2011: MOON OVER MANIFEST by Clare Vanderpool
The movement of the train rocked me like a lullaby.
"Two humans living in a place that hates humanity/
Disposable family, disposable dignity/
Disposable Holocene, disposable packaging, disposable TV screen/
Disposable everything."
-AJJ
"It has been a terrible year/
It has been a terrible year/
But it’s not gonna stop moving forward/
Even if it feels like nothing’s ever gonna change/
The sun’s gonna rise in the morning/
And you have to live anyway."
-Jeff Rosenstock
As I'm writing this, I'm sitting in the Newark airport. I'm there a week after the Canadian wildfires made the entire tri-state area look like Dark Souls 31. I can see out the window, and on the other side of the airport building is a giant plume of black smoke, like something big blew up. I have no idea what it is and no way to find out. There’s literally nothing I can do about it, I’m not going to leave the airport, I’ve already checked a bag. Nobody else in the airport seems even curious about this giant thing of black smoke that’s scarring the sky. I check my flight to see if it's still on time, and since it is, I just try not to think about whatever is causing this.
Are you starting to feel like the Earth is actively trying to get rid of us? I feel that way. I feel like the human race has blown it, and we’ve pissed the Earth off enough that it is sending every plague, every disaster, every storm it can to finally wipe us off itself like it’s scraping the dog crap off of its own shoe. I’ve been listening to the title track off of the new AJJ album, quoted above, and I appreciate the truth of the lyrics “Since we were a child, we knew that water's running out/Since we were a child, we knew what they should do about/The grinding down, the vicious gears, the gnashing of the teeth/Disposable everything, disposable everything”, even if I don’t super-enjoy hearing them. We deserve The Happening to happen to us, and I’m referring specifically to the M. Night Shyamalan film where trees start rebelling and killing humanity, and also Mark Wahlberg is hilariously miscast as a high school science teacher.
I, obviously, didn’t invent feeling like this, and M. Night Shyamalan didn’t either (although he did invent something called “narf”). I do think that every generation, to some extent, thinks they’re witnessing the end of humanity. People thought it was going to happen in a terrorist attack, or a nuclear war, or a volcanic eruption. When I started Newburied, I was looking for something new to write about, post-pandemic, post-insurrection, post-feeling-like-there-was-ever-a-chance-we-could-get-back-to-the-way-things-were. This era felt very new to me, and I wanted to write something about that new era, and what I landed on was “how am I going to raise my kids in a world that feels like it’s getting worse all of the time.” And then, to make it more fun, I brought in my lifelong obsession with the Newbery medal so I could goof off more and also focus a little more on “what stories do I tell my kids in a world that feels like it’s getting worse all of the time.” But now I’m asking something closer to “what stories do I tell my kids in a world that feels like it’s ending.” Again, I do think that every generation, to some extent, thinks they’re witnessing the end of humanity. My generation might be the first one to think it’s going to happen when the Earth dries up and rich people just gouge us for every penny we have left.
Except we’re not the first ones to think that, people thought that about a hundred years ago, when there was a dust bowl and a depression, and it’s in the misery of 1936 that we find twelve-year-old Abilene Tucker, sent to a desiccated town in Kansas while her father looks for work, feeling like she’s probably going to witness civilizational collapse while she’s waiting for him to come back. And, as Abilene learns very quickly, she is also not the first person to feel this way.
2011 Newbery medalist and State of Kansas Notable Book2 Moon Over Manifest is told in two parallel timelines: one is Abilene’s story in 1936, as she sits tight with her dad’s old preacher-slash-bootlegger friend and explores the town, and one is the story she learns of the town’s past through discovering her father’s old letters in hidden in her bedroom. As it turns out, everyone also thought the world was going to end in 1918, because there was a war that was going to kill everyone on Earth. And hey, once we were a good way into that war, there was a plague that was also going to kill everyone on Earth. And, for good measure, it turns out violent white nationalism was also having kind of a heyday in America.
