The following is an excerpt from Clare Rossini’s manuscript-in-progress.

The trees sort-of talk, Rock. Not you.
The rain’s damp chatter inflates to the tirade of storm.
But you, Rock—it’s shocking

how silent you seem.
You could be suffering bereavement, nursing a scar.
Or all riled up with extasis

like one of those mystics
I prayed to as a girl,
their bodies flaming as the spirit streamed through.

Orpheus plucked his lyre
and the stones came rolling.
Haven’t I strummed these stanzas with sufficient élan

to rouse your camouflaged heart?
Go ahead, Rock. Eke out a nicker, a squawk, a sharp


You negotiated the waves, Rock.
Then retired to my desk
to anchor its northern provinces. Your granite suit?

Yes, a bit staid.
Yet you’re endearing
in your restraint, who does not collude or acquire,

merge or liquidate, but seem nonetheless okay
with your status as a thing
that daily suffers the assault of lamplight,

and later, through the midnight window, starlight’s
tissue-gleam.
Klee’s word, 

,

“heavylight,” seems right for you. Palm-sized, fixed
in place, but in your perfect shape,
lifting into air.

Your inertness is convenient, Rock,
your blankness-in-waiting,
ready to acquire whatever thought

I ask you to take on, what cockleshells
of the heart. You can’t
shake me off, can’t unionize

or complain—I’m your Caesar, Rock,
and you, my conquered province.
It seems you have

little to say about your situation.
Or it is only that I don’t yet
hear your voice? Just as I’m deaf

to the grieving of the canyon’s river
as it dries to silt, the moans
of the drought-struck tree.

Master of the sugar crock, inquisitor of the vase, Morandi
would take the commission,
scumbling

your grayish white, Rock,
as you hunker here on my desk, deep in conversation
with my coffee mug.

Yes, the painter who briefly admired El Duce, Morandi
would touch in
your black flecks

as if quelling the claptrap of the goosestep, would see
in your soft undertones
the erasure of salute. Morandi, poet

of cracker tins,
who painted each shadow
like a poultice, as if to draw out the toxin of his shame.



Clare Rossini has published three collections of poems, the most recent of which is 

Giorgio Morandi, Natura morta (Still Life), 1952. Oil on canvas; 21 3/8 x 23 3/8 in. (54.29 x 59.37 cm), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Purchase, by exchange, through the bequest of Elise S. Haas © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome

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At times I would see an incipient, prenatal profile, outlined in firm brushstrokes, and although it anticipated me monstrously, I knew that with many decisions and patient adjustments, it would begin to take on an undeniable resemblance.

But even in its allusive, nascent state, the portrait already revealed me, through a kind of magic assimilation. Every time, even before she had finished, my face would somehow be captured.

Moira painted me many times. She drew me many times. Each time I learned to disappear. With each portrait I died. But I owe my rebirths—of this, too, I’m certain—to each new version of me Moira made.

Each abandoned drawing, each abandoned painting, struck me as a kind of gestation and miscarriage. Thus I came to know aborted versions of myself: I’d start to live, I’d wade into the waters of a sea of lines, a gash would appear across my face, I’d somehow recuperate my own genetic process, I’d acquire a gastrular consciousness, I’d start to throb, and then suddenly, Moira, in a movement in which she, too, would lose herself, would get rid of me: she’d tear the paper to shreds or erase me from the canvas with her painting knife.

“That pose is very him,” said the maestro, Colombo. He visits us often. I noticed that I really do usually sit like this. But no one should lose their innocence about the way they sit.

In Castiglione, I read: “Members of certain tribes don’t allow themselves to be photographed; they fear that it’s a ruse to snatch away their souls.”

Sometimes a bird comes to the studio and then, just as suddenly, disappears.

Colombo was here. We talked at length about Modigliani’s relationship with Jeanne Hébuterne.

At first that bird which now frequents the studio (each time it’s different) would bring with it a feeling of both unease and peace. The unease came from a dual heaviness: the surprise of its unexpected appearance, and later, or simultaneously, the fear that it would never return. The peace, simply enough, was a translation of the calm we felt at the sight of it.

But now its visits, which don’t obey rhythms of temporal regularity but rather a cadence all their own, create an atmosphere of absolute safety. I would say that, in some way, the bird is protecting us with its inscrutable companionship.

Secrets of the craft: first, smear your paint decisively, freely, don’t hold back. Then finish the shape by defining its outline from the background, drawing it from outside. This is the only way to prevent the painting from resembling a sketch with color laid over it.

There’s a particular way we can look at ourselves: like we look at everyone else, with all their stupidity, meanness, depravity, even their greatness—oneself as a synthesis of all one’s fellow beings. And there’s also another way: as if we were an island, or a monument, always the same as ourself, only multiplied within each unchangeable face of a polyhedron made of identical mirrors.

When I shave, I avoid looking at myself straight-on and all at once. I don’t want to know which face I’ll show myself. I’ve noticed that sometimes Moira captures my whole face. Or she changes it unforgivably.

The maestro, Colombo, arrived at around 6 o’clock. The light had dwindled, exaggerating the colors. “Destroy his face, Moira,” he said. And then, as though it were a mere game of construction and destruction, Moira smacked where my face was painted on the canvas with her palm, and the oil paint—fresh, pasty, fragrant—smeared in a way that was somewhat arbitrary and somewhat measured. My face looked as though a grenade had exploded nearby, deforming it in the blast.

When we’re tired, and calm, and we look at each other without the weight of the painting, the easel, the frame, I realize I couldn’t live without Moira’s clarity: “The only thing that matters to me is painting.”

This morning, the bird—which was blue—stopped for a while on the laurel tree on our terrace. Then it perched on the lemon tree planter, also for a good while. Finally, it took off.

Moira and I believe art is useful for glimpsing the Divine.

I can describe how a painting starts. The white canvas. A bit of sandpaper. Moira always keeps her palette tidy. She puts on a carpenter’s apron. She motions for me to sit down. We’ve developed a style based on obedience. I sit. I tell her to put her hair up. She puts it up while she looks at me with an outward smile that serves only to narrow her eyes. She goes through all the motions before picking up a brush in order to pull away from me. She looks for visual distance. An ideal distance. Later, that distance and no other will appear on the canvas, and then it won’t matter how close or how far the spectator is from the painting: the distance between the painted object and the eyes of the beholder will always be the same.

