BEHIND THE FORMALDEHYDE CURTAIN By Jessica Mitford The drama begins to unfold with the arrival of the corpse at the mortuary. Alas, poor Yorick! How surprised he would be to see how his counterpart of today is whisked off to a funeral parlor and is in short order sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged and neatly dressed—transformed from a common corpse into a Beautiful Memory Picture. This process is known in the trade as embalming and restorative art, and is so universally employed in the United States and Canada that the funeral director does it routinely, without consulting corpse or kin. He regards as eccentric those few who are hardy enough to suggest that it might be dispensed with. Yet no law requires embalming, no religious doctrine commends it, nor is it dictated by considerations of health, sanita- tion, or even of personal daintiness. In no part of the world but in Northern America is it widely used. The purpose of embalming is to make the corpse presentable for viewing in a suitably costly container; and here too the funeral director routinely, without first consulting the family, prepares the body for public display. Is all this legal? The processes to which a dead body may be subjected are after all to some extent circumscribed by law. In most states, for instance, the signature of next of kin must be obtained before an autopsy may be performed, before the deceased may be cremated, before the body may be turned over to a medical school for research purposes; or such provision must be made in the decedent’s will. In the case of embalming, no such permission is required nor is it ever sought. A textbook, The Principles and Practices of Embalming, com- ments on this: “There is some question regarding the legality of much that is done within the preparation room.” The author points out that it would be most unusual for a responsible member of a bereaved family to instruct the morti- cian, in so many words, to “embalm” the body of a deceased relative. The very term “embalming” is so seldom used that the mortician must rely upon custom in the matter. The author concludes that unless the family specifies otherwise, the act of entrusting the body to the care of a funeral establishment carries with it an implied permission to go ahead and embalm. Embalming is indeed a most extraordinary procedure, and one must won- der at the docility of Americans who each year pay hundreds of millions of dol- lars for its perpetuation, blissfully ignorant of what it is all about, what is done, how it is done. Not one in ten thousand has any idea of what actually takes place. Books on the subject are extremely hard to come by. They are not to be found in most libraries or bookshops. In an era when huge television audiences watch surgical operations in 5 the comfort of their living rooms, when, thanks to the animated cartoon, the geography of the digestive system has become familiar territory even to the n ...

1. BEHIND THE FORMALDEHYDE CURTAIN
By
Jessica Mitford
The drama begins to unfold with the arrival of the corpse
at the mortuary. Alas, poor Yorick! How surprised he would be
to see how his counterpart of today is whisked off to a funeral
parlor and is in short order sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled,
trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged and neatly
dressed—transformed from a common corpse into a Beautiful
Memory Picture. This process is known in the trade as
embalming and restorative art, and is so universally employed
in the United States and Canada that the funeral director does it
routinely, without consulting corpse or kin. He regards as
eccentric those few who are hardy enough to suggest that it
might be dispensed with. Yet no law requires embalming, no
religious doctrine commends it, nor is it dictated by
considerations of health, sanita- tion, or even of personal
daintiness. In no part of the world but in Northern America is it
widely used. The purpose of embalming is to make the corpse
presentable for viewing in a suitably costly container; and here
too the funeral director routinely, without first consulting the
family, prepares the body for public display. Is all this legal?
The processes to which a dead body may be subjected are after
all to some extent circumscribed by law. In most states, for
instance, the signature of next of kin must be obtained before an
autopsy may be performed, before the deceased may be
cremated, before the body may be turned over to a medical
school for research purposes; or such provision must be made in
the decedent’s will. In the case of embalming, no such
permission is required nor is it ever sought. A textbook, The
Principles and Practices of Embalming, com- ments on this:
“There is some question regarding the legality of much that is

2. done within the preparation room.” The author points out that it
would be most unusual for a responsible member of a bereaved
family to instruct the morti- cian, in so many words, to
“embalm” the body of a deceased relative. The very term
“embalming” is so seldom used that the mortician must rely
upon custom in the matter. The author concludes that unless the
family specifies otherwise, the act of entrusting the body to the
care of a funeral establishment carries with it an implied
permission to go ahead and embalm.
Embalming is indeed a most extraordinary procedure, and
one must won- der at the docility of Americans who each year
pay hundreds of millions of dol- lars for its perpetuation,
blissfully ignorant of what it is all about, what is done, how it is
done. Not one in ten thousand has any idea of what actually
takes place. Books on the subject are extremely hard to come
by. They are not to be found in most libraries or bookshops.
In an era when huge television audiences watch surgical
operations in 5 the comfort of their living rooms, when,
thanks to the animated cartoon, the geography of the digestive
system has become familiar territory even to the nursery school
set, in a land where the satisfaction of curiosity about almost all
matters is a national pastime, the secrecy surrounding
embalming can, surely, hardly be attributed to the inherent
gruesomeness of the subject. Cus- tom in this regard has within
this century suffered a complete reversal. In the early days of
American embalming, when it was performed in the home of the
deceased, it was almost mandatory for some relative to stay by
the embalmer’s side and witness the procedure. Today, family
members who might wish to be in attendance would certainly be
dissuaded by the funeral director. All others, except
apprentices, are excluded by law from the prepa- ration room.
A close look at what does actually take place may explain
in large measure the undertaker’s intractable reticence
concerning a procedure that has become his major raison
d’être.2 Is it possible he fears that public information about
embalming might lead patrons to wonder if they really want this

3. service? If the funeral men are loath to discuss the subject
outside the trade, the reader may, understandably, be equally
loath to go on reading at this point. For those who have the
stomach for it, let us part the formaldehyde curtain. . . .
The body is first laid out in the undertaker’s morgue—or
rather, Mr. Jones is reposing in the preparation room—to be
readied to bid the world farewell.
The preparation room in any of the better funeral
establishments has the tiled and sterile look of a surgery, and
indeed the embalmer-restorative artist who does his chores there
is beginning to adopt the term “dermasurgeon” (appropriately
corrupted by some mortician-writers as “demi-surgeon”) to
describe his calling. His equipment, consisting of scalpels,
scissors, augers, forceps, clamps, needles, pumps, tubes, bowls
and basins, is crudely imitative of the surgeon’s, as is his
technique, acquired in a nine- or twelve-month post- high-
school course in an embalming school. He is supplied by an
advanced chemical industry with a bewildering array of fluids,
sprays, pastes, oils, pow- ders, creams, to fix or soften tissue,
shrink or distend it as needed, dry it here, restore the moisture
there. There are cosmetics, waxes and paints to fill and cover
features, even plaster of Paris to replace entire limbs. There are
ingenious aids to prop and stabilize the cadaver: a Vari-Pose
Head Rest, the Edwards Arm and Hand Positioner, the Repose
Block (to support the shoulders during the embalming), and the
Throop Foot Positioner, which resembles an old-fashioned
stocks.
Mr. John H. Eckels, president of the Eckels College of
Mortuary Sci- ence, thus describes the first part of the
embalming procedure: “In the hands of a skilled practitioner,
this work may be done in a comparatively short time and
without mutilating the body other than by slight incision—so
slight that it scarcely would cause serious inconvenience if
made upon a liv- ing person. It is necessary to remove the
blood, and doing this not only helps in the disinfecting, but
removes the principal cause of disfigurements due to

