by Hilton Als
So I tell my Steve Harvey jokes. “He’s the rich one,” I say. Or “I had the name before he did.” Or “only on the telephone.” What I don’t say is the first thing that comes to my mind when anyone asks me if I’m really Steve Harvey. “No, he’s the black one.” Under the hoodie of my silence, that thought floats into my mind first, revealing an unconscious bias I cannot wring out of myself. When I tell the jokes—being self-deprecatory, of course, to disarm the situation—I drive my prejudice down in me where it is not apparent but does not die.
“Where do we take this?” President Obama asked, opening both of his hands outward toward the future, toward all of us, toward me. If I am an employer, it takes me to a tendency to say no too quickly, and if a juror to say guilty too easily, and if a cop to shoot before a threat is real. When I judge the death of Trayvon Martin and other black men killed by authorities under mysterious circumstances, it takes me to a conclusion contrary to all I have been taught: that the burden of proof is on the killer. And it takes me to an ugly truth hidden in my own name. With each repetition of my joke, an offensive Valentine card tumbles from the fingertips of memory, and I’m secretly clicking the lock on my car door. I’m surreptitiously checking my wallet in the elevator. I’m following Steve Harvey through the aisles of a department store, watching his hands.
Leslie Jamison
The March on Everywhere
from Harper’s Magazine
I was at a Maryland travel plaza just off I-95 when I finally saw them, en masse and outfitted: the women. They were emerging from the fog like visions, their bodies spectral and streetlamp-lit, walking alone and with friends, with canes, with glowing cigarettes between their fingers; with boots over their jeans, with their daughters and mothers, with paper cups of coffee in their hands. They were headed into the rest stop, its vertical windows rising from the mist like church spires. They were holding doors for one another, asking, “Did I just cut you in line?” They were buying sodas and bananas. They were going to the bathroom. They were letting pregnant women go first. They were in utero, they were in wheelchairs, and they were all headed where I was headed: to the corner of Third Street and Independence Avenue.
When I arrived at that travel plaza—with my friends Rachel and Joe and their eleven-week-old baby, Luke—it felt like a mythical village of Amazon women had been transplanted from the jungle to the harsh fluorescent lighting of a highway rest stop. That night on I-95, arms full of licorice and chips, we didn’t yet know the statistics of our surge. There would be half a million people in Washington, three times the size of Donald Trump’s inaugural crowd, and more than eight hundred demonstrations on seven continents, with an estimated 4.2 million people marching in this country alone: probably the largest protest in American history. But already, we were made of nerves and excitement. We were buzzed on coffee. We were breastfeeding babies. We were part of a creature with four million faces. We were a bunch of strangers intoxicated by our shared purpose, which is to say: we were a we.
The DC Metro was jam-packed at eight the next morning. People were practically embracing strangers to make room for other strangers. Trump and Putin were French-kissing on five different pins. One hat said make racists afraid again. One pair of sneakers showed a uterus painted in pink glitter glue. The left foot said pussy. The right foot said power. A voice over the loudspeaker said: “Women’s-rights fighters from all over the world, welcome to your Red Line!”
We marched past the Capitol—which I barely recognized at first, because we were marching past the back—and then down to Independence. We did not need directions. We just followed the human stream. Our friend Erin, five months pregnant, put a sign around her neck that said feminist future, with an arrow pointing down at her belly. I saw a sign that said viva vulva. I saw a sign that said fight like a girl. I saw a sign that said i’m with her. It had arrows pointing everywhere.
A woman my age wore a sign that said fourth-generation feminist. It made me wonder who counted, whether feminists existed before the phrase itself was invented. My grandmother was raised on a farm in rural Saskatchewan, bathing once a week in kettle-heated water, and grew up to work in a university laboratory. She was one of the founding members of the Shattuck Neighborhood Action Coalition, in Oakland, California, a community where she put down roots decades before it started to gentrify. She led cleanup missions around Bushrod Park, collecting piles of garbage for trucks to haul away, and had everyone over afterward for soup and homemade bread. Until her diabetes made it impossible, she delivered voters-alliance newsletters to eighty homes in her neighborhood. She wore bright flowing skirts and we took walks together pretending to be aliens from the planet Algernon, trying to figure out the purposes of all these mysterious objects: garden hose, fire hydrant, wind chime. She believed in the latent magic of the proximate, and in community as something actively built, not passively inherited. She put her body and her time—her self—into work she felt was important.
