newyorker--2020-06-21--SoHo Briefly Returns to Its Pre-Gentrification Past

The plywood first went up across the Manhattan neighborhood of SoHo in March , as the coronavirus prompted storefronts to close and turned the neighborhood into a ghost town .
Then , after a spate of looting in late May and early June , which followed protests over the death of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis , more plywood appeared , put in place to repair windows shattered by ransackers or to ward off future attempts to get inside .
All of a sudden , it seemed , SoHo had a new face : bland sheets @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at the possibility of blight .
The effect was monotonous and claustrophobic .
The plywood , mostly uniform in color , with only knots and whorls providing variation , blurred the differences between storefronts and made streets feel narrower .
Soon , the plywood attracted the attention of artists .
A photographer documented the boarded-up stores , likening them to “ lonely shells ” that embodied sadness .
Graffiti related to Floyd ’ s death appeared .
Then people with brushes and cans of paint began turning the blank pieces of plywood into @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the idyllic to the polemic .
Some of those artists saw a form of symmetry in their actions .
In the nineteen-eighties , pioneering galleries turned SoHo into the center of the art world .
But , by the two-thousands , most of the galleries had been supplanted by luxury retail shops that displayed jackets and shoes as if they were works of art .
Now , in the wake of the looting , the boards put up by those shops were being transformed into canvases .
“ It ’ s a beautiful @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as she painted a mural on a recent afternoon , down the block from the Greene Street loft where she grew up .
“ SoHo is going back to what it used to be—a destination for art instead of shopping.
” Within days of the looting , Steven Hirsch , a photographer and artist , began documenting boarded-up stores in SoHo and beyond .
To Hirsch , the storefronts reflected complex feelings brought on by grief over COVID-19 deaths , unease over the loss of jobs that accompanied the pandemic , and anger @ @ @ @ @ @ @ felt , he said , as if the city were dying of multiple traumas .
“ Looking at the plywood made it seem almost like you were looking at the top of a plain pine coffin , ” he said .
“ Looking straight down , as if it was being lowered into a grave.
” Before long , messages and art works added life to the plywood .
Miriam Novalle said that she and her friend , the artist and filmmaker Maxi Cohen , came up with the idea to start painting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ SoHo .
The two obtained a free supply of paint from someone who works at an art-supply store , Novalle said , and put out a call for artists .
Those who showed up created about seventy images on the project ’ s first day , including renderings of hearts and a color-block mural .
“ We want to bring back the community spirit , ” Norvalle , who ran a tea salon in the neighborhood for several years in the nineties , said .
“ We ’ re encouraging artists to create @ @ @ @ @ @ @ others have embraced overtly political messages .
There have been calls to vote , to redistribute wealth , and to “ defund the police.
” People have written George Floyd ’ s name , created murals with his likeness and painted the words “ Black Lives Matter.
” Plywood on Broadway bears the names of black men and women , including Amadou Diallo and Breonna Taylor , who were killed by police officers .
People have put up portraits of other black men and women who died violently , flyers calling for investigations @ @ @ @ @ @ @ X and a poem by Langston Hughes .
On Mercer Street , a series of multicolored flyers read “ Enough is Enough ” and “ We Will Breathe.
” In several spots , images have appeared showing a brown-skinned Superman wearing a face mask that reads “ I Can ’ t Breathe , ” the last words of both Floyd and Eric Garner , who was killed on Staten Island , in 2014 , after a police officer used a choke hold while arresting him .
Over the past week or so , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ part of an ever-changing streetscape .
New messages and markings have appeared , sometimes added to existing images or obscuring them .
Meanwhile , some shops have begun to remove plywood as they prepare to reopen .
On a recent evening , Strautmanis worked on a mural that showed four birds perched on branches , along with the words “ Birdwatching Is Not a Crime !
” It was a reference , she said , to a recent episode in Central Park , in which Amy Cooper , a white woman walking a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a black man , Christian Cooper , who was watching birds , then called the police and said she felt menaced by him .
Nearby , Myra Lobel worked on a mural that included weeping eyes—a reminder to remain vigilant , and a plea , she said , to watch out for injustice even in the midst of grief .
Lobel said she was moved to start the mural , in part , by the sight of so much plywood .
“ There ’ s a long history of artists painting on wood @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it ’ s everywhere , and accessible to everyone.
” Around the corner , on Broome Street , Mason Grassfield and Signe Ferguson painted George Floyd ’ s name in an elaborate calligraphic script .
Grassfield said that the art works and messages covering the neighborhood felt like an extension of the protests over Floyd ’ s death that he and friends had attended for more than a week .
Ferguson added that she hoped the images blanketing SoHo would serve as lasting reminders of the realities that motivated those marches and rallies @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the city is changing , ” she said .
“ We ’ re turning our streets into museums , and you can ’ t help but walk around a corner and be faced with the truth .
”

The plywood first went up across SoHo in March, as the coronavirus prompted storefronts to close and turned the Manhattan neighborhood into a ghost town. Then, after a spate of looting in late May and early June, which followed protests over the death of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis, more plywood appeared, put in place to repair windows shattered by ransackers or to ward off future attempts to get inside. All of a sudden, it seemed, SoHo had a new face: bland sheets of wood that projected anonymity and hinted at the possibility of blight. The effect was monotonous and claustrophobic. The plywood, mostly uniform in color, with only knots and whorls providing variation, blurred the differences between storefronts and made streets feel narrower.
Soon, the plywood attracted the attention of artists. A photographer documented the boarded-up stores, likening them to “lonely shells” that embodied sadness. Graffiti related to Floyd’s death appeared. Then people with brushes and cans of paint began turning the blank pieces of plywood into a medium for messages that ranged from the idyllic to the polemic. Some of those artists saw a form of symmetry in their actions. In the nineteen-eighties, pioneering galleries turned SoHo into the center of the art world. But, by the two-thousands, most of the galleries had been supplanted by luxury retail shops that displayed jackets and shoes as if they were works of art. Now, in the wake of the looting, the boards put up by those shops were being transformed into canvases. “It’s a beautiful circle,” Claire Strautmanis said, as she painted a mural on a recent afternoon, down the block from the Greene Street loft where she grew up. “SoHo is going back to what it used to be—a destination for art instead of shopping.”
Within days of the looting, Steven Hirsch, a photographer and artist, began documenting boarded-up stores in SoHo and beyond. To Hirsch, the storefronts reflected complex feelings brought on by grief over COVID-19 deaths, unease over the loss of jobs that accompanied the pandemic, and anger over racism and police brutality. It felt, he said, as if the city were dying of multiple traumas. “Looking at the plywood made it seem almost like you were looking at the top of a plain pine coffin,” he said. “Looking straight down, as if it was being lowered into a grave.”
Before long, messages and art works added life to the plywood. Miriam Novalle said that she and her friend, the artist and filmmaker Maxi Cohen, came up with the idea to start painting the plywood as they were bicycling around SoHo. The two obtained a free supply of paint from someone who works at an art-supply store, Novalle said, and put out a call for artists. Those who showed up created about seventy images on the project’s first day, including renderings of hearts and a color-block mural. “We want to bring back the community spirit,” Norvalle, who ran a tea salon in the neighborhood for several years in the nineties, said. “We’re encouraging artists to create images that make people smile.”
Many others have embraced overtly political messages. There have been calls to vote, to redistribute wealth, and to “defund the police.” People have written George Floyd’s name, created murals with his likeness and painted the words “Black Lives Matter.” Plywood on Broadway bears the names of black men and women, including Amadou Diallo and Breonna Taylor, who were killed by police officers. People have put up portraits of other black men and women who died violently, flyers calling for investigations, quotes from James Baldwin and Malcolm X and a poem by Langston Hughes. On Mercer Street, a series of multicolored flyers read “Enough is Enough” and “We Will Breathe.” In several spots, images have appeared showing a brown-skinned Superman wearing a face mask that reads “I Can’t Breathe,” the last words of both Floyd and Eric Garner, who was killed on Staten Island, in 2014, after a police officer used a choke hold while arresting him.
Over the past week or so, the neighborhood’s plywood has become part of an ever-changing streetscape. New messages and markings have appeared, sometimes added to existing images or obscuring them. Meanwhile, some shops have begun to remove plywood as they prepare to reopen. On a recent evening, Strautmanis worked on a mural that showed four birds perched on branches, along with the words “Birdwatching Is Not a Crime!” It was a reference, she said, to an episode in Central Park, in which Amy Cooper, a white woman walking a dog, got into a dispute with a black man, Christian Cooper, who was watching birds, then called the police and said she felt menaced by him. Nearby, Myra Lobel worked on a mural that included weeping eyes—a reminder to remain vigilant, and a plea, she said, to watch out for injustice even in the midst of grief. Lobel said she was moved to start the mural, in part, by the sight of so much plywood. “There’s a long history of artists painting on wood,” she said. “Now it’s everywhere, and accessible to everyone.”
Around the corner, on Broome Street, Mason Grassfield and Signe Ferguson painted George Floyd’s name in an elaborate calligraphic script. Grassfield said that the art works and messages covering the neighborhood felt like an extension of the protests over Floyd’s death that he and friends had attended for more than a week. Ferguson added that she hoped the images blanketing SoHo would serve as lasting reminders of the realities that motivated those marches and rallies. “Right now, the landscape of the city is changing,” she said. “We’re turning our streets into museums, and you can’t help but walk around a corner and be faced with the truth.”