4. discoloration.”
Another textbook discusses the all-important time element:
“The earlier this is done, the better, for every hour that elapses
between death and embalm- ing will add to the problems and
complications encountered. . . .” Just how soon should one get
going on the embalming? The author tells us, “On the basis of
such scanty information made available to this profession
through its rudi- mentary and haphazard system of technical
research, we must conclude that the best results are to be
obtained if the subject is embalmed before life is com- pletely
extinct—that is, before cellular death has occurred. In the
average case, this would mean within an hour after somatic
death.” For those who feel that there is something a little
rudimentary, not to say haphazard, about this advice, a
comforting thought is offered by another writer. Speaking of
fears entertained in early days of premature burial, he points
out, “One of the effects of embalming by chemical injection,
however, has been to dispel fears of live burial.” How true;
once the blood is removed, chances of live burial are indeed
remote.
To return to Mr. Jones, the blood is drained out through
the veins and replaced by embalming fluid pumped in through
the arteries. As noted in The Principles and Practices of
Embalming, “every operator has a favorite injection and
drainage point—a fact which becomes a handicap only if he
fails or refuses to forsake his favorites when conditions demand
it.” Typical favorites are the carotid artery, femoral artery,
jugular vein, subclavian vein. There are various choices of
embalming fluid. If Flextone is used, it will produce a “mild,
flexible rigidity. The skin retains a velvety softness, the tissues
are rubbery and pliable. Ideal for women and children.” It may
be blended with B. and G. Products Company’s Lyf-Lyk tint,
which is guaranteed to reproduce “nature’s own skin texture. . .
. the velvety appearance of living tissue.” Suntone comes in
three separate tints: Suntan; Special Cosmetic Tint, a pink shade
“especially indicated for young female subjects”; and Regular

5. Cosmetic Tint, moderately pink.
About three to six gallons of a dyed and perfumed solution
of formalde- hyde, glycerin, borax, phenol, alcohol and water is
soon circulating through Mr. Jones, whose mouth has been sewn
together with a “needle directed upward between the upper lip
and gum and brought out through the left nostril,” with the
corners raised slightly “for a more pleasant expression.” If he
should be bucktoothed, his teeth are cleaned with Bon Ami and
coated with colorless nail polish. His eyes, meanwhile, are
closed with flesh-tinted eye caps and eye cement.
The next step is to have at Mr. Jones with a thing called a
trocar. This is a long, hollow needle attached to a tube. It is
jabbed into the abdomen, poked around the entrails and chest
cavity, the contents of which are pumped out and replaced with
“cavity fluid.” This done, and the hole in the abdomen sewn up,
Mr. Jones’s face is heavily creamed (to protect the skin from
burns which may be caused by leakage of the chemicals), and he
is covered with a sheet and left unmolested for a while. But not
for long—there is more, much more, in store for him. He has
been embalmed, but not yet restored, and the best time to start
the restorative work is eight to ten hours after embalming, when
the tissues have become firm and dry.
The object of all this attention to the corpse, it must be
remembered, is to make it presentable for viewing in an attitude
of healthy repose. “Our customs require the presentation of our
dead in the semblance of normality. . . . unmarred by the
ravages of illness, disease or mutilation,” says Mr. J. Sheridan
Mayer in his Restorative Art. This is rather a large order since
few people die in the full bloom of health, unravaged by illness
and unmarked by some disfigurement. The funeral industry is
equal to the challenge: “In some cases the gruesome appearance
of a mutilated or disease-ridden subject may be quite discourag-
ing. The task of restoration may seem impossible and shake the
confidence of the embalmer. This is the time for intestinal
fortitude and determination. Once the formative work is begun
and affected tissues are cleaned or removed, all doubts of

6. success vanish. It is surprising and gratifying to discover the
results which may be obtained.”
The embalmer, having allowed an appropriate interval to
elapse, returns to 15 the attack, but now he brings into play
the skill and equipment of sculptor and cosmetician. Is a hand
missing? Casting one in plaster of Paris is a simple matter. “For
replacement purposes, only a cast of the back of the hand is
necessary; this
is within the ability of the average operator and is quite
adequate.” If a lip or two, a nose or an ear should be missing,
the embalmer has at hand a variety of restor- ative waxes with
which to model replacements. Pores and skin texture are simu-
lated by stippling with a little brush, and over this cosmetics are
laid on. Head off? Decapitation cases are rather routinely
handled. Ragged edges are trimmed, and head joined to torso
with a series of splints, wires and sutures. It is a good idea to
have a little something at the neck—a scarf or a high collar—
when time for viewing comes. Swollen mouth? Cut out tissue as
needed from inside the lips. If too much is removed, the surface
contour can easily be restored by padding with cotton. Swollen
necks and cheeks are reduced by removing tissue through
vertical incisions made down each side of the neck. “When the
deceased is cas- keted, the pillow will hide the suture incisions.
. . . as an extra precaution against leakage, the suture may be
painted with liquid sealer.”
The opposite condition is more likely to present itself—
that of emaciation. His hypodermic syringe now loaded with
massage cream, the embalmer seeks out and fills the hollowed
and sunken areas by injection. In this procedure the backs of the
hands and fingers and the under-chin area should not be
neglected.
Positioning the lips is a problem that recurrently
challenges the ingenuity of the embalmer. Closed too tightly,
they tend to give a stern, even disapprov- ing expression.
Ideally, embalmers feel, the lips should give the impression of
being ever so slightly parted, the upper lip protruding slightly

7. for a more youth- ful appearance. This takes some engineering,
however, as the lips tend to drift apart. Lip drift can sometimes
be remedied by pushing one or two straight pins through the
inner margin of the lower lip and then inserting them between
the two front upper teeth. If Mr. Jones happens to have no teeth,
the pins can just as easily be anchored in his Armstrong Face
Former and Denture Replacer. Another method to maintain lip
closure is to dislocate the lower jaw, which is then held in its
new position by a wire run through holes which have been
drilled through the upper and lower jaws at the midline. As the
French are fond of saying, il faut souffrir pour être belle (it is
necessary to be beautiful).
If Mr. Jones has died of jaundice, the embalming fluid will
very likely turn him green. Does this deter the embalmer? Not if
he has intestinal fortitude. Masking pastes and cosmetics are
heavily laid on, burial garments and casket interiors are color-
correlated with particular care, and Jones is displayed beneath
rose-colored lights. Friends will say “How well he looks.”
Death by carbon mon- oxide, on the other hand, can be rather a
good thing from the embalmer’s viewpoint: “One advantage is
the fact that this type of discoloration is an exag- gerated form
of a natural pink coloration.” This is nice because the healthy
glow is already present and needs but little attention.
The patching and filling completed, Mr. Jones is now
shaved, washed and dressed. Cream-based cosmetic, available in
pink, flesh, suntan, brunette and blond, is applied to his hands
and face, his hair is shampooed and combed (and, in the case of
Mrs. Jones, set), his hands manicured. For the horny- handed
son of toil special care must be taken; cream should be applied
to remove ingrained grime, and the nails cleaned. “If he were
not in the habit of having them manicured in life, trimming and
shaping is advised for better appearance—never questioned by
kin.”
Jones is now ready for casketing (this is the present
participle of the verb “to casket”). In this operation his right
shoulder should be depressed slightly “to turn the body a bit to

