Boy Bye
By Lauren Marie Scovel
Lauren Marie Scovel is a Boston-based bookseller and editorial assistant. She graduated from Emerson College with degrees in Writing, Literature, Publishing and Theatre Studies. This photograph was taken with a Promaster 2500PK Super film camera at the Women’s March in Washington D.C.
By Candy Schulman
Editor’s note: Trump’s inauguration initiated a series of public demonstrations that have continued throughout his first 100 days—including, challenging his refusal to release his taxes, in support of science and the environment, in defiance of his bigoted attempts to limit immigration and, as this essay reminds us, to make clear the power of women inspired to action by racism, misogyny, xenophobia, Islamophobia and injustice.
“Does this bring you back to your protesting days of the sixties?” my 22-year-old daughter asked me.
We were gathered with a group of writers in my friend’s apartment to assemble for the Women’s March the day after the inauguration, a short walk from our larger group’s meeting place. Even more importantly, she had two bathrooms where we could eliminate our bladders one last time before chanting, “This is what democracy looks like!”
“I never thought I’d be marching again,” a friend remarked after her final bathroom run. She was a grandmother, her thoughts reflecting signs we’d later see: I CAN’T BELIEVE I HAVE TO PROTEST THIS CRAP.
My daughter’s friends gave our posse diversity. I was thrilled to share this event with her, the way we’d voted last November, posting a Facebook photo saying, “We’re voting for the first woman president of the U.S.!”
Now my daughter wanted to know if today was like the past.
“Yes,” I told her, “but the drugs are different.”
My comrades discussed how much Xanax they’d ingested. I tended to reduce anxiety through meditation and swimming laps. Today, I wanted to fully feel the vibrations of sharing my daughter’s first protest march.
She wasn’t sure how many friends would come until the last minute, texting her social circle.
My host had sent out official invitations and instructions for weeks, and we’d RSVP’d to meet at her place as though responding to a wedding invitation. She snapped a photo before we left: three generations ranging from 14 to she-who-has-never-revealed-her-age. We dressed according to assorted maladies and hormonal spikes. A mix of original knees and replacements, we were a rowdy arthritic bunch: eager, hopeful, filling our pockets with tissues in case we found ourselves someplace without toilet paper.
It was unseasonably warm, temperatures approaching 50. A cool breeze whipped up. Noticing my daughter’s friend in a gray turtleneck and thin hat, I refrained from saying, “Are you dressed warmly enough?” I didn’t want to sound like her mother. Besides, she was from Maine.
Arriving at our designated starting corner, we found peaceful chaos. Crowds had grown so thick, we were gridlocked on East 48th Street. Occasionally the crowd roared, as if we were starting to move, but it was the kind of cheer you’d see at a baseball game when the stands erupt in an impromptu wave.
My daughter and her friends posed for a selfie. They looked so innocent and fresh, yet I worried that the rights they’d always expected might now be eroding. And I realized that those rights would mean much more to them once they had to fight for them.
A friend photographed the two of us, holding the sign she had crafted: WE HAVE TO START TALKING ABOUT THE ELEPHANT IN THE WOMB.
“Look at that adorable little girl,” my daughter said, pointing to a three-year-old on her father’s shoulders, holding a sign: NEXT POTUS.
Ninety minutes passed and we still hadn’t moved. “We’re going to push ahead,” my daughter said with the impatience of youth. “Do you want to come or stay?”
I wanted to march with her, but I was supposed to remain with my group. The organizers urged us to follow the rules for crowd control. I was no longer that sixties antiwar protestor, unafraid to be tear gassed, bailing friends out of jail. I’d turned into an adherer of the rules, a college writing professor who taught students to abide by attending classes and meeting assignment deadlines.
I told my daughter to go and kissed her cheek, hiding my disappointment.
An hour later we were still stuck in place. I worried about my daughter being trampled if the crowd grew impatient. Life without Xanax.
“Let’s reverse direction,” my group suggested.
That’s when we splintered into three subgroups. And I ended up alone. I began to feel claustrophobic the way I do in airplanes. I pushed my way through throngs of shoulder-to-shoulder people, all remarkably calm, waiting their turn. All 400,000 of us. The mall in D.C. is spacious. New York streets are narrow and dark.
“I’m having a panic attack,” I explained, forcing my way through bodies, signs and babies. When I reached Grand Central, thousands were spewing from subways and trains, and I went the opposite direction, downtown toward home.
Landing in Union Square in the sunshine, I felt my blood pressure lower. I ended up sharing the march with my daughter the way Millennials communicate all the time:
“We reversed direction and found our way to the march,” she texted. “We’re on Fifth Avenue!”
“Store employees keep waving at us!”
