness and there was nothing there except her reaching.
The peace comes from the knowing that the bow no longer sings and the bell is stuffed with paper and feathers, too full to chime. She wished she could read and write in Latin or Greek, preferably both. She wished she was fast like RoboSnatch here, passing her on the left. R.S. was squeezed into a two piece black spandex thing, no hips, almost no breasts, built like a guy, running like a horse with a bit in her mouth, chin tucked down and eyes up.
Kelsie had fallen behind weeks ago. There was no doubt Raza ran without pity, even if other hopefuls like R.S. made her look somewhat gauche. The pity in fact leeched out of her all through the beginning of the run and she was left adamantine, sunburnt over her usual tawny sallowness. Kelsie however was greenish white and then she got that mottled color tourists got before they ignite in a second and third degree burn. And then eventually she had to stop.
Just leave me here, she told Raza. I can’t go any more. Just leave me in the shade.
There is no shade, she replied.
Kelsie put her palm up to shield the sun from her eyes and she looked at her friend.
My journey ends here, she said. Leave me here, I’m gonna watch the birds. I want them to be the last thing I see. I’ve dreamed of this moment my whole life.
Raza was startled. Kelsie had never spoken like that before and Raza honestly didn’t think she was capable of any … she didn’t know what. Self poetry, maybe. She felt guilty for thinking Kelsie, probably her final friend, was dumb.
The sun was getting lower and the mountain on the other side of the strait had turned pink. It was not a breathtaking view but it was something else. She didn’t give a shit about the view or any view but she wanted some clean water. Her father told her that dreams were held in the mouth and honey vinegar and hot water at the bedside and sipped first thing in the morning would wash the hidden dreams into your mind and you’d be able to speak them. She would drink that in her white bedroom in Miami. Miami. The word alone conjured another life, nights and days of doing her toenails inches away from the new white berber, aqua and lilac roofs, hair down to her ass, writing her name in steam, the sweet and alluring smell of dry ice, cigarette smoke, the feeling behind her knees after a snort of dope, music so loud it decayed and became something else. The black guys in matching cheap black sweatsuits and picked-out floaty hair standing by their cars on Old Ocean Drive at dawn, feet wide apart, hatches up, vibrating. They always seemed to be waiting or watching. She thought they liked having people watch them listen to music that had been blasted into something else.
Raza hadn’t seen her reflection in a long time and she didn’t care to.
Now I am further ahead/ than either of us dreamed/anyone would be. What Kelsie said half delirious lying on the grass reminded her of a poem by some lady about a doomed climbing team. “I have never seen my own forces so taken up and shared and given back … we are moving almost effortlessly in our love” And: “We will not live to settle for less”
Now here she was on a road with no name, passing and being passed by other – and she had no other word for the living except -- hopefuls. Or the road once had a name but it had been forgotten, blissfully forgotten.
She would live to settle for less. She was in the process of settling for less and less right now and it was bringing her to perfection.
In fact it was pink to begin with because of the fucking feldspar in the granite. Why why why. She couldn’t help her friend.
She spit her remaining saliva into the dirt to show it didn’t matter that she was under siege. They were down to eating rats but they threw the last of the meat over the castle walls to show their attackers that it didn’t matter. Thoughts were doing that pearls on the parquet thing again. She had run, and then walked, and then limped, and then crouched, coughing and sighing, only to stand up – head rush – to begin running again. There was severance in the perfection of whatever we called union with whatever we called God, she thought, then, no, that isn’t right, you’ve missed it again.
The perfection comes from the union and the separateness together, she thought, slowing to a shuffle. The perfection comes from being with God and then being cut off. In that order precisely. The not happy ending and being okay with it. That’s what made Tereza a saint, she figured: Oneness, or whatever, and then her failure, her loss, the dark space, the white arm without dew reaching into darkness and there was nothing there except her reaching.
The peace comes from the knowing that the bow no longer sings and the bell is stuffed with paper and feathers, too full to chime. She wished she could read and write in Latin or Greek, preferably both. She wished she was fast like RoboSnatch here, passing her on the left. R.S. was squeezed into a two piece black spandex thing, no hips, almost no breasts, built like a guy, running like a horse with a bit in her mouth, chin tucked down and eyes up.
