See that fortified rooftop right in front of us? I tell you, that there’s the exercise yard of Brooklyn Detention Complex on Atlantic Avenue…It’s an encaged basketball court, and through the mesh you glimpse these lithe figures bobbing around within. Not much to see but plenty to hear. There was a ringing Fuck you followed by the usual six-letter salutation, but it was black-on-black – and friendly, even admiring, in tone, as if in recognition of some successful stunt or feint beneath the hoop…
They’re all black. The queues outside the seats of trial and correction, they’re all black. Last year Elena toured a high-security prison upstate – they’re all black. And we spent half a day together on the vast holding pen of Rikers Island – and they’re all black. It feels like a dogged answer to the African-American ‘question’. In about 1985 someone suddenly said, I know – let’s just lock them all up…No, really. Have a look at Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.
See that massive orange brick powering through the water? It could be a prison hulk on its way to Alcatraz, couldn’t it, but it’s only the Staten Island ferry, full of commuters and a few daytrippers in funny hats. I love that ferry now. So ingenuously, so loyally ploughing its furrow…
Yes, it was strange, it was passing strange with the Hitch. I don’t live in fear of being thought sentimental, as you know, but even I find it a shade embarrassing. Anyway, let’s save that for last.
…Look at Lady Liberty there, holding her golden torch aloft. She’s actually staring right at us, though we can’t clearly see that face of hers, with the Roman nose and the sneer of cold command – a conqueror’s face. And genderless too. It was always thought that the sculptor, Bartholdi, modelled her on his mother, but a recent view has it that he modelled her on his brother…
I went there, I went inside her, back in 1958, when I was nine. In her left hand she holds a tablet with a date in Roman numerals – July 4, 1776. At her feet lies a broken chain…
Far, far and away the most hateful thing about DJT is his – well, let me put it this way.
Picture in your mind the four black college students who in mid-afternoon ordered four cups of coffee at the wrong Woolworth’s lunch counter (Whites Only) on Monday, February 1, 1960, in Greensboro, North Carolina; they were denied service and directed to the Colored Section, heckled by incredulous locals. But they stayed in their seats, reading, until the store closed. This taut ritual was re-enacted the next day, and the next, and the next, in ever-strengthening numbers on both sides. By the end of the week, over 1,000 black protestors were faced by an equal number of whites…
Picture in your mind Ruby Bridges, who in the same year walked to school accompanied by four federal marshals, in New Orleans, a slender six-year-old in white bobby socks, clutching a satchel and a yellow ruler; she crossed the cordon of hollering, gesticulating citizens with her head unbowed and with firm steps entered William Frantz Elementary. All the other children had been spirited away by their parents, and all the teachers had left their posts and were on strike, all except one…
As we know and have always known, there is in this country a vast and inveterate minority (about 35 per cent) whose sympathies lie not with the silently studious protestors, in Greensboro, but with the rejectionists yelling in their ears and pouring sodas on their heads and then beating them to the ground; not with six-year-old Ruby Bridges, in New Orleans, but with the hate-warped face of the housewife in the picket line brandishing a black doll in a toy coffin.
…Is Trump a genuine white supremacist – or did he surmise, early on, that white supremacism was his only path to power? Is he an entirely unreflecting barbarian or is he an unusually scurvy opportunist? He is surely both. In any case, he thought it worth doing: to take the great American stain/taint/wound/block/blight/shame/crime – hate crime – and give it another season in the sun.
On clear mornings she looks at her very best, she looks as she’s supposed to look, an iconic beacon lighting the way to a glorious idea. When the clouds are low and the mist thickens, she looks like the remaining stub of a civilisation that has come and gone: two vast and trunkless legs of stone, in the soiled remnants of a robe.
…Fog, the other silent element, joining everything to everything else in a night of grey. Though it can’t silence a city, fog can subdue it, fog can talk it down and make it tamer – but mere rain, mere darkness is capable of that…
Look! I’ve never seen this before. Out in the estuary, yes, but not so close, not in the stretch before Governors and Liberty. The Staten Island ferries are about to cross.
One incoming, one outgoing. It’s like an eclipse. Two become one, just for a moment – and then become two again.
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Yes, now you ask, I do think about death, almost constantly in the sense that it’s always in my thoughts, like an unwanted song. That’s why I take it very kindly that you’re so young. Because you’ll be reading me every now and then at least until about 2080, weather permitting. And when you go maybe my afterlife, too, will come to an end, my afterlife of words.
And I’ll join the unknown German soldier in 1918. For by my glee might many men have laughed / And of my weeping something had been left, / Which must die now. That’ll be the third death: first my urge, then my life, then my written words.
Fair’s fair, and a promise is a promise. And we’ll come to the bequest of the Hitch very
