A Rememory: Ralph Yarl and America, U.S.A.
The young man walks quickly by himself through a neighborhood that sleeps. His eyes dart back and forth. It is dark, but the streetlamp offers a glimpse of the houses that once represented the American dream. They seem old and a bit worn, where children were raised and have long-since abandoned home, where parents are left to grow old together or, after death or divorce, to live alone, and where bright-eyed young couples who live there now reach for what was to be imagined as possible. Manicured decay.
Not long ago the neighborhood teemed with the activity of people protecting their way of life from the demands of integration. Northland was not Kansas City. A suburban haven, it belonged to them. Eyes greedy for faces that looked like them. Blood boiled over as others claimed the country’s promise as their own. Now they fight to secure and safeguard that inheritance—to fight for the America built by those who toiled in the factories, who hauled the slithery net, and who ploughed their own furrows. Irony. The young man walks by himself. The darkness howls at his presence. He must have lost his way.
He is somewhat puzzled that his twin brothers would be here. It is 9:45pm. This place or places like them were not meant for him or his younger brothers, especially after the sun goes down. It is a lesson he had to learn: that the South isn’t the only danger.
The insight did not come naturally like it does for some. American flags and yard signs declare the neighborhood’s loyalties and politics. They stand as warnings to people who look like him that, perhaps, they should reconsider. Turn around. Walk away. Don’t knock on any door. Hidden in the shadows of the house of an old, bitter and fearful man, next to his two-car garage, is a sign on a rusting chain-link fence that says in bold red ink, “THIS PROPERTY IS PROTECTED BY SURVEILLANCE CAMERAS.”
The young man is a child of immigrants. His parents migrated from Liberia, I suspect, with the hopes of a better life for themselves and their children. Of course, Liberia carries the burden of its history with America, U.S.A. The country’s contradictions became, in a way, theirs. Over the course of the 19th century, the American Colonization Society (ACS), founded in 1817, helped roughly 16,000 free Black men, women, and children to migrate to what would become Liberia. Recognizing the bicentennial of the first settlement in 1822, the United States State Department acknowledged “the racist nature of the American Colonization Society and that slavery continued in parts of America for more than 40 years after the arrival of the first Black Americans in Liberia.” No matter. A lot has happened between then and now. Wars. Movements. Betrayals. Trump. The young man thrives here. He is in the marching band and wants to be a chemical engineer. The success of his family is supposedly an American story.
But the idea of Ellis Island can be tricky magic. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” did not and does not apply to everyone. Certainly not to this young man’s family. Even those migrating from Europe had to come from a particular part of the continent to avoid the slur or the scornful glance. They couldn’t be Catholic or Jewish or have swarthy skin. The Old World had to be transformed in America, U.S.A., as James Baldwin put it, where Goldsmith had to become Smith and Giorgio, Joe. With that change of name, they could become white and required of us a song. And that is the tricky magic: to transform the incoherence at the heart of America, U.S.A into something clearly possessed and cherished—to be white and to live in neighborhoods like this one.
The young man walks fast by himself, but not fast enough. He is trailed by a host of assumptions about who he is and what he is capable of. He is a thug, lazy, an imminent danger; he is to be surveilled and contained (faces with badges and guns shadow his steps, pundits on conservative news shows and podcasts talk people into panics; white and Black liberals concede the terms of the debate; crime threatens their way of life and he is the reason why). His grades are not enough. Legislation is not enough. A Black President or Vice President is not enough. The fact that he is a good kid is irrelevant. Waving the Liberian flag doesn’t exempt him from stereotypes. He is one of them. Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice, Atatiana Jefferson, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd. The young man walks up the steps alone, but not really. Ghosts walk with him to the door of 1100 Northeast 115th Street.
He rang the doorbell. No answer. Sound. An old white man shot him in the head.
Only the ears too busy listening to the lie are not alone; they are linked by the tendrils of words and image that hide, obscure, and deepen what makes us so afraid. The spiral form of our speech and what lies behind the words stretches out and twines through city blocks that harbor the imminent threat and spread from manicured suburbs to the outer edges of dusty roads in small towns that lull and lumber. The words grow wild in Silicon Valley and nest in cool shadows as others toil under the brutal sun, belts pulled too tight as they, undocumented or not, harvest crops for America, U.S.A. They are dangers, too.
His mother told him to pick up his brothers. He went to the wrong address. No words. Sound. The old man shot twice; told the police he feared the young man (who stood at 5’8” and weighed 140 pounds) threatened his life—that he “was attempting to break into his house.” Haunted words.
Alone, the young man managed to run away and cried out for help; neighbors kept their doors shuttered; someone finally helped him as he lay in a pool of blood and his eyes darkened. The young man survived. “Now Ralph has to look over his shoulder everywhere he goes,” his mother says. “Ralph has a scar on the top of his head that everybody recognizes him wherever he goes as the kid who was shot.” The judge expresses concern for the health of the old man. He is 84. Ralph’s mother says her son cries for a sense of normalcy. “Can I please graduate like maybe a normal person?” The scar on the top of his head answers back. One wonders where he is and what he dreams.
What is not said, but known and felt, what lingers behind the words and image cling to the ear and color the eye, the rusted chain-link that contaminates the blood; America, U.S.A.
This place, with its ideas and ghosts, remains a riddle. A bundle of contradictions: a promise of freedom, a place of unfreedom; a country of unimaginable wealth and unbearable poverty, where the equality of men and women guides our way and white people stand above it all; where God saturates everything but repeatedly comes up missing in how we live together; where liberty is cherished and selfishness is freedom. America, U.S.A is a country of longing and restlessness, a place of titillating happiness and paralyzing melancholy; where we confidently know what we are and have little patience with who we really are; where politicians exploit fear and hatred, and where ordinary people, if they decide, can change the course of history. America, U.S.A is haunted by the madness at its heart, and the reality of race resides there. Coiled tight. The young man with the scar on top of his head knows this now and forever. We are not who we say we are. That fact and the fear of it unraveling this fragile experiment plague this nation. It cowers behind our words and image. That fear is the wheel within a wheel.
“Our culture is the predominance of an idea which draws after it this train of cities and institutions. Let us rise into a new idea, and they will disappear.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
This story hit me right in my guts.