The Princeton Anthology of Writing: Favorite Pieces by the Ferris/McGraw Writers at Princeton University

By John McPhee

In 1957--long before colleges awarded degrees in creative nonfiction and back when newspaper writing's reputation was tainted by the fish it wrapped--Princeton began honoring talented literary journalists. Since then, fifty-nine of the finest, most dedicated, and most decorated nonfiction writers have held the Ferris and McGraw professorships. This monumental volume harbors their favorite and often most influential works. Each contribution is rewarding reading, and collectively the selections validate journalism's ascent into the esteem of the academy and the reading public.


Necessarily eclectic and delightfully idiosyncratic, the fifty-nine pieces are long and short, political and personal, comic and deadly serious. Students will be provoked by William Greider's pointed critique of the democracy industry, eerily entertained by Leslie Cockburn's fraternization with the Cali cartel, inspired by David K. Shipler's thoughts on race, unsettled by Haynes Johnson's account of Bay of Pigs survivors, and moved by Lucinda Frank's essay on a mother fighting to save a child born with birth defects. Many of the essays are finely crafted portraits: Charlotte Grimes's biography of her grandmother, Blair Clark's obituary for Robert Lowell, and Jane Kramer's affecting story of a woman hero of the French Resistance.


Other contributions to savor include Harrison Salisbury on the siege of Leningrad, Landon Jones on the 1950s, Christopher Wren on Soviet mountaineering, James Gleick on technology, Gloria Emerson on Vietnam, Gina Kolata on Fermat's last theorem, and Roger Mudd on the media. Whether approached chronologically, thematically, randomly, or, as the editors order them, more intuitively, each suggests a perfect evening reading.


Designed for students as well as general readers, The Princeton Anthology of Writing splendidly attests to the elegance, eloquence, and endurance of fine nonfiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Sep 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9780691236865

Book preview

David K. Shipler, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, reported from 1968-88 for the New York Times from New York, Saigon, Moscow, Jerusalem, and Washington. His books include Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams and Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land. This piece comes from A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America (Knopf, 1997).

Beauty for Ashes

If you deprive a man of who he is, you can make him anything that you want him to be. But if you teach him his heritage and his culture, he will aspire to be greater than those before him.

Maj. H. L. Barner, a descendant of slaves

It is a September Saturday on the plantation. People are gathering for a day of reunion, and yellow ribbons are tied around the thick trunks of the cypresses planted two centuries ago by their enslaved ancestors. Families stroll in clusters, toward the mansion, up the walkway of red bricks laid by those who went before, along the dirt carriage path that borders the narrow canal. The earth smells of ripeness and age.

The canal is soothing, and it strikes a chill. The placid water moves lazily in the late summer shade, and harbors suffering in its murkiness. A double image shimmers beneath the towering trees. One is for those who do not consider the history; beauty shrouds the shame. The other is for those who recognize that they have come upon the site of a great crime and can feel a shiver of remembrance.

To drain a North Carolina swamp so that timber could be cut and rice could be grown, the canal was dug by slaves through two stifling summers and two raw winters in the 1780s; it ran twenty feet wide and six miles from Lake Phelps to the Scuppernong River, among tangled roots and swarms of blackflies and mosquitoes. Imagine the whistle of the whip, the ebony bodies glistening with sweat, the groan and cadence of the melancholy work songs. African-Americans too exhausted to return to their shacks at the end of the day were left behind, to be found dead at dawn. The canal they created is a lovely river of sorrow; it marks the divide in America between those who see the beauty and those who feel the chill.

The gathering today is of those who try to do both, who have traced their family lines back, back into slavery in this very place, on this particular ground, and who now stand on the same soil, pained and proud, reconciling themselves with history. Across the plantation drift the notes of a spiritual sung by two male voices, then the beat of four African drummers, then the sad and sour blues of a harmonica, like fragments of reminiscence.

The land is flat and the soil is rich, and the fields are deep in cotton and tobacco. Most of the back roads are paved now, slender traces of blacktop through the tranquil North Carolina countryside. With the arrival of air conditioning and television, folks don’t sit out on their porches much anymore to watch the gentle summer evenings settle over the woods and farms; many of the houses are bunched in suburban enclaves, where lawns are carefully mowed and azaleas lovingly fertilized so that they bloom in pastel reds and pinks in the springtime.

Near the little town of Creswell, the main road to the coast passes a small supermarket, a tiny restaurant, a Mobil station, and an historic marker that was finally erected a few years ago to acknowledge that human beings other than white planters had lived here and helped build the nation:

Somerset Place

Antebellum plantation of Josiah Collins III,

who grew rice and corn. Home in 1860

to 328 slaves. Located six miles south

If you’re white, you probably don’t stop to think that the road you’re driving may have been first cut by slaves, that the field you’re passing may have been first cleared by slaves. Americans, especially white Americans, have short memories. We are impatient with the past, always hurrying into the future, moving on, getting beyond, not dwelling, leaving behind. That’s history, we say dismissively. Whatever reverence our European ancestors had for the power of history has been lost in the frontier culture of this continent; whatever deference later immigrants felt for the age-old rhythms of their homelands in Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and elsewhere has not been transplanted well into the soil of the United States.