8. the right and soften the appearance of lying flat on the back.”
Positioning the hands is a matter of importance, and special
rubber positioning blocks may be used. The hands should be
cupped slightly for a more lifelike, relaxed appearance. Proper
placement of the body requires a delicate sense of balance. It
should lie as high as possible in the casket, yet not so high that
the lid, when lowered, will hit the nose. On the other hand, we
are cau- tioned, placing the body too low “creates the
impression that the body is in a box.”
Jones is next wheeled into the appointed slumber room
where a few last touches may be added—his favorite pipe
placed in his hand or, if he was a great reader, a book propped
into position. (In the case of little Master Jones a Teddy bear
may be clutched.) Here he will hold open house for a few days,
visiting hours 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.
All now being in readiness, the funeral director calls a
staff conference to make sure that each assistant knows his
precise duties. Mr. Wilber Kriege writes: “This makes your staff
feel that they are a part of the team, with a defi- nite assignment
that must be properly carried out if the whole plan is to suc-
ceed. You never heard of a football coach who failed to talk to
his entire team before they go on the field. They have drilled on
the plays they are to execute for hours and days, and yet the
successful coach knows the importance of mak- ing even the
bench-warming third-string substitute feel that he is important
if the game is to be won.” The winning of this game is
predicated upon glass- smooth handling of the logistics. The
funeral director has notified the pall- bearers whose names were
furnished by the family, has arranged for the presence of
clergyman, organist, and soloist, has provided transportation for
everybody, has organized and listed the flowers sent by friends.
In Psychology of Funeral Service Mr. Edward A. Martin points
out: “He may not always do as much as the family thinks he is
doing, but it is his helpful guidance that they appreciate in
knowing they are proceeding as they should. . . . The important
thing is how well his services can be used to make the family

9. believe they are giving unlimited expression to their own
sentiment.
The religious service may be held in a church or in the chapel of
the funeral home; the funeral director vastly prefers the latter
arrangement, for not only is it more convenient for him but it
affords him the opportunity to show off his beautiful facilities
to the gathered mourners. After the clergyman has had his say,
the mourners queue up to file past the casket for a last look at
the deceased. The family is never asked whether they want an
open-casket cere- mony; in the absence of their instruction to
the contrary, this is taken for granted. Consequently well over
90 per cent of all American funerals feature the open casket—a
custom unknown in other parts of the world. Foreigners are
astonished by it. An English woman living in San Francisco
described her reaction in a letter to the writer:
I myself have attended only one funeral here—that of an elderly
fellow worker of mine. After the service I could not understand
why everyone was walking towards the coffin (sorry, I mean
casket), but thought I had better follow the crowd. It shook me
rigid to get there and find the casket open and poor old Oscar
lying there in his brown tweed suit, wearing a suntan makeup
and just the wrong shade of lipstick. If I had not been extremely
fond of the old boy, I have a horrible feeling that I might have
giggled. Then and there I decided that I could never face
another American funeral—even dead.
The casket (which has been resting throughout the service
on a Classic Beauty Ultra Metal Casket Bier) is now transferred
by a hydraulically operated device called Porto-Lift to a
balloon-tired, Glide Easy casket carriage which will wheel it to
yet another conveyance, the Cadillac Funeral Coach. This may
be lavender, cream, light green—anything but black. Interiors,
of course, are color-correlated, “for the man who cannot stop
short of perfection.”
At graveside, the casket is lowered into the earth. This
office, once the pre- rogative of friends of the deceased, is now
performed by a patented mechanical lowering device. A

10. “Lifetime Green” artificial grass mat is at the ready to con- ceal
the sere earth, and overhead, to conceal the sky, is a portable
Steril Cha- pel Tent (“resists the intense heat and humidity of
summer and the terrific storms of winter . . . available in Silver
Grey, Rose or Evergreen”). Now is the time for the ritual
scattering of earth over the coffin, as the solemn words “earth
to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust” are pronounced by the
officiating cleric. This can today be accomplished “with a mere
flick of the wrist with the Gor- don Leak-Proof Earth Dispenser.
No grasping of a handful of dirt, no soiled fingers. Simple,
dignified, beautiful, reverent! The modern way!” The Gordon
Earth Dispenser (at $5) is of nickel-plated brass construction. It
is not only “attractive to the eye and long wearing”; it is also
“one of the ‘tools’ for building better public relations” if
presented as “an appropriate non-commercial gift” to the
clergyman. It is shaped something like a saltshaker.
Untouched by human hand, the coffin and the earth are now
united.It is in the function of directing the participants through
this maze of gad- getry that the funeral director has assigned to
himself his relatively new role of “grief therapist.” He has
relieved the family of every detail, he has revamped the corpse
to look like a living doll, he has arranged for it to nap for a few
days in a slumber room, he has put on a well-oiled performance
in which the concept of death has played no part whatsoever—
unless it was inconsiderately mentioned by the clergyman who
conducted the religious service. He has done everything in his
power to make the funeral a real pleasure for everybody
concerned. He and his team have given their all to score an
upset victory over death.
In the Kitchen
By

11. Henry Louis Gates
We always had a gas stove in the kitchen, in our house in
Piedmont, West Virginia, where I grew up. Never electric,
though using electric became fashionable in Piedmont in the
sixties, like using Crest toothpaste rather than Colgate, or
watching Huntley and Brinkley rather than Walter Cronkite.1
But not us: gas, Colgate, and good ole Walter Cronkite, come
what may. We used gas partly out of loyalty to Big Mom,
Mama’s Mama, because she was mostly blind and still loved to
cook, and could feel her way more easily with gas than with
elec- tric. But the most important thing about our gas-equipped
kitchen was that Mama used to do hair there. The “hot comb”
was a fine-toothed iron instrument with a long wooden handle
and a pair of iron curlers that opened and closed like scissors.
Mama would put it in the gas fire until it glowed. You could
smell those prongs heating up. I liked that smell. Not the smell
so much, I guess, as what the smell meant for the shape of my
day. There was an intimate warmth in the women’s tones as they
talked with my Mama, doing their hair. I knew what the women
had been through to get their hair ready to be “done,” because I
would watch Mama do it to herself. How that kink could be
transformed through grease and fire into that magnificent head
of wavy hair was a miracle to me, and still is.
Mama would wash her hair over the sink, a towel wrapped
around her shoulders, wearing just her slip and her white bra.
(We had no shower—just a galvanized tub that we stored in the
kitchen—until we moved down Rat Tail Road into Doc
Wolverton’s house, in 1954.) After she dried it, she would
grease her scalp thoroughly with blue Bergamot hair grease,
which came in a short, fat jar with a picture of a beautiful
colored lady on it. It’s important to grease your scalp real good,
my Mama would explain, to keep from burning yourself. Of
course, her hair would return to its natural kink almost as soon
as the hot water and shampoo hit it. To me, it was another
miracle how hair so “straight” would so quickly become kinky

