firehose

I want to say that it’s never come up, that no one has ever talked to me about editorials. But they probably did, and I didn’t know what it was, and as I’ve been doing since I was in kindergarten, I probably acted like I knew what they were talking about and promptly forgot it.

Now I walk around the block to the Greek deli. I pass the women and men waiting at the bus stop, buy a copy of the Times and flip over the A section. A friend has told me to look at the left side of the last page, at the short paragraphs stacked like shoe boxes in a closet.

The writing carries no byline. It’s monotonous, and I realize why I don’t know what an editorial is. I’ve never made it past the second line.

My feelings, though, are irrelevant. This is the New York Times. They have Maureen Dowd and stringers all over the world, including countries I have to find in the Britannica encyclopedia. If I get the internship, they won’t actually let me write.

But they do.

* * *

My summer internship begins on the tenth floor of the New York Times building on Forty-Third Street. The first days are heady: the large, revolving doors at the main entrance, the elevator racing upward, a massive desk of my own, the thick, solid wooden shelves in the library filled with old books and newspapers and magazines. It’s nine months since September 11, and Howell Raines is the executive editor. He supposedly has a penchant for the visual, which is why, a staff reporter tells me, the corridors are now filled with large-scale reproductions of photographs that have been in the paper. My favorite ones, the ones that make me pause, are the aerial photographs of New York City, the tops of skyscrapers like the closed beaks of birds.

I’m taken to lunch that week, shown how the computer system works, told to wait a minute while an editor, a white man with sharp eyes, answers a call and laughs about how India and Pakistan need to get it together and play nice. I’m told how to put editorials in a queue, how to see what other people are writing for the next day or the weekend edition, how to answer my editor’s questions online. I’m told to join the editorial board for their meetings in the morning.

The meetings take place in a conference room. Inside are a long wooden table, large heavy chairs, and a television in a cabinet. Men show up in stiff white shirts with cups of coffee in hand, notepads and pens, and the day’s paper. The women show up in slacks and button-down shirts with notepads and pens and the paper. They file in one by one, welcome me, make jokes about this and that, and it begins to dawn on me that they are regular white people.

I’m not sure what I expected them to look like, but I figured that writing for the New York Times would turn a person into something close to God, or at least Oprah Winfrey. I expected that they would look different somehow, more beautiful, more pristine, that they wouldn’t have to read the day’s paper because they would have a secret telephone they could pick up and hear about what was happening in the world.

What’s not surprising is that they are white.

It’s about a dozen people, and they’re all white except for one black man and one man who is white (blond actually) but Mexican. I sit at the table, terrified that I’ll say something stupid and more terrified that I won’t be able to say anything at all.

The meetings begin, and they go around the table, pitching ideas, shooting down ideas, bantering. A writer with a head full of white hair, a man who could be a grandpa on an after-school TV special, says, “Now I have an idea you’re not going to like . . .” and everyone grins. There’s much about which to have opinions—the war on terror, Bush, stem-cell research—but this man wants to write about the Superfund sites everyone else wants to forget.

Assignments are made. One writer sighs. “Yes, I guess I’m the one to do it,” he says. Then they retreat to their offices to make phone calls, conduct interviews, and write opinions.

* * *

My first idea for an editorial is straightforward, a no-brainer really. I think the New York Times editorial board should urge President Bush to grant Colombians political asylum in the United States. The issue is clear: the United States funds the war in Colombia and the people deserve relief.

To back up my idea I start making phone calls, and I quickly learn that people will talk to me. The name New York Times, in fact, produces the most spectacular effects on people. Local advocates return my calls with eager voices. Government spokespeople chat me up with fake grins. A number of people bristle at the name; others ask to have lunch with me. Me. An intern.

By the time I call an advocate at Human Rights Watch that summer about another topic, I am covered in arrogance. I announce that I’m phoning from the Times, but when I pause for effect, the woman snaps, “Which Times?”

I bite my lip, sure this woman has, with female intuition alone, figured out that I’m only a summer intern. “The New York Times,” I answer, doing my best to control the pitch of my voice.

“If you don’t say that, I can’t possibly know,” the woman answers, adding that there is the Los Angeles Times and Time magazine. But I hear it in her voice. The nervous laugh. The slight faltering, the retreating.

