Yesterday for the first time I read a sad, brilliant piece of creative nonfiction in The Georgia Review, a periodical my long-ago house mate once appeared in. And like my former house mate, the author of this story was a Pushcart Press award winner.
The title is “If Your Dreams Don’t Scare You” by Joni Tevis, and it is a tale of a hazing gone wrong but much, much more. I find it very sad, very engaging. You can read the story at this link.
Here is the storyteller’s impressive bio:
Joni Tevis
Joni Tevis is the author of two books of essays, most recently The World Is on Fire: Scrap, Treasure, and Songs of Apocalypse (Milkweed Editions, 2015). Her essays have appeared in Orion, The Southern Review, Oxford American, Poets & Writers, and elsewhere. The winner of a Pushcart Prize and a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship, she serves as the Bennette E. Geer Professor of English at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. She is at work on a new book of nonfiction about music, destruction, and iconic American landscapes.
Here is one section:
I don’t remember what they called that night. Someone drove us to a house off campus. Someone blindfolded us. Someone lined us up around the perimeter of a pool. They made us practice fundamentals—low mark time (heel up, toes down), high mark time (up to the knee), glide step (dig in the heel, turn up the toe). There was a girl ahead of me in line. I couldn’t see her, but I knew she was there.
We were in college marching band together, and there were thirty-five people in our section. Maybe eight of us were new. I tried to think how I would describe this moment, first to myself, then to someone else: that the air pressed in, humid and hot. That the pool’s cement edge warmed the soles of my feet. That layers of white tissue bandaged my eyes.
Then the girl ahead of me hit a brick wall. The impact knocked out her front teeth, bloodied her nose, and gave her a concussion…. Someone drove her to the emergency room, and the night ended. I remember some of the seniors were disappointed they didn’t get to do everything they had planned. They were going to tie us hand and foot and throw us blindfolded into the pool.
And this below:
Journalism professor Hank Nuwer has studied hazing since 1978 and maintains a database of hazing deaths on his website, on which he writes: “At least one U.S. school, club or organization hazing death has been reported every year from 1959 to 2019, according to my latest research effective August 2019.” I sift through newspaper reports of hazing events. One young man choked to death on a piece of raw liver; another drowned in the Colorado River. A young woman fell seven stories from a balcony; another died in a car crash. Death after death from alcohol poisoning, blunt force trauma. “A terrific blow to the head.” “Remained in a coma until he died.”
The events I read about range from the military (punctured eardrum; set her clothes on fire) to the workaday (Terre Haute, Indiana: “A federal prison guard fired for hazing a trainee will try to get his job back, saying the initiation of a fellow officer was ‘a past practice and it has been condoned for years’ ”). They take place in colleges (“beaten like an animal”) and in high schools (one band in Illinois—with faculty and parents as chaperones—allegedly made students “put bags over their heads [and drove them] on a bus to a wooded area where they were sprayed with bug repellent and led to the ceremony . . . ‘similar to a sacrifice scene from an occult movie’ and a knighting, ‘including tall sword-wielding men in costumes reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan’ ”).
And the credits say this: “I also relied on the work of Hank Nuwer, who has spent much of his career writing about hazing.”
Needless to say, I plan on reading more of the stories of the talented Professor Tevis. Hope you will, too.