Kelsie had fallen behind weeks ago. There was no doubt Raza ran without pity, even if other hopefuls like R.S. made her look somewhat gauche. The pity in fact leeched out of her all through the beginning of the run and she was left adamantine, sunburnt over her usual tawny sallowness. Kelsie however was greenish white and then she got that mottled color tourists got before they ignite in a second and third degree burn. And then eventually she had to stop.
Just leave me here, she told Raza. I can’t go any more. Just leave me in the shade.
There is no shade, she replied.
Kelsie put her palm up to shield the sun from her eyes and she looked at her friend.
My journey ends here, she said. Leave me here, I’m gonna watch the birds. I want them to be the last thing I see. I’ve dreamed of this moment my whole life.
Raza was startled. Kelsie had never spoken like that before and Raza honestly didn’t think she was capable of any … she didn’t know what. Self poetry, maybe. She felt guilty for thinking Kelsie, probably her final friend, was dumb.
The sun was getting lower and the mountain on the other side of the strait had turned pink. It was not a breathtaking view but it was something else. She didn’t give a shit about the view or any view but she wanted some clean water. Her father told her that dreams were held in the mouth and honey vinegar and hot water at the bedside and sipped first thing in the morning would wash the hidden dreams into your mind and you’d be able to speak them. She would drink that in her white bedroom in Miami. Miami. The word alone conjured another life, nights and days of doing her toenails inches away from the new white berber, aqua and lilac roofs, hair down to her ass, writing her name in steam, the sweet and alluring smell of dry ice, cigarette smoke, the feeling behind her knees after a snort of dope, music so loud it decayed and became something else. The black guys in matching cheap black sweatsuits and picked-out floaty hair standing by their cars on Old Ocean Drive at dawn, feet wide apart, hatches up, vibrating. They always seemed to be waiting or watching. She thought they liked having people watch them listen to music that had been blasted into something else.
Raza hadn’t seen her reflection in a long time and she didn’t care to.
Now I am further ahead/ than either of us dreamed/anyone would be. What Kelsie said half delirious lying on the grass reminded her of a poem by some lady about a doomed climbing team. “I have never seen my own forces so taken up and shared and given back … we are moving almost effortlessly in our love” And: “We will not live to settle for less”
Now here she was on a road with no name, passing and being passed by other – and she had no other word for the living except -- hopefuls. Or the road once had a name but it had been forgotten, blissfully forgotten.
She would live to settle for less. She was in the process of settling for less and less right now and it was bringing her to perfection.
In fact it was pink to begin with because of the fucking feldspar in the granite. Why why why. She couldn’t help her friend.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
fragment, c. 2011
I chose the Housatonic because I am a river lover, and I’ve been a champion of the Housatonic ever since I splashed my kayak under a railroad trestle years ago in Great Barrington on a listless July afternoon and took her south, way south, to the Connecticut border. The trip was enchanting – I saw bank swallows, pale carp, heron, and a loping water road through Berkshire County previously unknown to me. At the same time, the trip was squalid; my guidebook warned that the muddy river bottom and much of the wildlife were still afflicted by PCBs, the carcinogenic compound that is the legacy of Pittsfield’s General Electric plant. In many places, the riverbanks were littered with trash – a reminder that our waterways are often neglected and used as dumping grounds for our refuse.
Enchanted and squalid. Those words reflected, to me, the conundrum of what it meant to be a teen. Would my students learn to love the river as I had? Could my colleagues and I take them to the river? If my JRC students wanted to get out and do something after the morning academics, perhaps Housatonic history, ecology and advocacy would engage them.
I returned to the role of the researcher: My role was not to make anyone do anything. Nor was it my role as a researcher and instructor to force the roles of junior riverkeeper, custodian, or advocate on my students. I could not enter the study thinking that it was my job to give them (or my study participants) a voice; it assumed they did not previously have one. However, it was my role to understand how assumptions, hierarchies, the things people say, they way they say them, where they say them, and previously unseen connections (those loping river roads again) came together to create the experiential mosaic.
