Yesterday, I was having dinner with my grandparents who were passing through on their way to New York, and they happened to casually mention that they had gone to the March on Washington. So casually. They drew a diagram, nails as inked point and fingers as pen shaft, on my napkin, diagramming in invisible vividity where they had been positioned--very near, they told me, to Dr. King--relative to the National Mall. There was a friend of theirs, they said, who hadn't come to the march, hadn't joined them and their fellow church members to feel that crowd, and to be it. They told me about the race riots in Harlem, where they lived, in that great city from which my grandma says thousands of buses were just streaming, filled, toward Washington in preparation for the March that day--about living within the several blocks where rioting was most intense and watching Molotov cocktails sail through the sky and ignite on the ground during long nights in the city.
There was something profound about that to me, just so striking, to be related to these people. For their stories to be my heritage. I don't quite know what to make of it.