12. again the second it even approached some water.
My Mama had only a few “clients” whose heads she
“did”—did, I think, because she enjoyed it, rather than for the
few pennies it brought in. They would sit on one of our red
plastic kitchen chairs, the kind with the shiny metal legs, and
brace themselves for the process. Mama would stroke that red-
hot iron— which by this time had been in the gas fire for half
an hour or more—slowly but firmly through their hair, from
scalp to strand’s end. It made a scorching, crinkly sound, the
hot iron did, as it burned its way through kink, leaving in its
wake straight strands of hair, standing long and tall but
drooping over at the ends, their shape like the top of a heavy
willow tree. Slowly, steadily, Mama’s hands would transform a
round mound of Odetta2 kink into a darkened swamp of
everglades. The Bergamot made the hair shiny; the heat of the
hot iron gave it a brownish-red cast. Once all the hair was as
straight as God allows kink to get, Mama would take the
wellheated curling iron and twirl the straightened strands into
more or less loosely wrapped curls. She claimed that she owed
her skill as a hairdresser to the strength in her wrists, and as she
worked her little finger would poke out, the way it did when she
sipped tea. Mama was a south- paw, and wrote upside down and
backward to produce the cleanest, roundest letters you’ve ever
seen.
The “kitchen” she would all but remove from sight with a
handheld pair of shears, bought just for this purpose. Now, the
kitchen was the room in which we were sitting—the room where
Mama did hair and washed clothes, and where we all took a bath
in that galvanized tub. But the word has another meaning, and
the kitchen that I’m speaking of is the very kinky bit of hair at
the back of your head, where your neck meets your shirt collar.
If there was ever a part of our African past that resisted
assimilation, it was the kitchen. No matter how hot the iron, no
matter how powerful the chemical, no matter how stringent the
mashed-potatoes-and-lye formula of a man’s “process,” neither
God nor woman nor Sammy Davis, Jr.,3 could straighten the

13. kitchen. The kitchen was permanent, irredeemable, irresistible
kink. Unassimilably African. No matter what you did, no matter
how hard you tried, you couldn’t de-kink a person’s kitchen. So
you trimmed it off as best you could.
When hair had begun to “turn,” as they’d say—to return to
its natural kinky glory—it was the kitchen that turned first (the
kitchen around the back, and nappy edges at the temples). When
the kitchen started creeping up the back of the neck, it was time
to get your hair done again.
Sometimes, after dark, a man would come to have his hair
done. It was Mr. Charlie Carroll. He was very light-complected
and had a ruddy nose—it made me think of Edmund Gwenn,
who played Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street. At first,
Mama did him after my brother, Rocky, and I had gone to sleep.
It was only later that we found out that he had come to our
house so Mama could iron his hair—not with a hot comb or a
curling iron but with our very own Proctor-Silex steam iron. For
some reason I never understood, Mr. Charlie would conceal his
Frederick Douglass–like mane4 under a big white Stetson hat. I
never saw him take it off except when he came to our house, at
night, to have his hair pressed. (Later, Daddy would tell us
about Mr. Charlie’s most prized piece of knowledge, something
that the man would only confide after his hair had been pressed,
as a token of intimacy. “Not many people know this,” he’d say,
in a tone of circumspection, “but George Washington was
Abraham Lincoln’s daddy.” Nodding solemnly, he’d add the
clincher: “A white man told me.” Though he was in dead
earnest, this became a humorous refrain around our house—“a
white man told me”—which we used to punctuate especially
pre- posterous assertions.)
My mother examined my daughters’ kitchens whenever we
went home to visit, in the early eighties. It became a game
between us. I had told her not to do it, because I didn’t like the
politics it suggested—the notion of “good” and “bad” hair.
“Good” hair was “straight,” “bad” hair kinky. Even in the late
six- ties, at the height of Black Power, almost nobody could

14. bring themselves to say “bad” for good and “good” for bad.
People still said that hair like white people’s hair was “good,”
even if they encapsulated it in a disclaimer, like “what we used
to call ‘good.’”
Maggie would be seated in her high chair, throwing food
this way and that, and Mama would be cooing about how cute it
all was, how I used to do just like Maggie was doing, and
wondering whether her flinging her food with her left hand
meant that she was going to be left-handed like Mama. When
my daugh- ter was just about covered with Chef Boyardee
Spaghetti-O’s, Mama would seize the opportunity: wiping her
clean, she would tilt Maggie’s head to one side and reach down
the back of her neck. Sometimes Mama would even rub a curl
between her fingers, just to make sure that her bifocals had not
deceived her. Then she’d sigh with satisfaction and relief: No
kink . . . yet. Mama! I’d shout, pretending to be angry. Every
once in a while, if no one was looking, I’d peek, too.
I say “yet” because most black babies are born with soft,
silken hair. But 10 after a few months it begins to turn, as
inevitably as do the seasons or the leaves on a tree. People once
thought baby oil would stop it. They were wrong.
Everybody I knew as a child wanted to have good hair.
You could be as ugly as homemade sin dipped in misery and
still be thought attractive if you had good hair. “Jesus moss,”
the girls at Camp Lee, Virginia, had called Daddy’s naturally
“good” hair during the war. I know that he played that thick
head of hair for all it was worth, too.
My own hair was “not a bad grade,” as barbers would tell
me when they cut it for the first time. It was like a doctor
reporting the results of the first full physical he has given you.
Like “You’re in good shape” or “Blood pressure’s kind of
high—better cut down on salt.”
I spent most of my childhood and adolescence messing
with my hair. I defi- nitely wanted straight hair. Like Pop’s.
When I was about three, I tried to stick a wad of Bazooka
bubble gum to that straight hair of his. I suppose what fixed that

15. memory for me is the spanking I got for doing so: he turned me
upside down, holding me by my feet, the better to paddle my
behind. Little nigger, he had shouted, walloping away. I started
to laugh about it two days later, when my behind stopped
hurting.
When black people say “straight,” of course, they don’t
usually mean liter- ally straight—they’re not describing hair
like, say, Peggy Lipton’s (she was the white girl on The Mod
Squad), or like Mary’s of Peter, Paul & Mary5 fame; black
people call that “stringy” hair. No, “straight” just means not
kinky, no matter what contours the curl may take. I would have
done anything to have straight hair—and I used to try
everything, short of getting a process.6
Of the wide variety of techniques and methods I came to
master in the challenging prestidigitation of the follicle, almost
all had two things in common: a heavy grease and the
application of pressure. It’s not an accident that some of the
biggest black-owned companies in the fifties and sixties made
hair products. And I tried them all, in search of that certain
silken touch, the one that would leave neither the hand nor the
pillow sullied by grease.
I always wondered what Frederick Douglass put on his
hair, or what Phillis Wheatley7 put on hers. Or why Wheatley
has that rag on her head in the little engraving in the
frontispiece of her book. One thing is for sure: you can bet that
when Phillis Wheatley went to England and saw the Countess of
Hunting- don she did not stop by the Queen’s coiffeur on her
way there. So many black people still get their hair straightened
that it’s a wonder we don’t have a national holiday for Madame
C. J. Walker, the woman who invented the process of
straightening kinky hair. Call it Jheri-Kurled or call it
“relaxed,” it’s still fried hair.
I used all the greases, from sea-blue Bergamot and creamy
vanilla Duke (in its clear jar with the orange-white-and-green
label) to the godfather of grease, the formidable Murray’s. Now,
Murray’s was some serious grease. Whereas Ber- gamot was

