“What am I supposed to be doing man, d’you know? What am I supposed to be doing?” Jacob is looking me in the eyes across a diner table in New York’s East Village. He’s just finished telling me his life story, a monologue covering thirty-two years in two hours (plus cigarette interval). The whole emerged in one long, gripping stream, ending on a cliffhanger in present day New York. I feel like I’ve just met America itself. He talks with a warm Southern twang, handling the peak of his baseball cap as he does, gradually tightening its curve.
Jacob is from a suburb of Richmond, Virginia, a city “about five hours South of here, on a good night’s drive”. The eldest of five in a strict Catholic family, Jacob was home-schooled until he was 13, and ahead of the class and cheeky until 16, when he got arrested for stealing to support his newfound cocaine habit. In juvenile boot camp he felt the worst pain he’s ever known being jumped by ex-Navy Marines, but made friends with one, who persuaded him to become a Marine when he left. He graduated from Marine Corps boot camp with a fitness score two points short of perfect, and was given an administrative position at Fort Melo, Virginia. On a weekend off, back in Richmond, he was arrested again, this time for forging a cheque. He spent seven months in prison. Jacob got out just before September 11th, 2001 and decided to leave the Marines, gratefully receiving an honourable discharge. He was twenty-one, wanted to see the world, and had had enough of institutionalised discipline.
It’s September 15th; two blocks away in Washington Square Park, Occupy’s one-year anniversary weekend is being marked in the sunshine of a spotless New York day, groups of drummers drowning out the circles trying to have discussions on the grass.
Two days before the first presidential debate, I’m talking to a mother of two in the kitchen of the apartment that lies directly above mine in Harlem, New York. “It’s hard to make me feel uncomfortable in a situation. I think it’s because I spent so much of my life growing up in situations where there was just no way that I could be comfortable. You just sort of embrace it after a while… It did make me a little detached though. I think I have a harder time forming close relationships because I’m so used to relying on myself.”
Erika was born in Boston, where she likes to tell people if you see a black person, they’re related to her. Her grandfather came north around 1910, one of the six million who fled the Jim Crow segregation laws in what was later termed The Great Migration. Erika’s father reversed the migration, going back to Republican Mississippi when he moved his family to there to take up a position as the first black manager of a TV station in America; it was 1973. In a small Episcopal school in Jackson, Erika was one of two black girls in her year. She became a model student, graduating with good enough grades to get into Harvard. She has since had a very successful career.
In the living room, Erika’s son and daughter are watching Good Luck Charlie, a sort of King of Queens for kids. When Erika says it has meant a lot to her family to see Barack Obama and his family in The White House, I believe her.
“Just follow the script: it’s pretty easy. The first couple are going to be a little uncomfortable, but you get the hang of it.” In a small room on the twentieth floor of 521 8th Avenue, a young man with a nasally voice has just somehow inveigled me into calling people I don’t know in Ohio. The Obama campaign HQ on the night of the first presidential debate is not what I expected, just a small, dull office, with a loose handful of volunteers looking grey under wan fluorescent lighting. I eventually make about seven calls in the twenty minutes before the debate starts; thankfully all either wrong numbers or not home. The middle-aged woman sitting opposite me is just as reluctant to call anyone. As a twenty-year-old, she says, she went door-to-door for Eugene McCarthy, but that was then.
We take our seats in five rows of unfolded chairs. There’s some earnest applause when the candidates emerge. Obama’s opening address is so-so. Romney’s better. Obama now is given his first chance to respond to a claim from Romney. He doesn’t. He is evasive: of the question, of Romney’s eyes, and of the camera’s. He talks to Jim Lehrer only. He suddenly seems desperately human, just a man trying desperately not to fuck up. Romney, his big frame jerking in righteous indignation, expresses his reaction to Obama with sharp stabs of his hands. “You”, he says, turning his speech personal, seizing the heart-strings of thousands of emotional Americans who suddenly feel not afraid, nor confused by politico-speak, but thrilled. Yes! America, once again. In the uncomfortable silence of shifting plastic seats on 8th Avenue, I can almost hear the roars at TVs over beers in bars across the land.