The paper, I begin to learn that summer, is not a series of pages bound together. It’s not even the people themselves, the ones sitting at the conference table three times a week or the ones reporting the news. It’s something else. It’s an idea that produces tension in people or arouses their flattery. It has the power to agitate. It’s kind of like God, but not in the way I expected. It doesn’t feel good.

The other discovery I make is about white people.

One of the editors, a skinny man who I’ll call Mr. Flaco, listens to my initial idea for an editorial about granting Colombians asylum. “Why Colombians and not another group of people?” he asks, patronizingly. “If you open the door for them, do you open the door to every other country with internal conflicts?”

Mr. Flaco’s questions are rational, but they also feel odd somehow. When I board the bus for Jersey, I’m still thinking about what he asked.

In Jersey, I step off the bus a few feet from the Greek deli and Chinese restaurant. The street is littered with candy wrappers, the trash bin filled to capacity with soda cans. I walk past the long line at the bus stop, wondering who there is a Salvadoreño with political asylum and who is Honduran and Guatemalan and without papeles. They wear, all of them, jeans and jackets and baseball caps. They’re waiting for the 165, the 166, transfer tickets and bus passes in hand.

Do you open the door to every other country with internal conflicts?

It’s true that Colombians are not the only ones in need of asylum. It is every group from practically every country where the United States and Europe have at some point staked a claim on land. From the perspective of here, which is to say from the perspective of the United States, of this skinny editor, of people who have power, Colombia is not as devastated as Rwanda or even as El Salvador was in the eighties. Colombians are suffering, yes, but not as much.

There is a hierarchy of pain, and it is no longer confined to the pages of my college textbooks about political theory. It is here in Mr. Flaco. Pain in and of itself is not enough. It matters how many are dead, how many wounded, over what period of time, how much public outrage there is in the West. The pain has to be significant in relationship to those in power. By contrast, we (my family and the men at the bus stop and me) are free to make demands, to share outrage, to know solidarity.

Realizing this does not depress me. I consider it a discovery, because it feels that way, like I have entered the collective mind of white people with political power everywhere and managed to see one of the strange rituals by which they reproduce. This, I can only imagine, is how Darwin must have felt.

* * *

Because it’s the beginning of summer, NPR has an obligatory story about the high number of girls who are going to tanning salons. I listen to this while lying in bed next to my girlfriend, who frequents these salons, and with my idea for getting Colombians political asylum stalled, I suggest writing on the evils of the fake tan.

Mr. Flaco loves it. White men can always be counted on to agree that girls do crazy things in the name of beauty and that they need to be chastised. Who better than to scold teenage girls than a young woman herself ?

I put these thoughts aside and sit at my computer monitor in my office on the tenth floor writing the best opinion piece I can muster. Although the topic is one that slightly depresses me (I could be writing about the impact of the civil war in Colombia!), I nevertheless find myself humming and tapping away at the keyboard, having the experience that comes whenever I write: a rush of joy through my body. I feel energized, happy, strong, even.

At the end of the day, I get on the elevator exhausted, my face slightly flushed. I am living a life I could never have imagined, even if it is about suntans.

* * *

At the Times, people spend their days writing and then get paid every two weeks. It happens even if you disagree with Mr. Flaco or if you write a bad piece that needs tons of editing. You still get paid.

So, convinced that this life can’t be mine, I insist on taking my intern paycheck to the bank every two weeks and cashing it. Each time the black teller hands me the stack of hundred dollar bills, I feel that I am real and that this is really happening to me. It is a lesson I learned from my mother.

On Fridays, if she had been paid at the factory, Tía Chuchi would take my sister and me to meet my mother at the bank, where she would be waiting on line with a check, that precious slip of paper in her hand. She would take the money from the bank teller in one swift move, as if someone was going to steal it from her, and then she would move over to the side and count the bills, slipping them into a small envelope the way she would place a pillow in a pillowcase. Those dollars were freedom. We could afford an evening meal at McDonald’s and pasteles, too.

* * *

Several times a month, people visit the editorial board. Sometimes they are invited; sometimes they have lobbied to meet with the writers. Sometimes it’s people’s chance to talk about their issues; sometimes it’s the board members who have asked to hear someone’s perspective.

