The Best American Essays 2018

by Hilton Als

  Aditi loved watching the march flood her city: the Los Angeles subways were packed instead of empty, Pershing Square turned into an ocean. She lives just a few blocks from the knitting shop where the pussy hat was first conceived. When the conductor announced that they were rerouting her train that morning, because everyone on it was headed to the same place downtown, all the passengers started cheering. “It felt like a tiny victory,” Aditi said. “Like you’ve got to accommodate the will of the masses.”

  She had begun her adult life in the aftermath of George W. Bush’s election, and under the shadow of his wars. She protested the invasion of Iraq as often as she could, with “this sense that the world we were inheriting was being created by old, rich, white men for themselves and their kids.” After Obama was elected, she felt safer, which enabled her to turn inward, toward her own life and career.

  Trump’s election brought Aditi back to the streets. She felt proud to share the Women’s March with her parents, who had told her stories about living under Indira Gandhi’s autocratic regime, and had committed their lives to fighting for the oppressed: her mother as a sociologist, her father at UNICEF. Trump’s victory hit them “on all levels,” she said—as immigrants, people of color, parents who had raised two daughters.

  She was struck by the kindness people showed them that day: giving up subway seats, catching her mother’s arm when the train lurched. Her mother said the march felt like a collective exhalation. Sikhs passed out bowls of chana and reminded Aditi of her grandmother, a Sikh, who had passed away years before. Afterward, she and her parents went to one of their favorite spots in the city—a hole-in-the-wall run by a Mexican couple—and had Cokes and ceviche. It felt good to support an immigrant business, Aditi said, and it felt good to see her elderly parents “light up with excitement as they spoke about the resistance.”

  What does feminist inheritance mean? For Amy, it meant going to a Chicago Seven protest in utero, and then finding her mother, decades later, amid thousands-strong throngs of women in DC. For Vaeme Tambour, a former Hillary campaign staffer, it meant going to the march with the women in her family—ages sixteen to ninety-three—and walking in a tight circle around her great aunt, who marched with a walker, to protect her. For Laurie Logan, a family physician and lesbian mother from La Crosse, Wisconsin, it meant marching on Washington with her teenage daughter, Annie—full of maternal guilt because she hadn’t brought enough water or snacks—as the continuation of a lineage that began when she was young. She’d grown up with little sense of separation between politics and the rhythms of daily life. “I have clear memories of conversations about political issues being mixed with ordinary life,” she told me, “my mother ironing and talking about the Prague Spring and our right to free speech and a free press, drying dishes while talking about the importance of legal abortion.” Laurie learned her first chant at the age of four: Humphrey, Humphrey, he’s our man! Nixon belongs in the garbage can! As for Annie, she had grown up looking at pictures of her mother marching at rallies—and in DC, she finally got to march beside her.

  But feminist lineage isn’t always a simple inheritance. Brittany, who marched in New York, told me that the second time she ever protested—at a demonstration supporting HIV education, when she was in high school—she was arrested in front of the White House for civil disobedience. Her father, who had been the president of his local NAACP youth chapter and a 1960s civil rights activist, was proud. He said activism ran in her blood. But her mother was furious.

  Andrea Chen, a second-generation Chinese American raised in Queens, told me her mother disapproved when she found out she was marching. Andrea grew up in a “noisy, mercurial, dramatic matriarchy” of a family, with a single mom who worked full-time while raising her kids. She feels strongly that her liberal arts education—an education her mother and female relatives never got to have—was both their gift to her and a force that threatened to distance her from them. The women in her family didn’t grow up thinking about identity politics, eventually preferring to define themselves as “taxpayers and as people who made it.” Many of them voted for Trump, and see Andrea as “this somewhat radical naive bleeding heart.” But as Andrea told me, “Everything I am has been a straight line from these women.”

