This Land

by Dan Barry

  But back to that mile of pavement. Suppose a line were drawn between the Javits Center and the Midtown Hilton on a map of Manhattan. What would be seen? What would it say about a country on the cusp of new leadership? And what would be found in the exact middle, between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump?

  The Javits Center gleamed a frozen-blue in the distance, a cube-stacked glass structure that conveyed the proverbial ceiling that Mrs. Clinton intended to smash. It seemed unattainable—the building, at least—given the many police barricades. At every turn, it seemed, a police officer holding a cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee pointed to a distant entrance, on 40th Street.

  Here, a stencil in the street of a Clinton silhouette, accompanied by the words “Madam President.” There, a street vendor, selling red-white-and-blue Clinton flags to be worn like shawls, or superhero capes. (“Big flags are $20, little flags are $10.”) And above it all, a billboard for an Amazon program called “Good Girls Revolt.”

  Meanwhile, at the Midtown Hilton a mile away, security was looser, as hotel guests tried to wheel their luggage past the formally dressed Trump supporters gathering on the lobby’s marble floor. If some women heading for the Clinton party wore white, to honor suffragists, some women bound for the Trump gathering were wearing fire-red, the chosen color of the “Make America Great Again” movement.

  Heightened security also tied the two camps together. Orange sanitation trucks filled with sand served as barricades, while police officers with “Counterterrorism” emblazoned on the backs of their blue shirts kept watch. It was one of many reminders of the America that the night’s president-elect would be inheriting.

  Heading northeast from the Javits Center, that diagonal path passed Clyde Frazier’s Wine and Dine, where the many televisions meant for sporting events now displayed the slow tally of electoral votes—a scene that recalled how the three presidential debates were often promoted with the hyperventilated fervor of a football game.

  It passed the concrete road loops leading to the Lincoln Tunnel, leaving the Empire State Building—aglow in lights of red, white and blue—in the small of many rearview mirrors. And, in the shadows of the underpass, stood an unkempt man with a thin mattress at his feet, carrying on a solitary conversation.

  The complex issues of the homeless and mentally ill—this too shall be inherited.

  The path also crossed Covenant House, an eight-story shelter for homeless youth that was a polling place for the night. Busy, the poll workers said. Very busy.

  Now, heading southwest from the Midtown Hilton, the diagonal path cut across restaurants rare and routine, Le Bernardin and Sbarro’s, the Capital Grille and TGI Friday’s. It sliced across the eternal brightness of Times Square and past a homeless man who pitched for donations—“My name is William and I’m a good guy, not a bad guy”—while a tourist recorded the desperate street performance without reaching into his own pocket.

  It passed, too, the Engine Company 54/Ladder Company 4 firehouse on Eighth Avenue that lost 15 firefighters in the World Trade Center attacks. Their names and photographs are on display, but a sign says, “Please No Photos.” The raw aftermath of that day will also be passed on to the new president.

  So where, then, do these two paths meet? The one coming from the Hilton Midtown to the north and the other from the Javits Center to the south? The meeting point is, roughly, at El Rancho Burritos, a small Mexican restaurant near the corner of Ninth Avenue and 45th Street, between the Westside Deli and Cleantopia Cleaners.

  There, the owner, Manuel Gil, was working the counter, taking orders for burritos and enchiladas and steak ranchero. A short man of 54, wearing a white paper hat and a white apron over a dark T-shirt, he agreed to sit for a minute and tell his story.

  Mr. Gil came to New York from the Mexican city of Puebla more than 30 years ago, joining his father. He worked as a dishwasher at a fancy restaurant, a worker in a garment factory, and an assistant in a burrito restaurant, all the while saving his money for one day.

  That day came 20 years ago, when he rented out this cramped space and opened his restaurant. It has room enough for only five tables, each adorned with a small vase of plastic tulips. Stacks of Jarritos soda, mango and lime, take up what little room is left. On the far wall hangs an oval portrait of the Virgin Mary, a poster providing instructions for the Heimlich maneuver (“Choking Victim”), and a television that on this night was broadcasting election coverage in Spanish.

