My husband and I form a mixed marriage--in more ways than one. I am a Jew and he is a WASP, I am from a family comfortable in dense urban centers, his tend to light out for the territories. I am an actress and am fascinated by people and their psychology, and he is an artist whose focus on objects and environments will always take center stage. Like a pinball machine, the ball can carom from complementing each other to creating conflict in a split second.
Last month we spent a few days in Washington DC. He had never been and I had no memory of the family trip I'd taken as an apparently unimpressionable child. So many things to see! Especially museums, those echoey rooms in which he can spend a whole day and I'm at the exit when he's only just left the second room. As a compromise between art and humanity, we went to the National Portrait Gallery. Five hours later we emerged, only because we needed to eat. It's the history of the United States told through the faces and stories of rogues and reformers, generals and washerwomen, tycoons and politicians, enslaved people, indigenous leaders, inventors, journalists, artists, and farmers. Room after room of Americans staring right into our eyes.
In a room called "The Reconstruction 1865–1877: Radicals and Reformers," the women and men who worked to widen post-war emancipation and voting rights were placed among those who struggled to preserve the supremacy of their race and gender. As I slowly made my way around the room from portrait to portrait, I noticed that some of the portraits of these adversaries were hung to stare directly at each other. It's an unsettling reminder that America has always been, among other things, a debate. Those we celebrate were Americans, and those we disdain... well, they were Americans too.
When I was young I read James Baldwin, and I was moved by his insistence on the intimacy of race relations in America. He got that this was people interacting, not theories. He's writing here about Black and White, but I think it has application to the rest of us as well, and to boundaries other than race:
"No one in the world...knows Americans better, or, odd as this may sound, loves them more than the American Negro. This is because he has had to watch you, outwit you, deal with you, and bear you, and sometimes even bleed and die with you, ever since we got here, that is, since both of us, black and white, got here--and this is a wedding. Whether I like it or not, or whether you like it or not, we are bound together forever. We are part of each other."
The next morning we took the standard tour of the U.S. Capitol. I was overwhelmed with a sense of the grandeur and fragility of this great experiment, this mixed marriage of many peoples and positions. As in marriage, complacency is a killer. History is being written by us, by our actions or inactions, even as we careen through it.
.png){kind=logo}