  Andrea loves the urgency of marches, their powerful alchemy of compassion and righteous anger. But she found the Women’s March more mixed, clearly full of first-time marchers—many nervous, hesitant to chant anything besides the most familiar anthems—and driven by diffuse objectives. It also felt disorganized. “I don’t think you necessarily felt the history of the moment,” she said, “while standing there silently in ten-minute stretches, waiting for the march to move along.” But she also felt the joy of spending the night before Inauguration Day with friends, “making posters and thinking of slogans while eating takeout and watching Star Wars.” At the march, she felt she was witnessing the “birth of something massive and collective that didn’t quite know how to articulate itself yet.”

  “We know that we gather this afternoon on indigenous land,” Angela Davis told us as we stood in the shadow of the Smithsonian. “This is a country anchored in slavery and colonialism.”

  A middle-aged black woman standing beside me said, “Yes, yes, yes!” She said, “This is awesome. I haven’t seen this lady since 1986.”

  Angela Davis said, “The next one thousand four hundred and fifty-nine days of the Trump administration will be one thousand four hundred and fifty-nine days of resistance.”

  The seven days that followed the march were a nightmare of presidential orders. Trump reinstated the oil pipeline that would run near sacred Sioux land in North Dakota. He mandated a gag on federal funding to global health providers that offered abortion counseling, and issued orders to start building a wall along the Mexican border. He announced his plans to publish a weekly list of crimes committed by undocumented migrants. On January 27, just a week after the march, he issued a ban on refugees coming into the country, and on all citizens of seven predominantly Muslim nations, which meant that passengers in the air when he signed the order were detained in airports upon arrival. These executive orders are offensive to reproduce in summary. Every part of me fights the possibility of their normalcy, fights the neutral tone of reportorial prose, fears what will happen between the writing of these words and their publication.

  The morning after the Muslim ban (a term the president and his advisers have vehemently resisted), protesters started gathering at JFK’s Terminal 4, where two Iraqi men were being detained. One had worked as a translator for the US Army for more than a decade. Word went out over social media, and hundreds, then thousands, of people began flooding JFK and other airports throughout the country: LAX, Dulles, Houston, Sea-Tac.

  My husband and I took the A train to JFK from Manhattan after we bought posters and markers from a downtown drugstore and scribbled phrases from Emma Lazarus’s Statue of Liberty poem: give me your tired, your poor.

  The protest began before we got to the protest, at the Howard Beach AirTrain station. As we were waiting to buy our tickets, we saw a line of cops forming on the other side of the turnstiles. “Only ticketed air travelers and airport employees allowed to board!” they said. There were so many of them, so quickly.

  My husband asked one of them, “Is there a regulation allowing you to do this?”

  He asked my husband, “Are you a ticketed traveler?”

  “I don’t know,” my husband said. “Am I?”

  I could feel the molecules of the room vibrating and rearranging. The cops were multiplying. The protesters—mostly strangers, all of them intent on boarding the same train—were gathering into a sudden, spontaneous collective.

  “What you are doing is wrong!” a woman said. And then the chants began: “If we don’t get it? Shut it down!” I’d been in this station countless times—running late for a flight, checking email on my phone—and it was strange to see it as the site of such fervent desire, such heated conflict. The turnst
iles were the obstacles keeping us from the protest, which meant they had become the protest.

  I wish I could say I stormed the barricades, or cajoled the conscience of a Metro Transit Authority employee. The truth is, I just started thinking of another way to get to Terminal 4. We ended up catching an unmarked cab from a pizza place across the street, sharing a ride with an immigration lawyer who was trying to link up with a group of immigration lawyers already there. “They say they’re in the diner,” she said. “Where’s the diner?” We saw more cops approaching the AirTrain station, putting on their NYPD vests, heading upstairs to the showdown at the turnstiles. Were we making our way to the protest, or were we fleeing it? How could we tell?

  When we finally got to Terminal 4, the crowds went all the way back to the parking lots. It was cold. Someone had projected the word resist on the concrete wall of the parking structure, and then the words let them in. People had filled the structure, were standing at the edges—in rows, dangling their banners—looking out.

