MUD, BLOOD, AND GHOSTS

MUD, BLOOD, AND GHOSTS

Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West
University of Nebraska Press, 2023

At once a biography and a general history of especially the US West from the mid-nineteenth century to the Depression, this book is also a meditation on the present, a sort of memoir. As I move through this archive and try to address the violence and power running through or around it—stories of enslavement and marronage, of Indigenous dispossession and resistance, of interracial alliance and betrayal, of life-long hauntings and mental illness, of home, homelessness, and transit—I don’t and cannot leave myself out. 

The archive as a limit, a thing in a box, is always also an opening. It opens on losses sustained, harms inflicted, the tenacity of survival, and on the persistence of lineages both proud and shameful. The archive, like Paul Celan said of the poem, is lonely. This loneliness compels it, like a ghost, towards another, towards its reader: “It is lonely and en route . . . it intends another, needs this other.” To answer this intention by beginning to read, however haltingly and imperfectly, however quietly and slowly, is also to be en route. For to study the past is to prepare for a present time worth waiting for, even if that present time never comes. 

There are ninety and nine who live and die
In want, and hunger, and cold
That one may live in luxury,
And be wrapped in a silken fold.

And the one owns cities, and houses and lands,
And the ninety and nine have empty hands.

—Populist song