As for my own mom, I have always understood her commitment to social justice in worshipful, often cinematic terms. She fell in love with her first husband while they were protesting the Vietnam War in Portland, Oregon, at a liberal arts college where the students figured out ways to make their sex lives count toward the PE requirement. At one demonstration in San Francisco, where federal agents started photographing the crowd from nearby buildings, she and everyone held up their driver’s licenses.
I grew up hearing stories about the season she spent picking crops in the South of France, with the woman I eventually realized had been her lover—which only made these tales more intoxicating, their days spent harvesting olives and Roma tomatoes, staying in a small cottage in the woods, getting paid in jugs of wine, stacking the fireplace with roots at night and watching their knotted, whirling patterns burn. My mom told me about a strike she had led among the olive pickers, who were forced to work long hours in the brutal cold wearing only cotton socks as gloves.
As I saw it, my mother had repeatedly shown up for something larger than her own life. She’d been desperate to join the Peace Corps. She worked as a precinct leader for the McGovern campaign, in 1972, while she was pregnant with my oldest brother. (She called him George while he was still in the womb.) She brought my brothers, just five and six years old, to rural Brazil when she was doing her doctoral research on infant malnutrition. She spent decades working on maternal-health research and advocacy in West Africa, and I carried in my mind’s eye a vivid memory that wasn’t mine: the night in Togo when she accompanied a woman in obstructed labor to the hospital in Sokodé, driving along muddy, rutted roads while the rain pelted down.
It wasn’t just the things she had done that I admired but the spirit in which I imagined her doing them: selflessly, putting her own comfort aside, choosing the path of most resistance. Her life in social justice was always intertwined with her life as a primary parent. She was committed to her children—and to children who weren’t her children.
In her early seventies now, she is still at it. As a deacon in the Episcopal Church, she recently protested unjust immigration policies by giving Communion through the mesh of the border fence in Tijuana. She was also arrested with unionized hotel workers in downtown Los Angeles, wearing her clerical collar as she was handcuffed. As I construct the story of her life, it shimmers with valor, with purity of motivation, and with endless, altruistic work.
I have always found a kind of mission statement in the story of her very first protest, a march around Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square against the House Un-American Activities Committee. My mom was handing out flyers, and one woman handed hers back, looked my mom straight in the eye, and said, “I hope your children grow up to hate you.” It was a female curse, a way of saying: I hope the gods of motherhood punish you. But ever since my mother told me that story, I have believed that loving her as much as I do is a political act.
I have also seen myself as a disappointing inheritor of her legacy. My own commitment to social action—whi
le durable—has felt more like a series of do-gooder missteps and awkward incursions into activism: mixing concrete (badly) in a small Costa Rican village to build a footpath to the local church, as a naively well-intentioned fifteen-year-old whose parents could afford to fund her exercises in conscience; or tutoring mothers in a minimum-security prison to help them pass their GED exams, feeling so shy—so convinced I was doing a terrible job—that my stomach knotted up with anxiety.
My attempts at direct political action have been shot through with apathy and bumbling. When I canvass, there is the perpetual nervousness before each buzzer-ring, and an ongoing record of startling ineloquence. (“I’m not voting.” “But you should!”) My days organizing with my graduate-student union always felt grudging and full of discomfort: town hall meetings I didn’t want to attend, follow-up emails I didn’t want to type.