  Mr. Gil, who lives in Queens and works 60 hours a week, became a citizen 15 years ago. He and his wife, Carmen, who often works beside him, have four children: an accountant, a photographer, a student at Ithaca College and a student at the High School of Fashion Industries.

  In the late 1940s, shortly after Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton were born, this part of Manhattan, called Hell’s Kitchen, was mostly Irish and Italian. But now here was Mr. Gil, representing the ever-changing city, the ever-changing country.

  This flow of change will also be inherited.

  Mr. Gil removed his white apron to reveal a Hillary Clinton shirt that his daughter Leslie, the photographer, had bought him. He had voted for Mrs. Clinton, he said, because she was more capable. Mr. Trump, he said after a long pause, was not yet ready to be president.

  The reports in Spanish that emanated from the television behind him were suggesting that the rest of the country disagreed. But this is how it goes. And no matter who won, come late morning he’d be back behind the counter of his restaurant, greeting the new, uncertain day.

  Another Day at a Monument to Democracy

  WASHINGTON, D.C.—JANUARY 21, 2017

  The glorious Lincoln Memorial was closed on Inauguration Day, leaving its white marble inhabitant to inspire from a distance. The monument had served as a backdrop for an inaugural concert the night before, and now, in the late morning, construction workers were methodically removing the silvery bars of scaffolding that imprisoned it.

  Even so, its sole resident could still be seen behind the Doric columns, his gaze trained on the far-off domed Capitol, where a peaceful transfer of power was about to take place. And people still came to be in his presence, some to remind themselves that a country riven by dissent can come together. It has before.

  No matter that the sky was as gray as the Potomac, or that the cold air felt like a wet sweater. Here they were, from the North and South, East and West, in red Trump hats and blue Hillary T-shirts, jubilant, distressed, feeling a part and apart. They stood in admiration of Lincoln, as workers tore down and cleaned up, including a man collecting debris with a hand-held picker, his dog tag laced securely into one of his military-issue boots.

  Ed Rich, he said his name was, while taking a Camel break. Forty-four years old. A mortgage broker from Annapolis, trying to ride out a slow period. So it’s $12 an hour working for the inauguration, putting up fencing, laying down flooring, snapping up cigarette butts with a metal picker.

  “I voted for him,” Mr. Rich said of Donald J. Trump, at this point still the president-elect. “I think he could make a mess of it, but it could be cleaned up easily. People seem to forget there’s a House and a Senate.”

  Mr. Rich tossed his spent cigarette into the box of garbage he was carrying and returned to collecting butts and paper bits, his words nowhere near as eloquent as those of Lincoln, carved into the memorial’s walls, yet in the same vein: the belief—often tested, including on this day—in the country’s democratic system of governance.

  Generations have come to the Lincoln Memorial to reassure themselves—or to remind the rest of the nation—of this foundational belief. The African-American contralto, Marian Anderson, sang here in 1939, after the Daughters of the American Revolution had barred her from another Washington venue; she began with “My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty.”

  The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., of course, delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech here in 1963, after Mahalia Jackson called out, “Tell them about the dream, Martin.”

  Even Richard
M. Nixon, during a dark moment of his presidency (and that is saying something), came here on a very early May morning in 1970, valet in tow; he wound up in profoundly strange conversations with some Vietnam War protesters, his disjointed message: Don’t give up on this country.

  In their footsteps came others on this inaugural morning.

  Jerry Naradzay, 56, a physician from Henderson, N.C., cycled up to the monument with his 13-year-old son, Sammy, the father’s broad smile explained by his red “Make America Great Again” cap.

  He noted that the memorial’s stone had come from both the North and the South to convey unity after division. He then said he had goose bumps just thinking of more than two centuries of peaceful transfers of power.

  Nodding toward the memorial, Dr. Naradzay said, “This monument represents how the country is bigger than one man.”

