Public History

I sit here steeping in the History of Our Land, a class, my eyelids dense. Our Flag hangs in the corner of the class Red and White folds in deluge, licking the framed portrait of our Thomas Jefferson, our founding father, the slave holder. My teacher, stern at his pulpit, recites to silent rows of desks and students, to the classroom, he recites Our Constitution: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are...” my pen drops, my sight blacks yet I can see through the stars and the stripes, the desk legs tremble and I hear Ocean - seeking depth in the sands of my inner beach I can see true Lady Liberty kneeling in the dirt. She’s draped in the dull jade gown which she filched from the Iroquois, Catawba, Choctaw, and Creek. The Natives who shared their fish, corn, wisdom, and shelter with the savages who would betray them eventually, steal their hunting grounds, burn their homes, rape their women and children. I see why she stoops so low now, and how her crown pines for the Nature that once was, Nature that hides now in the oaks which had shed their trunks and rotted into divinity. So deep is my reverie that the scepter held by Lady Liberty does not shine, guide, shimmer, nor teach, but instead it falls - falls in black ash clouds, falls like grime culled from the backs of Germans, Italians, Chinese, from the farmer who brought his family by ship to polish the shoes of Christians who called him yellow. Or the daughter, destitute, and attending to men in brothels for coin. Or the minister, told that he knew not the word of God and would be spurned heaven. They will never hold the scepter, and so it falls like stinging sweat from the fissured palms of Africans, Irishmen, and Jews. There was the grandmother of eight who stole what time she could from her master to teach her son, daughter, and grandchildren how to read. There, in a gutter, lived the lonely wife who left home in wake of famine and still had to bury her children in the mud and abandon them to the Earth. And there was the street-sweep who knew the burn of cold spit on his forehead, kept his eyes cast down to the dirt, still held onto hope. Altogether, all together they were Americans. Beckoned by Lady Liberty’s gilded staff and enticed by her golden siren song to the eastern coast of teeming land where they first beheld its radiance, as if only in a dream, then ceded life’s breath to paint with Truth the lungs of Our Land and the sickly veins of its governance. I hear the collective voice of lives past: the dying utterances of the slave, the immigrant, the first woman to vote, the soldier, the farmer, the criminal, and the jailer, and they are one ocean, and their voice is the persistent undulation of the swelling-then-receding tide. Their waters will cover her feet and lick her shins until she falls like cornhusk, Lady Liberty, Lady of Ideals now empty, on her knees and in the sand. And the men, women, and children will come clad in white, blue, black, brown, red, and all to form a circle of one, one nation and one people gathered here together to cast a single acorn into the pit she left behind and declare this Their Land. My eyes open and so too do my ears to a teacher sleepily sputtering at a lectern spouting a message addressed to all, addressed to none: “...we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor.”