Whenever I compared my history of social engagement with my mother’s, it felt meager and disheveled. I was a lurker, always ducking around the edges of the crowd, hovering near the snack table, drinking too much coffee. I was both too insecure and too egotistical to fully join group efforts, convinced I had better ways to spend my time than being one body among many. I was too obsessed with singular expression, with my own voice, to lend myself to the humbler chorus of collective action. This was the ego investment—the stubborn sense of my own identity—that kept me from being useful, from being subsumed into the whole.
When we got close to Independence and Third Street, and found no stage in sight, we wondered: Are we in the right place? We were definitely someplace, with more people than I’d ever seen in my life. Every time we looked down a street, we saw endless bodies. We were looking for the core of it: the epicenter of the gathering, the departure point. Eventually we realized we were marching toward the wrong side of the stage, along with probably twenty thousand other people. I hadn’t imagined the rally like this, with this abiding uncertainty about where the thing itself was.
We inched up C Street to see if we could hit Independence further back. We walked over hay and flattened horseshit, perhaps left over from the inaugural parade, though we weren’t directly on its route. We passed circular black tanks labeled horse control. A woman stood in the back of a pickup truck hawking get your hands off my vajayjay pins at the top of her lungs. A few blocks away, bras dangled from the trees. A woman dressed in bright orange was looking for a group of other women dressed in bright orange.
The buildings of our government felt vast and indifferent on either side of us, made of cold pale marble. We flooded their inhuman scale with our human bodies. The crowd often stopped in its tracks, because there were so many of us and because so many of us were taking selfies. This did not seem like vanity so much as a useful motivating impulse, the desire to say: I was part of this. We all wanted our presence documented. If activism had to be entirely selfless—no affective payoff, no emotional or digital souvenirs—it would never happen at all.
For the first few hours, I couldn’t hear or see the rally. Gloria Steinem was speaking somewhere, but at a certain point I couldn’t have even told you which direction the stage was in. I tried to check on my phone, but I wasn’t getting reception. No one was. There were too many of us. Our technology was blocked by the more ancient technology of so many bodies gathering together.
We weren’t on the official route of anything. We weren’t even sure where we were going. But this didn’t mean we weren’t at the march. We were the march—in our mistakes and our rerouting, in our circling back, trying again, taking the long way around. We were already part of what we had been searching for.
When Alice Walker arrived home from the March on Washington in 1963 after taking a night bus back to Boston, her relatives were sure they’d seen her on TV. They insisted they had spotted her “among those milling about just to the left of Martin Luther King Jr.” But they had seen what they wanted to see. She wasn’t anywhere near him. “The crowds would not allow it,” she wrote later. “I was, instead, perched on the limb of a tree far from the Lincoln Memorial.”
I liked this lineage, this tradition of the partial and obstructed view: the marginal experience as authentic experience. It was permissive. You felt what you felt. You saw what you saw. You took what you could get. The only thing you could say for sure was that you had shown up.
At the Women’s March, I saw people perched in the trees all around me, straining to hear. I thought of their aching legs and wondered how long they would last up there. I wondered if they had remembered to bring snacks.
Activism isn’t an oil painting. It’s real life: a box of tampons, a forgotten cell-phone charger, a late-night car ride. It’s many hours standing on concrete. It’s not just the glorious surge, or the giddy feeling in your stomach when you’re on the move, tucked into the thick of the crowd, voice hoarse from shouting. It’s also everything it takes to get there. It’s dealing with the low-tire-pressure indicator light, flat on your stomach in a Bed-Stuy parking lot, losing the little metal cap somewhere on the oil-pocked asphalt. It’s getting stuck in bumper-to-bumper on the Verrazano, with barges chugging through the gloom below. It’s a post-quesadilla stomachache in Jersey. It’s changing the baby in the backseat because the changing table in the restaurant bathroom is covered in mouse shit.
There is no activism that isn’t full of logistics and resentments and boring details. Commitment to anything larger than your own life often looks mythic in retrospect. But on the ground, it’s all in-box pileup and childcare guilt; it’s a lot of wondering if you’re having the right feelings or the wrong ones, or confusion about which is which. It’s messy and chaotic and imperfect—which isn’t the flaw of it but the glory of it. It trades the perfect for the necessary, for the something, for the beginning and the spark.