Although some whites appreciate the durability of the past in shaping the present, the sense of continuity held by other cultures has not found its way into the American mainstream. History here begins the day you are born: To most of white America, slavery is an evil long gone, the segregation of Jim Crow is deeply buried, and the civil rights movement has wiped the slate clean. Our ethic is practical, and problems are for solving; we do not easily admit to those that we cannot fix. Wrongs have been righted, the residue of guilt erased—this is the current creed of many whites, especially those too young to have seen those pictures of white girls’ faces twisted in hatred as they screamed at little black children who were integrating their schools.

Some blacks acquire this habit of historical amnesia, but black America generally lives with a different memory, one that feels the reverberations of slavery, yearns for roots, searches for pride, and reaches back to grasp at ancient uncertainties. Present events occur in context, not in isolation, so they are interpreted according to what has gone before. Hence, in the eyes of many blacks, elements of the complex relationships of slavery are constantly being reenacted—between bosses and workers, between blacks and whites sexually, between African-Americans of lighter and darker skin, among blacks who suppress dissent within their ranks. Slavery is a permanent metaphor.

Rosanne Katon-Walden, for example, a passionate advocate of interracial adoption, engages in frequent combat with black social workers who oppose placing black children with white parents. And when she wants to explain why her fellow blacks are uncomfortable having this dispute in public, she reaches for old patterns: You don’t rat to the massah about what’s going on in the slave quarters, she says.

A black policewoman in Baltimore, noting that white women are almost never assigned with black men in patrol cars, sees a policy with distant origins. It’s a thing that goes all the way back to slavery, she says. The white slave owners didn’t want their wives to associate too much with the black slaves, and sometimes the wives were attracted to them, you know, white females were attracted to black males.

Understandably, some of the finest literature by African-Americans is haunted by the ghosts of slavery. Toni Morrison’s Beloved and August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson lay bare the wrenching struggles that blacks have with themselves over how to coexist with that past—whether to bury it, fear it, despise it, deny it, revise it, memorialize it, or somehow to absorb and face it and take nourishment from the sorrow and the survival. . . . August Wilson’s piano, purchased by a slaveowner in exchange for the heroine’s father and grandmother, stands at the pivot point of family, memory, history, and revenge. It is an unplayed instrument, a commodity, a shrine, an artifact of inner suffering.

Blacks and whites who manage to engage each other successfully across the racial line often do so by achieving concord in the historical dimension: Whites who are accepted by blacks are frequently those for whom black history has resonance. Blacks who are accepted by whites may tend toward the ahistorical, observing events in a vacuum and activating less white guilt as they put aside the prism of slavery and segregation.

More often, however, the black regard and the white disdain for history foster a collision of memories. Bearing the burden of history in its own manner, each group hears different echoes, tells a different story, creates a complete universe of perception that separates and disconnects. We need to listen to each other’s echoes.

SOMERSET is in a mood of warm celebration, not mourning. Quite a crowd has now assembled, mostly of blacks, who are hugging relatives on the lawn near the old mansion, filling the grounds with laughter and joyous greetings.

On a makeshift stage, with the lake in the background, one of the musicians gets up from his African drums and approaches the microphone. We’re gathered here in recognition of our ancestors, he declares. We’re here on hallowed ground, where our ancestors lived in the physical world at one time. But they’re still here spiritually. We’re going to call our ancestors to come and be with us this morning. A hush moves across the crowd. We’ll follow the African tradition of pouring libation.

He instructs all those gathered to close their eyes and breathe deeply. Silence has settled over the plantation. We ask that our ancestors, those who were left on the African continent, who go back to time immemorial, we ask that you come to be with us. He pours a little water from a green goblet onto the ground. Ancestors, those who died in the middle passage, whose bones are buried beneath the Atlantic Ocean, all the way to the shores of North America, South America, the Caribbean islands, we ask you to come and be with us. The goblet is tipped again. Ancestors, those who were in bondage in North America, South America, and the Caribbean islands, and those, in particular, here at Sunset Plantation—there are a few titters as he misstates the name—we ask that you come and be with us. Another splash of water into the soil.

Dorothy Spruill Redford is dressed as a slave might have been, in a skirt and blouse the color of burlap, her hair in a head wrap the color of field cotton. . . . Born a few miles from Somerset in 1943, she first encountered the enslavement of her ancestors by averting her eyes. My parents were not much for history, for talking about the old days. But they did reminisce now and then, she wrote in her 1988 book, Somerset Homecoming. Slavery was never mentioned around our house. The first time I heard the word, I thought some shame was attached to you if you even uttered it. I told myself it was just another thing about this place that had nothing to do with me. It was some kind of distant stain, something deep in the soul of the South. . . . When they talked about slavery in school, I was puzzled to think that an entire people could allow themselves to be enslaved—as puzzled as I was to see my parents allow little white children to call them by their first names.