“Mitt Romney isn’t actually saying that he’s going to do shit. But everyone thinks that he won this bitch and everyone thinks that he’s so…” Nina pauses for breath rather than give the Republican the positive adjective, then goes on: “Because he’s ‘eloquent’. And he’s not really eloquent, he’s not. He kinda says really dumb shit – you just have to pay attention.” It’s the day after the first presidential debate, and Nina is talking to me from her dorm at Yale University. She has the exhilarating ability to discuss America’s hypocrisies as I’ve only ever heard Europeans do, as if the entire country were in a state of catatonic dementia.
Having been brought up in a lower-income, West Indian neighbourhood in Brooklyn before moving to a well-to-do prep school on a scholarship aged 12, Nina’s experience of America’s deep socio-economic-racial divide is particularly stark. To make the transition even more pronounced, she was the daughter of two Jamaican immigrants who carried very little racial baggage, and raised her accordingly. “People would ask me things like, ‘Don’t you love fried chicken?’ And I would have no idea what they were talking about”. That race is now never far from her mind should render any claims to a “post-racial society” null and void.
Everyone I spoke to agreed that it is a place of little opportunity if you are born poor and a minority. An oft-repeated statistic is that one in three black males is, was, or will be in prison. For some reason related to political correctness, the discussion of this sort of vast, perpetual tragedy has become incompatible with public discourse. You don’t hear it on the radio, on TV, and you certainly don’t hear Obama mention it. Nina thinks she’ll leave America.
“I don’t think I like it here. I can’t wrap my head around having kids, walking down the street with little black kids, and knowing that they’re fighting from the day they’re born. I’m sick of it, and I’m 19. I can’t imagine myself being older and having the resources to be elsewhere, and to enjoy living here, and enjoy being here, and proudly call myself American. I’ve never proudly called myself American.”
In a shop on 10th Avenue, I meet a 58-year-old cab-driver, Said, waiting to start his shift. He came to New York from Egypt twenty-two years ago with nothing, and now has one son trained as a pharmacist, and two more in college. He’d like to go back to Egypt every year, but hasn’t been back in eight as he puts his third through college. “America is the greatest country on the globe. This is my belief. This is the most beautiful country. I see, because I’m a cab driver: all the cab drivers are immigrants – they come from everywhere. Everybody believes, ‘I can make it, as long as I’m working, and I don’t break the law, I’m good.’ Our kids are going to be – every one of them is going to be somebody. All of them are going to be suits and ties in the back of the cab. That’s our dreams.”
By October 10th, Romney’s debate showing has scraped him into a lead of .7 percent over Obama. I’m at the dining room table of a family home in Ridgewood, New Jersey. It’s the suburbs – beyond the porch-light outside is dark and quiet. Carol arrived as an Irish emigrant, as did Michael’s father. Signs of Irishness dot the house: trinkets, family emblems, proverbs. A proud American raised in the Bronx, Michael’s accent is New York through-and-through. He speaks deliberately, punctuating his points with taps on the table. “I haven’t decided who I’m going to vote for, because I don’t see anything in either one of ‘em.” He misses the days when Reagan and Tip O’Neill, the Democrat Speaker of the House of Representatives at the time, would go into a room and bash out a decision that was best for everyone. To him, politics in America today is at a gridlock, with the aisle between the two parties now a fence. Romantically, his and Carol’s marriage is itself something of a handshake across the aisle, as I realise when she condemns Romney and blames Reagan for the introduction of trickle-down government.
Michael, worrying that his opinions would be unpopular, asked that I keep him anonymous; I’ve changed his name.
In the eleven years since he left prison, Jacob’s restlessness has taken him all over America. He painted boats in Florida, repaired a run-down church in Oak Park, climbed cell phone towers in Kansas, smoked crack in Texas, and blunts in Bluntsville, Tennessee. Drugs are in every small town in America, he says, and always awaited him when he sat still for too long. But he’s worked hard to be a better Christian. He now works 36 hours a week to send money home to his wife and three daughters in Topeka, Kansas; in the evenings he volunteers with Occupy. He is homeless.