newyorker--2020-06-21--My Mother’s Dreams for Her Son, and All Black Children

By the late summer of 1967 , when I turned seven , we ’ d been living in the house for six years .
By “ we , ” I mean my mother , two of my four older sisters , and my little brother .
And although we shared the place with a rotating cast of other relatives , including my mother ’ s mother and an aunt and her two children , I always considered it my mother ’ s home .
The house was in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn .
Like all the moves my mother @ @ @ @ @ @ @ family , this one was aspirational .
Despite the fact that Brownsville had begun its slow decline into drugs , poverty , and ghettoization years before , my mother ’ s house—the only one in her life that , after years of work and planning , she would even partly own—symbolized a break with everything we had known before , including an apartment in Crown Heights , with a shared bathroom near the stairwell , where , on Sunday nights , my mother would line her daughters up with freshly laundered towels so @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Privacy was something my sisters had to get used to .
Our new house had doors and a proper sitting room , which sometimes served as a makeshift bedroom for visiting Bajan relatives .
( My mother ’ s family was from Barbados . )
The sister I was closest to , a poetry-writing star who wore pencil skirts to play handball with the guys , composed her verse amid drifts and piles of clothes and kept her door closed .
My brother and I shared a smaller room and a bed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , where the door was always ajar ; she didn ’ t so much sleep there as rest between walks up and down the hall to watch and listen for the safety of her children .
The Brownsville summer of 1967 was like every other Brooklyn summer I ’ d experienced : stultifying .
Relief was sought at the nearby Betsy Head Pool , and at the fire hydrants that reckless boys opened with giant wrenches .
The cold water made the black asphalt blacker in the black nights .
Gossip floated down @ @ @ @ @ @ @ front porches and from stoops flanked by big concrete planters full of dusty plastic flowers .
Nursing a beer or a Pepsi , the grownups discussed far-off places like Vietnam .
So-and-So ’ s son had come back from there all messed up , and now he was on the methadone .
Then the conversation would shift to the kids .
Every kid in our neighborhood was everyone else ’ s kid .
Prying , caring eyes were everywhere .
Sometimes the conversation stopped—just for a moment—as girls in summer dresses passed .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ those girls , for different reasons , as they ambled down the street , pretending to pay no mind to the fine-built boys who called to them from a distance .
In short , what one saw in that place on those nights was what my mother had been searching for : community .
She was a proud member of Mary McLeod Bethune ’ s National Council of Negro Women , and had attended Martin Luther King , Jr. , ’ s 1963 March on Washington .
When she reminisced about that march @ @ @ @ @ @ @ made her children feel shy : sometime in the long ago , Ma had been part of history .
Nonviolent organization , picket lines , and marches : all these strengthened our mother ’ s conviction that inclusion worked , that civil rights worked , that the black family could work , especially if welfare officers and other professionally concerned people—journalists and sociologists , say—paid attention to what a black mother built , rather than to how she failed .
( “ I don ’ t think a female running a house is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Toni Morrison said in a 1989 interview .
“ It ’ s perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man .
.
.
.
You need a whole community—everybody—to raise a child.
” ) If Ma failed , then we failed , and she never wanted us to feel that .
Something else Ma wanted : for black people in Brooklyn , in America , not to forever be effectively refugees—stateless , homeless , without rights , confined by borders that they did not create and by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they died , all while trying to rear children who went to schools that taught them not about themselves but about what they didn ’ t have .
And yet there was no way to save Ma ’ s idea of community and hope when , in September , 1967 , our neighborhood changed forever .
Someone , or a bunch of someones , heard that a young boy , a fourteen-year-old black kid , Richard Ross , had been killed by a cop—a detective named John Rattley—in Brownsville .
Apparently , Rattley @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mugging an old Jewish man ; as Ross tried to get away , Rattley shot him in the back of the head .
In those years , black boys were locked up or killed all the time ; you didn ’ t think about it much , because to think about it was to remember what a killing field New York was , and how easily you , too , could become a body in that field .
The detail we hung on to in the flurry of hearsay and speculation was that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Carson was big then ; it was said that he was leading a demonstration , and it was coming our way .
Marches , protests , and the like were , we knew , a prelude to the racially motivated violence that had already cropped up in nearby Newark and other places , such as Detroit .
For sure , Brownsville would get more messed up if the cops were involved ; that was how demonstrations became riots .
I remember that night—or was it late afternoon ?
—our mother walking us swiftly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ doors and windows .
Inside , it was lights-out .
The air was close .
We could hear our hearts beating .
Peeking from behind one of the living-room curtains , I watched as the protesters started flinging bottles and stones at the cops , and our real world turned into a movie , a horror film in which everything we ’ d built together—home , hope , the illusion of citizenship—was torn to the ground .
Black people , mostly men , were roaming the streets , periodically smashing car windows or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ were claiming what they felt to be a kind of freedom .
As refugees , we knew that none of it belonged to us—not that shop , not that newly built pigeon coop—even as we knew that it did belong to us , emotionally speaking : it was all part of our community .
Still , why not trash a universe that has trashed you ?
Standing by my mother ’ s living-room window , I tried , tentatively , to ask her why our world was burning , burning .
She gave @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be quiet so you can survive , her eyes seemed to say .
Did I want to be another Richard Ross , one of the hundred or thousand Richard Rosses out there ?
So many questions I could not ask—among them , had our desire for community also been reduced to rubble and ash ?
The chaos that night—it would last for two days before life went back to “ normal ” —was more vivid to my burgeoning writer ’ s mind than what I could not see : our mother ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of a promised land .
Where was that ?
And was it different from—or superior to—the world my poetry-writing sister was gradually entering , through her admiration for a number of the musicians and poets associated with the Black Arts Movement ?
A world that promised a cataclysmic end to whiteness , if only we could carry arms and follow the teachings of early Malcolm X ?
Was my mother a “ better ” forecaster of what was to come than my sister ?
Martin and Malcolm , like protest marches and riots @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I loved my sister and wanted to think as she did , I was , presumably , part of the “ riot generation ” ; I knew about violence from the teasing , taunting black boys in my neighborhood , and Sly and the Family Stone ’ s dark and furious live album “ There ’ s a Riot Goin ’ On , ” released four years after the Brownsville uprising , stayed in my bones more than those of any weepy folksinger .
But what about Ma and her dreams ?
I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as well .