Enchanted and squalid. Those words reflected, to me, the conundrum of what it meant to be a teen. Would my students learn to love the river as I had? Could my colleagues and I take them to the river? If my JRC students wanted to get out and do something after the morning academics, perhaps Housatonic history, ecology and advocacy would engage them.
I returned to the role of the researcher: My role was not to make anyone do anything. Nor was it my role as a researcher and instructor to force the roles of junior riverkeeper, custodian, or advocate on my students. I could not enter the study thinking that it was my job to give them (or my study participants) a voice; it assumed they did not previously have one. However, it was my role to understand how assumptions, hierarchies, the things people say, they way they say them, where they say them, and previously unseen connections (those loping river roads again) came together to create the experiential mosaic.
Monday, February 21, 2011
My Life in Furs: Hate Me If It Makes You Feel Good
I've been looking for this nasty nugget for a good long time. Here it is--my errant farewell to NYC.
Originally published in the New York Press, January 18th, 2000
by Jessica Willis
She sits in a wingback chair in the front room, stocking feet thoughtfully digging into the shag carpet, and over her shoulder, out the picture window, I can see the wood and wire cages, rows and rows of them, clustered on the lawn. The smell of mink–gamy, deeply organic, vaguely unpleasant–permeates the house.
We go outside to the stalls, where there are about 1800 mink, divided into long rows in their wood and wire cages by their color and gender. Currently, she breeds three different kinds of mink: ranch (black), sapphire (smoky blue) and violet (light lilac purple). Each cage is roughly the size and depth of a dresser drawer, and has frozen water in a dish on a sill outside a hole, which is ostensibly big enough for the mink’s head. There is a constant stream of dark feces falling out of the bottom of all of the cages’ wire floors, landing in identical dark, reeking pyramids below.
I peer inside the grilled peephole at the top of one of the cages and make eye contact with a sapphire male. Beady red eyes and needle teeth return my glare.
"Don’t put your finger near the cage," she warns. "You won’t get it back."
Naturally, when faced with this unpleasant, bloodthirsty mammal cooped up in a cage, I react with hostility and a bitter joy–the former because I know the mink would, if given the chance, hurl himself through the air and fasten his incisors to my jugular; the latter because I am human and relatively unfettered, and I have money for his hide while he does not, at this time, have money for mine.
His coat gleams. I mean, the way only living fur can shine–it flashes amethyst, peach and platinum, like the freshly shaved and oiled calves of a Brazilian virgin. Exactly. The male bares its teeth, wider now, tiny pink tongue panting, eyes little raging candy buttons. It only takes about 30 of him and his closest friends to make a full-length coat.
"When the animal rights people snuck in, they just let the minks out of their cages?" I ask.
"Isn’t that enough? We had a thousand minks running around here," she says. "We lost about 200 of them. They got squashed by cars. We had no insurance, and we took a heck of a hit. It was a tragedy."
This year, she estimates, a single sapphire male pelt could sell for $40 to $50 on the open market, where she sells her skins once or twice a year to the fur wholesalers of the world, which is a marked improvement from past years ($28-$35 per skin in 1998). In a market that fluctuates wildly–not only with the strength of the economies of the foreign nations like Russia, China, Korea and Greece, which make up the majority of the American fur industry’s business, but also with the whims of the tiny population of Americans who can and do buy fur–life as a mink rancher is anything but rock steady. "Every year is different," she says. "One year is better, then the next year we don’t even make our livelihood. It doesn’t even pay. We just went through one of those years, but this year should be better. Have you ever lived off one or two paychecks a year? I swear, mink farmers are the best money managers in the world."
The sapphire male squirms in its small cage and shits some more. Fuck you, you little creep, I think happily. You’re a little devil animal, useful to no one, save for your skin. Unfortunately, you’ve been born wearing the pubic thatch of the gods. He gets my drift and hurls himself against the wire peephole.
"Am I right or am I wrong?" she says.
Give it up, I say, because I can say so. Die for us.