  Standing nearby in full agreement were four Hillary Clinton supporters from Wisconsin’s North Country. They had made plans for this Washington visit in expectation of a different result, but decided to come anyway, in part to participate in the women’s march on Saturday.

  So: How did they feel?

  “Hollow,” said Jackie Moore, 33, a member of the Ashland City Council. Several awkward seconds of silence followed.

  When conversation resumed, another Ashland council member, David Mettille, 32, and his partner, Teege Mettille, 36, recounted how their blue Hillary shirts had spurred some heckling, but they didn’t mind. It was their way of saying: We’re still here.

  “We will remember this,” David Mettille said. “We will remember how painful today is, so that four years from now—we work to win.”

  Then Teege Mettille noted that they had about a half-hour left of President Obama, and off the visitors from Ashland went.

  It was true: Time was winding down, or winding up. From the swearing-in ceremony in the distance, beyond the reflecting pool’s greenish waters, came the echoes of ministers beseeching God for guidance, the raised voices of the Missouri State University Chorale, the somber tones of imminent transition.

  All the while, others came to be in Lincoln’s presence.

  A retired civil engineer from Virginia who said he had voted for Mr. Trump because a relative is a heroin addict, and because the Mexican border is a sieve. A couple from Utah who voted for Mr. Trump because their community depends on natural gas and oil. Mothers and their adult daughters from Texas and New Mexico, so dismayed that Mr. Trump would soon be their president that they kept their backs to the inauguration.

  Soon the Mormon Tabernacle Choir could be heard singing “America the Beautiful.” Then came the distinctive voice of the new president, his assertions of a restored American greatness in all things floating through the gray noon and up the four score and seven steps leading from the reflecting pool to the memorial.

  No longer president-elect, he was now President Trump.

  While the pageantry unfolded, Mr. Rich, the debris collector, kept working. A former Marine, he said he spent six months in Iraq with a mortuary affairs unit, collecting bodies and body parts from the front.

  Sometimes there wasn’t enough for certain identification, he said, “so you’d write, ‘Believed to be.’”

  He said he was making plans to succeed again in the mortgage business, in a country whose balanced-power form of government he trusts. But for now Mr. Rich had what he called his mission, which was to keep the plaza beneath Lincoln’s gaze clean.

  PART TWO

  Hope

  Meet me tonight in Dreamland

  Planning a Path Through Life on the Walk to School

  ST. LOUIS, MO.—APRIL 22, 2007

  Under a dreary sky the color of uncertainty, on a city block pocked by abandonment, a door opens and a girl of 15 steps out. With a black-and-blue book bag slung across her back, she starts walking to school, a high school sophomore of this country.

  Her name is Janay Truitt, and she lives on the crime-rich and money-poor north side of St. Louis. She shares an apartment above a dry-cleaning store with two grandparents, two sisters, a brother and her mother, who leaves at 4:30 in the morning to drive a school bus. Her father lives elsewhere.

  Janay sets out at 7:05 today for a city school system in which poverty, politics and mismanagement so closely conspire against the likes of her that the state recently decided to take it over. But who knows what that takeover means for this lanky girl with braids, now lugging gym clothes, math homework and a world history textbook the size and weight of a slate slab you’d find along a footpath.

  Wearing a thin blue sweatshirt over a T-shirt that says “Purrfect,” she moves through the St. Louis gloom, past the dry cleaners’ trellised gates of security, past an alley where no child should play, past buildings that are well kept and buildings that are vacant, their window frames like empty eye sockets.

  A man in an old green Volvo passing by beeps his horn. He is Travis L. Brown Sr., the principal of her high school, Beaumont. He grew up near here, one of 10 children. Enforcer and guardian, he drives the streets before the morning bell to signal that school matters, that he cares. I’ve been there and now I’m here, his actions say.

  Janay continues on, aware that she must pass through the school’s metal detector before the 7:20 bell or else be marked again as absent, and be subjected again to a Mr. Brown lecture. She is not a morning person, does not even eat breakfast, but she has a plan for her life that begins with a first-period literature class.

