Everyday People
Page 25
The buses come through every morning, full of people with good jobs, homes in the suburbs, country clubs, health insurance—some of them brothers and sisters afraid to look back, thinking how they’ll get dragged down. From the busway they can’t see the streets, only the walls rising on both sides, just the tip of a steeple. They’re blind all the way in, like a lab rat stuck in a maze, glass skyscrapers downtown their big piece of cheese. When they hit East Liberty and see The Wall, you think they even notice?
Maybe, but what do they see? To them it’s a curiosity, a little bit of homespun culture. Seen it written up in the paper. Or maybe it’s a landmark, a number on a clock, a way to count how much longer to downtown. Better drink up that cup.
But more likely, that time of day they don’t see anything, too busy following the stock market. They’re thinking about what’s on TV, what kind of car they want, how they didn’t get enough sleep last night. Pushing sixty, the bus blasts past a blur of color, a jumble of faces they don’t know, the letters illegible, different, hieroglyphic, the whole thing in code. And even if they could make out the names and faces, they’d be missing the history behind them, the meaning each of them carries, the price they paid.
None of them waits for it every day, not one out of a thousand turns sideways in their seat to pick out the few celebrities among the dead: Alex Haley—and there, lookit, it’s Charlie Parker. None of them can read the names of the other ones, not as famous, in fact almost totally unknown, yet still remembered, honored like the rest. They don’t know East Liberty, so the best they could come up with, even if they cared, would be ill-informed stories, pat tragedies in blackface. Maybe some of them—riding in, going home in the rain—see the flash of color flying by outside the window and marvel at the artwork, wonder what’s being celebrated here. Maybe for a split second they see what you see, the dreams of a people that will not be denied, the sacrifices made in the name of progress, but that’s just easy public-TV jive. No one wants to go beyond their own feel-good bullshit. No one wants to know what it really means. No one sees the three new faces one day and asks: Who is Fats? Who is Smooth? Who is Eugene?