Hitler, and the whole lot of luckless assholes like him, was reincarnated as a mink, left to crap and breed and whelp in a stall-crammed slaver-ship tight next to his equally karmically ruined brethren. And then, after taking in their last coat-glossing meal of fish and chicken entrails, "harvest" time comes, an event that she explains tenderly and defensively: The minks are gassed with carbon monoxide on the premises, and their deaths come upon them "humanely and quickly."
She thinks about this for a moment.
"As a matter of fact, we probably take better care of our animals than a lot of people take care of their children. They’re worth nothing to us if they don’t flourish."
Rewind now to a prepubescent girl splayed down on her Sears canopy bed. Easy to picture her, isn’t it, a fresh Vogue pinned down under her chin, pages rolled open to a spread of some dead doll clad in fox and not much else, or maybe it’s pictures of Bert Stern’s disintegrated Monroe she’s marveling at: How the star is flawed naked and scarred, and how achingly right she is in a perfect fur, laughing hard-faced like Sacher-Masoch’s auntie.
And the girl has her palms way down her pants now. Obviously I am not making this up. She wants fur. The golden fleece is growing an ace black pubis like MM’s and, more importantly, obtaining a wardrobe to match–a closet of furs that would make a Jewess newlywed smudge her eyeliner.
There’s a jaundiced rabbit fur coat in her mother’s room. She pauses there, chin on Vogue, not really humping her hand anymore, wondering if she can sneak the coat out of the walk-in closet. Her mother (in the den now, watching Days) wore it constantly, over halter tops and turtlenecks when she was young, big-legged and beehived. She hardly ever wore it now, which, to the soiled mores of the prepubescent girl, was license to steal the fur and put it in her own room. Elsewhere in the young dark mind, the girl knew her time was running out and that she, at 13 years of age, was quickly expending her first, and most arable, sexual peak. She needed that fucking rabbit.
"I wore it the night Georgie Jessel undressed me with his eyes," her mother sighed whenever her daughter mentioned borrowing the coat. Her mother’s way of saying no.
She got her chance, though, a few nights later, when her mother went out. She found the Polaroid, snapped on some fresh flashcubes, set up the tripod in the living room and stripped down to nothing but her Candie’s wedgies, gold barrette and the fur. Mouth hanging adenoidally open, nose chafed red from a recent cold, the thick collar drifting off her shoulders, she was ready for her maturity. She turned her back to the camera and then suddenly looked over one bare shoulder and the picture was taken.
She wasn’t alone. With a babysitter in the den, who was talking on the phone, struggling to correct her orthodontic headgear and watching tv at the same time, the girl’s sulky best friend Michelle walked into the living room, pushed the Polaroid’s shutter and was out the door before the print spat out of the camera and hit the floor. Michelle lived across the street and could be counted on for some things. She helped in the chrysalis of me.
Before I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life enveloped in someone else’s luxurious, preserved skin, I thought nothing. I harmed nothing. And then I harmed something and became a woman. A lucre queen, loinclothed, cock- and gift-hungry, with fuck oder kaput as my mantra.
And then I knew how real women lived: gorgeous, rich, superior, capable and inches from danger and death. As Adam’s rib. In fur.
Go on, say it, you Teva-heads: I’m old, weary and louche in my ratty vintage rabbit hoodie, since, as you say (and I’m paraphrasing your anti-fur propaganda lit here), wearing fur makes women look old and dated. Propaganda like this seems to omit the fact that nothing, short of edema and a shopping cart jammed with Fanta cans and broken radios, makes a woman look old and dated. Fur makes a woman look fierce, like she’s been around, and I don’t care if that thing cost $50 or $15,000, she had to get way the hell around in order to end up with that on her back. As many times as it takes. And every woman in fur knows this. And every woman in fur wishes you knew that she knew.
A few weeks ago, on one of the first cold nights of the season, I was making haste down Ave. A, which is right in the clammy little heart of the p.c. nest. For if the pro-choice, anti-death penalty, anti-fur guerrillas target midtown for their soapboxing, they all friggin’ live and lurk on A. It’s late, or early, I’m just back from London, 4 a.m., and I’ve got the rabbit jacket on and I’m walking with my friend. We’re eager to get home because although we’ve seen each other, we haven’t touched each other in a long time.