This vague belief that the victims were somehow responsible for their own suffering has haunted other black families as well. Just as some Jewish survivors of the Holocaust have not talked of their trials to their children, some black grandparents have never spoken of their parents’ or grandparents’ lives as slaves.

THERE is something delicious about seeing the bright blues and reds and oranges of men’s African dashikis against the bland, buttermilk-colored mansion. There is some satisfying justice in feeling the beat of African drums thundering across this ground. Here, at the genesis of America’s racial divide, blacks are recapturing a bit of what was stolen from them.

A brisk breeze comes off the lake and eases the midday heat. People are sitting around on folding chairs, eating traditional foods: fried chicken, black-eyed peas, mashed potatoes, and okra. They are talking about gathering strength from this reunion, seeing their ancestors as the true role models, as heroes who had the vigor, the dignity, the ingenuity to survive slavery.

Clara Small, a young history professor from Maryland, is in a reflective mood about this place of her ancestors, judging it a kind of neutral ground where people are searching for understanding. She smiles slightly. It is an interesting concept: neutral ground. Once, she notes, it was anything but neutral. Now it is acknowledged as a place that the whites owned but the blacks built. A curious equilibrium has been achieved, and with it a sense of calm that suspends Somerset in a temper of contentment. The moment is strange and intricate, tenuous and clean, for embracing the reality of the past creates an island of unreal harmony in the present. Surrounded by turbulence, isolated from the larger, contentious society, Somerset’s tranquillity today is a lesson in the therapy of honest history.

A spirit of remarkable charity pervades this place today. Oscar Bennett captures it directly. I don’t hold no madness against nobody, cause you didn’t do nothing to me, he says. Those people who done that is dead and gone. I don’t hold you responsible for something somebody else did. That’s the way I feel about it. I think we all should live together and be as one.

On the shady lawn, Cathy Collins Gowing is standing in a bright, flowered dress, her dark hair straight and long and framing a beatific smile as she gazes around her. She and the several other Collins descendants—including her little girl, Amber, who is clinging to her skirts—are incidental to this day, and that seems right to her. I think it’s great, she says softly. Oh, this is theirs. This is their place. She laughs. It’s wonderful. It means redemption. It means hope. She has come all the way from Oregon to be here.

Only in a vague, undefined way was the history of Somerset transmitted to her by her relatives, and the gauzy images were so abstract that they never encouraged her to think about her ancestors as the owners of slaves. I knew it was here, she says, but I didn’t know any of the background. I knew that eventually it traced back to Somerset, England, but that’s about all I knew. Here, too, a certain silence had descended over the generations.

I was an anti-war activist by the time I was fourteen, she explains, and became a revolutionary by the time I was seventeen. I organized May Day marches and lived in Paris working with the North Vietnamese. I was very concerned about racism and very angry. She laughs again. "Lots of marches, and lots of getting beat over the head with sticks and Mace and all of that. I gave my father Bobby Seale’s book when I was seventeen—Seize the Time—and he read it. Her father would always raise us saying, ‘Never lose the common touch.’ He was a humble man. So he challenged us to have open hearts. And I challenged him, too."

She looks out over the grounds. This is just excellent. I care about it being redeemed.

She pauses for a moment, listening to a spiritual being played over the loudspeakers, then hums along for a while before speaking again, her voice so low that it is nearly lost in the strains of the music. I went home and I thought, What’s the verse for this? And it’s Isaiah, and then she paraphrases Isaiah 61:3: To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he might be glorified.

Over the music, family names are still being called for photographs. How does she feel the descendants of slaves are seeing her? Well, I would understand it if they despised me. That’s all right. But most people haven’t. So, if I expect that, then everything else is a bonus. And what is she feeling, what is she thinking? I pray for forgiveness for all that’s gone on here. You know, there’s deep roots of wrong that my family has carried out that needs to be redeemed, that needs to be healed. I think that this is an excellent place for that to happen.

The day is coming to an end at Somerset Place. By 6:00, most people have departed, blacks with blacks and whites with whites, into separateness once again, abandoning the plantation to the lengthening shadows cast by the towering cypresses and sycamores. The sun sinks toward the lake, and the breeze off the water seems a little cooler.

Clusters of conversation are thinning out. The remaining descendants of slaves drift gently away, down the brick paths that slaves built, slowly saying farewells with handshakes and hugs and bursts of hearty laughter. Some pull the yellow ribbons, the symbols of homecoming, from around the tree trunks to take as pieces of memory.

In the deepening shade beneath the old, thick trees where families sat and talked, empty chairs are left in ragged circles on the lawn. Beauty for ashes.

Jonathan Schell is the author of The Village of Ben Sue and The Fate of the Earth. He was a writer for the New Yorker from 1967-87 and a columnist for Newsday from 1990-96. He teaches at Wesleyan University and the New School, and is the Harold Widens Peace Fellow at The Nation Institute. This is the epilogue from his book The Gift of Time: The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons Now (Henry Holt & Co., 1998).