Who would I be when the revolution finally came? A soldier for peace, or a man who might appear in “The True Import of Present Dialogue: Black vs. Negro,” a poem by the activist and writer Nikki Giovanni?
Nigger
Can you kill
Can you kill
Can a nigger kill
Can a nigger kill a honkie
Can a nigger kill the Man
Can you kill nigger
Huh? nigger can you
kill
Do you know how to draw blood
Can you poison
Can you stab-a-Jew
Can you kill huh? nigger
Can you kill
Can you run a protestant down with your
’68 El Dorado
(that’s all they’re good for anyway)
Can you kill . . .
A nigger can die
We ain’t got to prove we can die
We got to prove we can kill . . .
But my brother and I weren’t niggers. And if called upon we wouldn’t have been able to protect our mother and our sisters. Whom could we rely on to protect them, let alone us? Would the young black men with bats and other weapons who were flitting down our street—they seemed to leap as they walked—come for us? Would they save us? Or destroy us, too? No door or lock could keep them out.
Ma had her girls first. I wonder what it was like for her to try to understand boys—to rear boys who were not a threat to women, who would grow up to support women’s dreams and protect them. In her world, men came and went and were Something Else. My brother and I were different, and, although we were our mother’s familiars, I wonder if she eyed our difference unbelievingly at times, even as she nurtured it.
When we finally left our house in Brownsville, we walked out into a changed world. Apparently, while we were inside, Lloyd Sealy, who was then the commander of Brooklyn’s North Borough, had ramped up the police presence in the area. One way to control unruly, ungovernable refugees, of course, is to remind them that they are guests of a mighty police state. Every billy club that cracks open a black skull anywhere is proof of that. Once we learned that Sealy was black, too, we bent low in sorrow, or rose with arms high in grief and anger. What had civil rights wrought? Were powerful black men mere functionaries for a white administration? Did black lives not matter to them, then or ever?
Brownsville was not their home. Was it even ours? The world that Ma desired just wasn’t possible yet. We were still refugees living within certain borders. We would live and die in this amount of space and no more. Emerging from our mother’s house, we smelled burning tires and bedding. (Our house was relatively unharmed.) I don’t remember my mother crying; I remember entering that fetid air in silence. But you could hear our community mourning the loss of itself, if you knew how to listen; mourning was our language. The world around us was not the one we had worked hard to achieve but the quiet, degraded world that our not-country said we deserved. We couldn’t keep nothing, the elders said, not even ourselves.
Had the uprising been a kind of temper tantrum? Acted out by a community that was, like me, looking for a black man it could trust to protect and lead it? Rattley, Sealy, my only occasionally live-in father: there had been so many disappointments. Someone said that Sonny Carson had helped to quiet folks down. Someone said that a young Muslim man, a local youth-group leader, had also helped to calm things by serving as a liaison between the police and the crowds. Someone said that Mayor John V. Lindsay was around. And then there he was, our first celebrity, a tall white man, trailed by a group of photographers and tired-looking black people, walking through our streets, or someone’s streets, surveying the damage. Lindsay also served on President Lyndon Johnson’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, more commonly known as the Kerner Commission, which had been established after riots took place in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Detroit. He had access to a world beyond what we knew, and now he turned his attention to me, in this world. He took my hand. He was beautiful, like a star from a movie I had never seen. Mixed with the confusion and the vague erotics of the moment—it was a thrill to feel my small hand in his big one (was he my father?), though I had already learned to hide that part of myself—was my silent bewilderment over the fact that poverty and frustration could be an opportunity for a photograph, though no one asked us what it was like to lose a home or to dream of living in one.
Hope dies all the time. And yet we need to believe that it will come back and attach itself to a new cause—a new love, a new house, something that gives us a sense of purpose, which is ultimately what hope is. Ma always had hope, because she knew that it had helped to change the world, her black world. But I had no clear examples, growing up, of what might make a difference in mine. Guns? Death? Poetry? Would any of it dismantle the economic discrepancies, for instance, that defined our de-facto underclass, that kept us scavenging for a lifeline, even if it was just a pair of sneakers snatched through a pane of broken glass? When I finally saw the National Mall, in Washington, D.C., in person, the black-and-white pictures of King’s historic gathering there played in my head, but alongside memories of 1975’s Human Kindness Day. Established in 1972, Human Kindness Day—a series of exhibitions, concerts, and literary events meant to inspire racial pride—was spearheaded by the National Park Service, the D.C. Recreation Department, and Compared to What?, Inc., a nonprofit organization for the advancement of the arts. Each year, a concert by a great black artist capped off the festival—Roberta Flack the first year, Nina Simone the next. But in 1975, when Stevie Wonder was the headliner, vandalism broke out. Hundreds of folks were robbed and injured. It’s cited as an early example of “wildin’,” but, when discussing it, people rarely mention the recession of the mid-seventies, or the way that bringing together haves and have-nots lent a stage, yet again, to the drama of inequality.
It was a drama that I saw play out, over and over again, as I was growing up. I don’t remember when we moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant, but demonstrations and riots followed us there. Then, after a time, we moved to Crown Heights again; riots followed us there, too. No place was safe, because wherever we congregated was unsafe. The laws of real estate, economics, and racism made us unsafe. To cops. To landlords. To social workers, who “visited” our houses whenever they felt like it to see if our mothers were entertaining men (and, by implication, getting paid for it). To shopkeepers, who didn’t understand that the deprivations of poverty were a pretty good incentive for us to take what we’d never be able to buy. To schoolteachers, who weren’t paid to care. To a society that demanded our gratitude for the dried gruel at the bottom of the bowl which it tossed us after years of scarcely remunerated labor. To the black men whom we wanted to stay, but who couldn’t for fear that our vulnerability would compound their own.
The question for me from Brownsville on was: how would I protect my mother and the other women in my family when the riots came again (and they always came)? Adults are supposed to protect children, yes, but when I was growing up it didn’t necessarily work that way. It wasn’t that your mother didn’t care—you were all she had—it was just that she kept running out of time. In addition to her full-time job—and, often, a second job—there was the work that went into feeding you, listening to you, and making sure no one laughed at you or cracked you in the face because you had dreams.
As a boy in Brownsville and in Bed-Stuy, I was tormented by the question of protection, because, of course, I, too, wanted to be protected. Like any number of black boys in those neighborhoods, I grew up in a matrilineal society, where I had been taught the power—the necessity—of silence. But how could you not cry out when you couldn’t save your mother because you couldn’t defend yourself? Although I had this in common with other guys, something separated me from them when it came to joining those demonstrations, to leaping in the air when black bodies were threatened. My distance had to do with my queerness. The guys who took the chance to protect their families and themselves were the same guys who called me “faggot.”
For a while, I thought their looting and carrying on had to do with enacting a particular form of masculinity: if white men and cops could wreak havoc in the world, why couldn’t they? But, as I grew older, I realized that part of their acting out had to do with how we were brought up. They weren’t trying to be men—they were already men—but in order to have the perceived weight of white men they had to reject, to some degree, the silence they had learned from their mothers. If they were going to die, they were going to die screaming.
“Before humans started hibernating, this cozy little cave used to be a bakery.” Cartoon by Akeem Roberts Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
The silence that I was taught as a means of survival no longer fits me, either. But I know that I wouldn’t have given it up entirely—it’s hard to give up, Ma—if Christian Cooper hadn’t shown me another way in Central Park last month, if that fifty-seven-year-old thinker hadn’t woken up next to his slumbering boyfriend, then left their shared love to look at birds, which he loved, too. By example, Cooper showed me that I was not alone. When a white woman tried to endanger him with a lying 911 call (“An African-American man is threatening my life!”), he did not run, and he did not, on a profound level, engage with his attacker’s theatrics of racism. Cooper’s actions that day said, Listen to yourself, not to your accuser, because your accusers are always listening to their own panic about your presence. And if what they are saying—or shouting—threatens your personal safety, protect yourself by any means necessary. If you can protect yourself, you’ll be around to love and take care of more people, and be loved and taken care of in return.
I don’t entirely agree with the great Ralph Ellison when he says, in his 1989 essay “On Being the Target of Discrimination,”
It isn’t necessarily through acts of physical violence—lynching, mob attacks, or slaps to the face, whether experienced firsthand or by word of mouth—that a child is initiated into the contradictions of segregated democracy. Rather, it is through brief impersonal encounters, stares, vocal inflections, hostile laughter, or public reversals of private expectations that occur at the age when children are most perceptive to the world and all its wonders.
The truth is that nothing is impersonal when it comes to racism, or the will to subjugate. Every act of racism is a deeply personal act with an end result: the unmooring diminishment of the person who is its target. If you have suffered that kind of erasure, you are less likely to know who you are or where you live. My brother has suggested that we moved so much when we were kids because our mother kept looking for safety. I don’t remember exactly how many times we moved; in those days, my focus was on trying to win people over, the better to protect my family, or—silently—trying to fend off homophobia, the better to protect myself. My being a “faggot” was one way for other people to feel better about themselves. My being a “faggot” let cops know what they weren’t.