Cookies and coffee are served, and we show up with notepads and pens. If it is an extremely important person, like the head of the FBI or a superstar academic who wrote a new book about the economy, lunch is served.

It is during one of these visits that I find myself meeting Mr. Alvaro Uribe.

For months now, my mother’s kitchen has been plagued with his name. Colombians in Jersey and Queens and Florida were able to vote for him in the presidential election, and my aunties have been anxious. Will Mr. Uribe be able to do anything, however small, to end the civil war that’s held Colombia hostage since the sixties? The answer, of course, is no. It takes a movement, not a lone man, but people being people and aunties being aunties, they fantasize about being rescued.

Mr. Uribe comes from a wealthy family and he’s promising to be Colombia’s Rudy Giuliani. He is vowing law and order in a country known for drug cartels, magical realism, and the kidnapping of gringos. His own father was killed by the so-called rebel groups who are now drug trafficking, and Mr. Uribe is rumored to have ties to the paramilitaries, the privately funded armies who massacre civilians.

But in the editorial conference room on the tenth floor, Mr. Uribe hardly looks like someone privy to murders. He could be one of my uncles, a short man stuffed into a suit and not permitted, for the moment, to drink whiskey or curse in front of company. He proclaims that the coffee is not very good and then he makes a little speech about his Giuliani-style plan and takes questions. It dawns on me that he is here, because he has to be, like when my mother and tías would force me to leave the books in my bedroom and meet their friends for coffee.

“Many Colombians in the States are hoping for temporary protection status,” I say. “Will you take up that issue?”

His lips curve into a small sneer. “They voted for me, so I have to ask for it.”

Later in the day, it occurs to me that for the first time I met someone who may be responsible for the murders of many people, and I asked him a polite question.

* * *

It is a custom in Latino families like mine that you live at home until you marry. Even if you go away for college, which I didn’t, you still come home when you graduate.

I have already broken this rule once, going to live with a boyfriend at nineteen. But the moment the relationship soured, about a year later, I returned home. Now at twenty-seven, I am ready to leave. This time permanently. I just have to deliver the news.

In the kitchen, my parents and Tía Chuchi are watching the noticias. It is evening and everyone is done with dinner. My father is drinking his beer. The window shades are drawn, but the voices of children playing in yards and on the streets below come up in bursts of firecrackers.

“I’m going to live in the city,” I announce.

Everyone turns their head toward me. No one speaks. Then my father looks back at the television, and my mother and auntie do the same. I wait for some questions but they don’t come. Not then. They arrive the next day and the day after: Is it a safe place? Are you sure? You’ll be closer to work, yes, but . . .

They want to argue with me, but they can’t. I have married the best man I could possibly find—the New York Times—and we all know it.

My mother and Tía Chuchi go with me to buy spoons and forks, a Brita water filter, and curtains with a flower pattern. They help me set up the apartment, an illegal studio on the Upper East Side that’s about the size of the bedroom I shared with my sister. When they leave, I am left with myself in a way that feels new. I am on my own for the first time in my life. My very own place. I have the sensation of having escaped a burning building. I have a job. A good job. And my own illegal sublet. I am paying my rent and groceries and not doing it by working at a factory or cleaning toilets.

* * *

The New York Times building has windows like a cathedral’s: tall, large, indulgent with how much sunlight they permit indoors. I walk up to the fourteenth floor one afternoon and stare out a closed window, mesmerized that Manhattan can actually be reduced to a miniature city, that the millions of feet and voices cannot be seen or heard from here but are nevertheless in perpetual motion.

I love the quiet here, the space to contemplate how quickly perspective can be changed, to wonder how a man like Uribe, who loses his father, makes peace with grief or doesn’t, to think about what a man on the editorial board said to me: “I bet no one else has written for this editorial page whose parents didn’t speak English.”

In a few weeks’ time it will be the first anniversary of September 11 and with it will come the rush of memory, of women and men who—hundreds of feet above the city—stepped into the sky that morning to escape the heat and the twisting metal and the violence of not choosing their last moments.