Sometimes I wish I could be the way Moira paints me.

She drifts away, in her eyes she drifts away, until I begin to feel lonely as a planet. That’s where we part. And so much so that suddenly, only a musical phrase we turn to for connection reunites us in a fleeting glance. And I hear the brushstrokes on the canvas, I smell the oil, I sense the painting knife’s journey across the layer of paint. Small clouds pass by, and I shape them, correct them, stretch them until Moira seeks me out with her eyes and, without a word, gestures for me to reinvigorate my pose: with a movement of her chin, she asks me to lift my head. Using her palette knife, she mixes the colors to cover a wide surface. I hear the music, and I also hear a slick sound, like the glide of a loving caress.

Sometimes I wish I could be the way Moira paints me. Sometimes I notice I look increasingly like a certain version she has of me. Sometimes I dream with one of the faces she’s painted.

In love there’s a search that resolves not only in terms of the lovers’ union and in an assertion of each one’s solitude, but also in a kind of breath that comes from deep within, at once confirming and snatching away their sense of self.

Moira, me, each of us in our solitude, the two of us united in our solitude, united in that breath that comes to our mouths from our deepest depths, we understand ourselves to be me, myself; her, herself; the two of us, one; each one, us two.

The artist and reality, or lovers—why do they pursue each other so fiercely? In both cases, that merciless search has a sacramental aspiration.

Certainly it’s not enough to paint well. However, if you can’t paint well, you can’t paint a great painting. So first and foremost, humble perseverance. Returning time and again until the material and tools become a language that expresses exactly what the eyes see, so that later it’s possible to set down what the eyes don’t know they see.

Some drawings convey the mere outline of a form. The line, then, has a uniform thickness. Others, the most dynamic ones, use the pressure of the line to indicate form. Still others are a mere search, and hundreds of lines must be drawn in order to find the only one that should reign.

In general, the healthiest people go through the stories of their lives feeling a certain immortality. The vanity of seeking knowledge, the madness of intelligence, the clumsy probing of metaphysical secrets, it all deprives us of many pleasures. For example, the pleasure of letting the miracle of the world pass in awe before our humble senses, of loving it without the stupefying attempt to unravel it, mingling with the metaphysical condition like a docile substance that adjusts to the passing of time, to the changing conditions of space, to the necessity of death, and to the wise hope that there exists a supreme sanity that conceals and reveals itself in the subtlest hints: the intimate scent of saffron, the glint in a horse’s eye, the tone of a phrase, and even the inscrutable emptiness of a sleepless night.

It strikes me that to merely be in the world entails a wise renunciation: the sharpening of our attention with no motive but to nourish ourselves with reality as though it were sacred sustenance.

The fleetingness of things and beings. We love beings with a lasting glint in their eyes. Perhaps painting could rescue the eternity of an instant. But no. Everything is doomed to failure. All we can do is hope for something that, though it isn’t ours, represents us before eternity—like a face, this one indeed eternal, wrapped in a nameless fog.

To draw something, you must understand how it’s made, the connections between its elements. Only then is it revealed how one form fits into another. A neck, for example, into shoulders.

We have large windows in the studio. It’s nighttime. With artificial light, we can use the windows as mirrors to keep an eye on the paintings.

To learn to draw what can’t be seen. For example, a neck, from the front, will only be cylindrical if the contours, rather than parallel, are drawn as a parenthesis, although later the base will have to be split so it can be placed on the shoulders. (Reality can be admirable until one has to adhere to the laws of depicting it. But one must have the courage to destroy it to create a work of art, to make visible what it—reality—conceals.)

On our terrace we have lemon trees, a mulberry bush, aromatic herbs, jasmine, wisteria, laurel trees, and an olive tree. Today, the bird stopped again for a long time on the laurel. We watched it from the studio, where we were sitting. It was even-tempered, still in a way that was almost stonelike, and its eyes were inexpressive; its translucent pink feathers, smooth and shiny. Then suddenly, as if compelled from without, the bird took a short, swift flight to the mulberry tree. It was hidden in the leaves. We couldn’t see it. But we knew it was there. Moira came to my armchair and both of us fell silent.

Moira was drawing. She asked me questions. I gave my opinions; I hinted at a solution. She did the exact opposite of what I had suggested. “You were right,” she said. But once again, she’d done exactly the opposite of what I’d proposed. This happened over and over. Maybe an artist needs to believe their discoveries are always unrelated to their choices.

In saintliness, there must be a dose of something very similar to pride combined with the requisite humility. The same holds true in the realization of the work. The important thing is to detest easy satisfaction as much as the pride of perfection.

After several days of fruitless attempts, Moira has fallen into a depression. She’s never done such poor work. When she did make something worthwhile, she’d destroy it with a mistake. A sort of clumsiness enervated her. Finally—like I said—she seemed to have given up. She sat down next to me. She was the picture of helplessness. “Things are going badly,” she said. And then she added, “We’ll just have to wait.”

It’s an unfair fight the artist always loses, so much anxiety, so much waiting. Because neither skill, nor effort, nor bravery will suffice. Meanwhile, an ounce of grace is enough to produce the miracle.

It’s the same thing with the bird. Why, if it’s always a different color, a different size, and behaving differently, are we sure that it’s always the same one? In my portraits, sometimes I have two mouths. Other times, a single eye. In some portraits, I have more than one nose. I ask myself: What makes that person who Moira paints always me?

From what I’ve observed, I have certain features that could distinguish me. Still, in some portraits, those potential singularities are nowhere to be found. And so I ask myself again, what is it that makes them me? What makes me the same as them?

There’s nothing worse in an artist than weakness of character. To tend toward self-satisfaction can be fatal for their work. This afternoon, Moira and I argued bitterly.

The idea that the artist is only an instrument, a medium through which the work can materialize. Therefore, to work as the revealer will require a particular state of purity and special conditions as well (Moira speaks of a scalpel: sharpened and sanitized).

Ongoing practice, so that the hand, in the painter’s case, can express with machine-like accuracy what the eye sees. Any moral judgement, on the other hand, will be an obstacle to the work at least as serious as clumsiness.

The only keys are happiness or inner purity (they’re the same), steady practice, and to know to wait. And during the wait, consistent work to keep the hand agile, the eye lucid, the attention taut.

