Summary

In “Juju Reporting (1962),” Ernest fantasizes about his past life with Gracie, his wife, from his one-room apartment at the Publix Hotel. He remembers his mother and the girls on the merchant ship, imagining the trajectory of their lives. His journalist daughter, Juju, visits him and interrogates him about an article in which a boy named Ernest was offered as a prize at the 1909 exposition. Juju’s probing questions lead Ernest to think, “We all have things we don’t talk about… [e]ven though, more often than not, those are the things that make us who we are” (28). Ernest thinks about the people he knows in Seattle and suspects that “everyone his age, of his vintage, had a backstory, a secret that they’d never shared” (28). Ernest denies that the boy raffled off is him, but finds out that...