IN CAHOOTS, expr. Recently I was chatting with an author friend and mentioned that two of my characters were “in cahoots”—that is to say, conspiring together—and they said, “Have you written a newsletter about ‘cahoots’? Because you should.” So this is that newsletter.
“Cahoots” sounds and looks so US English, and it’s not the kind of fancy word we usually borrow from French, like ballet or sauté. But imagine a US English speaker gleefully fucking up French “cahute” (hut, shack), adding the [h] that isn’t spoken in French, and the connection starts to feel possible.
Were US English speakers really saying “cahute” in the early 19th century? Yes, sort of. They were also saying, or trying to say, that they were in “cohorte” (French for cohort, yet another word with a written h that isn’t pronounced in the original French), meaning working in partnership. It’s not quite clear how, but eventually the two French words got mixed into “cahoots,” taking on both that -s at the end and the connotation of doing something nefarious.
So a “cahute,” a hut or a shack, is almost synonymous with a cabin. Small, rustic dwellings. In English, you used to be able to specify that a cabin was really small by calling it a “cabinet.”
Over its lifetime, “cabinet” has had meanings associated with privacy and secrecy: a jewelry box or storage for other precious items, but also a room one can withdraw to, especially a boudoir. In Italian, a toilet and the room that houses it can both be “il gabinetto,” from French “cabinet,” and this same word can also refer to a council or an advisory body, just like in English we have political cabinets.
There are some things people prefer to do behind closed doors. You know, conspiracies and politics and shit.
Here’s what I’ve read lately in small-r romance, with no shortage of characters in cahoots:
If I Told You, I’d Have to Kiss You (f/f, both cis and lesbian, contemporary) by Mae Marvel. This is the cool-fun-action-sequences kind of spy fiction, not the devastating-human-cost-of-intelligence-work kind of spy fiction. I’m ruined for the former, but I still recognize a good example! So if you have not spent the past 8 months masochistically filling your brain with grim nonfiction about the many horrors the United States of America has covertly visited upon the world, or if you’re very good at compartmentalizing and could potentially enjoy a lovely lesbian romance where the characters happen to work for an organization called the Central Intelligence Agency, then this book might be for you! There are many cute moments, plus they go to a lot of fancy galas and kiss to avert suspicion, which I would love if only they worked for a made-up organization (or maybe even a fully made-up country, sob). I think Mae Marvel, the wife-and-wife author duo of Annie Mare and Ruthie Knox (previously), is very talented and look forward to reading some of their other works.
Here We Go Again (f/f, both cis and lesbian, one is maybe on the ace spectrum, contemporary) by Alison Cochrun. I realize “this made me cry” is not everyone’s favorite thing to hear about a romance novel, but in my defense, this one is pretty much stamped WILL MAKE YOU CRY on the back cover. It’s about Rosemary and Logan, estranged best friends who teach at the same high school, taking their mentor Joe—the first openly gay person either of them ever met—on one final road trip across the country while he’s dying of cancer. The two women can’t stand each other, but they agree to tolerate each other’s presence to honor Joe’s last wish. This is really a feat, writing so frankly about death, and also the gross, messy, annoying, embarrassing parts of being alive, but still being romantic and hopeful. I’ve written about my love of Spreadsheet Heroines before, and this book has an excellent example, opposite a chaotic fuckboy (gender neutral) who won my heart. Especially appreciate the dedication to showing that there are queer people everywhere—rural Idaho, the Deep South, everywhere.
Rear Admiral (m/m, both cis and gay, contemporary, erotic) by ‘Nathan Burgoine. This short story, about dating and slowly falling in love with a porn star famous enough that he has sex toys modeled after his dick, is so funny and cute and grounded in real life. Really great discussion of queer politics and assimilation, too. I loved it.
In things that are neither Romance nor romance, but that do paint a portrait of some people who are in cahoots in the worst of ways, I read Barry Werth’s Prisoner of Lies: Jack Downey’s Cold War. It’s a nonfiction account of the US’s longest-held prisoner of war—Jack Downey, a CIA agent who was in prison in China from 1952-1973. The book is both a biography of its remarkable subject and an overview of US history in the latter half of the 20th century, with a focus on US-China relations. This is not my usual fare, but as mentioned above, I’ve been reading nonfiction about espionage lately. Ostensibly this is because I’m writing fiction with spies in it, though the more I learn about real history, the more I wonder what the fuck I’m doing. Anyway, when the publisher offered me a review copy of Prisoner of Lies, I accepted. It’s riveting and I learned so much from it.
In a recent newsletter about Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American, I wrote about how one of the main characters is a CIA agent who believes he can create a “Third Force,” neither colonialist nor Communist, in Vietnam. It turns out Graham Greene did not invent the idea of a Third Force; this was in fact a real obsession of the CIA’s in the early Cold War, the idea that they could just invent (and arm) popular movements in countries where they wanted to topple the government. This idea failed everywhere they tried it, but that didn’t stop them from trying it over and over and over again. The most famous failure of the Third Force idea is the Bay of Pigs Invasion, in which the CIA tried to organize a force of Cuban exiles to invade Cuba in 1961 and the force was crushed within days.
That public catastrophe was years after another, much more private failure, the one that was officially called “Third Force”—and the one got Jack Downey twenty years in prison in China. Downey, as a 22 year old in 1952, was tasked with flying a team of Chinese soldiers who were loyal to neither Mao nor Chiang into the People’s Republic of China so they could… eavesdrop? foment unrest? It’s still unclear to me what exactly the CIA thought this small team was ultimately going to accomplish, but people sure did suffer and die for it. (In case you’re wondering if the older, higher-ranking people who made this boneheaded plan ever experienced one single consequence for it: no. They did not.) The Chinese soldiers were discovered; some switched allegiance to save their lives, others were punished or killed. Unaware of this reality, the CIA sent people to make contact. On a flight into Chinese airspace to retrieve the team using a “snatch pickup”—a bonkers, life-threatening maneuver in which a low-flying airplane picks up human beings from the ground—the pilots of Downey’s plane were shot and Downey and another agent were captured.
Downey was charged with spying for the US and sentenced to life in prison. The Chinese government indicated many, many times over the years of his imprisonment that they would free him and send him home if the US would simply acknowledge that Downey was a spy. The US refused to do this. This country condemned a twenty-two year old to live twenty years of his life in prison simply to avoid admitting the truth.
The book really brings home how long twenty years is by bouncing between descriptions of Downey’s life in prison (bleak and confined, but far more humane than what you might be imagining) and the vast scope of events in the outside world. Downey was in prison for four different US presidents. He missed almost the entirety of the Vietnam war.
How does a person survive that? Downey was remarkably mentally tough. He did his chores and daily exercises with singleminded determination. When he finally came home, he was very reserved about his experience. He seemed to bear no particular grudge against the People’s Republic of China for imprisoning him (he had, after all, committed a crime) or against the United States for abandoning him. Downey mostly declined questions, saying that the story was boring and anybody would have done what he had done. As this book shows, neither of those things is true.
Also, just a note in case this review is insufficiently emphasizing it, and honestly it should go without saying, but every history of the CIA is horrifying. On the scale of things, this book was mild.
I won’t inflict the rest of my nonfiction reading on you, but please know I have said enough about it within my toddler’s hearing that he has asked, on occasion, “Is Mama talking about the See Aye Eyy?” My child has no idea what this means, yet still I have felt so guilty for corrupting his innocence.
That’s all for this time! I’ll be back in your inbox on December 15.