And a busted woodie station wagon chortles up to a red light. Wan-faced guy in a snug knit cap yells out the open passenger window as I pass: How many dead animals did it take to make that coat?
Reflexively I yell fuck you, and I give the car’s windshield the finger. Nothing happens after that. We keep walking, they drive on, and we’re mutually satisfied.
Or not. I could have yelled something better. I have to stand up for the old lunching ladies and stout Jersey wives who get harangued and defaced every cold afternoon in midtown. I am not old, and I yell back.
I could have squashed my nose against the glass and yelled, "Don’t you think I know the covenant of wearing fur?" or, "I’ve made gentle love in this coat. Doesn’t that soften the hate that went into making it?" or "Anti-fur? What kind of fur are you anti?"
Maybe fuck you is better. Because, really–fuck you. The ashen PETA wannabe sitting on her milk crate, buffeting the freezing wind with her gore placards on Astor Pl. who whines stock footage every time I walk by: same thing. Dusky-looking broke kid standing in my way on St. Marks, who got p.c. brainwashed lord knows where (in line at Miami customs? At the bodega?) tells me I’m "disgusting" because I’m wearing "real fur": I’d use more syllables but I don’t want to overtax you, so fuck you too, fatty. I am wearing a rabbit jacket with a skull and crossbones shaved into the back, simmering happily in 15-degree weather with little or nothing on underneath, and you’re wearing blubber.
Wearing fur makes me angry, obviously. It makes you angry, too. But I’ve got it better. I’m angry and unstoppably warm. Everyone wants to feel me, but somehow can’t. Talk about luxury. I am also wearing the oldest, most traditional, most lush and intimate thing in the world, and it’s the only fashion statement that gets a rise out of people, and this is a big deal if you have intentionally been dressing like an asshole for many years, as I have. Forget leather and vinyl and nipples as jewelry.
I try to look into the eyes of all my naysayers. Wouldn’t it be funny if they looked like the animals they’re trying to save? But they don’t. Nobody can look as alert and pissed as a mink in a peephole. No, the animal saviors are tired, faded like an old tape.
"We know who they are," the mink rancher says. Her husband is sitting on the couch across the room in a colorless tracksuit, barefoot, attentive.
"Oh yeah," she continues. "Because we caught a few of them in that break-in. We have sat back and not said anything. A lot of [the activists] are young, well-educated people from wealthy families."
Young, well-educated and wealthy–taken separately, these attributes don’t amount to much, but when put together, you have a seething mass of good lawyers, pimples and ethics twisted by liberal arts and the sonorous, keening cry of campus collective: Take back the night, and all the good shit that goes with it. The cheap luxe vices like butts and booze can pass under the p.c. radar with only a minimum of squawk, but what about the less dangerous but far more expensive and showy luxury vices like furs and firearms?
Fossilized in the coming age? That remains to be seen. But for me, the answer lies in this sheared beaver coat I’m wearing. It’s one of the show pieces in the deeply carpeted and mirrored front room, which the rancher has nicknamed the Funhouse. The rancher retails a few pieces here, in varying species, and all of them are exemplary.
Now, if mink is bad, ooh, beaver is a sin. I mean, imagine clubbing Bucky’s head to a pulp, for chrissakes. But would I club Bucky for a bit of heaven, like what I’ve got right here? Hell yeah. Nothing feels like beaver. Dense, graphite blacky brown, soft like a horse’s nose.
"I tried on a beaver many years ago," I say, swiveling around to see all of it.
The rancher is watching me, leaning against the doorjamb. "You can still remember it. You can still dream about it," she says gently.
Then she says something about how the beavers shit in the water supply and cause diseases. Then she pads into the other room without another word. It is understood between us that diseased beaver shit in our drinking water is reason enough to kill many beavers and claim their fur.
"Yo, that jacket is buttah!" Now, the black ladies, they seem to still get it. They yell this at me sometimes, when I’m wearing the rabbit. To them, and maybe to me, wearing fur means arrival. Fur means Lil’ Kim and Aretha–snarling divas who know that nary an ounce of blood, acid or insult is going to get hurled anywhere near their profuse sprays of chinchilla and dyed sable.
