The Cave Dwellers, Christina McDowell [ap literature book list .TXT] 📗

a fan of the quid pro quo. So, for my silence, I’d like communications director when you run for president, maximum payout plus benefits.”

Doug runs his hand over his bald head, like the generals and the Corcorans! “I’ll have outside counsel send an ironclad. Okay? I have two daughters, Cate.”

“Oh, I know you do… and one of ’em is still fucking her Black boyfriend.” Cate smiles. “Merry Christmas, Doug.”

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Anthony appears on-screen, his eyelid swollen shut; he has a gash on his right arm, stitches crisscrossing along what looks like a knife wound, a knot tied at the end holding his flesh together. Bunny picks up the blue telephone and presses it to her ear.

“Hey,” she says.

“Hey.” Anthony tugs on the edge of his stitches, an itch. Bunny winces and directs her eyes down, avoiding the wound. “Did you give them the money?” he asks, visibly anxious.

“I went to see your sister and… I’m sorry, she didn’t want the money, Anthony,” Bunny says, but with a cruel withholding—Bunny doesn’t even have the money.

Anthony glares at her with contempt, a pervasive silence so strong she can feel it vibrating through the monitor.

“So what did my sister say to you?” he finally asks.

“She—she mentioned an agreement with the Banks company… I think.… Then she threatened to call the cops if I didn’t get off her property.”

Anthony fidgets in his chair, sniffs, rubs his right eye like he hasn’t slept in days.

“Can you tell me about the agreement?” Bunny asks.

“It’s the money they paid to keep us quiet,” he says.

Frustrated, Bunny demands, “Why didn’t you tell me this before I went over there?”

“Because you wouldn’t have gone over there if you knew we’d been given money.”

“Why would you assume something like that? Your sister was completely paranoid about me. And if you had warned her—she said you haven’t spoken in months—why did you lie to me? You didn’t have to lie to me. I would have still gone over there! I would have still tried to give her the money!” Bunny is working herself up, performing a kind of fake vulnerability, making her case for not being able to give him any money. A violent and manipulative navigation rooted in her shame and guilt for pretending to be someone else, for thinking she could help him. “I’m so sorry,” she says, “there’s… nothing else I can do.”

As if coming down from a high, or from a false and angry hope, Anthony looks at her; it is the most vulnerable she has ever seen him. He knows what he’s up against: multiple counts of first-degree murder, armed robbery, extortion, theft, arson. He’ll get life in prison without the possibility of parole.

“I tried, Anthony,” Bunny says, bowing her head.

“Then just help find me a lawyer! Find me a lawyer, I’m going to fucking die in here!”

“I’m—I’m a journalist, I—I can’t.…” Trapped in her legacy of lies and warped fantasies of terror and victimhood and self-righteousness, Bunny is left with nothing but the reality that the system was designed for this.

Anthony nods, on the verge of tears, then reaches down off-screen where Bunny can’t see. He comes back into the frame, composed, and holds up a copy of the Washington Post business section:

Bartholomew Industries to Acquire Banks Family Business Assets in Monopoly over Chemicals Industry

“Do you know who this family is?” he asks her.

“I—I can’t really see it, I’m having trouble reading—”

“Let me move it closer.” Anthony thrusts the headline so it fills the entire frame of the monitor. Bunny reads it, her heart thumping; the words probe her deepest fears, her nascent narcissism and whiteness railing against the belief that he didn’t do it, warping the truth, blind to the possibility: Did my family kill them?

Anthony laughs, a medicated laugh. “Sounds just like your family, Amazing Grace. Doesn’t it?”

Bunny feels herself falling back into the shadows of her privileged conscience before the Bankses were murdered.

“Did you fuckin’ lie to ME?”

“I—I—I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“YOU’RE THE FUCKIN’ LIAR! I may die in here, Grace, but at least I’ll die knowing the truth, while you may never accept yours.”

Bunny’s absorption of the Banks family legacy ignites a kind of new fragility within her she isn’t sure she can withstand, it feels too big. This door is closing on me. She cannot escape her inner circle, the expectation that someone else will do it for her, will welcome her with open arms, without consequences—but there are always consequences.

She thinks of Billy and his father. She wants to run and hide with him. To think she could solve the problems of the world—how could she be so naïve? Honey… you’re not on this road. She is entrenched in those problems, sinking in the quicksand of an antiquated life, romanticizing history, soaked in white paranoia within a hierarchy and nation stuck in its own imprisonment. That will be her legacy.

“I’m sorry,” Bunny says to Anthony. “I’m so sorry.” She hangs up the phone. Anthony looks at her through the screen as she gets up, rageful, scared; she is everything he thought she’d be. He wanted to tell her one last thing, but all he hears is silence.

Kicking Bear and the Ghost Dance

Matho Wanahtake, also known as Kicking Bear, was a chief of the Lakota Nation. He rose to prominence after the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, in which American troops were resoundingly defeated. In 1889, he traveled to Nevada to learn what was known as the Ghost Dance from its leader, Wovoka, and bring it back to his people. The dance, which spread quickly through the western part of the country, was believed to help reunite Native Americans with their ancestors and protect against white colonialism, bringing back their land, their traditions, and their good fortune and causing the white man to “be swallowed up by the earth.”I

Before the turn of the twentieth century, Kicking Bear traveled to Washington, DC, as a delegate