"I struggledto say indivisible-not individual or invisible butthe opposite of both. Over thirty years ago in my home town, when I was a childin elementary school, faithful in my recitation to the flag, the L.A.P.D. pounded into a man's bodyon the side of the freeway, caught on tape, the camera candid, the verdict not guilty, my neighborhood ablaze, the smoke visiblefrom the kitchen window and on TV."
"Before I talked with her last Sunday I'd imagined some politicromance, a fantasy of a Black woman, a motherat Pleasant Home Methodist A.M.E., who remembers Jim Crow: the peanut gallery, the back doors,the lost jobs, big money gone, but she's still here- I imagined her practicing her franchise,volunteering her time, to my mind righteous.Well. Come to find out that she didn't vote until she was in her thirties, for Kennedy."
The narrator links a remembrance of Whitney Houston to reflections on America, beginning with the childhood ritual of pledging allegiance and the struggle to say "indivisible." A videotaped beating by the L.A.P.D. and the subsequent acquittal are recalled alongside neighborhood flames and televised smoke. Family imagery—black fists, blue state force, and a limp flag—frames national contradiction. A great-aunt in Arkansas worked the polls late in life after being fired from a cleaner's job, accepting payment for the work amid financial need. Generational loss and pragmatic choices complicate ideals of civic virtue and belonging.
Read at The New Yorker
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