A View of Mountains

On August 9,1945, the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Yosuke Yamahata, a photographer serving in the Japanese army, was dispatched to the destroyed city. The hundred or so pictures he took the next day constitute the fullest photographic record of nuclear destruction in existence. Hiroshima, destroyed three days earlier, had largely escaped the camera’s lens in the first days after the bombing. It was therefore left to Yamahata to record, methodically—and, as it happens, with a great and simple artistry—the effects on a human population of a nuclear weapon only hours after it had been used. Some of Yamahata’s pictures show corpses charred in the peculiar way in which a nuclear fireball chars its victims. They have been burned by light—technically speaking, by the thermal pulse—and their bodies are often branded with the patterns of their clothes, whose colors absorb light in different degrees. One photograph shows a horse twisted under the cart it had been pulling. Another shows a heap of something that once had been a human being hanging over a ledge into a ditch. A third shows a girl who has somehow survived unwounded standing in the open mouth of a bomb shelter and smiling an unearthly smile, shocking us with the sight of ordinary life, which otherwise seems to have been left behind for good in the scenes we are witnessing. Stretching into the distance on all sides are fields of rubble dotted with fires, and, in the background, a view of mountains. We can see the mountains because the city is gone. That absence, even more than the wreckage, contains the heart of the matter. The true measure of the event lies not in what remains but in all that has disappeared.

It took a few seconds for the United States to destroy Nagasaki with the world’s second atomic bomb, but it took fifty years for Yamahata’s pictures of the event to make the journey back from Nagasaki to the United States. They were shown for the first time in this country in 1995, at the International Center for Photography in New York. Arriving a half-century late, they are still news. The photographs display the fate of a single city, but their meaning is universal, since, in our age of nuclear arms, what happened to Nagasaki can, in a flash, happen to any city in the world. In the photographs, Nagasaki comes into its own. Nagasaki has always been in the shadow of Hiroshima, as if the human imagination had stumbled to exhaustion in the wreckage of the first ruined city without reaching even the outskirts of the second. Yet the bombing of Nagasaki is in certain respects the fitter symbol of the nuclear danger that still hangs over us. It is proof that, having once used nuclear weapons, we can use them again. It introduces the idea of a series—the series that, with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons remaining in existence, continues to threaten everyone. (The unpredictable, open-ended character of this series is suggested by the fact that the second bomb originally was to be dropped on the city of Kokura, which was spared Nagasaki’s fate only because bad weather protected it from view.) Each picture therefore seemed not so much an image of something that happened a half-century ago as a window cut into the wall of the photography center showing what soon could easily happen to New York. Wherever the exhibit might travel, moreover, the view of the threatened future from these windows would be roughly accurate, since, although every intact city is different from every other, all cities that suffer nuclear destruction will look much the same.

Yamahata’s pictures afford a glimpse of the end of the world. Yet in our day, when the challenge is not just to apprehend the nuclear peril but to seize a God-given opportunity to dispel it once and for all, we seem to need, in addition, some other picture to counterpoise against ruined Nagasaki—one showing not what we would lose through our failure but what we would gain by our success. What might that picture be, though? How do you show the opposite of the end of the world? Should it be Nagasaki, intact and alive, before the bomb was dropped—or perhaps the spared city of Kokura? Should it be a child, or a mother and child, or perhaps the Earth itself? None seems adequate, for how can we give a definite form to that which can assume infinite forms, namely, the lives of all human beings, now and in the future? Imagination, faced with either the end of the world or its continuation, must remain incomplete. Only action can satisfy.

Once, the arrival in the world of new generations took care of itself. Now, they can come into existence only if, through an act of faith and collective will, we ensure their right to exist. Performing that act is the greatest of the responsibilities of the generations now alive. The gift of time is the gift of life, forever, if we know how to receive it.

Haynes Johnson was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1966 for his reporting on the civil rights crisis in Selma, Alabama. He is the author of thirteen books, and currently holds the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of Maryland. The following is an excerpt from Johnson’s book The Bay of Pigs (Norton, 1964), describing what happened to some of the survivors of the disastrous 1961 invasion of Cuba after they desperately swam to a sailboat at the invasion beachhead to avoid capture by victorious Castro forces advancing on them. They had been secretly trained, financed, and put ashore by the American CIA and led to believe they would easily liberate Cuba from the Castro regime.

The Boat

They were twenty-two men on a twenty-two-foot sailboat. In the few hours before dark they sailed toward the American destroyers, away from Girón and away from the sound of battle. The wind was south and they were heading straight toward the larger ships on the horizon. Night came. They never saw the destroyers again.

Most of them were paratroopers who had followed their commander Del Valle aboard the boat; but there were also men from the headquarters company, from the Third Battalion of infantry and from Roberto San Román’s Heavy Gun Battalion. Thrown together by chance in the desperate moments of defeat, they were representative of the Brigade: they ranged in age from eighteen to forty-three; they were humble men, educated men and one of them had been an Ambassador. Only one had had experience with a sailboat.