16. like oily jello, and Duke was viscous and sickly sweet,
Murray’s was light brown and hard. Hard as lard and twice as
greasy, Daddy used to say. Mur- ray’s came in an orange can
with a press-on top. It was so hard that some people would put a
match to the can, just to soften the stuff and make it more
manageable. Then, in the late sixties, when Afros came into
style, I used Afro Sheen. From Murray’s to Duke to Afro Sheen:
that was my progression in black consciousness.
We used to put hot towels or washrags over our Murray-
coated heads, in order to melt the wax into the scalp and the
follicles. Unfortunately, the wax also had the habit of running
down your neck, ears, and forehead. Not to mention your
pillowcase. Another problem was that if you put two palmfuls
of Murray’s on your head your hair turned white. (Duke did the
same thing.) The challenge was to get rid of that white color.
Because if you got rid of the white stuff you had a magnificent
head of wavy hair. That was the beauty of it: Mur- ray’s was so
hard that it froze your hair into the wavy style you brushed it
into. It looked really good if you wore a part. A lot of guys had
parts cut into their hair by a barber, either with the clippers or
with a straight-edge razor. Especially if you had kinky hair—
then you’d generally wear a short razor cut, or what we called a
Quo Vadis.
We tried to be as innovative as possible. Everyone knew
about using a stock- ing cap, because your father or your uncle
wore one whenever something really big was about to happen,
whether sacred or secular: a funeral or a dance, a wedding or a
trip in which you confronted official white people. Any time
you were trying to look really sharp, you wore a stocking cap in
preparation. And if the event was really a big one, you made a
new cap. You asked your mother for a pair of her hose, and cut
it with scissors about six inches or so from the open end—the
end with the elastic that goes up to the top of the thigh. Then
you knotted the cut end, and it became a beehive-shaped hat,
with an elastic band that you pulled down low on your forehead
and down around your neck in the back. To work well, the cap

17. had to fit tightly and snugly, like a press. And it had to fit that
tightly because it was a press: it pressed your hair with the
force of the hose’s elastic. If you greased your hair down real
good, and left the stock- ing cap on long enough, voilà: you got
a head of pressed-against-the-scalp waves. (You also got a ring
around your forehead when you woke up, but it went away.)
And then you could enjoy your concrete do. Swore we were bad,
too, with all that grease and those flat heads. My brother and I
would brush it out a bit in the mornings, so that it looked—well,
“natural.” Grown men still wear stocking caps—especially older
men, who generally keep their stocking caps in their top
drawers, along with their cufflinks and their see-through silk
socks, their “Maverick” ties, their silk handkerchiefs, and
whatever else they prize the most.
A Murrayed-down stocking cap was the respectable
version of the process, 20 which, by contrast, was most
definitely not a cool thing to have unless you were an
entertainer by trade. Zeke and Keith and Poochie and a few
other stars of the high-school basketball team all used to get a
process once or twice a year. It was expensive, and you had to
go somewhere like Pittsburgh or D.C. or Uniontown—
somewhere where there were enough colored people to support a
trade. The guys would disappear, then reappear a day or two
later, strutting like peacocks, their hair burned slightly red from
the lye base. They’d also wear “rags”—cloths or
handkerchiefs—around their heads when they slept or played
basketball. Do-rags, they were called. But the result was
straight hair, with just a hint of wave. No curl. Do-it-
yourselfers took their chances at home with a concoction of
mashed potatoes and lye.
The most famous process of all, however, outside of the
process Malcolm X describes in his “Autobiography,” and
maybe the process of Sammy Davis, Jr., was Nat King Cole’s8
process. Nat King Cole had patent-leather hair. That man’s got
the finest process money can buy, or so Daddy said the night we
saw Cole’s TV show on NBC. It was November 5, 1956. I

18. remember the date because everyone came to our house to watch
it and to celebrate one of Daddy’s bud- dies’ birthdays. Yeah,
Uncle Joe chimed in, they can do shit to his hair that the
average Negro can’t even think about—secret shit.
Nat King Cole was clean. I’ve had an ongoing argument
with a Nigerian friend about Nat King Cole for twenty years
now. Not about whether he could sing—any fool knows that he
could—but about whether or not he was a hand- kerchief head
for wearing that patent-leather process.
Sammy Davis, Jr.’s process was the one I detested. It
didn’t look good on him. Worse still, he liked to have a fried
strand dangling down the middle of his forehead, so he could
shake it out from the crown when he sang. But Nat King Cole’s
hair was a thing unto itself, a beautifully sculpted work of art
that he and he alone had the right to wear. The only difference
between a process and a stocking cap, really, was taste; but Nat
King Cole, unlike, say, Michael Jackson, looked good in his.
His head looked like Valentino’s9 head in the twenties, and
some say it was Valentino the process was imitating. But Nat
King Cole wore a process because it suited his face, his
demeanor, his name, his style. He was as clean as he wanted to
be.
I had forgotten all about that patent-leather look until one
day in 1971, when I was sitting in an Arab restaurant on the
island of Zanzibar surrounded by men in fezzes and white
caftans, trying to learn how to eat curried goat and rice with the
fingers of my right hand and feeling two million miles from
home. All of a sudden, an old transistor radio sitting on top of a
china cupboard stopped blaring out its Swahili music and
started playing “Fly Me to the Moon,” by Nat King Cole. The
restaurant’s din was not affected at all, but in my mind’s eye I
saw it: the King’s magnificent sleek black tiara. I managed,
barely, to blink back the tears.
Black Men and Public Space

19. By
Brent Staples
My first victim was a woman—white, well dressed,
probably in her early twenties. I came upon her late one evening
on a deserted street in Hyde Park, a relatively affluent
neighborhood in an otherwise mean, impoverished section of
Chicago. As I swung onto the avenue behind her, there seemed
to be a discreet, uninflammatory distance between us. Not so.
She cast back a worried glance. To her, the youngish black
man—a broad six feet two inches with a beard and billowing
hair, both hands shoved into the pockets of a bulky military
jacket—seemed menacingly close. After a few more quick
glimpses, she picked up her pace and was soon running in
earnest. Within seconds she disappeared into a cross street. That
was more than a decade ago, I was twenty-two years old, a
graduate student newly arrived at the University of Chicago. It
was in the echo of that terrified woman’s footfalls that I first
began to know the unwieldy inheritance I’d come into—the
ability to alter public space in ugly ways. It was clear that she
thought herself the quarry of a mugger, a rapist, or worse.
Suffering a bout of insomnia, however, I was stalking sleep, not
defenseless wayfarers. As a softy who is scarcely able to take a
knife to a raw chicken—let alone hold one to a person’s
throat—I was surprised, embarrassed, and dismayed all at once.
Her flight made me feel like an accomplice in tyranny. It also
made it clear that I was indistinguishable from the muggers who
occasionally seeped into the area from the surrounding ghetto.
That first encounter, and those that followed, signified that a
vast, unnerving gulf lay between nighttime pedestrians—
particularly women—and me. And I soon gathered that being
perceived as dangerous is a hazard in itself. I only needed to
turn a corner into a dicey situation, or crowd some frightened,
armed person in a foyer somewhere, or make an errant move
after being pulled over by a policeman. Where fear and weapons
meet—and they often do in urban America—there is always the