newyorker--2020-06-21--A Trump Visit Lays Bare Two Tulsas, a Mile and a Universe Apart

Saturday , June 20th—cloudy , chance of thunderstorms , brief glimpses of sun—was the kind of day few Tulsans have had much experience with .
Going all the way back to 1921 , the city of four hundred thousand in northwestern Oklahoma has seldom been in the national spotlight .
By early afternoon , several hundred supporters of President Trump had assembled in a parking lot outside Tulsa ’ s largest arena , the B.O.K .
Center , named after the Bank of Oklahoma .
The President ’ s arrival was hours away , but his backers had arrived early @ @ @ @ @ @ @ were admitted to the nineteen-thousand-seat venue on a first-come , first-served basis .
Dozens of journalists from across the country surrounded them , girding for an evening that could reënergize Trump ’ s campaign and be one of the worst superspreader events of the coronavirus pandemic .
In these strange times , the words of the prophets were written on T-shirts , hats , and men ’ s bare chests : “ Trump 2020 : NO MORE BULLSHIT ” ; “ Trump Those Bitches ” ; “ Impeach This , ” emblazoned across @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it seemed , his Democratic tormentors the bird .
And , in what is surely the most succinct summary of Trump ’ s attitude vis-à-vis dissent , “ Get on Board , or Get Run Over.
” Many Trump supporters declined to be interviewed for this article .
Several expressed fears of Antifa .
Bill , a white man from Tulsa in his sixties , agreed to be interviewed but declined to give his last name .
When asked to describe Tulsa ’ s greatest achievements and challenges , he played down the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tensions .
“ I don ’ t believe in color myself right now , ” he said .
“ I believe in character .
Yeah , but there are a lot of people that believe in a divided city .
.
.
.
But , you know , I just look at people .
Character instead of color.
” Asked the same question , John Goodenberger , a Tulsa native in his twenties , replied : “ You know , it ’ s a good place to be if you are a farmer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ place to be if you ’ re a musician .
It ’ s whatever , it ’ s got a little bit of everything .
I really like that about Tulsa.
” He added that the public-school system could need work .
Those answers do not address a century of racial violence in Tulsa .
The 1921 massacre of three hundred residents of the city ’ s prosperous and predominantly African-American Greenwood neighborhood is becoming a widely known historical event only because black survivors offered interviews , oral histories , and written accounts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ knowledge of the massacre have been conspicuously silent for the most part , even though it has been estimated that as many as five thousand of them descended upon Greenwood .
Six months after the massacre , just west of the neighborhood , the Ku Klux Klan erected a three-story steel headquarters , from which it gained a stranglehold on local politics .
Among the group ’ s members was Tate Brady , a Tulsa founding father whose name has been scrubbed from much of the downtown landscape in recent years .
Racial @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the decades since , but it certainly hasn ’ t disappeared .
In 2014 , a young black man named Jeremy Lake was killed by his white girlfriend ’ s father , a policeman named Shannon Kepler .
In 2015 , a black man , Eric Harris , was gunned down by a wealthy , seventy-three-year-old volunteer policeman named Bob Bates , who said he accidentally fired his pistol instead of his Taser .
Older white Tulsans—preachers , the local paper , city leaders and businesses and institutions—tend to call these events tragic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
In a 2018 Gallup poll , sixty-two per cent of white city residents said they felt that the police treated people like them fairly , while only twenty-three per cent of black ones said the same .
As the afternoon dragged on , the sense of giddy anticipation in advance of Trump ’ s 7 P.M. campaign rally began to turn sour .
The influx of hundreds of thousands of Trump supporters that locals had been told to anticipate failed to materialize .
The boarded-up windows along the main street—shuttered in anticipation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sky began to evoke a sense of a town prepared for a hurricane that , impossibly , seemed to be standing it up .
The National Guard troops who lined the emptied-out streets seemed to have little to do .
Street vendors , both white and black , hawked their wares , but , as 7 p.m. approached and it became clear that the Trump temple was not even close to filling up , tables overstuffed with Trump this and Trump that remained overstuffed .

Saturday, June 20th—cloudy, chance of thunderstorms, brief glimpses of sun—was the kind of day few Tulsans have had much experience with. Going all the way back to 1921, the city of four hundred thousand in northeastern Oklahoma has seldom been in the national spotlight. By early afternoon, several hundred supporters of President Trump had assembled in a parking lot outside Tulsa’s largest arena, the B.O.K. Center, named after the Bank of Oklahoma. The President’s arrival was hours away, but his backers had arrived early for an event at which ticket holders were admitted to the nineteen-thousand-seat venue on a first-come, first-served basis. Dozens of journalists from across the country surrounded them, girding for an evening that could reënergize Trump’s campaign and be one of the worst superspreader events of the coronavirus pandemic. In these strange times, the words of the prophets were written on T-shirts, hats, and men’s bare chests: “Trump 2020: NO MORE BULLSHIT”; “Trump Those Bitches”; “Impeach This,” emblazoned across an image of the President giving, it seemed, his Democratic tormentors the bird. And, in what is surely the most succinct summary of Trump’s attitude vis-à-vis dissent, “Get on Board, or Get Run Over.”
Many Trump supporters declined to be interviewed for this article. Several expressed fears of Antifa. Bill, a white man from Tulsa in his sixties, agreed to be interviewed but declined to give his last name. When asked to describe Tulsa’s greatest achievements and challenges, he played down the city’s current and past racial tensions. “I don’t believe in color myself right now,” he said. “I believe in character. Yeah, but there are a lot of people that believe in a divided city. . . . But, you know, I just look at people. Character instead of color.” Asked the same question, John Goodenberger, a Tulsa native in his twenties, replied: “You know, it’s a good place to be if you are a farmer, but it’s a good place to be if you’re a musician. It’s whatever, it’s got a little bit of everything. I really like that about Tulsa.” He added that the public-school system could need work.
Those answers do not address a century of racial violence in Tulsa. The 1921 massacre of three hundred residents of the city’s prosperous and predominantly African-American Greenwood neighborhood is becoming a widely known historical event only because black survivors offered interviews, oral histories, and written accounts of the attack; whites with direct knowledge of the massacre have been conspicuously silent for the most part, even though it has been estimated that as many as five thousand of them descended upon Greenwood. Six months after the massacre, just west of the neighborhood, the Ku Klux Klan erected a three-story steel headquarters, from which it gained a stranglehold on local politics. Among the group’s members was Tate Brady, a Tulsa founding father whose name has been scrubbed from much of the downtown landscape in recent years.
Racial violence has taken on new forms in the decades since, but it certainly hasn’t disappeared. In 2014, a young black man named Jeremy Lake was killed by his white girlfriend’s father, a policeman named Shannon Kepler. In 2015, a black man, Eric Harris, was gunned down by a wealthy, seventy-three-year-old volunteer policeman named Bob Bates, who said he accidentally fired his pistol instead of his Taser. Older white Tulsans—preachers, the local paper, city leaders and businesses and institutions—tend to call these events tragic one-offs instead of seeing a clear pattern. In a 2018 Gallup poll, sixty-two per cent of white city residents said they felt that the police treated people like them fairly, while only twenty-three per cent of black ones said the same.
As the afternoon dragged on, the sense of giddy anticipation in advance of Trump’s 7 P.M. campaign rally began to turn sour. The influx of hundreds of thousands of Trump supporters that locals had been told to anticipate failed to materialize. The boarded-up windows along the main street—shuttered in anticipation of possible riots—coupled with a tangle-cloud gray sky began to evoke a sense of a town prepared for a hurricane that, impossibly, seemed to be standing it up. The National Guard troops who lined the emptied-out streets seemed to have little to do. Street vendors, both white and black, hawked their wares, but, as 7 p.m. approached and it became clear that the Trump temple was not even close to filling up, tables overstuffed with Trump this and Trump that remained overstuffed.


