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The words she would have said and the sound of the blow she’d gone ready to deliver echoed and died in her head. Words rushed up and died in her throat—panicked words, words to soothe, to tame, to call him back—they rushed on her, but she forgot them halfway to her mouth and he lay so still. And that’s how she learned that Beau Clinton, her only son and the son of Charles Clinton, was dead.

Intercourse with resuscitated wife for particular number of days, superstitious act designed to insure safe operation of household machinery. Electricity mourns the absence of the energy form (wife) within the household’s walls by stalling its flow to the outlets. As such, an improvised friction needs to take the place of electricity, to goad the natural currents back to their proper levels. This is achieved with the dead wife. She must be found, revived, and then penetrated until heat fills the room, until the toaster is shooting bread onto the floor, until she is smiling beneath you with black teeth and grabbing your bottom. Then the vacuum rides by and no one is pushing it, it is on full steam. Days flip past in chunks of fake light, and the intercourse is placed in the back of the mind. But it is always there, that moving into a static-ridden corpse that once spoke familiar messages in the morning when the sun was new.

The experience of reading Sex and Race is one of embrace and recoil as Rogers indiscriminately loads us down with the provable and the forever dodgy, the serious and the frivolous. Sometimes his footnotes, not always adequate or acceptable, tell when he was at work on a given aspect of his subject, in the way that an itemized credit card bill is a diary, a record of movement. The references go in clusters: in the 1920s, he was reading about Syria, Palestine, Arabia, and Persia; in the 1930s, he was reading the memoirs of English travelers in Africa. Sometimes, he clearly couldn’t go back to a particular library or text to check his facts again. And sometimes Sex and Race reads as though it had threatened to consume him, because the first-person voice breaks through in the book at times of what could be called narrative stress.

Rat-baiting was the premier betting sport of the nineteenth century. Its prestige can be gauged in economic terms, circa 1875: admission to a then illegal prizefight between humans cost fifty cents, to dogfights and cockfights $2, while a fight pitting a dog against rats ran anywhere from $1.50 if the dog faced five rats or fewer, up to $5, in proportion to the number of rats. In the eighteenth century the biggest draw had been bearbaiting, but that sport gradually dissipated as the number of available bears decreased, although matches continued to be held up to the Civil War, notably in McLaughlin’s bear pit at First Avenue and Tenth Street. For a while, dog-vs.-raccoon contests were popular, but rats were so readily available that they came to dominate the scene; boys were paid to catch them, at a rate of five to twelve cents a head.

Our father comes in wearing his gorilla mask and hands, swinging his arms and beating his chest. My sister puts her hands over her plate. Our father pushes her hands away, grabs at her food and pokes sauerkraut through the mouth hole in his mask. He moves around the table, swiping food from the paper plates and guzzling from the cups. Near my mother he bangs his head on the knickknack shelf and one of the snow globes falls and breaks on the floor. It’s the one with the satellite inside.

When our father comes near me, I slide down under the table, but he pulls me back up by his hairy rubber hands. I don’t say anything. He likes being the gorilla. After dinner, when he takes off the mask and hands, his face will be flushed and there will be tears in his eyes.