Karen Spears Zacharias

Another swing and a miss from Karen Zacharias, who has chosen to create a fictionalized childhood for a young Virginia woman whose forced sterilization at the age of 17 became the subject of a Supreme Court case with far-reaching precedents. Zacharias is a talented and empathic writer who might better have set her sights on the system which allowed the practice, and what it meant to thousands of American girls and women in the early-to-mid 20th Century.

In the 1920s, the pseudo-science of eugenics was receiving considerable populist support. Theodore Roosevelt, Helen Keller, Winston Churchill, W.E.B. Du Bois, George Bernard Shaw, Aldous Huxley, Margaret Sanger, and of course the Poster Boy (and eventual destroyer) of the movement, Adolph Hitler, among others, thought the overall condition of humankind could be greatly improved if “unfit” specimens were prevented from reproducing. And the judgment of who was “unfit” rested, of course, with wealthy, powerful, white Christian men.

Carrie Buck was removed from the custody of her mother at the age of four and placed in foster care when her mother, abandoned by her husband, came to depend mostly on prostitution to support herself and her child. Utilized mostly for free labor in her foster home, Carrie was removed from school after the fifth grade, and her domestic services were offered to neighbors, with the money earned going into her foster parents’ pockets. When she became pregnant at 16, the foster parents successfully petitioned the court to have her confined to the Lynchburg Colony for Epileptics and the Feeble-Minded and to take custody of the child when it was born.

Once at the Colony, Carrie became a prime candidate for sterilization, based on her supposed mental and moral deficiencies. She was not the first of the female inmates sterilized there, but she was chosen by the Colony’s medical director (and staunch practitioner of eugenics) to serve as a test case to establish the state’s right to perform such surgeries at the discretion of medical staff. This arose at least partially from his having recently been sued in civil court for performing sterilizations on a mother and daughter from the same family, both of whom had been remanded to the Colony without the knowledge of the family’s husband and father.

Buck v. Bell ultimately worked its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled against Carrie Buck and established a legal precedent which would allow any state to legalize the practice. No less a legal light than Oliver Wendell Holmes, then an Associate Justice, wrote the decision, stating “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind."

The odds, and the level of horror, don’t get much bigger than this, but Zacharias has chosen to devote the first half of the book to presumably-imagined details of Carrie's childhood, her mother’s childhood, and the Black midwife whose association with the family over three generations was both intimate and caring.

The problem is that the reader doesn’t really have a clue as to what is fact and what is fiction. Was Carrie’s pregnancy the result of rape, as theorized in the book? We don’t know, because if Carrie ever told anyone this was so, it can’t easily be documented. Ditto the subtle hints that the husband in the foster family may have been her biological father. If true, that would have provided some understandable motive for their fostering Carrie, for her foster-mother’s dislike and abuse of the child, and even for the couple requesting custody of Carrie’s baby.

Carrie herself is problematical in this mix, for she is written as a silent, passive child who at no point speaks up in her own defense, and who really didn’t understand what was happening to her once she was swept into the brutal system of warehousing and dehumanizing developmentally or physically disabled individuals.

There’s a tremendously powerful story hiding here, but it’s just never fully realized.… (meer)

This disappointing true crime tale never quite comes together, as author Zacharias tries to balance the story of two separate murders with scientific investigation into the possibility that inherited traits may predispose some people to violent acts.

Zacharias takes as her case study a grandfather / grandson pair who collectively were responsible for two murders, an attempted murder, a kidnapping, and a rape, and who, although they briefly lived under one roof during the grandson’s childhood, had little or no contact beyond that brief period. Lincoln’s issues apparently surfaced in adulthood, when professional failures and alcohol-abuse issues destroyed his marriage. Chang grew up in an extremely repressive Fundamentalist Christian home that relentlessly controlled most emotional responses and isolated Chang and his sister from the society around them. Chang’s behavioral issues began to emerge in adolescence and came to a head after he went AWOL from the Marine Corps.

Zacharias frequently circles back from the acts of these two men to the "murder gene" notion cited in the title.
At the core of the question lie scientific studies suggesting that a malfunction of the MAOA gene may cause the build-up of certain brain chemicals that trigger or inhibit nerve impulses. If the gene is not functioning properly some researchers believe an excess of neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine may accumulate in the system and this seems to predispose individuals to violence when under stress.

But Zacharias never presents any evidence that Lincoln and Chang shared such a gene, or even that they were ever tested for its presence.

Even more problematical is when Zacharias suggests that more MAOA study and early intervention with children carrying the defect could help these people deal with the tendency in positive ways. She is, however, woefully short on specifics. What agency, for instance, should be tasked with testing the genetic makeup of every newborn? Is such testing even possible within a culture that values privacy, let alone practical when looking at three million or so newborns per year in the U.S. alone? And if these children’s genetic makeup were to be determined to be problematical, what then? What kind of intervention is appropriate, and who would be responsible for putting it into action? Who would make the determination as to which children would be included? How does one maneuver a slippery slope that could lead to eugenics, or to the propping up of racial / ethnic prejudices? Would the funds and energy devoted to such a studies not be better spent on human services issues such as education, nutrition, and general health care (including mental health intervention)?

Big questions, and better suited to a bigger canvas than this one, which ends up concentrating largely on Chang’s crimes, committed in the small Oregon city of Pendleton in 2012, 40 years after Lincoln’s offenses in Michigan. The investigation into the murder of Amyjane Brandhagen and the devastating beating of another Pendleton woman a year later, provides a fascinating look into the difficulties faced by what is essentially a small police department, unaccustomed to dealing with crimes of this nature. Zacharias may have been better off focusing on this alone, and leaving the “murder gene” question to be handled on a broader scale.… (meer)

After contacting all of the men who served with her father, Karen returns to Vietnam to visit where her father died. The death of her father affected the whole family in a negative way. The whole family would not talk about their feelings. She and her brother felt abandoned by her mother, she was working so hard to support the family. They both acted out, while the youngest child saw what her brother and sister did and chose not to cause their mother further grief. A very interesting read for those who grew up during the Vietnam era.… (meer)

"Burdy didn't set out that morning aiming to get shot by the end of the day."

An opening line like that is almost certain to draw the reader in, but ultimately the shooting has little to do with the rest of the book. It's essentially a device to bring Burdy's friends and family to her bedside as she, delirious, relives a decades-old journey to deal with a family tragedy. It's not until the last few pages that the secrets she uncovered on this trip come forward to touch someone intimately affeted by them.

This sequel to "Mother of Rain" can be read as a stand-alone, but it definitely draws from the events in the earlier book. In that novel, a troubled young woman appears to be moving toward a life of happiness and normalcy, but ultimately is shattered by events beyond her control and takes her own life. The child she left is the "Rain" of the title.

Rain is now a young adult, and Burdy -- who has been involved with the family since before his birth, has discovered something astonishing and possibly devastating about the events that orphaned him. Her journey of discovery forms the flashback central core of the book, and her decision to share those discoveries with Rain brings the tale back to the present and more or less closes it. (I say more or less because there is definitely a door left open for another story to unspool.)

Burdy is an interesting character, and Zacharias has an unerring ear for the language patterns and folk beliefs of the people of Appalachia, where the framework story is set. But the extremely short chapters - averaging only two or three pages in length -- break up the rhythm of the tale, and the two climaxes -- what Burdy discovers on her flashback journey and how she chooses to reveal that discovery to Rain in the present, lack any real emotional punch. There's also a romance subplot that just sort of wanders off without resolution, which is always disturbing.

This is a quick, enjoyable read that doesn't demand much of the reader and delivers rewards in kind.… (meer)