But before the anniversary, about two weeks before, a white man from the Times, a business editor, will look out a window like this one. He will be up one more flight of stairs and maybe he will wonder about the sky and the city and perspective. Or maybe not. The pain by then will be squeezing at him too much. He will prop open the window, place his face to the city air, and step into the sky.

* * *

Mr. Flaco is curious to hear what I might want to write about a new report showing that boys are being left behind in education. Nervous, I stumble through my pitch about how it’s not all boys.

It is black boys and teenagers. “Racism,” I begin, “has, you know, shaped the expectations the kids have of themselves and that teachers have of them.”

“What’s going to be your recommendation?” he asks, a smile dancing at his lips. “Tell teachers to raise their self-esteem?”

I stare at the carpet. He continues. “What’s remarkable is that when you look across socioeconomic levels, black boys consistently do badly in school. It doesn’t matter if they’re living in Westchester or Harlem.”

The air around me grows thin, choking.

“By comparison,” he says, “Chinese kids do well in school even when they just got here yesterday.” He chuckles. “It’s like it’s genetic.”

I glance at him to make sure he is really here in the room with me, that he has actually said those words. I don’t expect to see the familiar face of the skinny man I have known for two months. Surely his words have distorted his forehead and his eyelids and his nostrils. But no such thing has happened. He is still the same man with the flaco face and a high-up job at an important institution. A Mr. Uribe. He grins at me, like we’re best friends.

* * *

In Times Square, the taxis blare, the trucks screech, the tourists squeal and position themselves for photos. It’s August and the air is thick with humidity and the grease of hotdogs being sold by street vendors. The tourists point their cameras at each other and then up at the billboards. They have come from all parts of the country and the world to be here under these towering ads and bright lights, and as I watch them I begin to consider that maybe I don’t want to be here.

It’s not because of Mr. Flaco the Racist. Or Mr. Uribe the Killer. I don’t know what it is. The streets vibrate with too many people, and the billboards tower over us with white faces, white teeth, white summer cotton, and I find that I don’t have the words. As much as I want to leave, I can’t.

This is my big opportunity, the moment I have been preparing for my whole life. People like me, from the community I come from, we don’t just get to work at the New York Times. Rosa Parks sat down, Martin Luther King Jr. stood up, and my parents paid for Catholic high school so I could be here. Whatever I do, I can’t say no. I have to say yes, yes, and yes again.

When Gail asks if I want to pursue this journalism business, I say yes, and I find myself with a year-long internship on the third floor reporting for the metro desk.

* * *

Newsrooms are set up like mazes.

It is an endless series of desks and television screens, and everywhere you turn is another white man. You are meant to be the intern who gets lost and can’t find the elevators, or at least I am. Looking out across the third floor, I see only receding hairlines, white foreheads, and bushy eyebrows. Somewhere in that I am supposed to find an editor with a name like Bob or Jennifer. Locating my new desk—amid the clacking of keyboards and droning of television news—becomes my accomplishment that first week.

It doesn’t take long, though, to see that I am missing a crucial asset: a talent for talking to white men.

I have a good deal of experience with white women. I learned their mannerisms right alongside lessons in English, algebra, and chemistry. If I count my entire schooling starting with kindergarten, that is nineteen years of studying white women. It is easy, then, to now make small talk with them. I nod sympathetically about children, inquire about their favorite movies, commiserate about the morning commute.

But white men are different.

After two weeks in the newsroom, I see that talking to white men boils down to a crude combination of cracking jokes about children and the morning commute, referring to sports teams and events at random, and imparting snide comments about this book or that article. It is especially impressive if you can comment on something buried deep in a news story, since everyone knows that no one actually reads the story to the end. Talking to white men, then, has a pattern, a set of rules, but try as I might, I can’t learn them. My mind blanks when they joke with me. I find myself nodding and looking the other way, hoping they will leave me alone.

What’s worse is that I have absolutely no instinct for reporting. None.

“Here’s the news release,” an editor tells me. “I need copy by three.”

I nod, sit at my computer, and look at the paper. Something about a food-borne illness. I stare at the words and wonder what I’m supposed to do.

Writing an opinion, even a stiff editorial, comes easily to me. My mind immediately reaches for questions, important points, people to interview. But reporting produces in me a condition akin to stage fright. My body freezes, my mind stares at a blank white wall. Even though I’m doing exactly what I would do in the editorial department, here in the newsroom, without the option of forming an opinion, I have to remind myself of what to do: make calls, ask questions, quote, summarize, send to editor, wait.