And then suddenly, as if by chance, the mystery slips through with its ounce of miracle. That’s the work. For all these reasons—Colombo says when we discuss this—what differentiates an artisan’s work from a work of art is an element foreign to whoever made the work.

An artist is praised for that which does not belong to them.

Once again, the aleatory. A painting will often take a turn from its initial idea and, upon showing a new possibility, offer a new solution. Then the painter submits to the plan the material makes on its own.

What was going to be a human figure turns into a bouquet of flowers. The first idea gets cast aside, and the will of the painting (or chance?), which has acted all on its own, carries the artist along.

Perhaps painting could rescue the eternity of an instant. But no. Everything is doomed to failure. 

But don’t think this implies a lack of rigor. This is evidence that the artist’s eye is alert and, at the same time, able to see with innocence.

Moira has just painted two portraits of me, one large and another small. The large one is more in line with her original concept: it’s more allusive, has more depth, little contrast, and the setting is totally unrealistic.

The small one, however, is more pictorial. It uses lots of paint, lots of color, and the image is clean and vigorous.

There’s something worth noting. While one portrait articulates a being who is majestic and serene, capable of seeing planes of reality that I myself certainly cannot, the other has a worldly, pragmatic expression, as if it were the head of a politician.

It’s clearer to me now that all the portraits Moira makes or could make of me will show nothing more than my absence, that all she can paint are the faces of the people who I’m not.

Moira, painter, poet, tries to do the infeasible, grasp the ungraspable, touch the intangible. A staircase without steps. Hers is a thirst for water that barely comes to her in forgettable dreams. Meanwhile, she keeps searching my face, just as she searches the flight of a bird, for what can only be found deep in the earth, when our love is a damp seed awaiting the heat of the sun and the white light of day and the black light of night. And then she, alone, alone, Moira alone, understands at last what in some way she knows, that each search has a common destiny: the discovery of something with neither shape nor color, rather a singular presence that resembles nothing else and will not answer to any name.

Suddenly the bird crosses before our eyes. We watch it pass by without beating its wings. Gliding. It has a metallic, gray, or bluish color. It whizzes through the air like a bullwhip smoothly extended to its full length. It did a tour of the studio and departed with its motionless wings open.

(Sometimes it traces a diagonal from one corner of the ceiling to the other. Other times it flies swiftly and vertically, climbing or falling. It’s always different. I have seen it white as snow. One time, Moira saw it violet. Together, we’ve seen it black, blue, and even red.)

We paint at night. I pose about six feet away from the easel. There’s a spotlight to one side. Dust particles float silvery in the air like tiny stars. I have a thought, stupid and swiftly discardable: that in relation to eternity, between the span of those particles before me and that of the planets where civilizations, wars, and cultures—and everything that, for example, has happened and happens on our planet—the word 

 is a meaningless equivalency; that, in historical terms, even in those minuscule bodies my eyes see, there could have existed a reality with beings who posed a metaphysics, that among them there could have been a redeemer with a sacrament, and saints, and demons, and plans for love and hate, for heaven and hell.

Moira is painting and (once again I refuse my temptation to fantasy) in every particle of pigment is the same story of a species’ horror and faith, hope and doubt, devastation and death. But here and now—I tell myself—responsible as we are for our happenings within a possible time bounded by the limits of our own impermanent natures, God—I think—is an urgency, an absence, a request, an emptiness, a desperate reality Moira tries to capture, or at least allude to, through the color of my shirt, a correspondence of lines, a balance of chromatic conditions among the infinite number a few mixable colors offer.

Today it was white. Without flapping its wings it seemed to describe a line: as if it had passed through a wall and then exited through the window, but not by flying. Rather, as if Moira—I didn’t see this, she told me about it—had needed to transport it with a sort of gliding motion, using the power of her gaze. Because it had seemed like it wanted to fall or stop for good in the house, and we wouldn’t have been able to tolerate that.

Through the ages, painters have told countless stories about the model. It’s a starting point. It’s there to be destroyed. It’s something to turn your back on. It’s the exact opposite of all that.

The tempera, the paper, the water jug, the red-handled paint brushes, ideas about the quality of the paper, the music, Moira working atop her high wooden stool, the night, the plants must be watered, spring is beginning. Now the morning light has shed that thick gray consistency we had to endure all winter. The light is clearer. Dawn carries the warmth of the sun. It’s October. I think Moira will come to understand that her so-called chromatic coldness, her whites, could, if one so desired, be compared to a hot iron. But that shouldn’t matter either, because art should be free of any concerns regarding temperature. Its timelessness matters most.

I’d like the privilege of describing the magic surrounding our bird, which is looking at me now with its round eyes, three feet away, perched on the rim of a pewter jug with paint brushes in it. Today it has bluish feathers. I notice it swaying softly to maintain a difficult balance.

Tonight Moira turned off the lights because the moon is full and its light comes in clearly through the windows. The plants on the terrace draw their shadows on the ceiling.

I ask Moira to turn on the light again and the philodendrons we keep in the studio appear, projecting their shadows in the same place where the shadows of the lemon and mulberry trees were before. We turn the lights on and off, over and over again, and the landscape on the ceiling shifts in such a way that we feel dizzy, as if facing an imminent shipwreck. You can imagine the studio: it’s like a ship amid a storm, amid forces that seem to demand chaos.

Colombo, the maestro, said something about chaos that, to my taste, is arguable: “Each time an artist grapples with a new work, their problem lies in organizing chaotic elements. What is not organized chaos cannot be called a work of art.”

I can’t lay still in the sun, without fidgeting, like Moira does, like women do, who seem given over to inexplicable hope. So I went to work on the plants, pulling weeds, removing dry leaves, stirring up the soil in the flowerpots. At this time of year, the wind tends to afflict the plants: in the case of the wisteria, for example, the leaves become mortified to the point of agony, and you have to douse them with plenty of water in the evening. But since the sun was still out, a hot and intense sun, I loosened the soil with my knife and got lost in my thoughts while Moira, lying still, let herself be taken by the sun.

It must have been about 2 o’clock in the afternoon, and we were in that country silence that sometimes comes to the city and seems to confuse time and space. Suddenly, Moira, in one of those abrupt movements of hers that no longer really faze me (perhaps because I’ve come to think of them as acts of inner obedience), got up and went inside the house.