newyorker--2020-06-21--Trump to Hold Next Rally in Bunker

Trump to Hold Next Rally in Bunker

TULSA ( The Borowitz Report ) —Stung by the paltry turnout at his Saturday-night rally in Tulsa , Oklahoma , @ @ @ @ @ campaign has announced plans to hold his next rally in the bunker beneath the White @ @ @ @ @ rally , Brad Parscale , the chairman of Trump ’ s reëlection campaign , denied @ @ @ @ @ reflected a tepid level of enthusiasm to see the candidate speak .
“ The bunker @ @ @ @ @ Parscale said .
“ That is a much larger seating capacity than Joe Biden ’ @ @ @ @ @ choice of such an intimate venue , however , Trump campaign sources are privately worried @ @ @ @ @ filling the bunker .
According to one source , Jared Kushner spent all of Sunday @ @ @ @ @ people to attend the bunker rally .
“ All of Jared ’ s friends said @ @ @ @ @ so that ’ s five seats right there , ” the source said .

TULSA (The Borowitz Report)—Stung by the paltry turnout at his Saturday-night rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Donald J. Trump’s campaign has announced plans to hold his next rally in the bunker beneath the White House.
In announcing the rally, Brad Parscale, the chairman of Trump’s reëlection campaign, denied that the choice of venue reflected a tepid level of enthusiasm to see the candidate speak.
“The bunker holds forty people,” Parscale said. “That is a much larger seating capacity than Joe Biden’s basement.”
Despite the choice of such an intimate venue, however, Trump campaign sources are privately worried that they may have difficulty filling the bunker.
According to one source, Jared Kushner spent all of Sunday morning on the phone begging people to attend the bunker rally.
“All of Jared’s friends said they’re coming, so that’s five seats right there,” the source said.


newyorker--2020-06-21--Donald Trump’s Empty Campaign Rally in Tulsa

In some ways , what Donald Trump didn ’ t say on Saturday night in Tulsa , Oklahoma , at a rally that was billed as his big post-pandemic return to the campaign trail , matters more than what he did .
In more than ninety minutes onstage , not one mention of the murder of George Floyd .
Not one mention of the murder of Breonna Taylor .
Barely a mention of the hundred and nineteen thousand Americans killed by COVID-19 , or of the tens of millions thrown out of work , facing uncertain futures for themselves and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who was , just a few weeks ago , supposedly considering a big speech on race and unity .
Instead , on Saturday , Trump did a cool twenty minutes on his experience of walking down a slippery ramp after delivering the graduation speech at West Point last weekend .
He also bragged about the stock market ; called COVID-19 the “ kung flu ” ; accused Representative Ilhan Omar , who was born in Somalia , of wanting to turn America into a failed state “ just like the country from where @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he instructed a military officer during negotiations with Boeing not to put anything “ in writing , ” because he wanted to potentially skip out on paying a multimillion-dollar order-cancellation fee for new Air Force One planes .
A long spring of pain has just ended in America ; on the first night of summer , Trump both proved incapable of addressing that pain and confessed that he has contributed to it .
From the moment COVID-19 emerged , Trump has done his best to downplay the disease .
“ I like the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ said back in March—a sentiment that then became government policy .
More recently , Trump has become fixated on a peculiar , circular argument about testing .
“ If we didn ’ t do any testing , we would have very few cases , ” he said in May , an assertion as inane as it is inarguable .
On Saturday , Trump took things a step further , telling us—bragging , really—that he ’ d discouraged government officials from trying to get a full picture of the outbreak .
“ I said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ testing down , please , ’ ” he said .
Within minutes , Trump ’ s aides were trying to clean up his mess , saying the President had been “ joking.
” That we have a President whose priority is denying reality is a public-health catastrophe .
But what did he even want his supporters to take away from this confession ?
Campaign rallies play a special role in Trump ’ s life and his politics .
These events are where the legend of his connection to his base was born .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump ’ s aides think of these events as Presidential mood enhancers : when things are tough , Trump can blow off a little steam and enjoy the fawning of thousands of fans clad in merchandise bearing his name .
But Saturday ’ s event , which was supposed to make a big show of the country bouncing back by attracting a capacity crowd to a big indoor arena , was a logistical nightmare for Trump ’ s campaign .
Public-health officials in Tulsa begged the President not to hold the event , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t require the use of masks , made attendees sign health waivers in order to secure tickets .
On Saturday , news came that a half-dozen campaign employees who worked on organizing the rally had tested positive for the coronavirus .
The rally was originally scheduled for Friday , which was Juneteenth , the holiday that commemorates the end of slavery in America .
In 1921 , Tulsa was the site of the Black Wall Street massacre , in which white residents of the city killed hundreds of their black neighbors .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ inform the relationship between the city ’ s black residents and the police .
Following an outcry about the date of the rally , Trump was forced to move the event by a day .
The crowd that turned up on Saturday could hardly fill even the lower half of the nineteen-thousand-seat B.O.K .
Center .
A separate , outdoor event where Trump was slated to speak was scrapped for lack of an audience .
Trump ’ s campaign tried to blame the media and protesters for scaring people off , but protests @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( “ We had some very bad people outside , ” Trump said early in his speech—an echo of the way he once described white-supremacist marchers in Charlottesville , Virginia , as “ very fine people.
” ) Meanwhile , teen-agers on TikTok were claiming that they ’ d helped to kneecap the event , by making thousands of phantom ticket requests online—out-trolling a President who has made trolling his chief political strategy .
There ’ s just no escaping the interconnected crises facing the country right now , even at a Trump @ @ @ @ @ @ @ red “ Make America Great Again ” hats had to compete with blue and black face masks .
The over-all effect of the event was to show a campaign and a candidate struggling to figure out what to say .
“ We will make American great again—again !
” Mike Pence said at the end of his introductory remarks .
“ Keep America Great , ” the slogan that Trump had worked up for his reëlection bid , seems to have been scrapped .
Trump filed for reëlection the day he was inaugurated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of permanent campaigning , and he has never stopped running for President—and yet he billed Saturday ’ s speech as a kind of campaign launch .
“ We begin our campaign , we begin our campaign , ” he said .
Clearly , he was hoping for a kind of reset , at a moment when his poll numbers are cratering .
When Trump did speak of the coronavirus , he spoke of it not as an illness ( a topic which always unnerves him ) , nor as an economic calamity for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ robbed him of a key campaign talking point .
Without the pre-pandemic unemployment numbers to tout , he spoke of judges , military spending , tax cuts for the wealthy , and deregulation .
He barely mentioned his two big campaign promises from 2016 , building the wall and draining the swamp—both now reminders as much of what he hasn ’ t done as what he has .
He took some shots at Joe Biden , attacking him from the left in one breath ( “ America should not take lectures on racial @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from the right in the next ( “ Biden is a very willing Trojan horse for socialism ” ) .
Another President might have something to work with here , facing a candidate with Biden ’ s record of backing “ tough on crime ” legislation in the Senate at a time when people are in the streets protesting against police violence and systemic racism .
But Trump is the President who , three years ago , encouraged police officers to rough up people they arrest .
He ’ s the President who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ When the looting starts , the shooting starts.
” In Tulsa , Trump seemed to be enjoying himself .
He was doing his arm flaps and his struts and his small-mouthed yelling like it was the summer of 2016 .
( He even took some shots at Hillary Clinton . )
But the past few months have made his limitations more visible than ever .
He ’ s been unable to shout down a virus , or to make protests a wedge issue .
What will Trump be able to campaign on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has sided with the people demonstrating in the streets .
Polls show that large majorities of Americans believe that racism is a major problem in the country .
This is a change .
And , as much as it is an accomplishment of the Black Lives Matter movement , it might also have something to do with the special , public abuse that the man in the White House has unleashed these past five years on black people , Muslims , Latinos , and Asian-Americans .
( Not to mention women , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The list is long . )
Meanwhile , on Saturday , even before Trump was finished giving his speech , people were sharing clips on social media of MAGA-clad fans in the audience , yawning as their President rattled on .