That first night, Wednesday, April 19, they entered shallow water and ran aground close to the lighthouse of Cayo Guano, south of the Bay of Pigs. An argument broke out: some wanted to go to the lighthouse, kill the occupants and take what food there was; the others were opposed. Del Valle and Roberto San Román, as the principal leaders aboard, decided against an attack. The men jumped into the water and pushed until the boat was free, and they sailed on.

In the morning they examined the boat more closely: they found a small water tank about a quarter full and a storage bin filled with fish. The three or four on top were edible, but underneath the fish were rotten and had to be thrown overboard. With a cigarette lighter and the few pieces of charcoal on board, the fish were cooked, cut into small pieces and divided. They drank the water and ate the fish. It was the nearest thing to a meal they had while on the boat.

On the second day, Friday, they caught two small fish with a hook tied to a lighted flashlight as bait. José García Montes, thirty-seven years old, who had been Cuba’s Ambassador to Japan, a thoughtful, quiet man whom everyone respected, was appointed to cut the fish. While they stood watching silently, he carefully cut the fish into twenty-two tiny pieces, and took the last piece himself. They ate the fish raw, including its intestines. That night a storm came up and the boat was tossed about so severely they were certain it was their last moment. All night long they bailed with small tin cans, fearing they were about to capsize. Roberto San Román was so convinced it was the end that he pulled a piece of shrapnel from his face just to see how big it was. We were thinking it was the last day on earth. The boat weathered the storm and on Saturday they were greeted again by bright sunshine.

Their first two days served as a pattern for the others. They took turns at the rudder and keeping the single sail to the wind. And always they talked about the battle, about the hated Americans, about what fools they had been to let themselves get in such a trap. Del Valle and Roberto tried to steer the conversation away from the invasion—not out of loyalty to the Americans, but in an attempt to maintain morale.

There were quarrels about what they should do. Some, especially those with relatives in Cuba, wanted to go back and land on the western coast of Cuba in Pinar del Rio Province, but Del Valle and Roberto convinced them to go with the wind. By now the coast certainly would be heavily patrolled. So they sailed on.

The sun was a punishment. On the first day, someone had suggested they lean over the boat close to the water and let the waves refresh them. Soon, when they were not attending to the boat, everyone was leaning overboard, splashing water over their bodies. It became almost an obsession: some even tried to put water in their ears, in their nostrils, anywhere that it might possibly soak into their body and save them. They would use the tin cans to dip up the water and pour it over one another. When a man would drop his can and lose it, violent accusations would be made. Because of the size of the boat, they had to sleep in layers—a head on someone’s stomach, feet on someone else.

When they lost sight of the destroyers they planned to sail due south toward Grand Cayman Island, a British possession. But after the storm on the second night the wind changed from south to southwest, and they knew it was going to be a long trip.

The thing that mattered then was to get someplace, Roberto said, because after the second day we knew that nobody was looking for us.

For four more days they sailed southwest. Occasionally, they would see ships far off, and occasionally planes, flying very high. Each time, no matter how far off or how high, everyone started yelling, climbing the mast and waving furiously. Those who still had shirts held them into the wind and waved them back and forth. Each time, when the ship or plane was out of sight, everyone slumped back into the boat and began cursing the United States again.

On the fourth full day, Raúl García Menocal, twenty-one years old, the scion of a family that had produced presidents of Cuba, said he remembered reading that if you placed a cork over a bottle of urine and dropped it in the ocean the salt water would filter through the cork and the urine would become sweet and purified after an hour. Many men urinated in bottles, put the corks on and dropped them into the sea, tied by a string. Before half an hour had gone by, Menocal could not wait. He pulled up his bottle and drank. The experiment had not worked. He was so angry that he threw the bottle down, and from that time on as soon as he urinated he drank.

Each day they had been dropping their line overboard with the flashlight, and on the fifth day a shark nearly as large as the boat itself grabbed the bait and was hooked. For more than an hour, Del Valle and Armando López-Estrada, one of his airborne officers, fought to land him. Three or four times they succeeded in bringing the shark alongside, only to have it rush off the line. At one point, Del Valle said he was going to jump overboard and kill the shark with a knife, and his men had to restrain him. When the shark was pulled close the last time, Del Valle hit it over the head with a paddle. The shark got loose, the paddle was broken and the flashlight was lost. For one long day that shark followed the boat.

On the crude chart they were making they traced their course: from south to southwest. Then a wind shift forced them to turn northwest and it became apparent they were not going to reach even Central America. Although morale was steadily getting lower, it was not until the sixth day that they received their first great shock.

Inocente R. Garcia, a quiet man, called the uncle by everyone, at forty-three was the oldest man on the boat. He knew something about a fishing boat, and he had helped to distribute the men so their weight would be better balanced. Since the beginning he had been coughing and by the end of the fifth day had become worse. He was lying in the boat, half conscious, calling for water and talking incoherently—about his mother, his friends or the war. He turned almost yellow and, to their horror, the men saw green pus coming from his eyes. When they awoke in the morning he was dead.

