Postcard from the Ledge: 13th
Friends, I’m old enough to remember the Willie Horton ad. I’m old enough to remember when the Central Park Jogger –who was around my age, a jogger like me, white like me, educated like me– was raped and left for dead. I remember being terrified at the idea of “wilding” youths –who, somehow, were always black– out to get girls like me. And I remember three months ago, when I was stunned at the outcome of this election and none of my friends who aren’t white were.
I grew up in rural, northern, mostly blue collar, white America. I didn’t think much about just how unequally people who didn’t look like me were treated –I didn’t watch much television and I physically didn’t see it in my daily life– and I sure didn’t understand it on a visceral level. My ignorance about race changed fundamentally in my twenties, when I began living in cities, and I’ve spent my adult life playing catch-up. The documentary film “13th” places pattern to the past and present in a brilliant and succinct way. It’s one of the most powerful films I’ve ever seen. Watch it.
hat before spellcheck, he would say the word out loud and then look through the dictionary trying to find it by first letter. A word like psychology, for example, he would sound out and then search through all the S words. Not finding it, he would then look through all the C’s even though he was sure that it couldn’t begin with C. It was a slow and agonizing process, and all his papers came back with low grades and comments like “Your insights are terrific but you must learn to proofread.” 
Yesterday I sprinkled some sliced almonds into a small pan and turned the flame on low. I stood beside the stove watching over the pan and occasionally flipping the almonds so that they would brown evenly and not burn. When they were dark golden I shook a little sugar over them and stirred until they were caramelized. Then I turned the almonds out onto a plate to cool and took the pan over to the sink. The sink is a strange, cheap, plasticky thing, scarred from hot pans, so I held the pan up to the faucet and ran water in it to cool it down first. The water hit the pan and steam billowed up into my face. Suddenly I was breathing in vaporized sugar – I could feel it in my lungs and taste it as it went down. It was the most amazing sensation. I stood there by the sink and thought, All these years I’ve been alive and this has never once happened to me before. Then I thought of this poem, which I have secretly treasured ever since I first read it because I love how words, if you toss them around in your mind and on your tongue, turn surprising and magical in that same alchemical way. 
A long time ago, I floated down a tunnel toward a light far away. The floating was slow and the sensation around me was warm and soft. I was conscious the entire time, not thinking but feeling, and the feeling was Here we go again. At a certain point, soft bits of metal touched the top and sides of my head. Nothing hurt. Everything was inevitable. What would happen, would happen. This is my memory of being born. (The soft bits of metal part had always confused me, until one day my mother told me I had been a forceps baby, pulled out at the end with metal tongs.) The below excerpt from Kao Kalia Yang’s beautiful, haunting memoir The Latehomecomer makes me remember it all over again, in a different way. From the sky, I would come again.
I’m the mother of an immigrant and the aunt to immigrants. Family members and many of my dearest friends are gay. I am both a patron and former client of Planned Parenthood. I do not identify as Christian. These four facts alone make me –a white, middle-class born-and-bred citizen of this country– and my immediate and extended family current targets for persecution by my own government. Beyond that, many of my students, colleagues and friends are a) not white, b) Muslim, c) immigrants, d) people living with mental and physical disabilities. Being a patriotic American, which I most certainly am, means that my responsibility is to speak out against fascism. Being a progressive, which I also most certainly am, means keeping my focus on the bigger picture, which is the world as I know it to be, the one that Naomi Nye so beautifully brings to life in this poem.
Like many other patriotic citizens these days, free-range anxiety keeps waking me up in the middle of the night: health care, sexual assault, violence, our natural world, the crumbling of the democratic principles laid out in our constitution. Brutality in many and repulsive forms, from public mockery to online assaults. I’ve always been critical of what I see as the wrongs of some of my nation’s policies. But I never knew until now how much I love my country and how much I want it to keep righting its wrongs instead of retreating into some mythological past that served only one small segment of its citizens. The strange and powerful little poem below haunts me. No no no no no, is how most of its lines begin, and No no no no no is my response. I dream I’ve been captured forced into a cage, which is exactly why next weekend, my son and my daughters and I and many thousands of others will be descending on our nation’s capital to take a stand against fascism.
ollege, and how when I make coffee for her she sits quietly at the kitchen table, her head slightly bowed, silent, because she’s not a morning person, and how her black hair shines in the lamplight. Then I pictured the other daughter, who lives in Boston and whose room still smells like her, and I resisted the urge to get up and walk across the hall and open the door to her so I could breathe her in. Then I pictured the son who lives in Chicago and I remembered the collection of duct tape + cardboard swords he made when he was a little boy. And the other people I most love –the best friend, the painter, the sisters and brother and parents and friends– gathered together in my mind in the dark. All this is to say that when I read the poem below, it feels exactly like those middle of the night thoughts – that everything that matters is small and specific and enormous at the same time.
Young woman across the street, waving and calling to me as I trudge through the snowdrifts on the way home from 
Alison McGhee 