I continued turning the soil with my knife. I found a stone in the olive tree’s planter. It’s a huge planter. I noticed resistance against the tip of my knife. That rock might interfere with the normal growth of the roots. I carefully determined the extent of the stone, like a surgeon examining a cyst’s edges so as to remove it in one piece. At last, I felt the stone loosen. I pulled it out with my fingers and felt the warm soil around it. Then I heard the cry. I turned, and there it was. It had an orange beak. The wind was ruffling its crest. It looked dazed, as if it were seeing everything for the first time: reality, the trees, the river, the space, and the freedom and abyss they all entail.

Crouched under the roof of the balcony, I softly called out to Moira. But when she came it had already flown away. I thought I had lied to her. Or I was afraid that Moira would think I had lied to her. It was so large, so new, so beautiful, it was so detached from the world, so alien to things that any description would have misrepresented it.

Moira stayed there with me. I assured her, somewhat apologetically, that it had been very different this time. I think, in a way, it terrified me to have seen it on my own. I think I needed Moira as witness. I think secretly I was certain the bird only visited us so Moira could see it.

But it came back. Trembling, it installed itself in the same place on the railing where it had first appeared. It let itself be seen by us both. Moira hugged me. We watched it, holding our breath. I think it finally looked at us, and a second later, it took off in an almost vertical flight we didn’t see because we couldn’t lift our gaze.

There’s an arrangement of dry leaves and pomegranates in a vase I can hardly see behind a pile of books. I’m sitting in my armchair. I look at the portrait we’ve been working on all day. It seems to float in space. Today, while I posed, I saw the bird pause on my table. It was almost transparent. I didn’t say anything to Moira, so as not to distract her.

It’s already dark. Outside it’s raining in that tumultuous way it usually does in the summer. ♦

. Copyright © 2026 by Ángel Bonomini. Excerpted by permission of Transit Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Ángel Bonomini was an Argentine writer, poet, and translator. He was born in Buenos Aires in 1929 and died in 1994. The following story is excerpted from a new book of his enigmatic fictions, 

Death By Portrait

The idea arose suddenly. In the summer of 1955, Harry Belafonte—a Harlem-born son of Caribbean immigrants who’d begun his performing career as an actor, but whose star was now rising fast as a singer—was 28 years old. He’d caught the theatre bug in his teens in Harlem and dabbled as a jazz crooner. But then he’d found his métier, in the early ’50s and down in Greenwich Village, in the folk music scene whose paragons––Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie—extolled the dusty music of common people. Belafonte was a decidedly un-dusty thespian who sang songs from America’s backwoods and around the world, not sitting on a stool but standing up. He would famously turn these melodies into glamorous modern pop.

Tellingly, Harry’s big break had occurred not in one of the Village clubs where he’d honed his act but on Broadway, in a revue-style show wherein dramatic renditions of Mississippi riverboat songs convinced executives at RCA Victor to sign him to their label as a recording artist. They thought his folk act might lend itself extra well to a new format—the 33 ⅓ long-playing record they were pressing on consumers. His star turn in 

 also saw him cast, in 1954, in Hollywood’s first-ever blockbuster to feature an all-Black cast, 

. And now, just as the telegenic star was seeking ideas for his new record, he received a fateful invitation. Producers at NBC wondered: would he like to produce and perform in a special guest segment on the network’s 

Belafonte’s first idea for how to fill his 20-minute segment was with a folk-blues story built around John Henry, the rail-splitting giant of Negro folklore. But in discussing his plans for the show with his friend Bill Attaway—a writer at NBC with whom Belafonte had briefly run a burger joint in the Village called the Sage, frequented by the neighborhood’s folkies—another idea emerged: Why not present a musical theme with Caribbean flavor? Attaway enlisted a New York–based calypso composer named Irving Burgie to help, and they worked with Belafonte to conceive a segment called “Holiday in Trinidad.” The show aired on October 2, 1955. The 

’s host, Jack Carson, played the role of an island-hopping tourist who stops off in Trinidad to see Belafonte perform some tunes. Among those numbers, which Irving Burgie adapted from Jamaican and Trinidadian folk sources, were “Hosanna,” “Come Back Liza,” and “The Banana Boat Song” (or “Day-O,” as it was then known)—Belafonte’s first public performance of his most famous number. The show didn’t get great ratings. But it did give its star the material for his next LP.

The Artists-and-Repertory men at RCA were dubious. But Belafonte, who’d added these tunes to his stage set alongside a calypso called “Matilda” that his audiences loved, was adamant. And one night at dinner, he won the support of the label’s boss. George Marek’s call was in some ways a bold one. But it was also of a piece with the RCA executive’s larger effort to figure out how best to exploit the LP format at a time when other advances in recording and playback fidelity were making listening an ever more wondrous experience. It was an era whose booming consumer economy joined with new technologies—including the incipient rise of multitrack recording and stereophonic sound—to change fundamentally how music circulated in the culture.

The LP, which first appeared in 1948, allowed for capturing and playing back longer songs and symphonies, and extended solos on jazz records. It also forged the modern concept of the “album” with which we’re familiar today: as a linked suite of songs offering a coherent artistic statement by their creator. In the 1960s, college kids would become the great consumers of long-playing rock albums; in the LP’s early days, young people stuck to feeding dimes into jukeboxes and buying 45s. The new format’s primary consumers were the parents of ’60s hippies: those “greatest generation” denizens of new postwar suburbs who bought newfangled hi-fi equipment for their Levittown living rooms, and were newly in the market for recorded accompaniment to their cocktail parties or romantic evenings by the fire. 

At first this market was dominated by Broadway cast recordings like 

—a hit that remained the top-selling album in America throughout 1949, 1950, and 1951. Soon enough, though, cast recordings were joined by records explicitly aimed at providing sonic wallpaper for those suburban “dens.” Crooners like Perry Como and Johnny Mathis ruled the roost; Paul Weston launched an eponymous genre with his hit 

 LP in 1953; and the television comic Jackie Gleason had that year’s top-selling album with 

. With mood music’s emergence also came that of “exotica.” If the aim of mood music was to forge a particular atmosphere in its listeners’ homes—cozy, nostalgic, sexy—its close cousin aimed to bring distant parts of the world into those same spaces.