Del Valle seemed even more shocked than the rest: Garcia had been one of his men, he had trained him and led him. A bitter argument began over what to do with the body.

He didn’t want to bury that man in the ocean, Roberto said. I told him that his corpse was destroying our morale. Del Valle said, ‘Let’s wait a few hours to see if we are rescued and we can deliver his body to his family.’

The rest of the men were equally divided. In the end Del Valle agreed to the burial. Someone spoke a brief eulogy, they knelt and said the rosary and the body, heavily weighted, was thrown into the sea.

Garcia’s death was a heavy blow. As they became weaker, they began talking constantly about food—the food they had thrown away in Guatemala, the food they were going to eat when they got back—and always about water and juices. They began making resolutions: they were going to be better husbands and fathers; they were going to work hard and make their families proud of them. Del Valle, who was single, told Roberto, who was married and had children, that he was going to get married and go to New York with him and forget about the war.

After García died the boat ran into a dead calm. For twenty-five hours they drifted under the broiling sun with the sail hanging slack. The cursing increased. In the midst of the calm a ship passed—close enough, it seemed, to see them. Again men climbed wearily up the mast and waved their tattered clothes and shouted. While they tried to attract attention, the rest laboriously cut part of a spar in two with dull combat knives until they had two rough paddles. Then they took turns paddling toward the ship. Some of the men were so weak that they were unable even to lift the paddle when their turn came. The ship disappeared, but they continued paddling. Now they could see sharks gathering around them.

García Montes, bleeding from the mouth, and so weak he could hardly move, was told to rest. He replied, No, as long as I’m alive I won’t be a burden for you, and he took his turn. Most maddening of all during the calm was the sight of fishes beneath the boat; but there was no way to catch them. At night the wind came up, and they picked up speed under shortened sail.

In the afternoon of the next day one of the men went berserk. He began screaming and shouting curses, blaming all of them for what had happened. He collapsed in the bottom of the boat, still screaming, but staring wildly and fixedly ahead. From those terrible, staring eyes they saw green pus coming. He was placed beside Raúl Menocal, who was also delirious and showing the fatal sign of green pus. The men bathed their sick companions as well as they could, but late in the day Menocal died. A quarter of an hour later, as it was getting dark, the second man died. García Montes, a lawyer by profession, had also studied medicine, and was asked to certify the deaths. With great effort he crawled across the boat until he reached the two men. He held Menocal’s wrist to check his pulse and then called back, I’m sorry, but I’m not sure if he’s dead or not.

He was not feeling well himself, he said, and would wait until the morning to verify the deaths. In the morning all three men were dead, with García Montes still holding Raúl Menocal’s wrist.

This time the service was brief. It was a great effort to throw the three bodies overboard and the men were exhausted when it was done. Nothing was left to weight the bodies and for nearly twenty minutes they could see them, floating.

At some point—no one knows exactly when—they had passed through the Straits of Yucatán and entered the Gulf Stream. In the Gulf the water was wonderfully clear, and the sky a brilliant blue. Very deep below them they could see large schools of fish. To the tormented men it seemed as though the fish were taunting them; swimming close and then deliberately moving away. Men dived into the water trying to snatch them, but it was no use. They had been eight days without food or water. Each day they took turns cooling their bodies in the water, holding onto the rope they had cut in escaping from Girón.

Among the men were two brothers, Joaquin and Isias Rodríguez. Twice Isias had thrown himself into the sea, saying he was going to kill himself. Both times the others had pleaded with him to come back, and both times he had swum back. But on the third time he refused. His brother called out that their mother was waiting, but Isias said he wasn’t going to die as the others had. On the boat they began discussing whether they should swim to bring him back. The life of another man had become of such little value by then that Roberto San Román said, I will go if you reserve that place for me. (It was a special place in the front part of the boat, that only one man could occupy.) The men agreed and Roberto swam to Rodríguez and convinced him by saying they were already in the Gulf and soon would reach the coast. Well, he came back. But after I got to the boat that place had been taken by somebody else, and they didn’t give it to me. The others spoke harshly to Rodríguez and told him that the next time he jumped no one was coming for him.

Some already had lost forty or fifty pounds. Their hair was long and matted, their skin was burned and cracked and their bodies were covered with blisters and boils. On each fingernail and toenail there was a distinct white mark, showing the place where the nails had stopped growing. They all had continual violent stomach cramps. Some had taken to raking in seaweed and eating it. From the second day, when they had caught the small fishes, they had nothing to eat until the ninth day.

Roberto was dozing on the front part of the boat that day when a seagull landed on his leg. Holding his breath and trying not to move his body, he edged his hand slowly toward the bird—but it flew away and perched on the mast. With the infinite patience born of desperation he climbed up until he reached out and caught it.

When I caught the bird I was the important man on the boat, Roberto said. Everybody came to me. I was so weak that I made a little pressure on the bird’s head to kill it, but it’s funny, I was not in a hurry to eat it. After that I put the bird in the water and started cleaning it.