After that first story, editors send me to get quotes from people on the street about an increase in subway fares. Then to interview people on the street about the mayor’s new idea to ban loud noises. Then to take the subway to Brooklyn, because a fire there has killed a black child. Then to a Latino event to get the governor’s reaction. Eight hours become ten, eleven, twelve. The copy editors call at seven, eight, and nine at night.

In the morning, I board the subway, exhausted. I spot that day’s paper in someone’s hands. A small thrill comes into my heart. Someone is about to read one of my stories. But the woman scans the headlines, flips the pages, and then folds the paper and stores it in her bag.

That’s it. Twelve hours of work—by hundreds of reporters, stringers, editors, copy editors, designers, and deliverymen—were considered for a total of five seconds by a white woman on the

Number 6 train. I meet humility for the first time, and I hate it.

* * *

One of the other young reporters decides that we need to meet with veterans at the paper for informal conversations about the business. This is her code for “I’m trying to move up,” and the rest of us agree that it’s a good idea. Someone from the powers-that-be says we can meet on the fourteenth floor, where the big private events happen.

I arrive early. I want to enjoy the quiet here, the cathedral windows, the sense that the city and even the newsroom, with its ringing phones and chatty television screens, are at a distance.

The veteran reporter steps into the room. He’s an older man with a kind voice and gentle smile. We exchange a hello, but then his eyebrows furrow. He’s staring at a door off to the side of the room. “Is the stairwell through there?” he asks.

“I think so.”

He’s lost now in his own world as he walks over and props the door open. I follow him. In the stairwell, he pauses at one of the windows, mentions the editor, the white man who killed himself, and grows silent.

The window pane here is dusty and viejo. It’s late in the afternoon, and the light bathes the parapets of the building and even, I suppose, the place where the man met his final moment. The older reporter stares out the window, then inspects the frame and sighs deeply, and I begin to understand that I believed the TV shows I watched as a child. I believed bad things didn’t happen to white people, not in places like this. But now here is the window, the man grieving, the light golden and punishing.

* * *

While I’m reporting for the Times, my father is spending his days in the basement where he’s made a room of his own, apart from my mother and tías. He has his beer, his radio, even a mattress so he can take naps. He has set up a shower for himself.

I am afraid of finding him dead in the basement one day. Already once, he drank too much, fell, and cut his head open, and we had to rush him to the emergency room. But there is no use trying to get him out of the basement. It is a blessing that he lets me take him now for a visit to the doctor.

The waiting room is large enough for about fifty people, but it doesn’t have a television, so everyone looks bored and restless. Papi is dressed in dark jeans, construction boots, and a flannel button-down shirt over a white Hanes T-shirt. He asks me about the New York Times, and I confide that I’m not liking it. He stares at the floor and says nothing.

Inside, he sits on the examination table, and I take the chair reserved for spouses or parents. I figure my father won’t say anything about what I shared, but then without my prompting, he comments, “Tú piensas que a mí me gusta mi trabajo? A mí no me gusta mi trabajo. A tu mamá tampoco.”

That is what I record in my journal that night: “Do you think I like my work? I don’t like my work. Your mother doesn’t like hers either.”

When the doctor arrives, I begin moving back and forth between Spanish and English admonishments: stop drinking, stop smoking, eat more vegetables, more fruits, more oranges.

“Oranges?” my father exclaims in Spanish. “No. That’s all I ate in Cuba, only oranges. No oranges.”

The doctor and I look at each other. After so many years of working in our community, he knows, like I do, that there is no use in arguing against memory.

Nor do I disagree with my father about whether or not people should have work they enjoy. But the next morning, I notice I have a hard time getting out of bed. Not an impossible time. Just a heaviness about me, as if the air itself were an open hand holding me down.

* * *

It’s a cool night in November and I am walking on the Upper East Side, past doormen and women in three-inch heels hailing cabs and men in their fifties walking dogs the size of their briefcases. I am, as usual, lost in my inner world. I am contemplating a conversation or rewriting an article or wondering about the origin of three-inch heels. I am acutely aware of the streets in Manhattan, of the way darkness never wins here, not even at night, but is always kept at bay by street lamps and the bobbing headlights of taxis and limos and buses. The city is a blitz of lights and sounds and smells, but I have learned to shut it out, to be in my own quiet place.