Fur also means that I have a lineage, draped down from my great-great-grandparents who came here from Lithuania with furs, pajamas and a few pots and pans, and it means my beautiful dark-skinned grandmother with mischievous blue eyes can decide it is now, this winter, this afternoon, that she will bestow upon me her never-worn three-quarter-length ranch mink.
It was mine all along, she said. Talk about arrival. I put it on, and it was me.
Originally published in the New York Press, January 18th, 2000
by Jessica Willis
She sits in a wingback chair in the front room, stocking feet thoughtfully digging into the shag carpet, and over her shoulder, out the picture window, I can see the wood and wire cages, rows and rows of them, clustered on the lawn. The smell of mink–gamy, deeply organic, vaguely unpleasant–permeates the house.
We go outside to the stalls, where there are about 1800 mink, divided into long rows in their wood and wire cages by their color and gender. Currently, she breeds three different kinds of mink: ranch (black), sapphire (smoky blue) and violet (light lilac purple). Each cage is roughly the size and depth of a dresser drawer, and has frozen water in a dish on a sill outside a hole, which is ostensibly big enough for the mink’s head. There is a constant stream of dark feces falling out of the bottom of all of the cages’ wire floors, landing in identical dark, reeking pyramids below.
I peer inside the grilled peephole at the top of one of the cages and make eye contact with a sapphire male. Beady red eyes and needle teeth return my glare.
"Don’t put your finger near the cage," she warns. "You won’t get it back."
Naturally, when faced with this unpleasant, bloodthirsty mammal cooped up in a cage, I react with hostility and a bitter joy–the former because I know the mink would, if given the chance, hurl himself through the air and fasten his incisors to my jugular; the latter because I am human and relatively unfettered, and I have money for his hide while he does not, at this time, have money for mine.
His coat gleams. I mean, the way only living fur can shine–it flashes amethyst, peach and platinum, like the freshly shaved and oiled calves of a Brazilian virgin. Exactly. The male bares its teeth, wider now, tiny pink tongue panting, eyes little raging candy buttons. It only takes about 30 of him and his closest friends to make a full-length coat.
"When the animal rights people snuck in, they just let the minks out of their cages?" I ask.
"Isn’t that enough? We had a thousand minks running around here," she says. "We lost about 200 of them. They got squashed by cars. We had no insurance, and we took a heck of a hit. It was a tragedy."
This year, she estimates, a single sapphire male pelt could sell for $40 to $50 on the open market, where she sells her skins once or twice a year to the fur wholesalers of the world, which is a marked improvement from past years ($28-$35 per skin in 1998). In a market that fluctuates wildly–not only with the strength of the economies of the foreign nations like Russia, China, Korea and Greece, which make up the majority of the American fur industry’s business, but also with the whims of the tiny population of Americans who can and do buy fur–life as a mink rancher is anything but rock steady. "Every year is different," she says. "One year is better, then the next year we don’t even make our livelihood. It doesn’t even pay. We just went through one of those years, but this year should be better. Have you ever lived off one or two paychecks a year? I swear, mink farmers are the best money managers in the world."
The sapphire male squirms in its small cage and shits some more. Fuck you, you little creep, I think happily. You’re a little devil animal, useful to no one, save for your skin. Unfortunately, you’ve been born wearing the pubic thatch of the gods. He gets my drift and hurls himself against the wire peephole.
"Am I right or am I wrong?" she says.
Give it up, I say, because I can say so. Die for us.
Hitler, and the whole lot of luckless assholes like him, was reincarnated as a mink, left to crap and breed and whelp in a stall-crammed slaver-ship tight next to his equally karmically ruined brethren. And then, after taking in their last coat-glossing meal of fish and chicken entrails, "harvest" time comes, an event that she explains tenderly and defensively: The minks are gassed with carbon monoxide on the premises, and their deaths come upon them "humanely and quickly."
She thinks about this for a moment.
"As a matter of fact, we probably take better care of our animals than a lot of people take care of their children. They’re worth nothing to us if they don’t flourish."