The problem is that I only find one of these stories interesting, and the book is over 300 pages long; there’s a world in which the 1930s timeline - in which Abilene makes some friends, learns the history of the town, and tries to understand who her father was - gets cut out of Moon Over Manifest and the book becomes significantly tighter and more enjoyable. But the 1910s timeline? Oh man, that one is right up my alley. This mining town of various immigrant communities is kept under the thumb of a coal baron who moonlights as a Klan grand wizard on the side. When presented with one slim chance to buy a piece of land and finally put some pressure on their town’s boss, a troublemaking teenage drifter - later revealed to be Abilene’s dad from Back In The Day - comes up with a long con to save the town. And it’s pretty risky and pretty out there, and nobody’s really into the plan. But the different fraternal organizations from the different communities in Manifest did come together for one night to hear out the kid, and the town matriarch convinces them to go along with the plan:
“Do you forget where you come from?” She stared them down. “What about the others who depend on us? Those who are left behind?” Her breathing was heavy. “Casimir Cybulskis.” She raised her chin at him. “When your village was attacked, did your grandmother not hide you in a barn? Did she not give you her life savings to send you to America? “Callisto Matenopoulos. Your mother. Did she not work three jobs to provide you with the chance to make the same voyage? “And, Nikolai Yezierska? What about your family? They had to make a choice. Which son will go to America and which son will be forced to join the army? Your older brother. He insists you go and he will stay, no?” There was a stunned silence. They hadn’t realized she knew so much about them. “They sacrifice to send us here.” she continued. “And for what? To live a dream of freedom and prosperity? Pah. They would be ashamed of us. What is it to defy the Devlin mine to those who have risked everything?”
While this conversation is going on, it feels like the world is ending, on every possible scale. Every family in Manifest has sent a son to fight in the Great War, and many of them will end up dead or mutilated. The Klansman owns the mine, he pays everyone in scrip, he owns every store and every house in town, and there’s no way out. And there’s some really nasty version of the flu that’s starting to spread. Everything was dread and hopelessness, the feeling that this was the last go-round for civilization and everyone was just going to watch the world collapse in slow motion, was going to watch Earth finally shrug everyone off once and for all. But everyone in Manifest, for one second, remembered where they came from, what their stories were, and pulled together to finally fight back.
Abilene learns this story when she’s feeling some dread and hopelessness of her own, living in another time when the Earth is trying to get rid of everyone. And there's value in this story, in these stories: as one character says, “The Lord himself knew the power of a good story. How it can reach out and wrap around a person like a warm blanket.” Decades ago, the families of Manifest sacrificed and took risks for the people they loved. Because they did that, they could bring themselves to sacrifice and take risks for people they barely knew, people they shared a town with. And Abilene finds something there to keep her going: "It was like putting together a big family tree. And even though I wasn’t familiar with the tales they told, I felt like I wasn’t just reading about them. It was more like remembering them. As if somehow their memories were becoming mine."
During my trip to Newark, my coworkers and I went on one of those booze cruises on the Hudson, saw lower Manhattan and the Brooklyn Bridge, saw the Statue of Liberty, the whole thing. I was still a pretty new face at this company, but because of how I look (I wear glasses and stare at my phone a lot), people like to ask me about buildings as if I'm some sort of expert. "Tony what's that big square building" et cetera. I usually answer these questions by looking up the answers in my phone, but I figured out one building for my coworkers pretty quickly: the Museum of Immigration, which is on Ellis Island. If you came to America in a certain time and from a certain place, your name is written down there, and maybe your family remembers you generations later. One of my great-grandparents came from Italy, through Ellis Island, to America in the late 19th century. His name is there on Ellis Island. I've seen it. He lived in West Virginia, and then his daughter grew up, moved to Pennsylvania, and raised a family, and her daughter grew up, moved to Illinois, and raised a family, and now her son (me) is raising his own family and wondering how to do it in a world that feels like it's ending. My great-grandfather probably felt the same way at some point in his life. He wanted to raise a family but he didn’t know how to do it in a world that felt like it was ending. So he took a huge risk and he came to a country he didn’t know, to a place where the world didn’t feel like it was ending, for his family. And then he and his children took risks and sacrificed for their children, and for their towns, and for their unions, so that decades after they were gone, their descendants could live in a world that wouldn’t feel like it was ending. And now I’m here, still in this strange new world, eleven miles from the island my great-grandfather landed on, hoping that I can live a life and raise a family that he won’t be ashamed of, all while trying to ignore that black plume of smoke and telling myself that it probably isn’t anything real.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1972 medalist, Mrs. Frisby And The Rats Of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brien.
And, in retrospect, about three weeks before the Canadian wildfires made Chicago look like Dark Souls 3.
Real award.