By our second day at Camp Crescendo, the girls in my Brownie troop had decided to kick the asses of each and every girl in Brownie Troop 909. Troop 909 was doomed from the first day of camp; they were white girls, their complexions a blend of ice cream: strawberry, vanilla. They turtled out from their bus in pairs, their rolled-up sleeping bags chromatized with Disney characters: Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Mickey Mouse; or the generic ones cheap parents bought: washed-out rainbows, unicorns, curly-eyelashed frogs. Some clutched Igloo coolers and still others held on to stuffed toys like pacifiers, looking all around them like tourists determined to be dazzled.

At the end of the first week of teaching, Lynnea found herself having to raise her voice to get their attention—something she wasn’t used to doing. They didn’t quite yell and scream, but their collective whimsical talk was the unsettling buzz of a far-off carnival. When she sent them to the principal’s office, they snickered and bugged out cartoon eyes, heading toward the office for a few paces, then bolting in the opposite direction. She found herself sharking the room, telling duos here and there that they should not be talking about their neon fingernail polish or the Mos Def lyrics in front of them, but the novel at hand, Their Eyes Were Watching God. They were quiet for a moment, controlling their grins as if they were hiding something live and wriggling between the covers of their notebooks.

You could only truly speak in tongues when all worldly matters were emptied from your mind, or else there was no room for God. To do that, you had to be thinking about him, praising him, or singing to him. She had tried at church and she had tried at home, but nothing worked. In her room, she would genuflect, pushing her head against her bed ruffle, reciting scriptures, praying, singing, concluding it all with a deep, waiting silence. But nothing would come out. Her only solace was that Marcelle was three years older and hadn’t spoken in tongues either.

Then, without any warning, Taylor could speak Abini. June and Peter could not recall a learning period, a month when the girl communicated awkwardly with the villagers. By the time June noticed her daughter speaking the native language, the girl was spitting out long sentences at her friends, laughing with them, and joining in songs and chants, and when June’s back was turned to Taylor and her friends, she could barely distinguish her daughter’s voice from those of the other children.

When he woke up, he did not know where he was, and the red, grease-covered boys and the men chanting in Abini began to blend into a dark pattern where he could no longer make out individuals. The men started to play bamboo flutes, and the sound disappointed Peter. The flutes sounded distant and reedy, and the music had no melody, only an insistent percussive drive. He looked around the room and tried to find Makino or any of the other men he had come from Abini with, but he could not distinguish any of the people around him.

It was only when he saw [his daughter] Taylor, sitting near the door with poinsettia leaves crowning her head, that he realized he was hallucinating. Ah, he thought, I am really very sick now. And then he was aware of fainting into Makino’s arms.

She called Taylor inside and asked her to pronounce the words. Taylor stared at her mother, silent, with large eyes that seemed full of fear. For a moment June thought that she would say something, or refuse to be with her, but she stayed there, quiet, unhappy, and finally began to speak Abini so quickly the words sounded like hiccups in her mouth. June mimicked her daughter and heard how awkwardly her own voice wrapped around the language—she knew she sounded wrong and comical.

“I can’t get it right,” she said.

“Try, Mom. Try harder,” Taylor said.

Gruel, crumbs on a table

of ice, a labyrinth of snow:

and infinite distances

in the small box of the kitchen.

Mother chopped pieces

of her heart into the skillet.

Brother and I heard oil sizzle

until we huddled in shame.

She salted the meat with tears.

She cried if we ate

and cried if we refused to eat,

warning You’ll go hungry.

Admit it. You hate the body

because it can be broken,

stabbed, shot full of holes.

And so you become a butcher.

Say the spirit cannot be broken.

Say you see better than anyone

how fiercely an ox, a hog, a cock

fights to stay alive, until the end.

You wonder how nothing seems

to stop this rat: sucking, gnawing

through cement walls to snatch

scraps of gristle – not knowing

what you need to kill, or why.

Beat it with a shovel: skin-slither,

pestle of skull and will. Admit

it shamed you to cover with dung.

I don’t mean to make you cry.

I mean nothing, but this has not kept you

From peeling away my body, layer by layer,

The tears clouding your eyes as the table fills

With husks, cut flesh, all the debris of the pursuit.

Poor deluded human: you seek my heart.

Hunt all you want. Beneath each layer of mine

Lies another skin: I am pure onion – pure onion

Of outside and in, surface and secret core.

Like most of the fight world’s habits, hand wrapping is both practical and ritual. Done properly, it protects the hands from damage without giving a fighter an unfair advantage. Like boxing gloves or a football helmet, wrapping functions as both armor and sword, a protective measure that allows you to hit harder and more frequently than you could without it. One of the officials murmured, “That’s beautiful.” Colonna said “Thank you” without looking up from his work.

The Polkaholics, sweating like stevedores, are in fine ironic form, decked out in white shoes, black pants, white ruffled shirts, and stunning leopard-print vests with matching oversize bow ties. All wear thick-framed glasses, and anyone standing anywhere near the stage can smell the torrent of Old Spice with which they douse themselves, Method actor style, before a show. They do not play polka versions of rock tunes, an ill-advised crossover strategy that has produced far too many bizarre novelty songs by polka bands. Rather, they play original songs and well-chosen polka covers that make use of rock sensibilities, winkingly sampled classic-rock phrases, and bursts of the jet-engine guitar whine common to certain forms of punk and heavy metal—all undergirded by drums and bass playing straight-ahead, hurry-up polka rhythms.

Tom C. cultivated a morbid fascination with clowns. Instead of merely doodling in class, he created obsessive dossiers of clown types: the savage Jester, the crocodile-teared Sad Clown, the enigmatic Bowler Hat, the rare Plume Clown, the annihilating Whiteface. He practiced different stylized ways of saying the word clown—drawing it out, barking it sharply, stretching his rubbery features to make a demented face while he said it, adopting a strangled or a booming voice—as if he could figure out what was hiding in the word by turning it inside out. He drew up clown scenarios and composed clown ditties, and invented ancient traditions to which they belonged. He tried to figure out if it would be worse to wake up one night to find a clown at the foot of your bed or to think you had dreamed it and then find a deflated balloon in your room the next morning.