Rewind now to a prepubescent girl splayed down on her Sears canopy bed. Easy to picture her, isn’t it, a fresh Vogue pinned down under her chin, pages rolled open to a spread of some dead doll clad in fox and not much else, or maybe it’s pictures of Bert Stern’s disintegrated Monroe she’s marveling at: How the star is flawed naked and scarred, and how achingly right she is in a perfect fur, laughing hard-faced like Sacher-Masoch’s auntie.
And the girl has her palms way down her pants now. Obviously I am not making this up. She wants fur. The golden fleece is growing an ace black pubis like MM’s and, more importantly, obtaining a wardrobe to match–a closet of furs that would make a Jewess newlywed smudge her eyeliner.
There’s a jaundiced rabbit fur coat in her mother’s room. She pauses there, chin on Vogue, not really humping her hand anymore, wondering if she can sneak the coat out of the walk-in closet. Her mother (in the den now, watching Days) wore it constantly, over halter tops and turtlenecks when she was young, big-legged and beehived. She hardly ever wore it now, which, to the soiled mores of the prepubescent girl, was license to steal the fur and put it in her own room. Elsewhere in the young dark mind, the girl knew her time was running out and that she, at 13 years of age, was quickly expending her first, and most arable, sexual peak. She needed that fucking rabbit.
"I wore it the night Georgie Jessel undressed me with his eyes," her mother sighed whenever her daughter mentioned borrowing the coat. Her mother’s way of saying no.
She got her chance, though, a few nights later, when her mother went out. She found the Polaroid, snapped on some fresh flashcubes, set up the tripod in the living room and stripped down to nothing but her Candie’s wedgies, gold barrette and the fur. Mouth hanging adenoidally open, nose chafed red from a recent cold, the thick collar drifting off her shoulders, she was ready for her maturity. She turned her back to the camera and then suddenly looked over one bare shoulder and the picture was taken.
She wasn’t alone. With a babysitter in the den, who was talking on the phone, struggling to correct her orthodontic headgear and watching tv at the same time, the girl’s sulky best friend Michelle walked into the living room, pushed the Polaroid’s shutter and was out the door before the print spat out of the camera and hit the floor. Michelle lived across the street and could be counted on for some things. She helped in the chrysalis of me.
Before I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life enveloped in someone else’s luxurious, preserved skin, I thought nothing. I harmed nothing. And then I harmed something and became a woman. A lucre queen, loinclothed, cock- and gift-hungry, with fuck oder kaput as my mantra.
And then I knew how real women lived: gorgeous, rich, superior, capable and inches from danger and death. As Adam’s rib. In fur.
Go on, say it, you Teva-heads: I’m old, weary and louche in my ratty vintage rabbit hoodie, since, as you say (and I’m paraphrasing your anti-fur propaganda lit here), wearing fur makes women look old and dated. Propaganda like this seems to omit the fact that nothing, short of edema and a shopping cart jammed with Fanta cans and broken radios, makes a woman look old and dated. Fur makes a woman look fierce, like she’s been around, and I don’t care if that thing cost $50 or $15,000, she had to get way the hell around in order to end up with that on her back. As many times as it takes. And every woman in fur knows this. And every woman in fur wishes you knew that she knew.
A few weeks ago, on one of the first cold nights of the season, I was making haste down Ave. A, which is right in the clammy little heart of the p.c. nest. For if the pro-choice, anti-death penalty, anti-fur guerrillas target midtown for their soapboxing, they all friggin’ live and lurk on A. It’s late, or early, I’m just back from London, 4 a.m., and I’ve got the rabbit jacket on and I’m walking with my friend. We’re eager to get home because although we’ve seen each other, we haven’t touched each other in a long time.
And a busted woodie station wagon chortles up to a red light. Wan-faced guy in a snug knit cap yells out the open passenger window as I pass: How many dead animals did it take to make that coat?
Reflexively I yell fuck you, and I give the car’s windshield the finger. Nothing happens after that. We keep walking, they drive on, and we’re mutually satisfied.
Or not. I could have yelled something better. I have to stand up for the old lunching ladies and stout Jersey wives who get harangued and defaced every cold afternoon in midtown. I am not old, and I yell back.
