Kumbaya, Brooklyn

Which march did I make this sign for?

April 25, 2017

Yesterday: I carry the sign on the subway to Park Slope and don’t sing because it’s quiet in the car. One dowdy white woman at the center pole, wearing a long cardigan and sunglasses, flattens her upper lip and faces away. She has the sleeve of her cardigan wrapped around her hand so she doesn’t touch the pole, and the tops of her feet are bulging out of her shoes. A queen at Patricia Fields once told me the term for that is “giving biscuit.”

There is only one other person who is visibly reacting to the sign — a white-haired older man across the aisle two benches away. He keeps leaning over slightly to look at it, then turning away. I smile and keep it angled so he can read it. He doesn’t meet my eyes.

Walking down the street with the sign in Park Slope is not a revolutionary act. Everyone is on the same side here. Singing would be gratuitous. People are smiling as I pass, and the woman in front of me turns around to see what they’re smiling at, probably thinking I’m a very cute baby or dog. “Oh!” she says, surprised, then hastens to add, “I agree.”

Are we normalizing yet? A hundred days in, are we becoming inured to the magnitude of the insanity and cruelty and provocation we’re subjected to? The weather is changing, now that we’ve made it through a hundred days. The revolution is so last season. If I wasn’t writing about it, I probably would have put down the sign by now.

But then I leave the house this morning, and one of the doormen in the new developments in my neighborhood stops me and asks if there’s a protest. “We gotta get together,” he says. “Some people are ignoring it, we can’t do that.”

I talk to an older guy on the train who lives part time in Florida and canvassed for Hillary. “The white people,” he says sadly, a white man talking to a white woman. “They just loved Trump.”

Walking down the street, I meet Lenore, shopping with her granny cart. We talk about the March for Science, and all the great signs. How important it is to get creative.

She brings up Saturday Night Live, and I start gloating over how much the show annoys him. She thinks sometimes maybe he likes it too much, and SNL should ignore him, and in some ways I agree. “But he took the Sean Spicer thing so seriously,” I say, and we both smirk.

A block later, another granny cart with granny attached. She asks, “Is there a march today?”

“No, but this Saturday, there’s a march…”

“Against Climate Change, I know. Just wanted to make sure I didn’t miss one today.”

A block later, a guy rushes up to me with a printout of a Village Voice article from 1996, “How Reagan Created Gangster Rap.” It’s a diagram of the policies that led to the epidemics that gangster rap was responding to. “I was just taking this over to show the kids, and then I saw you with your sign. And it’s all related!”

“Spread the word,” I say.

“Keep it UP!” he says.

The train is stuffed on the way home. The sign is cumbersome. I am quiet.

I smile but don’t sing on my way home from the train.

I’m almost home when I pass a delivery truck, and the young white driver says, “Hey, that’s my president.”

I don’t even slow down. As I pass: “Yeah? Great, I hope that’s working out great for you.”

“It’s terrific,” he says, and goes back to the game on his iPad.

(To read Kumbaya, Motherfucker in chronological order, click here.)