Exotica’s great purveyor, the Hollywood bandleader Les Baxter, scored 1951’s #3 seller with 

, recorded with Yma Sumac’s Inca orchestra. “Do the mysteries of native rituals intrigue you?” asked the liner notes to his other 1951 effort, 

. “Does the haunting beat of savage drums fascinate you? . . . This original and exotic music by Les Baxter was conceived by blending his creative ideas with the ritualistic melodies and seductive rhythms of the natives of distant jungles and tropical ports to capture all the color and fervor so expressive of the emotions of these people.” Belafonte’s political and artistic aims may have diverged radically from Baxter’s. But by the time he made 

, the idea of evoking a foreign, exotic world over the course of a whole LP wasn’t new. What was novel was perhaps Belafonte’s essential advantage—that he didn’t need to hire Inca princesses to lend his albums their “exotic” tinge: he could embody it himself. As a folk singer, Harry had sung material from around the world from the start: his first RCA single to chart, in 1953, was a Japanese love song called “Gomen Nasai.” And now he wanted to record a full album of songs from the foreign region he knew best.

The RCA honcho who embraced his pitch, George Marek, was a Vienna-born Jew who’d emigrated to New York in his teens. He’d gotten his start in the record business seeking to popularize Old World art music for U.S. listeners. First as music editor at 

 and later as chief of A&R at RCA, he’d released such records as 

Classical Music for People Who Hate Classical Music

. Classical music was his passion, but Marek was a proselytizer for the sonic arts in general, with a keen marketer’s mind. He’d overseen RCA’s mood music series and initiated the label’s shift to packaging its records in colorful dust jackets and selling them in drugstores and supermarkets. Getting customers hooked on “music, any kind of music” was to be the record man’s aim. “As the cigarette people believe,’’ he said, ‘‘the habit is everything.’’ Marek’s ambit at corporate RCA was far different from that of famously uncommercial impresarios who’d fostered the Village folk scene like Moe Asch of Folkways Records. But George Marek’s interest in what Belafonte had to say about Caribbean music went much deeper than the profit motive. “He was very much an intellectual,” Belafonte would recall of that dinner with a professional colleague he came to cherish, “hugely sensitive to oppression. He loved culture, and he was very open toward all kinds of music.”

Marek’s openness, in the event, enabled Belafonte to release his most popular record—and augured what made its triumph historic. 

 would prove, to Marek’s fellow executives at RCA and the culture at large, that as Belafonte later put it, “Americans were more ready than had been assumed to hear the voices of others or the culture of other people.” 

No one knows how to make a hit record. That’s an industry truism with which pop savants like Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran may disagree. So might purveyors, nowadays, of dance hits and boy-band bait concocted with algorithmic precision to inflame the dopamine receptors of preteens. But every record-business veteran has had the experience of seeing a record they thought to be brilliant flop in the marketplace—and of being surprised by what takes flight. As Quincy Jones said of producing Michael Jackson’s 

 in the 1980s, “If anyone tells you they know how to sell 60 million copies, they don’t. You do something that you love and that gives you goose bumps. It works out or it doesn’t.” No one, in other words, can legislate for the kind of supernova success enjoyed by an album like 

. And the same was certainly true of its historic forebear, in the annals of LPs that became cultural touchstones, that Belafonte set out to record in October 1955. Neither he nor his collaborators knew what was in store when they turned up at a storied concert hall on East 11th Street—Webster Hall—that RCA’s engineers had recently outfitted as a capacious studio for recording their biggest projects and stars.

 segment aired on NBC. It was released the following May, while his previous LP, 

, was also still riding high on the charts. The new album, buoyed by its breakout singles “Banana Boat (Day-O)” and “Jamaica Farewell,” sold fast. By summer’s end, it had bested Elvis Presley’s own sophomore album for RCA to top Billboard’s charts—and would retain that spot, on its way to becoming the first LP by a solo artist to sell a million copies, for no fewer than 31 weeks. It stayed on the charts for 137 weeks—a mark not surpassed until 

 came along three decades later. But it got its start in Manhattan’s East Village, near the clubs where Harry’s musical career had taken flight a few years before, and in a vaunted space that RCA acquired, in 1953, as a kind of acoustical annex to the company’s main recording studio in the city on 24th Street.

Webster Hall’s story began in 1886, when a Polish-born German Jew opened a grand new “hall for hire” near the northern end of Kleindeutschland—the sprawling enclave of German speakers that thrived across what’s now Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Charles Goldstein’s place was built in a Renaissance Revival style. It had an ornate mansard roof and brick facade accented with terra-cotta cherubs and was intended, reported 

, “for balls, receptions, Hebrew weddings, and sociables.” It also hosted working-class members of new immigrant groups, and revelers and radicals of all stripes. After the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire killed 146 seamstresses a few blocks away, it is where the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America was founded in 1914. Webster Hall is also where Emma Goldman propounded anarchism and birth control to insist that women had “the right to beautiful, radiant things,” and where the socialist magazine 

 staged masquerade balls. During Prohibition, drag fetes and outré bacchanals filled this “Devil’s Playhouse,” which also played host, at Prohibition’s end and for a more upmarket set, to an epic party called The Return of John Barleycorn.

After World War II, the place became home to heroes of Latin music like Tito Puente and Tito Rodriguez, who turned its dance floor into a vital seedbed for New York’s mania for mambo. Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger hosted hootenannies that became integral to the founding of 

 magazine, in 1950, and to the folk revival at large. But what most drew RCA’s engineers to the high-ceilinged space were acoustics at once reverberant and clear, which helped anything recorded at Webster Hall sound like sitting mid-orchestra at a Broadway show. Among the original cast recordings made here between 1953 and 1969, when RCA sold the place to open a new suite of studios at its uptown offices, were favorites including 

 This is where Elvis came to record “Hound Dog” in July 1956. And anyone lucky enough to happen into the place the fall before, on the afternoon of October 20, 1955, would have witnessed one of the most beloved vocal performances in the history of pop.