In some ways, what Donald Trump didn’t say on Saturday night in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at a rally that was billed as his big post-pandemic return to the campaign trail, matters more than what he did. In more than ninety minutes onstage, not one mention of the murder of George Floyd. Not one mention of the murder of Breonna Taylor. Barely a mention of the hundred and nineteen thousand Americans killed by COVID-19, or of the tens of millions thrown out of work, facing uncertain futures for themselves and their families. This is the President who was, just a few weeks ago, supposedly considering a big speech on race and unity. Instead, on Saturday, Trump did a cool twenty minutes on his experience of walking down a slippery ramp after delivering the graduation speech at West Point last weekend. He also bragged about the stock market; called COVID-19 the “kung flu”; accused Representative Ilhan Omar, who was born in Somalia, of wanting to turn America into a failed state “just like the country from where she came”; and said that he instructed a military officer during negotiations with Boeing not to put anything “in writing,” because he wanted to potentially skip out on paying a multimillion-dollar order-cancellation fee for new Air Force One planes.
A long spring of pain has just ended in America; on the first night of summer, Trump both proved incapable of addressing that pain and confessed that he has contributed to it. From the moment COVID-19 emerged, Trump has done his best to downplay the disease. “I like the numbers where they are,” he said back in March—a sentiment that then became government policy. More recently, Trump has become fixated on a peculiar, circular argument about testing. “If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases,” he said in May, an assertion as inane as it is inarguable. On Saturday, Trump took things a step further, telling us—bragging, really—that he’d discouraged government officials from trying to get a full picture of the outbreak. “I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please,’ ” he said. Within minutes, Trump’s aides were trying to clean up his mess, saying the President had been “joking.”
That we have a President whose priority is denying reality is a public-health catastrophe. But what did he even want his supporters to take away from this confession? Campaign rallies play a special role in Trump’s life and his politics. These events are where the legend of his connection to his base was born. White House reporters often tell us that Trump’s aides think of these events as Presidential mood enhancers: when things are tough, Trump can blow off a little steam and enjoy the fawning of thousands of fans clad in merchandise bearing his name. But Saturday’s event, which was supposed to make a big show of the country bouncing back by attracting a capacity crowd to a big indoor arena, was a logistical nightmare for Trump’s campaign. Public-health officials in Tulsa begged the President not to hold the event, and the campaign, though it didn’t require the use of masks, made attendees sign health waivers in order to secure tickets. On Saturday, news came that a half-dozen campaign employees who worked on organizing the rally had tested positive for the coronavirus.
The rally was originally scheduled for Friday, which was Juneteenth, the holiday that commemorates the end of slavery in America. In 1921, Tulsa was the site of the Black Wall Street massacre, in which white residents of the city killed hundreds of their black neighbors. The legacy of that event continues to inform the relationship between the city’s black residents and the police. Following an outcry about the date of the rally, Trump was forced to move the event by a day. The crowd that turned up on Saturday could hardly fill even the lower half of the nineteen-thousand-seat B.O.K. Center. A separate, outdoor event where Trump was slated to speak was scrapped for lack of an audience. Trump’s campaign tried to blame the media and protesters for scaring people off, but protests in Tulsa on Saturday were small. (“We had some very bad people outside,” Trump said early in his speech—an echo of the way he once described white-supremacist marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, as “very fine people.”) Meanwhile, teen-agers on TikTok were claiming that they’d helped to kneecap the event, by making thousands of phantom ticket requests online—out-trolling a President who has made trolling his chief political strategy. There’s just no escaping the interconnected crises facing the country right now, even at a Trump rally. Waivers or no, the red “Make America Great Again” hats had to compete with blue and black face masks.
The over-all effect of the event was to show a campaign and a candidate struggling to figure out what to say. “We will make American great again—again!” Mike Pence said at the end of his introductory remarks. “Keep America Great,” the slogan that Trump had worked up for his reëlection bid, seems to have been scrapped. Trump filed for reëlection the day he was inaugurated, in 2017—his governing style is one of permanent campaigning, and he has never stopped running for President—and yet he billed Saturday’s speech as a kind of campaign launch. “We begin our campaign, we begin our campaign,” he said. Clearly, he was hoping for a kind of reset, at a moment when his poll numbers are cratering.
When Trump did speak of the coronavirus, he spoke of it not as an illness (a topic which always unnerves him), nor as an economic calamity for many, but as a force which robbed him of a key campaign talking point. Without the pre-pandemic unemployment numbers to tout, he spoke of judges, military spending, tax cuts for the wealthy, and deregulation. He barely mentioned his two big campaign promises from 2016, building the wall and draining the swamp—both now reminders as much of what he hasn’t done as what he has. He took some shots at Joe Biden, attacking him from the left in one breath (“America should not take lectures on racial justice from Joe Biden”) and from the right in the next (“Biden is a very willing Trojan horse for socialism”). Another President might have something to work with here, facing a candidate with Biden’s record of backing “tough on crime” legislation in the Senate at a time when people are in the streets protesting against police violence and systemic racism. But Trump is the President who, three years ago, encouraged police officers to rough up people they arrest. He’s the President who, three weeks ago, tweeted, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
In Tulsa, Trump seemed to be enjoying himself. He was doing his arm flaps and his struts and his small-mouthed yelling like it was the summer of 2016. (He even took some shots at Hillary Clinton.) But the past few months have made his limitations more visible than ever. He’s been unable to shout down a virus, or to make protests a wedge issue. What will Trump be able to campaign on in the months ahead? The public has sided with the people demonstrating in the streets. Polls show that large majorities of Americans believe that racism is a major problem in the country. This is a change. And, as much as it is an accomplishment of the Black Lives Matter movement, it might also have something to do with the special, public abuse that the man in the White House has unleashed these past five years on black people, Muslims, Latinos, and Asian-Americans. (Not to mention women, the disabled, and gay and trans people. The list is long.) Meanwhile, on Saturday, even before Trump was finished giving his speech, people were sharing clips on social media of MAGA-clad fans in the audience, yawning as their President rattled on.


newyorker--2020-06-21--The Celebration of Juneteenth in Ralph Ellison’s “Juneteenth”