Tonight, however, is different.

I turn a corner, and the city yanks me from my inner world. Fifty feet up in the air is Kermit the Frog, his belly nearly touching the top of the street lamps, his fingers reaching to tap the windows of high rise buildings, his inflated balloon body covering a chunk of the Manhattan street.

It’s the night before Thanksgiving Day, and the balloons are being prepared for their annual walk in the Macy’s parade. It’s the sort of the thing that can only happen in New York, not the balloons but finding their giant faces and hands around the corner, the way they make even this city feel small, insignificant. It feels magical and bizarre too, how the world can contain all of this, the plastic green frog, the memories and the oranges, the dead white man.

* * *

Editors were invented for several reasons, one of which is to torture interns.

It’s a metro editor who decides that interns will spend time on the police beat helping to cover New York City’s homicides, rapes, and robberies. The work mostly involves chatting with white police officers in charge of information they won’t give you unless the two of you get along and they consider you something of a person they’d want to have a beer with. To say that I’m terrible at this would be putting it kindly.

The rest of the work, at least for me, involves watching a veteran reporter with reddish curls call the families of crime victims and say in a mournful tone, “I’m sorry for your loss. I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions.”

The first few times, I stare at him, and when it’s no longer polite to do so, I pretend to read online while listening to him. He sounds genuine and compassionate during every phone call. He modulates the tone of his voice, and I note how his English is comforting, the way a hand-rolled cigar feels, as if the earth has been gathered up, made compact, held steady. His voice reaches out to the other person, yes, but it also allows for mutual silence and then directs back to the questions, the information that’s needed, the interview.

Then, the call is over, the moment has passed, and he’s on to other calls, detectives, cops, higher-ups, and he’s issuing orders, because another paper caught a piece of information we should have, and I’m off to the Bronx for a story about a young man named Buddha.

* * *

The hierarchy of pain has nuances.

The fact that Buddha murdered someone is news, because the victim was a child. If the child had been a few years older, if he had been not a child but instead a young black man, the editor would have said, “Victim and perp knew each other,” which is the preferred way to explain that black men killing each other in the Bronx is not news.

But Buddha murdered a child, and he did so three days after Christmas, on a day when the news was slow.

He’s in jail now, Buddha. It’s his mother we are after. Me and reporters and stringers for local newspapers. I interview the neighbors and note the holiday decorations (“Peace and Joy”). Later, the district attorney’s office will say that Buddha got his name because he was tall and fat, and that three days after Christmas, Buddha was bruised, not on his body but somewhere else. His heart or his ego. Another man, another tall, overweight black man had teased Buddha. Words were thrust back and forth between them, threatened to erupt into fists, into gunshots, but the women stepped in. The novias. And the air became if not calm, then, at least, still. Buddha and the man parted ways.

But Buddha followed him, not the man, but the man’s little cousin, thirteen-year-old Brandon. In an elevator, Buddha towered over the youngster, and while boasting of how he planned to hurt the other man, his mirror image, Buddha shoved Brandon against the wall of the elevator and shot him in the head.

The elevator reached the twelfth floor. It was after midnight. The door must have opened then, mechanically, indifferently, and spilt the boy’s blood.

Now the elevator door creaks open and Buddha’s mother steps into the narrow hallway. She’s pushing a shopping cart. It has two six packs of beer. She refuses, however, to talk to us as she opens the door to her apartment. She’s a heavy black woman with colorless eyes and deep lines set in her face, and my first thought is that no one is going to tell her story, the story of how she probably falls asleep at night in front of the television set with a can of beer still open, like my father, and how she raised a family here so many hundreds of feet above the Bronx, and how she bathed Buddha when he was an infant and fed him WIC baby formula and now all she wants to do is smack him.

There are also the other stories, the ones about how these neighborhoods were set up, how white men decided where black families would live, how it came to be that Buddha grew up in a place where you carry a gun to come and go from home and kill a boy who looks like a younger version of yourself.

