By this time, I had wasted my day.
That was nothing new and nothing important, in a sense. If I wasn’t actively, whole-heartedly, pushing-with-all-my-might-and-giving-it-200% fighting against Trump and fascism, I was doing nothing.
The problem was that everybody else was doing their Tuesday, and their Tuesday didn’t include restoring democracy to the United States. Their Tuesday was about going to work to pay the mortgage—or whatever else was more urgent (if not more important) than democracy.
The problem, I decided, was that I had a past. I had always known about ladies with a past, but what was I doing with one? And why was it hitting me so hard now?
It was hitting hard, I decided, because for over 300 years, a part of my family has been in the United States. Not a big part, I grant you. In fact, there aren’t even branches of my family that are historically interesting—it’s only a couple of twigs. But there they are, and they were weighing me down. According to my grandmother, her family had been burning witches in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. They had been fighting the British in the Revolutionary War. They had fought in the Civil War and the World War II—they had been right there during all the right moments in American history, and they had been on the right side.
Nobody in the family had much money, but we were there. True—it took us a while. We tend to get on the second boat that’s going places—never the Mayflower, but whatever it was that followed it. And we got it wrong initially at the Salem Witch Trials—Henry Herrick had been the magistrate, and had rounded up and (presumably) tried the women and found them guilty. He did, however, apologize for the affair. It had been a snare of the devil, and he had fallen.
Three hundred years takes the stench of burning or rotting flesh away—the witch trials seem quaint. But are they? If a child is starving on the bus going back home, I’m responsible for feeding him or her. But why, if the child is in Gaza, am I not equally responsible? And why should the deaths of a score of women and children matter less because they happened three centuries ago?
It was all going down on my own watch, and I hated it. Even worse, I now knew about Henry Herrick and Nicholas Coleman Pickard and my own grandmother and parents. I am no more responsible for saving democracy than a guy who has walked up from San Salvador a couple years ago, right?
Wrong, and I don’t know why.
I don’t like noblesse oblige, probably because I suffer from it. But we’ve been around for 300 years and counting, and we’re in a better position than the guy from Salvador. Or at least we should be. We’re supposed to know better and be better.
It was better when I was a teenager, and could cheerfully send my family to hell. I would have snickered at the witch-burning / hanging Henry Herrick: it was a long time ago, and what difference does it make, today?
There were three or four of us in the family that I returned to over and over. There was Henry Herrick, who actually was involved in the whole process of finding the witches, getting them into the court, trying them, and executing them. Oh, and saying sorry afterwards.
There was Nicholas Coleman Pickard, my great-great grandfather. He had been a country doctor, sent his son off to fight the South in the Civil War, gone to collect his son’s body, and then “disappeared” for the last thirty years of his life. “He abandoned his family,” my grandmother would state, and then go on to attribute it to “gold fever.” In fact, he kept practicing medicine until three years before his death, at his daughter’s home in Kansas. What had caused this man to disappear from one part of his family only to appear again later, decades later and somewhere else?
There was my grandmother, who had written the story down (what she knew, what she remembered) and left out (wisely, Marc?) any mention of herself, though she did note her marriage, her three children, and a few details of her life. Details had slipped out: she was married and pregnant with twins in 1918, in a small, airless, Chicago apartment. The heat was infernal, that summer, and she was tired and lonely (her husband was a travelling salesman, selling paper from Wisconsin to businessmen in Chicago). Worse, the “Spanish flu” was ravaging her world just as COVID-19 had ravaged ours. She had endured, raised her children, and then was left a widow in her sixties. It was the depression, there wasn’t any money, she had gone to work (for the first time) operating the switchboard at the YWCA.
She had seen a lot, more perhaps than I. Her father had saddled horses and ridden his carriage down the country roads to see his patients. She sat, at the end of her life, with me, her young grandson. We watched the moon landing in 1969, and she marveled that such a thing was possible.
She had seen other marvels as well. She drove past and saw the quarter of a million black people gathered to hear Martin Luther King in 1963. She saw Europe and the United States fight Nazism and win.
We had all been there, and we had been part of it, to one degree or another. I say “we” for a reason: I don’t walk alone. I have three centuries of family to account for and to answer to. One Herrick—either George or Henry—had even fought in King Philip’s War. I have the luxury of knowing only that there had been a war, that Henry / George had fought in it, and absolutely nothing else.
(AI knows, and can tell you:
King Philip's War (1675–1678) was a devastating conflict between Native American tribes and English colonists in New England, named after the Wampanoag chief Metacomet, also known as King Philip. Driven by increasing English encroachment on Native lands and mistreatment, the war led to widespread destruction on both sides, with Native American raids on colonial settlements and significant casualties. It ultimately resulted in Anglo-American domination of the region, the deaths of many Native Americans, and their enslavement or forced migration, making it the bloodiest conflict per capita in American history. )
Wonderful—the slaughter of Native Americans gets dignified with high-falutin’ name. A century and a half later, my great-great grandfather takes off by train to collect his dead son’s body in Richmond, Virginia. Another hundred years: my grandmother and I are sitting in the living room on the family home on Bagley Parkway. The same home that will protect us, with its bomb shelter neatly in place. (True—we had never bother to equip the bomb shelter with food or water or even mattresses. But it was there, and we were safe.)
The network breaks for commercials. We go outside, my grandmother and I. My father has pulled me aside, before he and my mother left for six weeks in Norway, and told me that I am looking after my aged grandmother. My mother has pulled her mother aside, and told my grandmother that she is looking after me. I know this now, though we were both too delicate to mention that we were looking after each other, my grandmother and me.
We look up at the sky, at the moon. We totally believe that there’s a spaceship up there, with American astronauts, and there’s an American flag up there too, flapping in the non-existent wind.
We look up and we marvel.
We had been lucky, for the most part. We were on the winning side (if not the right side) of King Philip’s War. We had burned the witches, not been the witches. And we had been on the right side, I certainly knew, of the Civil War.
Things had been going along swimmingly, all those centuries of Herricks and Pickard and Newhouses.
I took off for the Poet’s Passage, to talk about Jack Smith and American Democracy.
I walked a couple of blocks to the Passage.
I did not walk alone.