  This was protest. Not just the perilous electricity of the AirTrain station, bodies blocking other bodies by force, voices crying out in response; and not just the stark beauty of those luminous words across concrete; but also the tedium of an hourlong subway ride, the uncertainty of what to do or where to go when the protest did not go as planned. It was the immigration lawyer wondering, “Where’s the diner?”

  “Mic check!” someone called, and then proceeded to warn anyone undocumented that they should leave, in brief parcels of language that turned into communal chants: “The police may be coming! If you think you are in danger! Protect yourself!” Then another call-and-response began, its force only deepened by its familiarity. “Show me what democracy looks like!” And the response: “This is what democracy looks like!”

  That answer gave me chills, in total earnest, every time.

  Like my mother, the old mythic marches weren’t myth; they were life. They were full of flawed people and bored bodies. But it matters that they happened. What would our collective story look like if they hadn’t? What would our collective story look like if it didn’t include a massive gathering after Trump’s inauguration, if it held instead a vacancy—thousands of people in despairing, isolated, private disbelief? What if the ban on refugees came down and no one marched at all?

  A few days after the election, Greenpeace hijacked a construction crane near the White House and hung a rainbow banner that said resist. The banner thrilled me, but I also knew that thrilling work wasn’t the only kind that mattered. When Alice Walker said that the “real revolution is always concerned with the least glamorous stuff,” she wasn’t talking about flying giant flags from giant cranes. She wasn’t even talking about the logistics of five hundred thousand people marching, bringing enough trail mix and backup onesies. She was talking about ongoingness: showing up past the first flush of indignation and sticking with it. She was talking about the daily tedium of tutoring, voter registration, helping people fill out food stamp applications. She said that one of the great achievements of her life was taking a bag of oranges to Langston Hughes when he had the flu.

  “Militancy no longer means guns at high noon, if it ever did,” Audre Lorde wrote in the 1980s. “It means doing the unromantic and tedious work.” This will never be the stuff of cinematic grandeur. It’s never satisfying, in part because it’s not enough. It should never feel like enough. But invoking insufficiency as an alibi is just as dangerous as self-righteous satisfaction or comfortable despair—the very things Lorde warned us against.

  A week after that chilly day in DC, I sat with my friends Greg and Ginger in their Bed-Stuy kitchen, along with their daughters—Sara, twelve, and Fita, nine, who had marched with them—and their pet rabbit, Oliver, who had not. Ginger had never marched before. When I asked her about her activist history, her first instinct was to say she had none. Zero. But then she started recalling things that might have counted as activism all along: tutoring students in her class who were falling behind, back when she was a student herself, or working with kids in her local community garden. Ginger called this “lowercase-a activism.” Alice Walker would have called it revolutionary work.

  Ginger said that for her, the march itself hadn’t been about sacrifice or service, it had been about sustenance. “It’s going to be a long four years,” she said. Her family was from El Salvador, and she felt the potential breakdown of civil liberties as a real peril.

  As for Greg, his earliest memories of collective action involved marching on the picket lines outside Newark International Airport when his dad was part of an air-traffic-controller strike. Greg was twelve. He and his father marched along the highway, and Greg remembered the chants, the union-hall meetings, the thrill of fighting Ronald Reagan as their personal enemy. Years later, he went to the Million Man March with his father and grandfather, and it made him feel connected to the black community in a more tangible way than he ever had before. This was part of what communal action could do: it could introduce you to collective identity in a way that didn’t feel forced or conceptual, that felt bodily, emotional, palpable.

  Greg described a moment during the Women’s March when he started chanting because he heard Sara chanting beside him. This captured something true about chanting, and about inheritance: Both work like contagion. Both work in multiple directions. You never knew who might start chanting simply because your voice gives them prompt or permission. Ginger wasn’t a chanter—she was firm on that point—but she described one part of the Women’s March when she found herself chanting. It had been outside the Trump Hotel, the historic post office that Trump had converted and bragged about—ceaselessly, it seemed, in lieu of policy arguments—during the presidential debates.

