My Sag Harbor Story

To end the year, I wanted to approach this novel a little differently. Because Sag Harbor is so rooted in mundane details and ordinary moments, parts of it kept reminding me of experiences from my own life.

I wanted to talk about some parallels I've found in this book. Quick recap: a French kid says something about Benji, and Benji tells his mom about it. About a week later his dad confronts him and says the kid basically called him a slur, then asks why he didn't hit him. Benji's dad (James) proceeds to hit Benji 3 times while asking him if the French kid can hit him harder. 

My brother is French, just like the boy who may or may not have been calling Benji a racial slur. And my father is a hegemonic Black man whose mindset consists of the following: "If I can't make you smarter, I'll make you stronger" "I'll give you a reason to cry" "It hurts me more than it hurts you."

Some insight on my brother:

- 2 years older than me

- Arab/Dominican ethnically

- French/American by nationality

- Raised in France with his mom

- Accent = heavy

I won't bother to explain the family tree because that's a whole other story, but in short, our dad (my stepdad) had moved in with my mom and I in Chicago when I was 5. Every summer my brother would come visit from France and we'd go to summer camp together in Humboldt Park. If you don't know, Humboldt Park is a Puerto Rican diaspora. Every summer they host a huge Puerto Rican fest. Music blasted from every direction, people carried flags bigger than the world, and the sidewalks smelled like fried food and smoke. 

When we were 8 and 10, we went to one of these fests. My brother and dad wore the loudest Dominican flag jerseys one could find. Throughout the entire fest, my brother would yell "think fast" before throwing something at me, a ball or a stick or a wad of paper. I suppose I wasn't a very fast thinker, because I kept getting hit by whatever he decided was funny to throw. Every time it happened, a string of stop its and quit its followed.

Similar to Benji, a lesson my father tried to teach me repeatedly was to fight back. If I didn't, I'd get in trouble for "takin' shit from people like a coward." <--something my dad told me often.

There was this constant expectation that pain should toughen you into somebody sharper, faster, harder to embarrass. In Sag Harbor, James believes violence can prepare Benji for the world before the world gets to him first. My father carried that same logic, so I felt like I understood this family dynamic more than I'd like to admit. The problem is that when violence becomes a lesson, eventually somebody learns it.

So, by the end of the night, after hours of being told to think fast, I beat up my brother. Curled in a ball with blood dripping down his nose and I kept yelling "think fast, French boy, think fast" while hurling my fists at him. Despite what it may sound like, it was not a gruesome fight. My brother was prone to nosebleeds. Maybe my fist in his face wasn't the reason the nosebleed occurred. I guess we'll never know. In hindsight, I also wonder why nobody intervened in the moment. The nuances of this situation evade me. 

I was subject to my father's belt when we got back to the apartment 2 hours later. And like in Sag Harbor, there were times where the rules changed and you'd only find out after you had already broken them. I know you may feel a deep sense of injustice here, Reader. Obviously, he had his coming; Not this night, and not for that reason, but there were handfuls of times where he got the short end of the stick.

I think that's part of what Sag Harbor captures so well. The tension isn't only in the punishment itself, it's in never fully understanding when punishment will arrive, who deserves it, or what lesson is actually being taught. Benji spends so much of the novel trying to understand the codes around him, the social rules at Sag Harbor, the expectations of masculinity, race, coolness, toughness. To prevent flare ups, everybody learns how to shrink and calculate themselves.