  She thinks as she walks. She thinks about keeping her grades up; she had five A’s and two B’s last marking period, and those two B’s, in world literature and biology, vex her.

  She thinks about learning long ago how to toss balls into a milk crate nailed to a post, and about starting as a guard on the girls’ varsity basketball team this fall. When asked whether she’s a point guard or a shooting guard, she does not hesitate to answer: “Both.”

  She thinks, she hopes, that with her high grades and honed basketball skills, she might one day attend the University of North Carolina, or Duke, or Tennessee. That one day she can become an anesthesiologist and make a lot of money.

  “I’m thinking, probably, about trying to get out of the neighborhood,” Janay says later, explaining that at the moment she has to walk a mile to buy a decent ice cream cone, and take two buses and a light-rail train to see a movie.

  She walks under a liquor store’s red-and-white beer sign and stops in front of the Upper Room Fire Christian Assembly to meet two other Beaumont students: LuCretia Scott, who wants to be a fashion designer, and Dominique Taylor, who says she might become a psychiatrist because she gives good advice.

  It is 7:11, nine minutes until the bell. They push on toward Beaumont.

  Beaumont High School, built in the 1920s, looms over the troubled neighborhood like a castle of trapdoors and passageways. With high student turnover and a low graduation rate, it reflects an urban system plagued by poverty and homelessness. Nearly 80 percent of the school’s 1,200 students receive free or discounted lunches.

  Still, Beaumont tries. Mr. Brown, the principal, and his top assistant, Pamela Hendricks, walk the grounds so much—cajoling, disciplining, and, when necessary, hugging—that they wear sneakers with their suits. If he sees a boy wearing a hood, he shouts the school slogan, “Not at Beaumont!” If she sees a girl dawdling, she bellows, “Hurry up! Come on! What’s the problem?”

  Mr. Brown says he emphasizes the possible by celebrating every success: school T-shirts one day, pizza the next. The students know that achieving a perfect average of 4.0 means they and their parents will be taken by limousine to lunch in a restaurant. The limo is a donated service, and the restaurant, of course, is several miles from here.

  “You look for ways to keep the students engaged,” says Mr. Brown, enthusiastic still after 10 years at Beaumont.

  Janay and her two friends rush across Vandeventer Avenue and follow a concrete path around the building, opting not to cut across the school’s wet grass. They make
it to the metal detector just as the maternal Ms. Hendricks is calling, “You have 30 seconds! Everybody needs to be in class!”

  A dozen hours from now, Janay will travel to a nice gymnasium in a nice suburb to practice with other young women on a traveling team called the St. Louis Queens. She will demonstrate her crossover dribble and her sweet jump shot. An accidental hit to the mouth will bloody her lip and chip a tooth; it does not stop her from playing in a scrimmage.

  But that is later. For now, she settles into a small classroom in a challenged high school in the flawed school system of St. Louis, looking forward to sixth period, her favorite class, the history of the world.

  Where Little Else Grows, Capitalism Takes Root

  LUCIN, UTAH—MAY 13, 2007

  Great Location! Rare Parcel! Premium Lot!

  Somehow these hoary come-ons still cast their spell, drawing us in, relieving us of that obstacle to suspect acquisition, our disbelief. With words that all but wink in confidence, they slyly suggest that our mothers raised no fools, that we should get while the getting’s good—and that desert land in Utah is the next big thing.

  “Excellent investment property in high-growth area,” reads an eBay advertisement for the sale of 40 acres in a remote part of rural Box Elder County. Good roads (unencumbered by pavement), close to casinos (if 80 miles is close), and, the ad says, “Only one mile away from Lucin Town.”

  Ah, the lure of Lucin Town.

  To reach Lucin from the pleasant county seat, Brigham City, you must drive nearly 150 miles, around the top of the Great Salt Lake and then southwest, along a two-lane road curling past tumbleweeds and the very occasional ranch. After a long while you turn left onto a dirt road, travel six bumpy miles—and there you are, smack in the middle of spectacular nothingness: Lucin.