I could have squashed my nose against the glass and yelled, "Don’t you think I know the covenant of wearing fur?" or, "I’ve made gentle love in this coat. Doesn’t that soften the hate that went into making it?" or "Anti-fur? What kind of fur are you anti?"
Maybe fuck you is better. Because, really–fuck you. The ashen PETA wannabe sitting on her milk crate, buffeting the freezing wind with her gore placards on Astor Pl. who whines stock footage every time I walk by: same thing. Dusky-looking broke kid standing in my way on St. Marks, who got p.c. brainwashed lord knows where (in line at Miami customs? At the bodega?) tells me I’m "disgusting" because I’m wearing "real fur": I’d use more syllables but I don’t want to overtax you, so fuck you too, fatty. I am wearing a rabbit jacket with a skull and crossbones shaved into the back, simmering happily in 15-degree weather with little or nothing on underneath, and you’re wearing blubber.
Wearing fur makes me angry, obviously. It makes you angry, too. But I’ve got it better. I’m angry and unstoppably warm. Everyone wants to feel me, but somehow can’t. Talk about luxury. I am also wearing the oldest, most traditional, most lush and intimate thing in the world, and it’s the only fashion statement that gets a rise out of people, and this is a big deal if you have intentionally been dressing like an asshole for many years, as I have. Forget leather and vinyl and nipples as jewelry.
I try to look into the eyes of all my naysayers. Wouldn’t it be funny if they looked like the animals they’re trying to save? But they don’t. Nobody can look as alert and pissed as a mink in a peephole. No, the animal saviors are tired, faded like an old tape.
"We know who they are," the mink rancher says. Her husband is sitting on the couch across the room in a colorless tracksuit, barefoot, attentive.
"Oh yeah," she continues. "Because we caught a few of them in that break-in. We have sat back and not said anything. A lot of [the activists] are young, well-educated people from wealthy families."
Young, well-educated and wealthy–taken separately, these attributes don’t amount to much, but when put together, you have a seething mass of good lawyers, pimples and ethics twisted by liberal arts and the sonorous, keening cry of campus collective: Take back the night, and all the good shit that goes with it. The cheap luxe vices like butts and booze can pass under the p.c. radar with only a minimum of squawk, but what about the less dangerous but far more expensive and showy luxury vices like furs and firearms?
Fossilized in the coming age? That remains to be seen. But for me, the answer lies in this sheared beaver coat I’m wearing. It’s one of the show pieces in the deeply carpeted and mirrored front room, which the rancher has nicknamed the Funhouse. The rancher retails a few pieces here, in varying species, and all of them are exemplary.
Now, if mink is bad, ooh, beaver is a sin. I mean, imagine clubbing Bucky’s head to a pulp, for chrissakes. But would I club Bucky for a bit of heaven, like what I’ve got right here? Hell yeah. Nothing feels like beaver. Dense, graphite blacky brown, soft like a horse’s nose.
"I tried on a beaver many years ago," I say, swiveling around to see all of it.
The rancher is watching me, leaning against the doorjamb. "You can still remember it. You can still dream about it," she says gently.
Then she says something about how the beavers shit in the water supply and cause diseases. Then she pads into the other room without another word. It is understood between us that diseased beaver shit in our drinking water is reason enough to kill many beavers and claim their fur.
"Yo, that jacket is buttah!" Now, the black ladies, they seem to still get it. They yell this at me sometimes, when I’m wearing the rabbit. To them, and maybe to me, wearing fur means arrival. Fur means Lil’ Kim and Aretha–snarling divas who know that nary an ounce of blood, acid or insult is going to get hurled anywhere near their profuse sprays of chinchilla and dyed sable.
Fur also means that I have a lineage, draped down from my great-great-grandparents who came here from Lithuania with furs, pajamas and a few pots and pans, and it means my beautiful dark-skinned grandmother with mischievous blue eyes can decide it is now, this winter, this afternoon, that she will bestow upon me her never-worn three-quarter-length ranch mink.
It was mine all along, she said. Talk about arrival. I put it on, and it was me.
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