  As they marched past the hotel, Ginger told me, police cars drove through the crowds with their sirens blaring. “If they wanted to make us disperse,” she said, “they had just the opposite effect.” The sirens got her riled up, made her want to resist, to keep moving, to raise her voice. This was activism as generative friction, activism as diversion from plan, off-roading away from script: a protest at the turnstiles, AirTrain as flash point, sirens as tuning fork. This was guilt—or awkwardness, or showing up for uncertainty—as the beginning of knowledge.

  My mom texted me photos from her march at LAX while I texted her photos from my march at JFK. She shared the news of her resistance, as she had always shared the news of her resistance, which wasn’t the ticker tape of myth but the stumbling notation of the actual. She recounted the pain of McGovern’s loss, the weeping voices on the other end of telephone calls, the protests she felt proud of, and the one she apologized for—decades later—to a veteran who hadn’t been there. She told me about the olive pickers, their hands covered in socks, and how good it had felt to stand with them by a blazing fire, when they got inside, after they finally said: Enough.

  That Saturday, before the march-too-crowded-to-become-a-march became a march, when the multitudes were already tired of standing—hungry, shoulder to shoulder, antsy—the singer Janelle Monáe took the stage. She said her mother had been a janitor, her grandmother a sharecropper. “We birthed this nation,” she said. “It was a woman gave you Martin Luther King. It was a woman gave you Malcolm X.”

  She introduced five mothers who had lost their sons to police violence. Each woman said the name of her son, and we called back, “Say his name.”

  We heard “Jordan Davis,” and we said, “Say his name.”

  We heard “Eric Garner,” and we said, “Say his name.”

  We heard “Trayvon Martin,” and we said, “Say his name.”

  We heard “Mohamed Bah,” and we said, “Say his name.”

  We heard “Dontre Hamilton,” and we said, “Say his name.”

  When you are talking about half a million people, saying something is more like a roar. You feel it in your body, in your bones. It vibrates the air. This wasn’t intersectionality as the heading on a college syllabus, it was the sound of primal, indis
putable truth.

  Each time Monáe passed the microphone to one of these mothers, she said: “This isn’t about me.” We heard the name of Sandra Bland. We heard the names of Mya Hall and Deonna Mason, two trans women of color killed by the police. Many of the mothers’ voices cracked as they said the names of their sons. To hear and feel the crowd around me saying “Say his name” and to feel my own voice as one small fraction of that crowd: it filled my whole body. It made me feel large and small at once.

  This was one of the most important things a crowd of half a million people could do: stand in the capital of our country and listen to these mothers say the names of their sons. It wasn’t about me. I mattered only insofar as the we would be impossible without five hundred thousand individual voices. The we: pink-hatted and extending beyond our range of vision. Our mouths were parched and our voices hoarse. We were fidgeting. We were loud.

  What mattered? The surge and force of us: half a million strong, nameless, calling for their names.

  Notes

  * Brittany Martinez’s name has been changed, as have the names of two other interview subjects, Vaeme Tambour and Andrea Chen.

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  Beth Uznis Johnson

  Your Friend/My Friend, Ted

  from Southwest Review

  Do you remember Ted from elementary school? Of course you do—I saw a picture of the two of you on Facebook eating at a restaurant. I don’t know whether it was lunch or dinner, or whether the restaurant was in Illinois where you lived as kids, or Michigan where you live now. No matter the location or time of day, you have drinks in front of you: tall, red drinks over ice.

  Knowing you, I suspect the drinks are something like strawberry iced tea. Not because you like fruit-infused nonalcoholic beverages, but I’d be shocked if it were a froufrou cocktail. If you and Ted were going to have a drink, it would probably be a beer. I say this knowing you drink beer or something stronger like Jack and Coke. The idea of you sipping a fruity cocktail makes me laugh, though I’m sure you’ve had one in the past. At least one time, somewhere with someone who probably remembers it, especially now.