To deliver it, Harry riffed on the lyric to a Jamaican work song around which he and Bill Attaway had also built his 

 segment. He stepped back from his mic’s metal grille to let his voice travel a little ways, through Webster Hall’s echoing air, before hitting its diaphragm. He began this new record—the first seconds of what became 

’s first track—with a trick he’d picked up in Las Vegas of grabbing a crowd’s attention with an a cappella cry: “Daaaaay O!” The words voiced the relief with which island stevedores, who loaded banana boats at night to avoid the sun’s heat, met the arrival of daylight that let them go home. They might have been addressed to the unionists who’d once packed Webster Hall or the flappers who danced there until dawn, resounding as they did with a sense of a greater workers’ history. Seven decades later, they still echo across our sports arenas and in the culture at large:

“Daaaaay O! Day-ay-ay O! Daylight come and me wan’ go home . . .”

If the aim of mood music was to forge a particular atmosphere in its listeners’ homes—cozy, nostalgic, sexy—its close cousin aimed to bring distant parts of the world into those same spaces.

Audiophiles and casual fans alike have marveled at this record’s quality and wondered at the vibrating clarity of Harry’s voice. In truth its reverb was simply in the effects of Webster Hall, as captured by RCA’s engineers with the help of what the company touted as a “New Orthophonic High Fidelity Recording.” RCA had been using this mode of electronic recording ever since acquiring the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1929. But new state-of-the-art microphones and precision cutting heads now allowed its engineers to transfer what those microphones captured to lacquer grooves with more fidelity than ever before. Such was the alchemical technology by which the sounds aired here would reach people’s hi-fis at home. But as with all creative projects that grow bigger than the sum of their parts, the ideas and forces that gathered in Webster Hall for the 

 sessions (the October date was preceded by an earlier one on August 18, and followed by a final session on November 9) were the product of both accident and intention. 

was a collaboration with a larger cast of characters, drawn from the now-28-year-old singer’s decade-long career in the performing arts. They all brought key ingredients to a record conceived as an “integrated trip through the West Indies,” as Bill Attaway put it in his liner notes, with “songs ranging in mood from brassy gaiety to wistful sadness, from tender love to heroic largeness.” The organic-yet-orchestral timbre of the finished tracks—drawn from folk sources and mixed to an impeccable sheen—was created by a group of musicians convened by Harry’s bandleader Tony Scott, another close friend from the Sage days.

Scott was born Anthony Sciacca in New Jersey: he was an Italian American drawn to Black music who used his chops on clarinet and a network of leading jazzmen, as he later told 

 magazine, to lend Belafonte’s folk records a “jazz feeling.” Among those Scott summoned to Webster Hall, alongside Harry’s longtime accompanist Millard Thomas on guitar, were the brilliant jazz bassist Milt Hinton and drummer James “Osie” Johnson. Also present were a chorus of Broadway actors led by Brock Peters, who’d sung Belafonte’s parts in

; Frantz Casseus, the Brooklyn-based “father of classical Haitian guitar” (and contributor of “

” to Harry’s repertoire); and Herman Diaz, Jr., the Puerto Rican session leader responsible for moving the drums on “Day-O” closer to the room’s mics to make them more prominent in the mix. Perhaps most notable of all was Irving Burgie, who wrote—or, more accurately, adapted from folk sources—the songs that became Belafonte’s most iconic hits.

Burgie was born in Brooklyn to a Barbadian mother and a Black American father: he was a fellow New Yorker with West Indian roots, and a gifted songwriter who shared Belafonte’s affinity for turning folk music from the islands into northern pop. After the war, Burgie had used his own GI Bill funds to study classical voice and composition at Juilliard. He’d knocked around the same circuit of folk clubs and union-sponsored hootenannies Belafonte plied in the late ’40s with the likes of Pete Seeger. And then Burgie built an encyclopedic knowledge of folk songs from across the West Indies—mentos from Jamaica, merengues from Santo Domingo, calypsos from Trinidad—and a healthy store of ballads and love songs, always island-tinged, that he wrote himself.

Burgie was short and unassuming in aspect; he was never destined to break out as a performer. But in 1954 at the Village Vanguard, he convened a group of Caribbean musicians—among them Haitians and Afro-Cubans and a Jamaican piano and penny whistle player, Herb Levy, who would also join Belafonte’s 

sessions—that the club’s owner, Max Gordon, dubbed Lord Burgess and the Sun Islanders. Thus did Burgie, now also known as Lord Burgess, gain a sobriquet that recalled the regal monikers of calypso’s mighty makers in Trinidad, the British island in the southern Caribbean where the form was born. Never mind that “Lord Burgess” had never matched wits or lyrics with calypsonians there who battled for supremacy, with their songs, to be crowned monarch of Trinidad’s famed yearly carnival.

This borrowing of the customs and vibe of calypso’s home island—a place neither Belafonte nor Burgie had visited in 1956—was in keeping with their project’s gestalt. Notwithstanding its title, only two songs on 

 were in fact calypsos—“Brown Skin Girl” and “Man Smart (Woman Smarter),” both by a vaunted Trinidadian composer named King Radio but miscredited here. Of the album’s other nine songs, Burgie received a writing credit for eight. Alongside his originals like “I Do Adore Her” and “Dolly Dawn,” these were mostly mentos and folk songs from Jamaica whose lyrics or melodies Burgie tweaked for a new frame. He’d learned a few of them, including 

’s breakout hit, from fellow denizens of the Village Vanguard—which is where, in or around 1953, he and Harry both met the great Jamaican folklorist and singer Louise Bennett.

“Miss Lou,” as Bennett was affectionately known, became a national hero in Jamaica who did more than anyone to convince her people that the richness of their own oral culture—from the patois they spoke to the Anansi stories they told and folk songs they sang—held as much value as any book published in Oxford English. During a stint in New York in the early ’50s, she wrote plays but also worked as a cashier at Macy’s—which is where she met Harry’s friend Tony Schwartz, an agoraphobic connoisseur of what came to be called world music who obsessively recorded the sounds of his home neighborhood in midtown. After hearing Bennett sing at Macy’s, Schwartz introduced her to Belafonte and Burgie and then helped her record an album for Moe Asch on Folkways. Called 

, it included a recording of “Day Dah Light” that beat Belafonte’s version to the punch by two years (as did 

, by the Trinidad-born singer and actor Edric Connor—who in 1956 made a star turn, as Daggoo the harpooner, in Gregory Peck’s 1956 film version of 

