Oath: n. curse, vow, promise.
By Lea Page
The photograph: Vice-President Kamala Harris (let’s just say that one more time: Vice-President Kamala Harris)—a woman, a brown woman, a black woman, an Asian-American woman, a woman born of immigrants, a powerful woman, a fierce woman, a joyful woman—swears in a man whose husband—partner, third-gentleman (?), the love of the man’s life, his staunchest supporter and best friend—holds the Bible on which he places his left hand before taking his oath of office. The book is small with a yellowed cover. Its pages appear tattered, maybe dog-eared, and all I can think is: That looks like my old Roget’s Thesaurus. I know the man is devoutly Christian in the old-time love-your-neighbor way, so I believe the book is an actual Bible (turns out, it’s his mother’s), but I wonder what it would mean to swear on a thesaurus, on a religion devoted to all the possibilities, to an expansion of definition, to inclusion and nuance. Think of paging through that holy book for a synonym for vice-president and finding: woman, brown woman, black woman, anyone, everyone, you, you, you.
Lea Page’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Washington Post, The Rumpus, Pinch, Stonecoast Journal, Pithead Chapel, High Desert Journal and Slipstream. She is also the author of Parenting in the Here and Now (Floris Books, 2015). She lives in rural Montana with her husband and a small circus of semi-domesticated animals.
Photo credit: The White House Flickr account.