This is such a haunting question. It’s stuck with me ever since Brittany emailed it to me. There are so many people, so many events, so many moments I would like to erase from history and replace with such a casual encounter as Eve L. Ewing suggests in her stunning poem. My first reaction was Sam Cooke, who was murdered as a young man; i…
This is such a haunting question. It’s stuck with me ever since Brittany emailed it to me. There are so many people, so many events, so many moments I would like to erase from history and replace with such a casual encounter as Eve L. Ewing suggests in her stunning poem. My first reaction was Sam Cooke, who was murdered as a young man; it wasn’t so much that I imagined meeting him in a shop as Ewing does with an older Till as I immediately thought of what it would feel like to react to an older Cooke song coming on the radio today, one that reacted to the late-sixties or the seventies. But I have two children and one of the reasons my family lives overseas with them is because of America’s gun violence. I still cannot shake the horror of Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas and the cowardice of the cops who let those children be butchered while they waited outside. And so my answer is this:
I’d reimagine a visit to Robb Elementary several years after the police had done their jobs and stormed the school. I would enter past the memorial that honors the two cops who died stopping the shooter, paying it very little mind because the tragedy would’ve already become the past by then. And I would greet students, the ones who should still be here, and talk to them about writing, about telling stories, about the possibility of them becoming storytellers themselves one day, too, and then I would leave and drive away and forget I was ever there to begin with because it was such an unremarkable school in such an unremarkable part of the country.
This is such a haunting question. It’s stuck with me ever since Brittany emailed it to me. There are so many people, so many events, so many moments I would like to erase from history and replace with such a casual encounter as Eve L. Ewing suggests in her stunning poem. My first reaction was Sam Cooke, who was murdered as a young man; it wasn’t so much that I imagined meeting him in a shop as Ewing does with an older Till as I immediately thought of what it would feel like to react to an older Cooke song coming on the radio today, one that reacted to the late-sixties or the seventies. But I have two children and one of the reasons my family lives overseas with them is because of America’s gun violence. I still cannot shake the horror of Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas and the cowardice of the cops who let those children be butchered while they waited outside. And so my answer is this:
I’d reimagine a visit to Robb Elementary several years after the police had done their jobs and stormed the school. I would enter past the memorial that honors the two cops who died stopping the shooter, paying it very little mind because the tragedy would’ve already become the past by then. And I would greet students, the ones who should still be here, and talk to them about writing, about telling stories, about the possibility of them becoming storytellers themselves one day, too, and then I would leave and drive away and forget I was ever there to begin with because it was such an unremarkable school in such an unremarkable part of the country.
This is horrifying and beautiful. What is wrong with Americans that they permit this to keep happening?