How I Made the Fourth of July Work For Me This Year

It’s been many years since I felt like sporting the red white and blue on the Fourth of July. Maybe the same is true for you, too.

Here’s an excerpt on the matter from my memoir, Real American, which was published in 2017:

Daddy never liked the Fourth of July.

I couldn’t understand it, because I adored the parades, songs, and flags, the neighborhood barbecues, the explosion of firecrackers, and the smart looks on everyone’s faces that revealed the innate understanding that our country was better – and by extension we the people were better – than the rest of the world.

My mother was the one to inform me of Daddy’s opinion about the Fourth, and she did so in a whispered-sideways-glance kind of way with no explanation as to why he felt it. I understood from the way she said it that it had something to do with Daddy’s past, his experiences, his Blackness. Her silent “why” bespoke pain too painful to discuss, so I never asked. Didn’t think it related to the America I was inhabiting anyway. Didn’t think I was Black in the ways he was. Thought America was beyond all that.

I was wrong.

Looking back over the years of even my earliest childhood, the clues were everywhere.

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I wrote Real American in 2016. You can find it here. It’s a memoir that chronicles the small moments in my life that showed me that I was different because of my race, from earliest childhood to the present moment. I included comments from Donald Trump toward the end of the manuscript because his attitudes about people of color were becoming an audible part of America’s narrative and were causing me fear. My editor urged me to cut those parts. “He’ll be a footnote to history by the time the book is published,” she said.

Yet here we are. I’m glad I kept those parts in.

When my kids were growing up, we took them to the local fireworks – whether those put on at Frost Amphitheater at Stanford University just north of us, or at Shoreline Amphitheater, the much larger concert venue to the south. We’d pack bags with a sumptuous picnic dinner, snacks, and blankets and pillows to comfort us well into the night. I remember when the kids were so young we had to cover their ears as they watched the explosions with awe.

But these days I cannot get myself to feel excited about a patriotic array about America. Not with its unmet promises so nakedly on display, promises eroding further every day. Still, I did want to mark the day somehow. To note what it meant once and means still. To reckon with what it is and what it isn’t. You might say that I bring a “Critical Race Theory” approach to it. Ha! Take that, MAGA Republicans. 🤎🇺🇸🤎

So, this year, this is what I made of the Fourth of July:

1. At about 7:30 p.m. we sat around the fire pit in our back yard, eating a meal on paper plates piled with roasted chicken, filet mignon, corn on the cob, and Caesar salad, and enjoying margaritas made by my 24-year-old son Sawyer. Rounding out the circle were my 84-year-old mother Jeannie, my 70-year-old sister-in-law Sheila, and my beloved, Dan, who is 54.

2. Much as I love a fire, we don’t light the gas fire pit anymore, because we now know not to release propane into the warming climate. Instead, Dan nestled huge cream-colored candles in and amongst the fake logs, and they put up a warm flicker as the evening darkened. We ate and chitchatted over this and that, and when the eating was done, I asked if folks were ready to segue into the introspective portion of the evening. I’d given them a packet, and now it was time to dig in.

3. We began with the poem "I, Too,” by Langston Hughes, written in 1926. You can find it here.

   

   It bespeaks the experience of the American who has to enter through the back door and eat at the inferior table. Each of us took a stanza to read aloud. When we were done, I began to move us too quickly to the next reading, forgetting – in my haste, or in my worry that I was foisting a bunch of work on people on a holiday evening – that a poem should be savored and thought about and then reacted to. Sheila saved us. Sheila, who is Black, told us that although the poem was written twenty-five years before her birth, it spoke to the era and circumstances in which she was raised in Oklahoma in the 50s and 60s, which was the era of the “Jim Crow South.” She shared about school desegregation coming in the late 50s when she was about to start 1st grade, and dashing her hopes of attending the Black school across the street. She spoke of being on her high school basketball team, about the team being hungry after away games, about the white male coach having to check out three or four restaurants in order to find a place that would let him bring in a team with Black players, about herself and the other Black players having to enter the restaurant through the back door. She spoke of being the top student in her class at high school, and when it came time to graduate in 1970, the principal called her in to see him. “We can’t have you as Valedictorian. Ron isn’t that far behind you, so we’re going to make him Valedictorian and make you Salutatorian.” She says she didn’t make a fuss. Ron, a white boy, could be Valedictorian, but she could not, even though Ron routinely copied off of her work. Even though her older brother and sister came to the school to advocate for Sheila’s right to be declared the top student. This was just the way things were. As Sheila spoke, the candles flickered in the waning sunlight.