“I think I just saw Senator Schumer!”
She kept the texts and photos coming. This wasn’t how I’d expected to share my daughter’s first protest march, but technology allowed us to do it together after all.
That night we cooked lasagna, craving comfort food. We formed a group message, sharing photos of protest messages from one edge of our country to the other. One of our favorites: NOW YOU’VE PISSED OFF GRANDMA. That was how I felt, a bit old to be protesting this crap anymore, but doing my part as much as I could. I was passing the protest torch onto my daughter, but I’d always be there to cheer her on.
Candy Schulman is an award-winning essayist who has published personal essays and political Op-eds in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, New York Magazine, Salon, and elsewhere. She is a creative writing professor at The New School. As an anti-war protestor at Ohio State University in 1970, she published an essay about the four students who were killed at Kent State, illuminating how peaceful student protests were combatted with tear gas and guns, whereas post-football game drunken brawls were overlooked by police.
Photo credit: Thomas Altfather Good via a Creative Commons license.
Hi, Julie,
Thank you for writing your essay, “March, interrupted: When plans go South” (Writers Resist, February 2, 2017 issue). Thank you for raising your pen in service of the movement and for speaking from a place of awareness and resistance. Thank you for lifting up hope in the face of all the fear and anxiety in which we have been mired. We need more people like you—people who, as you put it, are inexperienced in civic activism, but are moving their voices (whether figuratively or literally) from the page to the street.
As a Southerner and an activist, a person both of great privilege and lack thereof, I would like to offer something for your consideration: The South is not a place which exists in opposition to the resistance. The South is the home of the resistance.
The narrative about the South that exists outside of the South (and, as we internalize it all too often, inside the South as well) is that we are ignorant and, in our ignorance, we are conservative. We are viewed as a people detached from the rest of the country; unmoored from the progressive agenda to which the North is both paladin and avenging angel; our church is our chain; our poverty, the cell to which our ignorance (sadly but justifiably) confines us.
The truth is that we are not so much a people detached as a people divided. The South is the seat of power in the United States. The 13 states of the Old Confederacy house 178 of the 270 electoral votes required to win the presidency, 152 of the 435 members of the House of Representatives, and 26 of the 100 U.S. senators. Almost 38 percent of the U.S. population lives in the South. Our politicians are no strangers to these numbers. The South is also home to half the nation’s Black population, a third of its (known) LGBTQ population, and the highest poverty rates in the United States. And yet, consistently, the South as a political entity behaves in ways that are counter to the interests of Black, LGBTQ and poor people.
There’s an old saying, “As the South goes, so goes the nation.” If this is true (and it is), it becomes suddenly very important to our leaders (almost all of whom are not Black, LGBTQ or poor) to win the South. That is, it becomes important to out leaders to win over a people whose interests are not their interests, whose needs run counter to their own needs. To do this, they taught the South to vote against itself.
Let me say again: We are not a people detached; we are a people divided. They split us up and pitted us against each other. Literacy laws, the “one drop” rule, Jim Crow, voter suppression, gerrymandering, anti-LGBTQ laws, the Southern Strategy, North Carolina’s Amendment 1, and, most recently, HB-2 all serve an important function. Our leaders taught poor whites that black and brown people are a threat to white jobs, white security, white wealth. This is not true. They taught straight people that LGBTQ people are a disease and a menace to their children. This is not true. They taught Christian people that people of other faiths are predators, criminals and terrorists. This is not true. With coded language and the strategic application of resources, they taught us to hate and fear each other. We looked at each other sidelong. We voted against one another in hopes of protecting ourselves from monsters (that did not exist), and, in voting against each other, we voted against ourselves. They stole our power out from under us and so won the governmental seats they desired.
We are not ignorant; we are a closely-guarded federal resource. We are not powerless; we are enchained. So when you write of speaking out, do not write of speaking out even in southwest Georgia—write of speaking out especially in southwest Georgia. Look on your Fox News-watching relatives with compassion; they’re under the same spell as all the rest of us. Don’t hold yourself too far removed from those who are less knowledgeable than you or from those who are less sensitive or less aware. We’ve all been listening to the same propaganda, all drinking from the same poisoned well. What we need now is not to shun those who have swallowed more poison than us, but to extend to them our empathy and compassion. The work to be done now is the work of healing and bridge making. It is the hardest work of all, but it must be done if we are going to win back the power that has been stolen from us, whose origin is in our hearts and our hands and our throats.
I’m glad you’ve come here—we need people like you. Welcome to the South. Welcome home.
K Walton is a writer and activist in Asheville, North Carolina, where she lives in the sticks with her partner and their cat.
Image credit: U.S. Library of Congress, “The End of the United States Rebellion 1865.”