I recommend devoting a portion of the weekend of Juneteenth to reading a particular passage from the novel “ Juneteenth , ” by Ralph Ellison .
The advice holds whether you are familiar with the occasion—which commemorates the date , in 1865 , when the enslaved black people of Texas received belated word of their emancipation—or were ignorant of it until our recent national racial reckoning , which pushed the celebration of Juneteenth onto the calendars of various states and corporations .
I suspect that the new prominence of the holiday has driven interest in the book ; when I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Amazon , I was told that I had to wait for weeks .
I suppose that a few of these recent purchasers were seeking an overview or explainer .
The interest of such a reader will perhaps be disappointed by “ Juneteenth , ” but the novel is like a wild shot that hits its target nonetheless , on the strength of one passage that shows how to regard the holiday as a holy day .
In a pinch , any passage of Ellison will do .
The novelist was a tremendous writer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ between the incandescent accomplishment of “ Invisible Man ” and his death , in 1994 , producing many reams of stunning ones that never coalesced into a proper novel .
He had the problem of a house fire that consumed at least some of a manuscript ; he had the challenge of setting down an expansive parable about race in America in bright , hard language , like the radiant vernacular of a jazz-head Joyce .
He had been dead for seventeen years when the bulk of this latter work was published as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Before The Shooting .
.
.
” —a vast slab of gorgeous marble amounting to an incomplete monument .
“ Juneteenth , ” published in 1999 , at three hundred and sixty-eight pages , is the fine effort of his executor , John F. Callahan , to shape the manuscript into a comprehensible sculpture .
The book concerns a race-baiting United States senator named Sunraider and a Baptist preacher named Hickman .
The Reverend Hickman is black , and he was called to God after a career as a jazz trombonist .
Sunraider @ @ @ @ @ @ @ enough that it seems so to his New England constituents—and he has passed into politics following a spell as a filmmaker and con artist , after a youth spent as a child preacher whom Hickman raised from infancy .
The story line flows as an unfolding of their personal history .
The mid-nineteen-fifties setting of the novel sees Hickman going to Washington , D.C. , where a would-be assassin badly wounds Sunraider as he speaks on the floor of the Senate .
Sunraider receives Hickman in his hospital room , and we move @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reveries as the older man draws him out and spurs him on .
The chief significance of Juneteenth within “ Juneteenth ” is an eruption at a revival meeting that opened a week of prayer and community , back when Sunraider was a child named Bliss .
( Decide for yourself whether the ripeness of the names of the characters—another figure is called the Reverend Eatmore—indicates allegorical excess or constitutes an appropriate evocation of American surreality . )
On this night , under that tent , when Bliss was six or seven , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ crowd to claim the boy as her son .
The nature of her claim is the motor of the plot , but I ’ m interested here in what comes before that central scene : a remarkable seventh chapter in which Bliss , the boy who lives submerged within Sunraider , lies in a hospital bed and recollects a sermon that he and Hickman preached , in call-and-response fashion , at the outset of a Juneteenth celebration .
The setting is Alabama .
The tent is pitched on a local holy site .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ swamp reclaimed it ; the black folk filled it in with black soil and made a graveyard for slaves .
The crowd numbers five thousand .
The heat of evening is palpable in the prose .
Hickman , with his author ’ s every endorsement , begins making a frame for the understanding of Juneteenth , by exhorting worshippers to approach it as something like Passover—a day of deliverance on which to tell stories that keep history alive in memory .
He teases out meaning .
His substance is to identify a blessing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The people of Africa , having been robbed from home , having been dispossessed and dispersed—having been left “ eyeless , tongueless , drumless , danceless , songless , hornless , soundless , sightless , wrongless , rightless , motherless , fatherless , brotherless , sisterless , powerless ” —were , thus bereft , positioned to receive the Word of God .
You may have heard such things before , at Sunday service , but the miracle of the chapter is that Hickman says it in a way that speaks even to any @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an oratorical tradition , as if reverse-engineering a prototype of a black-church sermon .
In the flashback , at a world-class cadence , Hickman speaks of fortitude : The speech goes on like so , thrumming , describing powers forged under oppression that inspire peace amid chaos .
Near the end of the chapter , the sustaining cadences of the sermon give way to a description of “ the feasting part , ” where a catalogue of loaves of sandwich bread , and barbecue , and fifteen gallons of hot sauce punctuates the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and secular motions .
The sermon ’ s message of tenacity—the rendering of social forces on a spiritual level—resonates with the current moment , or at least I ’ d like to think so , seeing people in the streets with a long road before them .
The heart of the “ Juneteenth ” sermon sounds to me like an exhortation to them : “ Never mind the laughers , the scoffers—they come around because they can ’ t help themselves .
They can deny you but not your sense of life .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ along like an old inchworm .
If you put one and one and one together soon they ’ ll make a million too .
There ’ s been a heap of Juneteenths before this one and I tell you there ’ ll be a heap more before we ’ re truly free !
”

Ralph Ellison’s “Juneteenth” features an extraordinary passage that shows how to regard the holiday as a holy day. Photograph by David Attie / Getty
I recommend devoting a portion of the weekend of Juneteenth to reading a particular passage from the novel “Juneteenth,” by Ralph Ellison. The advice holds whether you are familiar with the occasion—which commemorates the date, in 1865, when the enslaved black people of Texas received belated word of their emancipation—or were ignorant of it until our recent national racial reckoning, which pushed the celebration of Juneteenth onto the calendars of various states and corporations. I suspect that the new prominence of the holiday has driven interest in the book; when I went to buy a new copy on Amazon, I was told that I had to wait for weeks. I suppose that a few of these recent purchasers were seeking an overview or explainer. The interest of such a reader will perhaps be disappointed by “Juneteenth,” but the novel is like a wild shot that hits its target nonetheless, on the strength of one passage that shows how to regard the holiday as a holy day.
In a pinch, any passage of Ellison will do. The novelist was a tremendous writer of passages who spent four decades, between the incandescent accomplishment of “Invisible Man” and his death, in 1994, producing many reams of stunning ones that never coalesced into a proper novel. He had the problem of a house fire that consumed at least some of a manuscript; he had the challenge of setting down an expansive parable about race in America in bright, hard language, like the radiant vernacular of a jazz-head Joyce. He had been dead for seventeen years when the bulk of this latter work was published as an eleven-hundred-and-thirty-six-page behemoth called “Three Days Before The Shooting . . .”—a vast slab of gorgeous marble amounting to an incomplete monument. “Juneteenth,” published in 1999, at three hundred and sixty-eight pages, is the fine effort of his executor, John F. Callahan, to shape the manuscript into a comprehensible sculpture.
The book concerns a race-baiting United States senator named Sunraider and a Baptist preacher named Hickman. The Reverend Hickman is black, and he was called to God after a career as a jazz trombonist. Sunraider is white—or, at least, fair enough that it seems so to his New England constituents—and he has passed into politics following a spell as a filmmaker and con artist, after a youth spent as a child preacher whom Hickman raised from infancy. The story line flows as an unfolding of their personal history. The mid-nineteen-fifties setting of the novel sees Hickman going to Washington, D.C., where a would-be assassin badly wounds Sunraider as he speaks on the floor of the Senate. Sunraider receives Hickman in his hospital room, and we move through the senator’s memories and reveries as the older man draws him out and spurs him on.
The chief significance of Juneteenth within “Juneteenth” is an eruption at a revival meeting that opened a week of prayer and community, back when Sunraider was a child named Bliss. (Decide for yourself whether the ripeness of the names of the characters—another figure is called the Reverend Eatmore—indicates allegorical excess or constitutes an appropriate evocation of American surreality.) On this night, under that tent, when Bliss was six or seven, a white woman charged out of a crowd to claim the boy as her son. The nature of her claim is the motor of the plot, but I’m interested here in what comes before that central scene: a remarkable seventh chapter in which Bliss, the boy who lives submerged within Sunraider, lies in a hospital bed and recollects a sermon that he and Hickman preached, in call-and-response fashion, at the outset of a Juneteenth celebration.
The setting is Alabama. The tent is pitched on a local holy site. It had been Choctaw land; the swamp reclaimed it; the black folk filled it in with black soil and made a graveyard for slaves. The crowd numbers five thousand. The heat of evening is palpable in the prose. Hickman, with his author’s every endorsement, begins making a frame for the understanding of Juneteenth, by exhorting worshippers to approach it as something like Passover—a day of deliverance on which to tell stories that keep history alive in memory. He teases out meaning. His substance is to identify a blessing within the calamity of American slavery. The people of Africa, having been robbed from home, having been dispossessed and dispersed—having been left “eyeless, tongueless, drumless, danceless, songless, hornless, soundless, sightless, wrongless, rightless, motherless, fatherless, brotherless, sisterless, powerless”—were, thus bereft, positioned to receive the Word of God.
You may have heard such things before, at Sunday service, but the miracle of the chapter is that Hickman says it in a way that speaks even to any unbeliever. Ellison captures the soul of an oratorical tradition, as if reverse-engineering a prototype of a black-church sermon. In the flashback, at a world-class cadence, Hickman speaks of fortitude:
We were owned and faced with the awe-inspiring labor of transforming God’s Word into a lantern so that in the darkness we’d know where we were. Oh God hasn’t been easy with us because He always plans for the loooong haul. He’s looking far ahead and this time He wants a well-tested people to work his will. . . . He’s tired of untempered tools and half-blind masons! Therefore, He’s going to keep on testing us against the rocks and in the fires. He’s going to plunge us into the ice-cold water. And each time we come out we’ll be blue and as tough as cold-blue steel! Ah yes! He means for us to be a new kind of human. Maybe we won’t be that people but we’ll be a part of that people, we’ll be an element in them, amen!
The speech goes on like so, thrumming, describing powers forged under oppression that inspire peace amid chaos. Near the end of the chapter, the sustaining cadences of the sermon give way to a description of “the feasting part,” where a catalogue of loaves of sandwich bread, and barbecue, and fifteen gallons of hot sauce punctuates the scene with a merger of Biblical tones and secular motions. The sermon’s message of tenacity—the rendering of social forces on a spiritual level—resonates with the current moment, or at least I’d like to think so, seeing people in the streets with a long road before them. The heart of the “Juneteenth” sermon sounds to me like an exhortation to them: “Never mind the laughers, the scoffers—they come around because they can’t help themselves. They can deny you but not your sense of life. . . . Just keep on inching along like an old inchworm. If you put one and one and one together soon they’ll make a million too. There’s been a heap of Juneteenths before this one and I tell you there’ll be a heap more before we’re truly free!”
Race, Policing, and Black Lives Matter Protests


