The Book of Delights: Essays

by Ross Gay

Though being broke and hustling to stay afloat most certainly occasions other mostly undelightful inefficiencies, such as my father driving from Philadelphia to Youngstown, Ohio, every year to reregister his car in a state where they didn’t have inspections, because his 1978 Toyota Corolla, in my mind one of the most beautiful cars ever made, the wagon I mean, had two doors that didn’t open and a hole in the floor and was more or less a latticework of rust.

I learned today, watching the trailer for that documentary, and with some subsequent online research, that when Hardiman was a boy in the 1920s, he was one of a group of little children, little test subjects, upon whom radiation experiments were performed. The experiments exposed these little children, little test subjects, to severe levels of radiation, such that, for little five-year-old Hardiman, it burned a hole in his head. (It might sound harsh to say it, but good lord, black people, never let an official-looking white person dressed in a white lab coat experiment on you or your children. Good lord.)