IMPEACH, v. If you look up “impeach” in a modern English-French dictionary, you’ll be given a translation along the lines of “lancer une procédure d’impeachment contre” (to start a process of impeachment against) because the concept of “impeachment” that’s in the news right now is specific to Anglo-American law.
But the word “impeach” arrived in English through French. It comes from the verb empêcher, which means “to stop, to hinder, to prevent.” Empêcher is not related to pêcher (to fish, or in context as a noun, a peach tree) or pécher (to sin), though those guesses are reasonable enough. Old French had another verb from the very same Latin root and with the same meaning, empiéger, whose relationship to piège (trap) is easier to see.
The Latin root in question here is pedica, an ankle fetter, related to pedis, foot. The Latin verb is impedicare, to put in fetters. In Old French, its meaning expanded to including stopping or preventing. In contemporary US English, it now means “to bring a charges against a public official” with a side of “it’s about damn time.” Bring back the ankle fetters.
I did not read any Capital-R Romance this week, but I did speak a lot of very uncertain French, including a conversation in which I tried to explain to a friend from the Democratic Republic of the Congo what is happening in the US right now. I said personne ne sait (nobody knows) a lot.
She asked me if our president was trying to have his political enemies killed, because that is what politics means to her. I said “no,” and then I came home to the news that Trump had said that the whistleblower should be executed, so I guess we do know—not that he’s tried, but that he wants to. He’s always saying the quiet part out loud.
Every day I think about this moment in The Wire:
This week in small-r romance, I read a lot of books, and they almost have a theme. Three of these are about America, celebrating the culture and lives of Black and Latinx Americans without pushing aside the ugly truth of this country, and four of them deal with living outside the law. A few of them contain a criminal fuckin’ conspiracy.
Trashed (cis het m/cis het f, contemporary) by Mia Hopkins, which was just as gorgeous as its predecessor Thirsty (discussed 9/8/19), with the same strong pacing, setting, and an equally interesting pair of people at the center of the story. Again, I loved the plot about this group of characters trying to open a small brewery in their neighborhood as much as I loved the (very sexy) romance between impulsive ex-con Eddie and authoritative chef Carmen. Content warnings: child abuse, gang violence, references to drug use and addiction, parental and sibling death in backstory, grief, sex.
American Fairytale (cis gay m/cis gay m, contemporary) by Adriana Herrera, which takes place in Harlem and the Bronx and features Afro-Latinx characters and culture and really celebrates New York City’s diversity. It’s a sweet story of prickly, independent Camilo finally letting his guard down for his Prince Charming, generous, upstanding millionaire Tom. Content warnings: mentions of domestic violence, a character suffers from depression and anxiety, sex.
The Rat-Catcher’s Daughter (trans ace f/cis ace m, historical, short story) by KJ Charles, which is exactly as brilliant as KJ Charles always is. This fits a lot of setting and character into a small word count, introducing us to music hall singer Miss Christiana and Stan Kamarzyn, fence for stolen goods, who find themselves in trouble with a gangster in 1890s London. It made me even more excited for Gilded Cage, the next novel in this series. Content warnings: transmisogyny, misgendering, violence.
Rulebreaker (cis bi f/cis lesbian f, sci-fi) by Cathy Pegau, which is a futuristic heist story starring career criminal Liv. The opening scene, in which Liv runs into her ex-husband while the two of them are trying to rob the same bank, is fantastic. Liv’s ex invites her to join his crew, and Liv infiltrates a mining corporation by posing as an assistant to R.J. Talbot, a powerful executive with secrets. Liv intends to get close to Talbot to steal from her, not fall for her. Naturally, she gets more than she bargained for. Their scenes together crackle with chemistry, but habitual romance readers should be warned that this book is as much heist as it romance—Talbot doesn’t show up in the first 40% of the book. I think she’s worth the wait. Content warnings: violence, major character death, sex.
White Whiskey Bargain (cis het m/cis het f, contemporary)by Jodie Slaughter, which takes place in Kentucky. Kentucky! My home state is responsible for perpetrating horrors on this country, but one thing we’ve done right is whiskey. Jodie Slaughter (a fellow Kentuckian) sets this story in a contemporary Appalachia still ruled by feuding moonshine families who operate outside the law. Heroine Hannah is a leader in the Hawkins family, Black Americans who’ve been making moonshine in Appalachia since before Prohibition, and they’re getting harassed and attacked by a white family who want to drive them out. Hannah agrees to marry the scion of a rival family, the Mexican-American Mezas, to cement an alliance against their mutual enemy. That happens in chapter one. You don’t often see marriage-of-convenience as a plot device in contemporary romance, but this book joyfully gets right to it, and it’s fun as hell. Content warnings: violence, arson, kidnapping, racism, death of a parent before the story, grief, a minor character is treated for and passes away from cancer, sex.
And in books that are neither Romance nor romance, I also read Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which is magnificently creepy. It felt like an appropriate thing to listen to while I was hanging out with one of our neighborhood cats and pulling Eastern black nightshade out of my yard (Solanum ptycanthum, not Solanum dulcamara, a more toxic nightshade that gets a shoutout in the book).
I also watched the recent film adaptation done by Netflix, which is excellent. It renders a number of elements of the story less ambiguous than they are in the text, but it does so elegantly, and it’s not like I’m gonna be mad that there’s a scene of Sebastian Stan shirtless among the film’s minor additions and changes. (Also, as long as we’re on that subject: Alexandra Daddario lying in bed in pale blue lingerie.)
A detail of the film that I loved is that every object Merricat buries in the yard as magical protection for herself and her sister is in a glass jar, making visually explicit the connection between Merricat’s witchcraft and the work of her sister Constance and the preceding generations of Blackwood women, who spend their time harvesting what comes out of the earth in their garden and making it into preserves—kept in jars in the basement of the house like another spell of protection. Everything cycles into and out of the ground in this story, from the fruits of the garden to the arsenic in the sugar bowl to the bodies of the living and the dead. (“I could swear he was buried with it,” says Uncle Julian of John Blackwood’s gold watch.)
Merricat refuses to wash herself; her face and hands are always smeared with dirt. She refuses to participate in feminine social norms the way Constance does. Her sister seems to have spent every day of the six years since her acquittal cooking for her remaining family members, and when she’s not doing that, she’s making herself and her house presentable, even though visitors are rare. Merricat does help with the routine—ritual—cleaning of the house. She and her sister live like this, their whole life circumscribed by property boundaries and domestic labor. At times their seclusion seems like a curse, but the cruel incursion of the world turns it into a blessing.
Everything is two things at once: food gives life and death, violence is both protection and destruction, the house is a prison and a refuge, Merricat is an avenger and a murderer. Sometimes what looks like kindness is cruelty, and vice versa. The sisters survive two cycles of the world’s violence, each one both shrinking the physical space of the world and expanding their freedom within it. Like the things they hide away from the world through the arts of magic and canning, Merricat and Constance preserve themselves.
