3 1 R T O L L E , L E G E G R E G O R Y P A R D L O For generations, or so I’ve heard, Brooklyn families have shrugged o√ the city swelter, crowding I-87 North en route to the Catskills for summer weekends. In July 2016, partly in search of traditions that might bind our family to a community, Ginger and I joined the exodus. It was our second annual hauling of the Volvo, overstu √ed like a circus wagon with a hodgepodge of du√els and rolly bags, and our two girls, Sara and Fita, who fought over holding Oliver, the family rabbit. With a generic soul singer – the voice we downloaded for the GPS – as our field guide, we avoided the highway and bushwhacked the rural roads to the temperate oasis of Fleischmanns, a small town seasonally occupied by Orthodox Jews. We were Gentiles – outsiders, as the word implies, a role we found comfortably familiar. This was my first family trip as the undisputed elder Pardlo male. Even after his death, and even though what contact I had with my father in the previous five years was mostly through texts and rare phone calls by which I recognized him, figuratively and literally, as ‘‘unavailable’’ on my caller ID, I was still competing with him. In the end, he was convinced I hated him, which wasn’t true, but he’d become so delusional by then I couldn’t tell if he was 3 2 P A R D L O Y high or merely unhinged. I couldn’t tell his heartfelt self-pity from manipulation. The reality that he was gone, that our cold war was finally over, left a deficit of purpose in my life. Alan, Cynthia, and their two kids lived in the Catskills the entire season, in a house owned by the synagogue where Cynthia served as rabbi, which, considering the town population maxed out in the double digits during the o√-season, made them locals. We were there for the card games and camaraderie, and to scavenge used bookstores for the weekend. We so anticipated the trip that it had the aura of a family reunion. We jokingly considered printing matching T-shirts for everyone to mark the occasion. On the first day, Alan took the kids out for ice cream and found a local bookshop on the way, where he scored a complete set of the Boys’ and Girls’ Bookshelf, a ten-volume set of books from 1912. The subtitle was ‘‘A Practical Plan of Character Building.’’ It looked like a precursor to the World Book Encyclopedia set, those books that entertained me as a kid when there was nothing on television. Unlike the World Book, however, the Bookshelf wasn’t alphabetized. It was organized by topic, with titles like ‘‘True Stories from Every Land’’ and ‘‘Wonders of Invention.’’ When we came across a spread on the building of the Titanic, Alan palmed his forehead: the Titanic hadn’t sunk yet. As Alan put one volume back and grabbed another, I shuΔed between the dusty covers in my lap: anthropologists at work. The books implied hilariously rigid gender norms, but we also learned that, in 1912, it seems there were three distinct races of humans on earth: Negroid, Caucasoid, and Mongoloid. Also, the planet was stocked with unlimited resources begging to be exploited. Asia consisted of China and Japan, and the people who lived there were all called ‘‘Chinamen.’’ Less surprisingly, American Indians were noble and, not to mention, fun to imitate in speech and dress. I figured the average black person in 1912 must have had to deal with pretty shitty conditions in public life, and these books targeted middle-class white American families who would have interacted with blacks while they were in uniform as domestic servants , barbers, train porters, caterers: occupations obscured from view by strict codes of conduct. The Bookshelf probably wouldn’t detail the structural and political shittiness surrounding black people’s public lives, I expected, but it must have something to say T O L L E , L E G E 3 3 R on race...