Day Dah Light by Louise Bennett

Irving Burgie, in adapting the folk version recorded by Bennett and Connor for American ears, retained enough of the original Jamaican lines to keep its island feel. He replaced certain of its denser patois lyrics with plainer English, and made one odd change: where the old work song referenced counting banana “hands”—as bunches of the fruit are logically called—his lyric invoked another appendage (“Six foot, seven foot, eight foot bunch!”). But tweaks to language aside, what most distinguished his version from Miss Lou’s was how Harry’s was arranged and performed. Miss Lou’s “Day Dah Light” hewed near to renditions sung by workmen to keep themselves trudging up Jamaica’s docks onto bananaboats like those owned by the United Fruit Company, the firm for which Harry’s father worked as a cook and whose vessels Harry also boarded as a boy. Her voice’s up-tempo lilt, accompanied by little more than hand drums, is more plea than demand. Summoning the tallyman is a lament, in her tuneful staccato, redolent of what Bill Attaway described as “the irrepressible rhythm of a people who have not lost the ability to laugh at themselves.” Harry’s slowed-down version, on 

, is different. It’s vested with as much pathos and drama as his voice could wrest from a feeling—as daylight comes, he wants to go

—that here becomes a demand indeed. Harry may have been capable, on occasion, of self-deprecation, but in truth he was never much given to laughing at himself, let alone at his people. And he didn’t do so in the number here rechristened “Day-O” and also released as “The Banana Boat Song.”

Day-O (The Banana Boat Song) by Harry Belafonte

His initial cry grabs our attention. Then his lush vocal drifts toward us as if from down the beach, drawing closer. He riffs on the word he’s insisting we hear: “Me say day-ay-ay-O.” He descends a note with each line, as if striding downstairs, and then steps down quicker. We’ve hit the bottom of his range. His voice is still warm and full. He exhales the reason we’re here—daylight’s come, he wants to go home—with a last extended “O.” We’re ready, now, for this dynamic preamble to end. We’re ready for the song to begin in earnest, with a rhythm set by the next line—he’s worked all night, he wants to drink a rum—that the chorus and drums hit just as the rum does. Voices gather around Harry’s. They keep time with the congas’ steady march. They reply to his rum line with the refrain they’ll repeat, about wanting to go home, for the rest of this song about stacking bananas till morning comes. And so it goes as the tallyman arrives and the black tarantula does, too—before this tired singer and his cohort of harmonizing friends and a conga that sounds like rain eases off down the beach.

We feel, as the record ends, the exhaustion of ending a workday at dawn—the weary yet insistent note that greeting the sun’s rise entails. But part of the magic of records that resonate for as many people as this one did, is their power to do so in ways that vary across context and time. Harry turned a workman’s lament into a prideful demand. When “Day-O” echoes as a sing-along chant across Yankee Stadium today, it sounds more like a taunt—a clip of familiar Americana that underscores to the opposing team that the home side’s winning—the same sentiment as Ray Charles’s “Hit the Road Jack.” But such novelty uses, to Harry’s mind, didn’t change what the song was about. Nor did the infectious hit that the rapper Lil Wayne scored in 2011, “

,” that sampled its chorus. Decades after his signature tune’s release, Harry said, it didn’t belong to him any more than it did to Lil Wayne. “Day-O” belonged to working people in the Caribbean with whom it was born. He was just glad to see a new generation embrace “a song about struggle, about black people in a colonized life doing the most grueling work.” This, he told Gwen Ifill in a 2011 interview on 

, is what made him proud. “I took that song and honed it into an anthem that the world loved.” ♦

 by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro. Copyright © 2026 by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro. Excerpted by permission of Penguin Press, a division of Penguin Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is the Director of Publishing at Pioneer Works and co-editor-in-chief of

. The following excerpt is drawn from his new book, 

Daylight Come: Harry Belafonte and the World He Made

Daylight Came

When I found myself questioning Virginia’s motives, I took consolation in the genius of our plan. It was brilliant enough to withstand a little mistrust between us, I told myself. The plan was good enough, even, to withstand betrayal. It had a freakish quality to it, really, belonging to that rare class of crime, like certain forms of blackmail, that led the perpetrator and the victim to conspire together, as a team.

Airlines don’t announce how long it has been since their last crash. Schools don’t tout their success at avoiding an active shooter. Were a data center to boast of its security record, it would only draw attention to its vulnerability. But one shouldn’t confuse secrecy with indifference. Data firms understood the need for security because they were ripped off all the time.

The few public reports of information heists came from tattletales: a police department’s press release, say, or an individual victim’s complaint. Even then, critical details tended to go missing. If a dollar amount was disclosed, for instance, it referred only to the value of the stolen hardware. When NBC News reported that a thief had dropped through the ceiling of a data center operated by American Insurance Group and seized a server containing the Social Security numbers and medical records of nearly a million people, the value of the theft was estimated as $10,000: the cost of the machinery. This was as revelatory as noting the value of the picture frames smashed in a museum heist.

The unspoken assumption, in such reports, was that information itself had no inherent economic value. After a Chicago data center owned by a website hosting service was robbed by men with tasers, its spokesman insisted that the only consequence was a brief slowdown in loading times. That center, which stored information for corporations from 200 countries, boasted of 24/7 armed guards, biometric authentication, and “a double-locking mantrap” at every door. In the next two years it was successfully burglarized four times.

When five men dressed as policemen, with a German shepherd posing as a patrol dog, bound the staff of a “state-of-the-art” Verizon data center in London, the Metropolitan Police claimed to suspect that the physical servers, valued at more than a million dollars, were the target. It was only noted in passing what those servers held: the private banking files of JPMorgan Chase, the world’s second largest bank.

Even G—, which then owned the world’s largest data center operation, seemed slow to grasp the value of its data. The company had outsourced its own storage until 2008, when a vast trove of employee information was stolen. In response, G— invested $13 billion to build its own centers. Other corporations, lazy or cheap, soon paid to rent G—’s excess storage space. By the time we settled on our scheme, in the winter of 2014, G— had accumulated the private information of many of the world’s wealthiest banks (JPMC, HSBC, GSG, PPH), and the world’s largest accounting firm (D—), newspaper (N—), cable news station (F— N—), financial news organization (B—), online marketplace (E—), and social networking services (F— and T—). G— housed the data of more than two million businesses—real estate brokerages, Hollywood studios, software firms, oil and gas giants. G— stored the data of the army, the navy, the U.S. Postal Service, the Patent and Trademark Office, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (the federal agency that I knew most intimately from my own journalistic career: the national repository for climate change data). Incidentally, G— also operated the world’s largest email system. And the largest search engine—though search data occupied only 10 percent of its storage capacity.

