“Unflinching and honest…both timely and timeless” (Houston Chronicle), this extraordinary collection of essays by the award-winning writer of The Other Side—rooted in her own experience with sexual assault—pursues questions that strike at the heart of our national conversation about the justness of society.

In 2014, Lacy Johnson was giving a reading from The Other Side, her “instant classic” (Kirkus Reviews) memoir of kidnapping and rape, when a woman asked her what she would like to happen to her rapist. This collection “attempts to parcel out several knotted problems and suggests forms of meaningful justice” (Booklist, starred review). Drawing from philosophy, art, literature, mythology, anthropology, film, and her own experience of violence, Johnson considers how our ideas about justice might be expanded beyond vengeance and retribution to include acts of compassion, patience, mercy, and grace.

“The Reckonings is not a book about changing the world. It’s philosophy in disguise, equal parts memoir, criticism, and ethics…The twelve essays deserve great consideration, while you read it and long after” (NPR). From “Speak Truth to Power,” about the condition of not being believed about rape and assault; to “Goliath,” about the ways evil is used as a form of social control; to “The Fallout,” about ecological and generational violence, Johnson creates masterful, elaborate, gorgeously written essays that speak incisively about our current era. She grapples with justice and retribution, truth and fairness, and sexual assault and workplace harassment, as well as the broadest societal wrongs: the BP Oil Spill, government malfeasance, police killings. The Reckonings is a powerful and necessary work, ambitious in its scope, which “challenges our culture’s expectations of justice and expose the limits of vengeance and mercy” (Ms. Magazine).

Leseprobe
The Reckonings

THE RECKONINGS

Usually it is a woman who asks the question—always the same question. She is sitting near the door in the last row of the auditorium, having spent the last hour listening to me talk about what it means to have once been kidnapped and raped by a man I loved, a man with whom I lived, a man who even before the kidnapping had already violated me in every way you might imagine possible, especially if you were a man like him. Someone else in the audience asks what happened to the man, and I explain how he got away, how he is a fugitive living in Venezuela, raising a new family. This is not the ending anyone expects.

Now the woman has a question. She raises her hand, and when I call on her, always last, she stands and speaks in a clear, assertive voice: “What do you want to have happen to him, to the man who did this to you?” By “this” I know she means not only the actual crime the man committed but also all of the therapy, the nightmares and panic attacks, the prescribed medication and self-medication, the healing and self-harm. “I mean, you probably want him dead, right?”

No, I think. “No,” I say out loud. Her expression crumples; she looks confused. Everyone in the audience looks confused. This isn’t supposed to be how the story ends; it’s not the ending they want for themselves, for me.

The women at the book club don’t want this ending either. They are sitting around a long oak dining table in the home of our gracious host, who brings food out in many courses, during each of which the wine flows freely. They ask questions, mostly bookish ones, but eventually the conversation turns to the man I lived with, to how he got away.

“I’d kill him for you,” one says.

“I’d kill him on the spot,” says another.

They carry guns in their purses, they have told me. Maybe they are angry enough to use them.

One brings up a story she heard earlier in the day: a local man has been convicted of a boy’s murder. The boy was seven when the local man raped him; he turned eight on the day the local man burned him alive. The boy survived long enough to implicate the man, who was charged with capital murder after the boy died. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to forty years in prison.

“Justice has been served,” one of the women in the book club says.

“How is this justice?” asks another. “He’s going to spend the next forty years living off our taxes.”

“He should be burned alive,” the host says, “the same way he tried to kill that boy.”

She has been quiet the entire evening, in and out of the kitchen, up and down from her chair. Now she is seated at the head of the table, looking at her hands, which twist and untwist an ironed napkin over the middle of her plate. “What do you want to have happen to him?” she asks me.

This woman, like every other woman who asks the question, sits with her back to the wall, like I do when I have the choice, or near the door in the last row of every auditorium. Sometimes she is my mother’s age, or my age: she wears oversized sweaters, little makeup, pulls back her hair in a simple bun. She does not want attention. She has children, like I do, and like I do, she sometimes struggles to love them well. She will tell me this after I have finished answering questions, when I am sitting at a little table signing books. She has a story that is similar to mine “in ways,” and she doesn’t even know what to feel about it anymore.

Sometimes the woman sitting near the door, or against the wall, is an old woman with crepe paper hands. Sometimes she is not a woman but a man—an old man my father’s age in a ten-gallon hat, who tells me he was raped by an uncle when he was the age of my son. Or the person who asks the question is a man young enough to be my son if I had started much earlier, who tells me the question is for himself, or for his girlfriend. They both have a story like mine, he says, and they have not yet found an ending to it. I am surprised at how the people sitting near the door in the last row of the auditorium always have a story like mine.

I carry these stories with me because I don’t know what else to do with them. The details may differ. If it is not the story of an abusive lover, perhaps it is a mother, or a father, or an uncle; or it is the story of a friend who has been killed by a stranger while trying to do the right thing, or a woman who is shot in the back of the head while asking for help; it might be a story about the abuse of power, or authority, of the slow violence of bureaucracy, of the way some people are born immune from punishment and others spend whole lifetimes being punished in ways they did nothing to deserve.

In my story, there was a man I once loved very much, and because of the self-destructive way in which I loved him, I didn’t want to leave him when he abused me first with his words and then with his fists. I told myself I could fix him. That this wasn’t who he was, not really. I let him keep showing me who he really was until I finally believed him and left.

I had already lived a few lives by that time, I thought—a farm girl from Missouri, a door-to-door steak salesperson, a sex worker, a model in New York, a survivor of domestic violence and sexual assault—but I was afraid none of these lives had sufficiently prepared me to live the one I wanted more than anything else. I had only just begun thinking of myself as a writer around that time, but I told myself I had probably not read enough books, had not visited enough continents, was not smart enough or wise enough, …