My mother may have led olive pickers on a strike in France, or been cursed out by an angry housewife in Pioneer Square, but her life isn’t myth. It’s a life. Over the years, I’ve learned the counterhistory of whatever glorious legend I wrote for her—not its cancellation, but its supplement: the fuller version. Her life in activism was fraught with apathy, despair, an urgent sense of inadequacy.
In other words, it was full of humanity. There were other truths, other parts of the story. She couldn’t fulfill her Peace Corps assignment because her marriage fell apart and she wasn’t allowed to report to Botswana without her husband. After the first flush of her antiwar activism, she fell away from the movement and into depression. She was working as a telephone operator in Oakland, trying to connect calls across the Pacific, hearing wives and mothers crying as they failed to reach soldiers they hadn’t heard from in months.
The whole arc of her story was punctuated by moments of doubt and disillusionment. When McGovern was crushed in a landslide, losing every state but Massachusetts, she felt as though she had been personally rejected by her country. Her career in public health didn’t grow seamlessly or instantaneously from her days of early motherhood; it took her years to figure out that she didn’t want to spend two decades at home caring for her children. She almost dropped out of grad school on her first day because she was afraid it would take her too fully away from her sons. In retrospect, she felt guilty about bringing them to Brazil, especially my middle brother, who didn’t like his preschool and had trouble learning the language.
Not long ago, she met a Vietnam vet who had also become an Episcopal deacon, and she told him about heckling a train of returning soldiers, how much she’d always regretted doing it. She told him that she was sorry. He said she was the first person who had ever apologized to him for doing that.
My mother recently confessed to me that she had never liked canvassing. This was years after I’d written an internal script that imagined her knocking on doors with full-throated eloquence and confidence, the way I never could. She didn’t knock on doors because she enjoyed it, she told me, or even because she felt she was good at it. She did it because it was the work that needed to be done.
The point of
participating in large-scale collective action isn’t glory. It’s something close to the opposite: being a body among bodies. It’s about submerging yourself, becoming part of something too large to see the edges of. Over chiles rellenos in South Jersey, at a strip-mall Mexican restaurant on our drive down, Rachel told me: “My goal is just to be a body in Washington.”
We were bodies among bodies. We were with an old man with a silver beard and a green vest and a sign around his neck that said this is what a feminist looks like. Feminists looked like many things. A woman in a coat covered with tissue-paper flowers had a sign that said frida choose. Another woman was dressed up like a giant vagina, with plumes of purple and beige felt. We had our tampons and our cigarettes and our breast pumps. We were ready to rewrite Mailer’s Armies of the Night. We wore American flags as miniskirts, as bandannas, as hijabs. The transparent backpacks mandated by the organizers showed Luna bars and sunflower seeds: the comet trails of preparation behind everybody’s presence. You saw the internal organs of cell phones and city maps, little confessions strapped to everyone’s backs. A first-time protester told me she brought homemade cookies, but noticed that the veterans brought throat lozenges.
I felt awkward chanting—I often do—but chanted anyway. If everyone felt too self-conscious to chant, then we would make no noise at all. I wanted to reframe my own awkwardness as part of the process going right, or getting started, rather than a sign that it had always been going wrong. I wanted to believe that submission to awkwardness is one of the ways you can show up for a cause. Awkwardness can be part of authentic presence, the same way doubt is part of faith. One guy’s sign said i hate crowds, but i hate trump more. Another said so bad even introverts are out.
We passed a cluster of pro-life women standing on a traffic island. One held up a rosary and a poster of a dead baby. The baby in the photograph—the idea of the dead baby, the visual rhetoric of shame-mongering—was less real to me than the baby my friend was pushing in his stroller: the child of a pro-choice mother, surrounded by the children of pro-choice mothers. The women on the island held posters that said women do regret abortions.