20. possibility of death.
In that first year, my first away from my hometown, I was
to become thoroughly familiar with the language of fear. At
dark, shadowy intersections, I could cross in front of a car
stopped at a traffic light and elicit the thunk, thunk, thunk,
thunk of the driver—black, white, male, or female—hammering
down the door locks. On less traveled streets after dark, I grew
accustomed to but never comfortable with people crossing to the
other side of the street rather than pass me. Then there were the
standard unpleasantries with policemen, doormen, bouncers,
cabdrivers, and others whose business it is to screen out
troublesome individuals before there is any nastiness.
I moved to New York nearly two years ago and I have
remained an avid night walker. In central Manhattan, the near-
constant crowd cover minimizes tense one-on-one street
encounters. Elsewhere—in SoHo, for example, where sidewalks
are narrow and tightly spaced buildings shut out the sky—things
can get very taut indeed.
After dark, on the warrenlike streets of Brooklyn where I
live, I often see women who fear the worst from me. They seem
to have set their faces on neu- tral, and with their purse straps
strung across their chests bandolier-style, they forge ahead as
though bracing themselves against being tackled. I understand,
of course, that the danger they perceive is not a hallucination.
Women are par- ticularly vulnerable to street violence, and
young black males are drastically overrepresented among the
perpetrators of that violence. Yet these truths are no solace
against the kind of alienation that comes of being ever the
suspect, a fearsome entity with whom pedestrians avoid making
eye contact.
It is not altogether clear to me how I reached the ripe old
age of twenty- two without being conscious of the lethality
nighttime pedestrians attributed to me. Perhaps it was because
in Chester, Pennsylvania, the small, angry indus- trial town
where I came of age in the 1960s, I was scarcely noticeable
against a backdrop of gang warfare, street knifings, and

21. murders. I grew up one of the good boys, had perhaps a half-
dozen fistfights. In retrospect, my shyness of com- bat has clear
sources.
As a boy, I saw countless tough guys locked away; I have
since buried sev- eral, too. They were babies, really—a teenage
cousin, a brother of twenty-two, a childhood friend in his mid-
twenties—all gone down in episodes of bravado played out in
the streets. I came to doubt the virtues of intimidation early on.
I chose, perhaps unconsciously, to remain a shadow—timid, but
a survivor.
The fearsomeness mistakenly attributed to me in public
places often has a perilous flavor. The most frightening of these
confusions occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I
worked as a journalist in Chicago. One day, rush- ing into the
office of a magazine I was writing for with a deadline story in
hand, I was mistaken for a burglar. The office manager called
security and, with an ad hoc1 posse, pursued me through the
labyrinthine halls, nearly to my editor’s door. I had no way of
proving who I was. I could only move briskly toward the
company of someone who knew me.
Another time I was on assignment for a local paper and
killing time before an interview. I entered a jewelry store on the
city’s affluent Near North Side. The proprietor excused herself
and returned with an enormous red Doberman pinscher straining
at the end of a leash. She stood, the dog extended toward me,
silent to my questions, her eyes bulging nearly out of her head.
I took a cursory look around, nodded, and bade her good night.
Relatively speaking, however, I never fared as badly as
another black male journalist. He went to nearby Waukegan,
Illinois, a couple of summers ago to work on a story about a
murderer who was born there. Mistaking the reporter for the
killer, police officers hauled him from his car at gunpoint and
but for his press credentials would probably have tried to book
him. Such episodes are not uncommon. Black men trade tales
like this all the time.
Over the years, I learned to smother the rage I felt at so

22. often being taken for a criminal. Not to do so would surely have
led to madness. I now take pre- cautions to make myself less
threatening. I move about with care, particularly late in the
evening. I give a wide berth to nervous people on subway
platforms during the wee hours, particularly when I have
exchanged business clothes for jeans. If I happen to be entering
a building behind some people who appear skittish, I may walk
by, letting them clear the lobby before I return, so as not to
seem to be following them. I have been calm and extremely
congenial on those rare occasions when I’ve been pulled over by
the police.
And on late-evening constitutionals I employ what has
proved to be an excellent tension-reducing measure: I whistle
melodies from Beethoven and Vivaldi and the more popular
classical composers. Even steely New Yorkers hunching toward
nighttime destinations seem to relax, and occasionally they even
join in the tune. Virtually everybody seems to sense that a
mugger wouldn’t be warbling bright, sunny selections from
Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.2 It is my equivalent of the cowbell that
hikers wear when they know they are in bear country.
EXTRA LIVES: WHY VIDEO GAMES MATTER
By
Tom Bissell
Someday my children will ask me where I was and what I
was doing when the United States elected its first black
president. I could tell my children— who are entirely
hypothetical; call them Kermit and Hussein1—that I was home
at the time and, like hundreds of millions of other Americans,
watch- ing television. This would be a politician’s answer,
which is to say, factual but inaccurate in every important detail.
Because Kermit and Hussein deserve an honestly itemized
answer, I will tell them that, on November 4, 2008, their father
was living in Tallinn, Estonia, where the American Election
Day’s waning hours were a cold, salmon-skied November 5

23. morning. My intention that day was to watch CNN International
until the race was called. I will then be forced to tell Kermit and
Hussein about what else happened on November 4, 2008. The
postapocalyptic video game Fallout 3 had been officially
released to the European market on October 30, but in Estonia it
was nowhere to be found. For several weeks, Bethesda
Softworks, Fallout 3’s developer, had been posting online a
series of promotional gameplay videos, which I had been
watching and rewatching with fetish-porn avidity. I left word
with Tallinn’s best game store: Call me the moment Fallout 3
arrives. In the late afternoon of November 4, they finally rang.
When I slipped the game into the tray of my Xbox 360, the first
polls were due to close in America in two hours. One hour of
Fallout 3, I told myself. Maybe two. Absolutely no more than
three. Seven hours later, blink- ing and dazed, I turned off my
Xbox 360, checked in with CNN, and discovered that the
acceptance speech had already been given. And so, my beloved
Kermit, my dear little Hussein, at the moment America changed
forever, your father was wandering an ICBM2-denuded
wasteland, ner- vously monitoring his radiation level, armed
only with a baseball bat, a 10mm pistol, and six rounds of
ammunition, in search of a vicious gang of mohawked
marauders who were 100 percent bad news and totally had to be
dealt with. Trust Daddy on this one.
Fallout 3 was Bethesda’s first release since 2006’s The
Elder Scrolls IV: Obliv- ion. Both games fall within a genre
known by various names: the open-world or sandbox or free-
roaming game. This genre is superintended by a few general
conventions, which include the sensation of being inside a large
and disinter- estedly functioning world, a main story line that
can be abandoned for subordi- nate story lines (or for no
purpose at all), large numbers of supporting characters with
whom meaningful interaction is possible, and the ability to
customize (or pimp, in the parlance of our time) the game’s
player-controlled central charac- ter. The pleasures of the open-