The Dad Archive

My father was killed in 1987 , in a car crash on a twist of highway with the macabre and clichéd name Dead Man ’ s Turn .
After the accident , I became a morose and serious kid , a tiny scholar dedicated to the art of grieving .
I had a trunk of my father ’ s belongings that became an archive I catalogued and re-sorted .
It was full of yellowed certificates , holiday greetings , school report cards , and all the other flimsy , flammable things that make up a life .
I would remove @ @ @ @ @ @ @ child monk , studying his loose , impulsive handwriting and smelling the dried sweat on the rim of his baseball cap .
I scanned his personal letters for pearls of meaning to cling to , but they contained only cheerful , postcard-sized exchanges with my mother while the two of them were stationed at different naval bases .
On the backs of these cards , he had written “ I love you ” in smaller , more formal cursive .
I erected altars with his military photographs and scrutinized VHS tapes of family @ @ @ @ @ @ @ those videos , he followed my toddler antics with affectionate teasing and nascent dad jokes .
I tried to burn this doting new-parent energy into my brain .
I didn ’ t want to forget the lilt of his Long Island accent or the slope of his eighties mustache .
I wanted to remember the mischievous way he said “ Alison !
” as he filmed me picking my nose .
But our minds are sloppy archivists , and by the time I was a teen-ager his outline had retreated into a hazy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lost their dad essence , evolving into painful markers of childhood loss .
I still studied them occasionally , but with an exhausted reverence .
Without much to go on , I invented a father .
He was a dad pastiche culled from different sitcom parents—a genial bearded guy with an easy laugh who probably liked Bruce Willis movies .
I dismissed reality ( and my mother ’ s well-meaning boyfriends ) , clinging instead to the glittering generalities of my dream dad .
I cried every time I listened to Elton John @ @ @ @ @ @ @ song title shared my father ’ s name .
I read books about fatherless kids and wrote about my father , or , rather , losing him , in all of my creative-writing classes .
My obsession with death found form in the emo , unsubtle poetry of nineties adolescence .
But whom had I lost , exactly ?
Most of the memories I have of my father are obscured by the patina of a lonely little girl who obsessively repaints a portrait until it becomes a whorl of whimsical abstraction .
I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : We were painting a swing set red , a few weeks ( or months ? )
before he died .
I remember the smell of paint in the muggy Maryland air and his big body next to mine , happily at work .
In my mind , we are both wearing overalls , although this seems too cute to be true .
As we finish—in my imperfect vision—we gaze at our handiwork , our arms snugly intertwined , and my father says , “ Good job.
” A second memory lingers for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ father died , I discovered a frog on our lawn and put it in a glossy beach bucket to swim around .
The frog had cut itself on the bucket ’ s rim and died as I gripped the sides , helpless .
It was my first exposure to death , a leitmotif that would soon resurface .
My father wrapped himself around me , wiping away my tears .
He made a speech about loss , which I desperately wish I could remember .
Recently , my uncle Tony gave me a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ my father .
It is a faded , mellow red and has an earthy smell that diminishes with each wash .
Sometimes I feel a melancholic pull to wear it .
When I do , I am briefly enveloped by a familiar scent , and my childhood desire to conjure a dad returns .
During one of these moments , I chose to imagine what my father might have said about the frog : “ Ali-bear , it ’ s really hard when someone leaves suddenly ; you ’ ll be sad about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But you don ’ t have to be sad forever .
That frog wants you to be hoppy—oops , I meant happy .
He ’ ll always be with you , even when you think he ’ s not .
We carry around pieces of one another , like shiny rocks that change color in the sunlight .
Sometimes they get darker or worn down .
There might be a time when you forget him , but that doesn ’ t mean you don ’ t love him .
You and the frog @ @ @ @ @ @ @ together .
”

My father was killed in 1987, in a car crash on a twist of highway with the macabre and clichéd name Dead Man’s Turn. After the accident, I became a morose and serious kid, a tiny scholar dedicated to the art of grieving. I had a trunk of my father’s belongings that became an archive I catalogued and re-sorted. It was full of yellowed certificates, holiday greetings, school report cards, and all the other flimsy, flammable things that make up a life. I would remove each item with the solemnity of a child monk, studying his loose, impulsive handwriting and smelling the dried sweat on the rim of his baseball cap. I scanned his personal letters for pearls of meaning to cling to, but they contained only cheerful, postcard-sized exchanges with my mother while the two of them were stationed at different naval bases. On the backs of these cards, he had written “I love you” in smaller, more formal cursive.
I erected altars with his military photographs and scrutinized VHS tapes of family vacations he had shakily recorded. In those videos, he followed my toddler antics with affectionate teasing and nascent dad jokes. I tried to burn this doting new-parent energy into my brain. I didn’t want to forget the lilt of his Long Island accent or the slope of his eighties mustache. I wanted to remember the mischievous way he said “Alison!” as he filmed me picking my nose.
But our minds are sloppy archivists, and by the time I was a teen-ager his outline had retreated into a hazy silhouette. The objects in the trunk lost their dad essence, evolving into painful markers of childhood loss. I still studied them occasionally, but with an exhausted reverence.
Without much to go on, I invented a father. He was a dad pastiche culled from different sitcom parents—a genial bearded guy with an easy laugh who probably liked Bruce Willis movies. I dismissed reality (and my mother’s well-meaning boyfriends), clinging instead to the glittering generalities of my dream dad. I cried every time I listened to Elton John’s “Daniel” because the song title shared my father’s name. I read books about fatherless kids and wrote about my father, or, rather, losing him, in all of my creative-writing classes. My obsession with death found form in the emo, unsubtle poetry of nineties adolescence. But whom had I lost, exactly?
Most of the memories I have of my father are obscured by the patina of a lonely little girl who obsessively repaints a portrait until it becomes a whorl of whimsical abstraction.
I remember him vividly only on two occasions:
We were painting a swing set red, a few weeks (or months?) before he died. I remember the smell of paint in the muggy Maryland air and his big body next to mine, happily at work. In my mind, we are both wearing overalls, although this seems too cute to be true. As we finish—in my imperfect vision—we gaze at our handiwork, our arms snugly intertwined, and my father says, “Good job.”
A second memory lingers for more ominous reasons. Shortly before my father died, I discovered a frog on our lawn and put it in a glossy beach bucket to swim around. The frog had cut itself on the bucket’s rim and died as I gripped the sides, helpless. It was my first exposure to death, a leitmotif that would soon resurface. My father wrapped himself around me, wiping away my tears. He made a speech about loss, which I desperately wish I could remember.
Recently, my uncle Tony gave me a big, old shirt that belonged to my father. It is a faded, mellow red and has an earthy smell that diminishes with each wash. Sometimes I feel a melancholic pull to wear it. When I do, I am briefly enveloped by a familiar scent, and my childhood desire to conjure a dad returns.
During one of these moments, I chose to imagine what my father might have said about the frog:
“Ali-bear, it’s really hard when someone leaves suddenly; you’ll be sad about the frog for a long time. But you don’t have to be sad forever. That frog wants you to be hoppy—oops, I meant happy. He’ll always be with you, even when you think he’s not. We carry around pieces of one another, like shiny rocks that change color in the sunlight. Sometimes they get darker or worn down. There might be a time when you forget him, but that doesn’t mean you don’t love him. You and the frog will always have this lazy summer afternoon together.”