Slowly, feather by feather, he cleaned the bird and then held the prize for all to see before dividing it.

Some of my friends took a leg, another the head. What I took was the chest and the heart.

That afternoon they again sighted ships on the horizon and again yelled and waved, and again fell back in despair. Each man reacted according to his personality—some with prayers, some with blasphemies, some with silence. No one showed the strain more than Del Valle.

With the death of the first man, Del Valle had changed. He was still the recognized leader of them all, the one everyone turned to for the final decision and the one who, more than anyone else, maintained discipline. Yet the death of García had unsettled him. Already weakened from fighting with the shark, he seemed to fail rapidly and became weaker and weaker. Whether he lost his spirit or his faith, no one can say—but he was obsessed with dying. After García’s death, he told Roberto that if he ever died he didn’t want to be thrown overboard, and he didn’t want to be buried at sea. You must hang me on the mast or do something to take me to land. Every day he asked Roberto to inspect his eyes and every day Roberto told him he was all right.

On the night of the tenth day Del Valle became delirious. He was lying next to the mast, with Roberto’s head on his stomach, calling out messages to the American advisor of the paratroop battalion. With his hand on the mast, he tapped out imaginary telegraph messages. He shouted out the coordinates of their position at sea and told the Americans to come and rescue them. The messages had a certain horrible logic: We are weak and sick and dying; then he would pause for a few moments and act as if he were receiving a message. The last thing they heard him say that night was: We are saved. They are coming in a ship. In the morning he was dead.

When Alex died it shocked all of us, Roberto said, because he was the leader. He wanted to do everything. I didn’t work on the part of throwing him over because he was my very best friend and I didn’t want to touch him or see him dead.

The twelfth day at sea began with five men dead and seventeen dying. That afternoon Jorge García Villalta died, with the familiar green pus coming from his eyes. He was thirty-three years old and they felt his death deeply, for he had led them from the beginning in saying the rosary five or six times a day. He had been the kind of man who thought of others and who tried to make them forget their situation with a kind word or a smile or an expression of faith. With his death following closely after Del Valle’s, it seemed that all faith was a mockery, and to hope was futile. For the next day they sailed on in silence.

Then, when there was no hope, the skies darkened and the night of the thirteenth day it began to rain. Momentarily they forgot their weaknesses and jumped up. There were brief fights over who would hold the two or three remaining cans to catch the water, and whether to drink it or save it. Some men opened their mouths as the rain beat down. They drank as much as they could catch. But in the morning they felt worse than before: the taste of the water had tantalized them and made them crave more. Their throats were swollen and they felt as if they had no air in their lungs. To make it worse, they had found another man dead when they woke up. Marcos Tulio, a very strong man, was the seventh to die.

That fourteenth day, the day after the rain, was hot and clear without a cloud in the skies. Suddenly, in the middle of the morning, they saw a sail coming closer. It was a two- or three-masted sailboat, and they could see people walking the deck. The boat spotted them and circled around them three or four times.

They put down their sail, beat on their tin cans, waved their clothing, shouted and tried to climb the mast once more. But the ship did not come closer. They waited and then someone said, We must be close to land. That is why they don’t pick us up. They raised the sail again and continued on. For some minutes the ship followed them; then it turned away and the Cubans moved on, straining to see the land they were sure must be ahead. The day passed and in the night one man called out, Land! He saw the lights of a village. They tried to alter their direction and sail toward the lights, until they realized they were the lights from a ship far in the distance.

Thursday, May 4, the fifteenth day at sea, dawned bright and clear. The fifteen men lay in the boat, barely able to move or talk.

I remember that morning, Roberto said, I was getting a little out of my mind. It is very difficult to explain. I don’t know if I was crazy or not. It’s like being dizzy. I remember I caught some seaweed and showed it to the men and said it had water inside it and I ate it.

In the middle of the afternoon he dived out of the boat and went as deep as he could into the water to try to get cool. When he came up he began drinking salt water—as much as he could hold. About 4:00 he lay down beside three others who were covering their eyes with canvas. López-Estrada joined them. Roberto pulled out his combat knife, handed it to López-Estrada and said, Kill me. I don’t want to die as the others. López-Estrada refused.

About 5:30 in the afternoon, when the sun was beginning to set and the water was very dark and the horizon very bright, Cuélla went to the mast and tended to the sail. He said the sail looked like the gown of the Virgin. He knelt down before it and began praying to the Virgin de la Caridad del Cobre, the patron saint of Cuba, who guards over men in distress at sea.

Joaquin Rodríguez, who was steering the boat, shouted across to him, Don’t pray to the Virgin any more. We have been praying for days. Only Satan can save us. And he began summoning the devil in a loud voice.

At that moment someone shouted, A ship! A ship! and the next thing they remember they were in the water, swimming toward a black ship.

Jane Kramer is the New Yorker’s European correspondent. She is the author of eight books, winner of an American Book Award and a National Magazine Award, and the first American, and first woman, to receive the Prix Européen de I’Essai. Dated August 1982, this profile was published in Europeans (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988).