24. world game are ample, complicated, and intensely private; their
potency is difficult to explain, sort of like religion, of which
these games become, for many, an aspartame form. Because of
the freedom they grant gamers, the narrative- and mission-
generating manner in which they reward exploration, and their
convincing illusion of endlessness, the best open- world games
tend to become leisure-time-eating viruses. As
incomprehensible as it may seem, I have somehow spent more
than two hundred hours playing Oblivion. I know this because
the game keeps a running tally of the total time one has spent
with it.
It is difficult to describe Oblivion without atavistic fears
of being savaged 5 by the same jean-jacketed dullards who in
1985 threw my Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual
II into Lake Michigan (That I did not even play D&D, and only
had the book because I liked to look at the pictures, left my
assailants unmoved.) As to what Oblivion is about, I note the
involvement of orcs and a “summon skeleton” spell and leave it
at that. So: two hundred hours playing Oblivion? How is that
even possible? I am not actually sure. Completing the game’s
narrative missions took a fraction of that time, but in the world
of Obliv- ion you can also pick flowers, explore caves, dive for
treasure, buy houses, bet on gladiatorial arena fights, hunt bear,
and read books. Oblivion is less a game than a world that best
rewards full citizenship, and for a while I lived there and
claimed it. At the time I was residing in Rome on a highly
coveted literary fellowship, surrounded by interesting and
brilliant people, and quite natu- rally mired in a lagoon of
depression more dreadfully lush than any before or since. I
would be lying if I said Oblivion did not, in some ways,
aggravate my depression, but it also gave me something with
which to fill my days other than piranhic self-hatred. It was an
extra life; I am grateful to have had it.
When Bethesda announced that it had purchased the rights
to develop Fall- out 3 from the defunct studio Interplay, the
creators of the first two Fallout games, many were doubtful.

25. How would the elvish imaginations behind Obliv- ion manage
with the rather different milieu of an annihilated twenty-third-
century America? The first Fallout games, which were exclusive
to the personal computer, were celebrated for their clever satire
and often freakishly exagger- ated violence. Oblivion is about
as satirical as a colonoscopy, and the fighting in the game,
while not unviolent, is often weirdly inert.
Bethesda released Fallout 3’s first gameplay video in the
summer of 2008. In it, Todd Howard, the game’s producer,
guides the player-controlled character into a disorientingly
nuked Washington, D.C., graced with just enough rav- aged
familiarities—among which a pummeled Washington Monument
stands out—to be powerfully unsettling. Based on these few
minutes, Fallout appeared guaranteed to take its place among
the most visually impressive games ever made. When Bethesda
posted a video showcasing Fallout 3’s in-game com- bat—a
brilliant synthesis of trigger-happy first-person-style shooting
and the more deliberative, turn-based tactics of the traditional
role-playing video game, wherein you attack, suffer your
enemy’s counterattack, counterattack yourself, and so on, until
one of you is dead—many could not believe the audacity of its
cartoon-Peckinpah3 violence. Much of it was rendered in a slo-
mo as disgust- ing as it was oddly beautiful: skulls exploding
into the distinct flotsam of eye- balls, gray matter, and upper
vertebrae; limbs liquefying into constellations of red pearls;
torsos somersaulting through the air. The consensus was a
bonfire of the skepticisms:4 Fallout 3 was going to be fucking
awesome.
Needless to say, the first seven hours I spent with the game
were distin- guished by a bounty of salutary things. Foremost
among them was how the world of Fallout 3 looked. The art
direction in a good number of contemporary big-budget video
games has the cheerful parasitism of a tribute band. Visual
inspirations are perilously few: Forests will be Tolkienishly5
enchanted; futur- istic industrial zones will be mazes of

26. predictably grated metal catwalks; gun- fights will erupt amid
rubble- and car-strewn boulevards on loan from a thousand war-
movie sieges. Once video games shed their distinctive vector-
graphic and primary-color 8-bit origins, a commercially
ascendant subset of game slowly but surely matured into what
might well be the most visually deriv- ative popular art form in
history. Fallout 3 is the rare big-budget game to begin rather
than end with its derivativeness.
It opens in 2277, two centuries after a nuclear
conflagration between the United States and China.
Chronologically speaking, the world this Sino- American war
destroyed was of late-twenty-first-century vintage, and yet its
ruins are those of the gee-whiz futurism popular during the Cold
War. Fallout 3’s Slinky-armed sentry Protectrons, for instance,
are knowing plagrarisms of Forbidden Planet’s Robby the
Robot,6 and the game’s many specimens of faded prewar
advertising mimic the nascent slickness of 1950s-era graphic
design. Fallout 3 bravely takes as its aesthetic foundation a
future that is both six decades old and one of the least
convincing ever conceptualized. The result is a fascinating past-
future never-never-land weirdness that infects the game’s every
corner: George Jetson Beyond Thunderdome.
What also impressed me about Fallout 3 was the buffet of
choices set out by its early stages. The first settlement one
happens upon, Megaton, has been built around an undetonated
nuclear warhead, which a strange religious cult native to the
town actually worships. Megaton can serve as base of
operations or be wiped off the face of the map shortly after
one’s arrival there by deto- nating its nuke in exchange for a
handsome payment. I spent quite a while poking around
Megaton and getting to know its many citizens. What this means
is that the first several hours I spent inside Fallout 3 were, in
essence, optional. Even for an open-world game, this suggests
an awesome range of narrative variability. (Eventually, of
course, I made the time to go back and nuke the place.)
Fallout, finally, looks beautiful. Most modern games—

27. even shitty ones— look beautiful. Taking note of this is akin to
telling the chef of a Michelin- starred restaurant that the
tablecloths were lovely. Nonetheless, at one point in Fallout 3 I
was running up the stairs of what used to be the Dupont Circle
Metro station and, as I turned to bash in the brainpan of a
radioactive ghoul, noticed the playful, lifelike way in which the
high-noon sunlight streaked along the grain of my
sledgehammer’s wooden handle. During such moments, it is
hard not to be startled—even moved—by the care poured into
the game’s smallest atmospheric details.
Despite all this, I had problems with Fallout 3, and a
number of these problems seem to me emblematic of the
intersection at which games in general currently find themselves
stalled. Take, for instance, Fallout 3’s tutorial. One feels for
game designers: It would be hard to imagine a formal
convention more inherently bizarre than the video-game
tutorial. Imagine that, every time you open a novel, you are
forced to suffer through a chapter in which the characters do
nothing but talk to one another about the physical mechanics of
how one goes about reading a book. Unfortunately, game
designers do not really have a choice. Controller schemas
change, sometimes drastically, from game to game, and
designers cannot simply banish a game’s relevant instructions to
a directional booklet: That would be a violation of the
interactive pact between game and gamer. Many games thus
have to come up with a narratively plausible way in which one’s
controlled character engages in activity comprehensive enough
to be instructive but not so intense as to involve a lot of failure.
Games with a strong element of combat almost always solve this
dilemma by opening with some sort of indifferently conceived
boot-camp exercise or training round.
Fallout 3’s tutorial opens, rather more ambitiously, with
your character’s birth, during which you pick your race and
gender (if given the choice, I always opt for a woman, for
whatever reason) and design your eventual appearance
(probably this is the reason). The character who pulls you from