I don’t have words for these other stories, only the feeling of them inside of me like pebbles piled at the corner of a child’s desk.

* * *

There were other black reporters in the newsroom at the New York Times besides Jayson Blair. When I think back to that time, though, to the spring of 2003, I can only see Jayson.

He is writing front-page stories for the paper about Iraq War veterans. I know he was once an intern like me, but what I haven’t figured out yet is if he’s quiet and withdrawn because he’s brilliant or if something is wrong with him. The fact that he wears long sweaters instead of shirts and ties unsettles me. It isn’t the sort of thing a white man would do here, let alone a young black man. I keep wanting to tuck his shirt in. I tease him once or twice about being short. He’s polite, but it’s clearly a sore point with him, and I leave him alone.

It turns out, though, that he has good reason to keep to himself. Jayson is drinking, lying, and plagiarizing his stories. Front-page stories.

“Did you hear?” another intern asks me.

I nod. “Crazy.” I figure the paper will run an apology and move on.

But there isn’t an apology. The story unravels. The anxieties of white people, the ones kept behind private doors, burst and the other newspapers report them: Jayson only got as far as he did because he’s black. A fellow intern comes up to me, irritated. “Why are people thinking it’s okay to say racist shit in front of me?”

She’s holding a cup of coffee. We both glance across the newsroom, across the cubicles and the tops of people’s heads. I have no way, none really, of knowing who in the room is a Mr. Flaco, and this is part of the agreement we make by working here, as people of color. We don’t know who harbors doubts about our capacity to think and work and write. We don’t know, not really, who we can trust.

Jayson, meanwhile, is rumored to be shut away in his apartment, and as a friend of mine puts it, the white people do then what they always do when they get nervous: they call a meeting.

* * *

The meeting is held on Forty-Fourth Street, in a theater. I get in line along with hundreds of reporters and administrative staff and editors. The executive editor and managing editor and publisher sit before us on a stage. They’re going to explain what happened. Sort of.

There isn’t an easy way to tell us that someone who was mentally unstable managed to get a job at the world’s most recognized newspaper and snuck lies past more than one or two or even three editors. I sit in the audience and inspect my identification card. I don’t like sports where a person is put in a ring to get beat up. Besides, no one is going to talk about race. Not in an honest way.

But I’m wrong.

The executive editor, Howell Raines, has the mic. He’s from the South, he reminds us, a place where a man has to choose where he stands on race. “Does that mean I personally favored Jayson? Not consciously. But you have a right to ask if I, as a white man from Alabama with those convictions, gave him one chance too many …”

I wince and I pray that he won’t go there, because if he does it will not be cute. It will not be understood by the hundreds of white people in the theater. But he does it. He goes there.

Did he, as a white man from Alabama, give a young black man too many chances? “When I look into my own heart for the truth of that,” he admits, “the answer is yes.”

* * *

It’s been eight years since that day in the theater, and I’m thinking again about a white man confessing to his own people that he cared about the black community, that he thought he could singlehandedly change a hierarchy. I’m thinking about the whiteness of the news organization and how that whiteness reproduced itself with every hire, every promotion, but that is not a scandal.

He left, the editor. He was fired and the metro editor—a white man who once told me that community-based organizations, the ones helping poor people of color, were no longer relevant—was hailed as a savior because he had tried to stop Jayson from writing for the paper.

* * *

A week or so after the theater meeting, I meet the Jourdans.

They are Haitians. They came to New York City one by one over the course of thirty years: Patrick, Paul, Cosner. They knew that life would be easier the closer they lived to white Americans. They earned their money; they sent it back home. They brought another brother, a sister and a young cousin. Together, some of them with spouses, they shared the basement apartment and second floor of a two-story home in Brooklyn.

They learned to have familial love by telephone calls. Like Tía Chuchi, they probably bought the wallet-size phone cards and used pennies to scratch the personal identification numbers. The Jourdans probably called the 800 number and an automated woman’s voice asked them for the PIN and then told them how much money they had to call Aquin, their home town, how much time they had with the people they loved.

Maybe that’s what Cosner Jourdan did on Saturdays. He walked the neighborhood most days. At sixty-six, he had diabetes and had retired from factory work. He had been in Brooklyn for ten years and he took care of two trees outside of his basement apartment. He had friends, people who loved him.