4. We then took out a speech called “What To the Slave Is the Fourth of July,” by Frederick Douglass, a formerly enslaved man turned abolitionist who was asked to speak to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society in Rochester, New York on July 5, 1852 which was 76 years after the Declaration of Independence was signed, and 13 years before slavery would be abolished. You can find it here.

   

   Douglass’ speech is over twenty pages long, so we decided to just read the first two pages to get a feel for it and to bring Douglass’ perspective into our space. The candles were our primary light now. We went around the circle and each of us read a paragraph aloud into the darkening night. Douglass’ language was eloquent and grand, and makes you wish you’d had a chance to be in the presence of this magnificent man. As we reached the segment where I thought we’d stop, Sawyer said he wanted to keep going, and Sheila, and Mom, and Dan did too. So out came the blankets, and I slapped away the mosquitos eating my ankles as we continued taking turns reading more into the night. This was my secret hope. That the words would draw us back to the past, back to a sense of what a formerly enslaved orator hoped would change about America 171 years ago. I hoped reading Douglass’ views on celebrating America’s “independence” would enable us to better understand our own era. In the distance, the fireworks being set off around the Bay Area echoed off the invisible clouds of this beautiful night.

5. We then turned to the final selection of the evening: Pages containing the lyrics to the song Lift Every Voice and Sing which is a testament to the enduring spirit of Black people and which is known as the Black National Anthem. It was written by James Weldon Johnson in 1899 and set to music by his brother J. Rosamond Johnson, both of whom were members of the Harlem Renaissance. You can find the lyrics here.

   

   It was now so dark that we had to use our phones for light. I pulled up a recording made by my favorite a cappella group, Stanford Talisman, which got on Zoom in the terrible summer of 2020 to sing this old song anew at an important moment in time. You can watch it here. The five of us sang around our fire pit nestled in our blankets with the booming echoes of different celebrations off in the distance, and I teared up at the final line of the third verse, as I always do. I remain ever thankful that this song finds a way to connect me to my African ancestry.

A line in my memoir Real American states, “I’m so American, it hurts.” And while our times cannot be compared to those of slavery or even Jim Crow, we seem to be in a season of backsliding and I find that scary. But I am buoyed by the people who came before us. Because it was tough for Frederick in 1852 and he kept going. And it was tough for James and J. Rosamond in 1899 but they kept going. And it was tough for Langston in 1926 and he kept going. And it was tough for Sheila in 1970 and she kept going and she is here to hold me and teach me and inspire me today.

Legions of people of various backgrounds have found America’s assertion that it is a place of liberty and justice for all to be an unmet promise, and yet have never lost their optimism and hope, never stopped doing the work, and kept going. So let me not get bogged down in the now and feel like I can’t keep going with all of this evidence past and present of how enduring we are. Our spirit is indomitable. And that’s an exquisite enduring truth worth celebrating.

xo

📚 Here are the resources mentioned in this piece: 1) My memoir, Real American; 2) Langston Hughes Poem “I, Too;” 3) Frederick Douglass speech “What To the Slave Is the Fourth of July;” 4) Lyrics to Lift Every Voice and Sing; 5) Stanford Talisman 2020 recording of Lift Every Voice and Sing.

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