28. your mother’s birth canal is your father, whose voice is
provided by Liam Neeson.8 (Many games attempt to class
themselves up with early appearances by accomplished actors;
Patrick Stewart’s9 platinum larynx served this purpose in
Oblivion.) Now, aspects of Fallout 3’s tutorial are brilliant:
When you learn to walk as a baby, you are actually learning
how to move within the game; you decide whether you want
your character to be primarily strong, intelligent, or charismatic
by reading a children’s book; and, when the tutorial flashes
forward to your tenth birthday party, you learn to fire weapons
when you receive a BB gun as a gift. The tutorial flashes
forward again, this time to a high school classroom, where you
further define your character by answering ten aptitude- test-
style questions. What is interesting about this is that it allows
you to customize your character indirectly rather than directly,
and many of the questions (one asks what you would do if your
grandmother ordered you to kill someone) are morbidly
amusing. While using an in-game aptitude test as a character-
design aid is not exactly a new innovation, Fallout 3 provides
the most streamlined, narrratively economical, and interactively
inventive go at it yet.
By the time I was taking this aptitude test, however, I was a
dissident citizen of Vault 101, the isolated underground society
in which Fallout 3 proper begins. My revolt was directed at a
few things. The first was Fallout 3’s dialogue, some of it so
appalling (“Oh, James, we did it. A daughter. Our beautiful
daughter”) as to make Stephenie Meyer look like Ibsen.10 The
second was Fall- out 3’s addiction to trust-shattering
storytelling redundancy, such as when your father announces, “I
can’t believe you’re already ten,” at what is clearly established
as your tenth birthday party. The third, and least forgivable,
was Fallout 3’s Jell-O-mold characterization: In the game’s first
ten minutes you exchange gossip with the spunky best friend,
cower beneath the megalomaniacal leader, and gain the trust of
the goodhearted cop. Vault 101 even has a resident cadre of

29. hoodlums, the Tunnel Snakes, whose capo resembles a
malevolent Fonz.11 Even with its backdrop of realized Cold
War futurism, a greaser-style youth gang in an underground
vault society in the year 2277 is the working definition of a
dumb idea. During the tutorial’s final sequence, the Tunnel
Snakes’ leader, your tormentor since childhood, requests your
help in saving his mother from radioactive cockroaches (long
story), a reversal of such tofu drama that, in my annoyance, I
killed him, his mother, and then everyone else I could find in
Vault 101, with the most perversely satisfying weapon I had on
hand: a baseball bat. Allowing your decisions to establish for
your character an in-game identity as a skull-crushing monster,
a saint of patience, or some mixture thereof is another attractive
feature of Fallout 3. These pretensions to morality, though,
suddenly bored me, because they were occurring in a universe
that had been designed by geniuses and written by Ed Wood
Jr.12
Had I really waited a year for this? And was I really
missing a cardinal event in American history to keep playing it?
I had, and I was, and I could not really explain why.
What I know is this: If I were reading a book or watching a
film that, every ten minutes, had me gulping a gallon of
aesthetic Pepto, I would stop reading or watching. Games, for
some reason, do not have this problem. Or rather, their problem
is not having this problem. I routinely tolerate in games
crudities I would never tolerate in any other form of art or
entertainment. For a long time my rationalization was that,
provided a game was fun to play, certain failures could be
overlooked. I came to accept that games were generally
incompetent with almost every aspect of what I would call
traditional narrative. In the last few years, however, a dilemma
has become obvious. Games have grown immensely
sophisticated in any number of ways while at the same time
remain- ing stubbornly attached to aspects of traditional
narrative for which they have shown little feeling. Too many
games insist on telling stories in a manner in which some

30. facility with plot and character is fundamental to—and often
even determinative of—successful storytelling.
The counterargument to all this is that games such as
Fallout 3 are more about the world in which the game takes
place than the story concocted to gov- ern one’s progress
through it. It is a fair point, especially given how beautifully
devastated and hypnotically lonely the world of Fallout 3 is. But
if the world is paramount, why bother with a story at all? Why
not simply cut the ribbon on the invented world and let gamers
explore it? The answer is that such a game would probably not
be very involving. Traps, after all, need bait. In a narrative
game, story and world combine to create an experience. As the
game designer Jesse Schell writes in The Art of Game Design,
“The game is not the experi- ence. The game enables the
experience, but it is not the experience.” In a world as large as
that of Fallout 3, which allows for an experience framed in
terms of wandering and lonesomeness, story provides, if nothing
else, badly needed direction and purpose. Unless some narrative
game comes along that radically changes gamer expectation,
stories, with or without Super Mutants, will con- tinue to be
what many games will use to harness their uniquely extravagant
brand of fictional absorption.
I say this in full disclosure: The games that interest me the
most are the games that choose to tell stories. Yes, video games
have always told some form of story. plumber’s girlfriend
captured by ape! is a story, but it is a rudimentary fairytale
story without any of the proper fairytale’s evocative nuances
and dreads. Games are often compared to films, which would
seem to make sense, given their many apparent similarities
(both are scored, both have actors, both are cinematographical,
and so on). Upon close inspection comparison falls leprously
apart. In terms of storytelling, they could not be more different.
Films favor a compressed type of storytelling and are able to do
this because they have someone deciding where to point the
camera. Games, on the other hand, contain more than most
gamers can ever hope to see, and the person deciding where to

31. point the camera is, in many cases, you—and you might never
even see the “best part.” The best part of looking up at a night
sky, after all, is not any one star but the infinite possibility of
what is between stars. Games often provide an approximation of
this feeling, with the difference that you can find out what is
out there. Teeming with secrets, hidden areas, and surprises that
may pounce only on the second or third (or fourth)
playthrough—I still laugh to think of the time I made it to an
isolated, hard-to-find corner of Fallout 3’s Wasteland and was
greeted by the words fuck you spray-painted on a rock— video
games favor a form of storytelling that is, in many ways,
completely unprecedented. The conventions of this form of
storytelling are only a few decades old and were created in a
formal vacuum by men and women who still walk among us.
There are not many mediums whose Dantes and Homers one can
ring up and talk to. With games, one can.
I am uninterested in whether games are better or worse
than movies or novels or any other form of entertainment. More
interesting to me is what games can do and how they make me
feel while they are doing it. Comparing games to other forms of
entertainment only serves as a reminder of what games are not.
Storytelling, however, does not belong to film any more than it
belongs to the novel. Film, novels, and video games are separate
economies in which storytelling is the currency. The problem is
that video-game storytelling, across a wide spectrum of games,
too often feels counterfeit, and it is easy to tire of laundering
the bills.
It should be said that Fallout 3 gets much better as you
play through it. A few of its set pieces (such as stealing the
Declaration of Independence from a ruined National Archives,
which is protected by a bewigged robot programmed to believe
itself to be Button Gwinnett, the Declaration’s second
signatory)are as gripping as any fiction I have come across. But
it cannot be a coincidence that every scene involving human
emotion (confronting a mind-wiped android who believes he is

32. human, watching as a character close to you suffocates and
dies) is at best unaffecting and at worst risible. Can it really be
a surprise that deeper human motivations remain beyond the
reach of something that regards character as the assignation of
numerical values to hypothetical abilities and characteristics?
Viewed as a whole, Fallout 3 is a game of profound
stylishness, sophistication, and intelligence—so much so that
every example of Etch A Sketch16 characterization, every
stone-shoed narrative pivot, pains me. When we say a game is
sophisticated, are we grading on a distressingly steep curve? Or
do we need a new curve altogether? Might we really mean that
the game in question only occasionally insults one’s
intelligence? Or is this kind of intelligence, at least when it
comes to playing games, beside the point? How is it, finally,
that I keep returning to a form of entertainment that I find so
uniquely frustrating? To what part of me do games speak, and
on which frequency?