On the night of May 29, 2003, however, a fire breaks out around three in the morning. It rips through the basement apartment. The smoke spreads to the other floors, and the brothers, their spouses, sister, and young cousin flee to the streets. But not Cosner. He dies in the basement from smoke inhalation.

Because his death happens on a day when the news is slow, the story catches my editor’s attention, and I arrive at the Jourdan house along with reporters from other papers. We all scribble the pertinent facts: Cosner’s age, the names of the brothers, the cause of death. The other reporters leave the scene in a matter of minutes having deduced that there is no news. I see the same thing, but I stay.

Perhaps it is the basement.

Layers of soot cover a bicycle and shopping cart. Hours after the fire, it’s still hard to breathe in the basement. I sit with the Jourdan brothers on the front stoop as friends and neighbors come by. They speak in Creole about the night and Cosner’s death. I ask a few questions from time to time, but mostly I watch the sadness on their faces.

The day is hot; sweat coats my back and drenches my button-down shirt. In his last moments, did Cosner dream of his father, of his homeland? Did he wake up and think it was his father’s birthday that day, that the old man was turning ninety-eight and what would he say when he received the news? His son, dead.

* * *

Remembering now that day with the Jourdans, I think: we were not meant to be here. We were not meant to die underground engulfed in smoke. Not Cosner, not any of us. The death of a Haitian man is not some accident in the middle of the night, but that is how it is reported. It is how I reported it.

I wish I had saved my notes from that day, but I threw them out. I discarded them because it was perhaps that day sitting in the thick heat of a Brooklyn summer with the Jourdans that I began to feel a cracking inside of me.

I first read that word cracking in an F. Scott Fitzgerald essay called “The Crack-Up.” I didn’t know much about his writing, only that he had become a writer and earned a lot of money and did not live in basements. Everyone had told me as a child that I would be like Fitzgerald one day, without the booze and early death. I would do more with my life than work to pay the rent. I would write, and in writing, I would help people.

But sitting in Brooklyn, surrounded by the somber faces of Haitian men and the smell of soot, it begins to seem to me that things are not going to turn out as people said they would, as my parents hoped for, as I wanted. At least not at this newspaper, not now. I need time to find words for what I am seeing, for the grief and the killings, for my confusion, for the people who wake up each day and help to keep a hierarchy in place because they are afraid.

* * *

The bravest phrase a woman can say is “I don’t know.” That’s my answer when my mother asks what I am going to do with my life if I am leaving the New York Times. I don’t know.

She gives me a blank face, and some of my friends give me sympathetic looks the way you do when someone is about to file for divorce and you really liked both people in the marriage and you feel sad and wonder what it says about life that two good people couldn’t make it work. I don’t know.

* * *

My last months at the newspaper are a blur of reporting, of long hours and nights out with friends. When a blackout hits that August, the city is flung into a universe without cell phones or computers or subways, and Manhattan turns into a small town. People start walking home. They laugh and curse and eat ice cream at the deli before it melts, and I interview people at the Lincoln Tunnel trying to get rides to New Jersey. An old man hollers, “East Orange! South Orange! Any Orange!”

Maybe it’s perfectly acceptable to not know what is going to happen next in life. I walk back to the office in Times Square, where editors are frantically shouting into phones, and I file my story on the oranges. It’s after eight or nine when I start the walk home to my illegal studio on the Upper East Side.

Times Square is silent now.

It’s not only an absence of sound but also of color. The black billboards loom like empty picture frames. I squint my eyes to adjust to the dark. At Grand Central Station, I can barely make out the grown men in suits stretched out on the sidewalk, their heads on their briefcases, fast asleep, because the trains are not running tonight. The only lights are from the taxis, from the city buses that groan past me, their doors open, people teetering from the steps.

There is comfort in walking through Manhattan when it has been flung into darkness. There is humility, some quietness, and I find that I am not afraid or confused, or maybe it’s that when those feelings rise up, I am focused on my feet, on where the sidewalk ends and where the next one begins.

Excerpted from “A Cup of Water Under My Bed: A Memoir” by Daisy Hernández, (Beacon Press, 2014). Excerpted with permission by Beacon Press.