Kia Corthron on the genesis of "A Cool Dip..."

In January 2007, I traveled with the Foundry Theatre, who partnered with Ma-Yi Theater Company and Hip-Hop Theater Festival, to the World Social Forum in Nairobi. Sixty-six thousand internationals descending upon the Kenyan capital, and of the literally thousands of political sessions, I was most drawn to the ones focusing on water: who has access, who doesn’t, and the consequential power structure. On the edge of the city, where remarkably few of the activists ventured, was Kibera, an enormous slum.  My fellow traveler Katy Savard befriended and introduced us to Kiberan resident Kennedy Odede, the 23-year-old director of a local community center (in a space that Americans would consider a shack but which held for Kiberans boundless possibilities) from which a youth theater had been founded.  In Kibera there is no running water.  I stood on a hideous cement bridge staring down at the filthy grey stream, its banks crammed with garbage.  When Kennedy and his partner came to visit us in our hotel, they joked about bathing in the fountain outside, its constant fall of sparkling clear water.  Kennedy spent the night in one of our rooms, and in the morning twisted the shower handle, awed by the confidence that water would invariably flow from the spigot.  This was the beginning of A Cool Dip before I knew there would be A Cool Dip.

Ten months later, November of that same year, I sat at a desk at a Sewanee, Tennessee writer’s retreat with plans to spit out a first draft.  I cracked open volumes and skimmed websites evoking droughts and megadams, aquifers and the melting Arctic, doing research and notably little writing, and I discovered eBay.  After exhausting various antiquated methods in a search of many years, I finally located an obscure Brook Benton album from my (deceased) dad’s old record collection, something my sister and I had enjoyed as very small children.  The task seemed to be more than a mere diversion from (not) writing – but what could this personal nostalgia journey, my yearning to replace a childhood loss, have to do with water (a very finite resource)?  Sewanee at that time was selling some of its water to the neighboring town of Monteagle whose reservoir had recently run dry.  Meanwhile Atlanta was suffering its own dehydration issues— the Southeast?  Sure, put up a city in the desert—Las Vegas, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Dubai—and don’t be surprised you come up thirsty, but the humid Southeast?  When did that happen?  How?

In the early days of the retreat I spoke with my fifth-grade nephew.  The father of his classmate had just shot and killed his wife before turning the weapon back onto himself.  In the coming spring of 2008, white boys in my nieces’ high school would suddenly start draping the Confederate flag over the beds of their pickups, drive them to school, then stand in the classroom doorways, blocking the black kids, threatening them to cross the line.  My nieces and nephew live in Cumberland, Maryland, the ninety-five percent white Appalachian town where I also grew up.   (I was usually the only black kid —the only kid of any color—in my class.)  Perhaps I should not have been shocked to ascertain that such red-neckedness in my birthplace endures into the 21st Century:  Cumberland’s Army reserve base was the incubator of the Abu Ghraib soldiers.  Some paradox—reconciling many fond childhood memories with the smiling face of that young woman from Fort Ashby, WV (thirteen miles due south of Cumberland) splattered all over the notorious photos.

Back to Confederates and murder-suicide: These two incidents­­ were completely unrelated.  Except: If I live in a once-booming factory town where all the factories closed decades ago, where the official label of “depressed” goes far beyond the economy, if a job is my only sense of self-worth and jobs are nowhere to be seen, maybe the God-given confidence that I’ll always be white is the one thing that can keep me from ending it all—or not.

Haven’t you digressed a bit? you ask.  What in the world has all this got to do with water? 

I pondered this myself in the spring of 2008, staring at a stubbornly blank page.  More research: Seventy percent of the earth is water.  Sixty-five percent of our bodies is water.  Sixty percent of our blood is water, blood and water, water and blood.

Summer of that year marked the first of several of my visits to the Museum of Natural History’s excellent “Water: H20 = Life” exhibit: the usable 1% and tap versus bottled and staggering American consumption rates and public versus private and one particularly mesmerizing display, a model of humble buildings constructed on stilts, a community hovering above a lake.  Tonle Sap annually and naturally reverses its course and overflows its banks, flooding the bordering Cambodian villages with carp and shrimp and giant catfish: food.  The good flood: What an exquisite contradiction!

And I began to write.

—Kia Corthron, January 2010

Photo by Aaron Epstein