Joséphine Guezou

My friend Joséphine Guezou cannot forgive the Germans. Joséphine is a Breton villager of sixty-four, with a sick husband and a dipsy uncle around the house, five children, eleven grandchildren, and (at the moment) forty-one rabbits to worry about, and normally she does not have time for old antagonisms. I spent a few weeks in her village this summer—it is a gray stone village on a little estuary of the English Channel—and I know that one reason I felt at home there was that Joséphine worried about me, too. She looks after her villagers the way Mme Gonçalves, my concierge, looks after our Paris street, except that Mme Gonçalves is a professional and tends to regard local life as a challenge in housekeeping, whereas Joséphine is an amateur, a natural backwater busybody, who makes herself useful because she can’t resist her neighbors’ domesticity. Joséphine makes the rounds of the village and the nearby farms in a bright-blue Deux Chevaux, pinning up messages. She lets the vet know that one of the cows is sick at Crec’h Le Coz. She puts the artichoke farmer on the road to the market town in touch with the mason who wants to borrow the farmer’s truck to haul some firewood to his grandfather’s cottage. She writes on the back of used brown wrapping paper, which she gets from her cousin at the quincaillerie, starting small and shaping her letters carefully but always letting loose at the end with an enormous and enthusiastic JOSÉPHINE. There is satisfaction in that signature. It graces barn doors and village mailboxes like a royal seal, conferring a kind of confidence in the day’s arrangements. Joséphine began writing messages for the village in 1942, when she was a ruddy young woman of twenty-four and her husband—the husband who is sick now, with a bad heart and failing eyesight—was underground with the Resistance, coming out in the dark to blow up German trucks or set flares for the Free French soldiers who would parachute into the artichoke farmer’s fields at night, carrying cyanide pills and radio batteries and instructions straight from Charles de Gaulle, across the Channel. Joséphine offered herself to the Resistance with a stubborn and good-natured curiosity, just as she offers herself to the village now. She bought a grammar book and practiced writing. Soon no one in the commune moved against the Germans unless his orders were signed with her enormous JOSEPHINE. The mayor and the policeman and the butcher who spied for them were bewildered, but they never stopped to consider why Joséphine—she had a bicycle then—was always pedalling across the countryside at odd hours. They knew that Joséphine was incorrigibly useful, that she liked bursting into other people’s houses. They knew that anyway she had to deliver the oysters she dredged at low tide to trade for eggs and bread for her little boys. Certainly they never imagined that Joséphine was JOSÉPHINE. The Germans had a meeting, and brought in experts to break the JOSÉPHINE code, but the only code in Joséphine’s messages was the fact that they were all written with her little boys’ red crayon and by the time the Germans thought to search for a red crayon Joséphine had given it to the goat and the goat had eaten it.

Joséphine still writes her messages in red. (She has switched from crayons to red felt-tip pens, which she buys at a stall in town at the Friday market.) And she is still writing about Germans, though most of the Germans who concern her now were not alive forty years ago, and Joséphine—out of politeness, she says—has learned to spell "Guten Morgen, Guten Abend," and "Auf wiedersehen" They are couples, mainly, and sometimes families. They come in the summer in groups of six and eight, and even ten, and they rent the new white cement house that Joséphine has built for her only daughter, Marianne, with the savings of a lifetime, and that Marianne and her husband are slowly furnishing with food processors and fitted sheets and electric lettuce dryers for their old age and their dying. Joséphine has always known where she was going to die. She wanted her daughter to have that same important information, in order to give her life its proper quality and her work its proper conclusion in her own village, her own pays, among her own people, and so Joséphine built the house. She sometimes says that the reason her interest in the sea stops at the oyster beds she dredged in wartime is that the treacherous North Breton currents kill so many of her neighbors before their time and rob them of the death they planned. In Joséphine’s day, people left the sea and farmed if they had the good luck to get hold of some land of their own. They had to plant their cabbage and their artichokes in sandy coastal soil and graze their milk cows in fogs so thick that the only way to gather them in, most winter days, was by sniffing, but they could still get by if they worked hard. Now there is not much profit in farming the little peasant freeholds along the estuary. The oldest of Joséphine’s four sons gave up his few acres and joined a merchant fleet, and comes home to his family only four or five times a year. Her second son is a kind of sea sweeper, working a rig that skims the oil slick from the Channel waters. Her last two sons are fishermen. But Marianne married a village boy to Joséphine’s liking, and the two of them moved to Rennes and went right to work in a cheese factory—and Joséphine knows that one day they are coming home to their own house, with its clumps of pink and blue hortensia by the front wall, because Joséphine has thought to provide her daughter with the dowry of a peaceful dotage. While they are in Rennes—making money, raising children, Gastarbeiter in their own province—Joséphine pays their mortgage with the rent she collects from Germans on holiday

Joséphine is not in business, like the old Cartwright across the road, who moved his family into a shack and put their fine stone house on the market as a summer cottage. She watched the Cartwright’s boy grow up and go off to the big lycée in town and then