KELLY MCWILLIAMS

 

I am a California baby who crossed the continent to Boston. Here, on the eastern seaboard, everything is utterly different from what I knew, culturally, as a landscape, and as a home, and yet I recognize it as American. I often imagine the 3,000 miles in between my first home and my new one, the incredible expanse, the fields, the western cities, the mountains, the mines, the houses rich and poor, the million different voices, the different languages, and know that all that, too, is American.

 

What is America? For myself I call it home, though I am aware that it is not always so, for everyone. It was not always home even for my ancestors. Because I am mulatto, mixed black and white, I know that America is a country malleable as gold that can be made our own, if words strike it hard enough. Frederick Douglass, famous abolitionist and escaped American slave, and a writer whom I will always love, used his words to convert our country, first his prison, into his home. Because words are powerful here, and because our constitution demands that they cannot be silenced, I am a writer. I am American.

 

Already, I have crossed an X in the sand, in place of my name, to mark that this ground, however imperfect it has been or may be, is the ground that I will work until my bones are dust. History beckons that we work to make the land yield the truths on which human souls subsist: freedom, opportunity, and the right to struggle even against our own country’s wrongs. I am not afraid for America as long as I know that we as citizens are listening.

 

Recently I have wondered why more Americans don’t cry out against wrongs, why there is silence, even if it lasts only a moment. But always the rumble in the ground begins, the news sets itself a new challenge to print, and we begin to answer for our part in history. At this moment people of conscience are beginning to speak out against injustice that we have fallen into overseas.

Guantánamo Bay will mark a dark period for us as a nation. International policies I can’t believe in personally challenge my optimism. But I remember that the people are the poets of this nation. They will see to it that our country always wakes from its nightmares.

 

Frederick Douglass wrote not only to change America for our people, but also because he loved it. He did not go to Canada as so many slaves did. He stayed on the East Coast, near Boston, near where I live now, and traveled, broadcasting the words he wrote, casting them like seeds that took root. After his example, I believe with all my heart, young and untenable as it may be, that America can be made and re-made to fit its people. It is willing. It is waiting. And for as long as this remains true, I will be American. «±