It was impossible to predict how much money we could make from scouring the highest concentration of the world’s secrets. But we could arrive at some conservative estimates.

Professional data thieves, like bulk commodity traders, tended to deal in large quantities and low yields. Virginia had found various comps on the black market. User data for a dating website’s 30 million members sold for $500; a digital photo service with 15 million users went for $3,500; user data for the million subscribers to Minnesota’s largest newspaper yielded $1,100. But what would the sale of your uncle’s watch at a pawn market tell you about the value of a haul from the U.S. Treasury? The math didn’t scale. And the data center in Pryor was much larger than the U.S. Treasury. I know this because the U.S. Treasury, or at least its digital records, was stored 

If we could get inside that death star, if we could make off with those sleek black boxes, some fraction of the world’s secret information would be ours to examine, to explore, to exploit. How many corporate databases might a single server hold? Dozens? Thousands? The black-market sale of databases at regular intervals would provide a steady income. But that really represented the baseline, a worst-case scenario. Safe enough, but not especially profitable. A more lucrative outcome, we decided—Virginia decided—would carry even less risk. We would use confidential information found in those databases to make informed bets about the future: prediction markets, futures contracts, short selling, options trading. The best-case scenario, however, was hard to anticipate. We were open to the possibility that we would find something unexpected, grander, reality shifting . . .

There was no particular thing we were trying to steal, which is another way of saying that we were trying to steal everything.

Were a data center to boast of its security record, it would only draw attention to its vulnerability. But one shouldn’t confuse secrecy with indifference.

The next morning, our first day on the job, Virginia emerged from the motel bathroom in a wig of long brown curls.

“Are you speaking as Virginia or . . .” I gestured toward her new persona—jeans, mud boots, diamond ring, and a shapeless mustard-hued long-sleeved shirt under a fleece vest imprinted with the logo of a regional feed center.

“. . . It’s a pleasure to know you, Maura.”

“I am happy to make your acquaintance, Tim.”

“. . . Tim?” She nodded firmly, and it was decided. I was Tim.

We had chosen as our base of operations a no-tell in the town of Vinita. Safely ensconced within a Goldilocks zone of invisibility, Vinita was about 25 minutes from the data center, far enough that nobody would reasonably expect that we’d have business in Pryor. It was a mile east of the county line, so beyond the purview of the local police, and a 40-minute dash to the Missouri border. Vinita was just large enough to avoid scrutiny from locals, and small enough that no one outside the county gave a thought to its existence.

On the way to breakfast we turned on the radio. Virginia listened with great concentration. “It’s 

“Flattened diphthongs,” said Virginia. “They drop the terminal 

“I dunno. They sound pretty normal to me.”

There was only one place to eat in Vinita: the Cherokee, a pink-lit diner advertising a breakfast buffet for $4.99. Virginia, or rather Maura, settled into four pancakes, several slices of grease-popping bacon, and fried cubed potatoes herded through an unseemly clot of ketchup. I had a flashback to our first breakfast together at the Ritz. I wanted to think that everything had changed since then but I wasn’t sure anything had.

“Gotta fill out my clothes, by cracky,” said Maura.

“A localism,” she said under her breath. “It’s a gentler way to say Jesus.”

It was our first dress rehearsal. I wore a baggy sweatshirt and jeans and a Dallas Cowboys baseball cap. At the other occupied tables, exhausted farmer types stared moonfaced at the television or hunched over paper plates. When the waitress poured hot coffee into our Styrofoam cups, Virginia worked on slowing her speech. “

The waitress gave her a long look but made no comment. When I went back for a second helping of pancakes, a different waitress interceded to remind me that I could not bring a soiled plate to the breakfast bar. I apologized sheepishly.

“That’s all right, darling,” she said. “You’re a long way from Broken Arrow.”

Virginia was thrilled when I repeated the exchange. We’d begun as foreigners—Australians or Israelites—but a wardrobe change and a few behavioral tweaks had promoted us to residents of a city only two counties away. Perhaps, from Vinita, Broken Arrow seemed as foreign as Wagga Wagga, but that didn’t matter: the data center ran a private commuting shuttle each day to Tulsa and its suburbs to pick up employees. To pass for Tulsans would have been good enough. To be taken for a Broken Arrowan felt like acing the test.

“We’re going to do this, aren’t we?” I heard my own voice breaking through my vigilance, speaking for the vulnerable part of me that I tried to disguise—the part of me that thought in terms of 

“Yes, Tim,” said Virginia. “We are.” And she smiled—a brief, glowing, carefree smile that seemed to confirm more than the success of our costuming.

That called for another packet of syrup. At the buffet I nodded to the waitress. “Actually,” I told her, cocky now, “we’re not from Broken Arrow. We’re from Tulsa.”

When I turned back to the table, a large bald man was looming vastly over Virginia. I recognized him by the goatee—the man we’d met in the costume shop 10 miles earlier, where we bought our wigs and regionally appropriate denim and . . . Virginia’s ring.

“You’re not wearing your ring,” said Vandyke, pointing at my finger.

I smiled politely, closing the distance between us.

“Where y’all lovebirds coming from, anyway? Or going to?”

“Me and Maura here are going south. Home to Louisiana.” Our waitress intervened with a steaming carafe of coffee.

“Coulda swore her name was Virginia,” said Vandyke.

“The hell?” The other customers had turned their attention from the television to us.

“Back then her hair was different too,” said Vandyke. “A ginger.”

“You don’t say,” said the waitress.

“You going to linger round Vinita?” asked Vandyke.

“Looks real good.” He turned to the waitress. “Could never tell it was a wig, could you?”

“Sure is. Say, Candace—you ever want to be a brunette again, come down to Party Shop.”

We left cash on the table and did not speak until the Cherokee was gone from the rearview.

As a black hole devoured photons, it also brought those photons closer to one another.

I didn’t like her tone. “We go back to New York?”

She looked at me like I was crazy. “No,” she said, snatching off her wig. “We split up.”

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