Mother of Exiles

Months before the twin towers fall, my father takes me to the Statue of Liberty, and we walk up all the way to the crown. I lift up my arms several times, but he refuses to carry me. I don’t think I’m that exhausted, or that lazy, it’s just that mom likes to talk about how she’d had her own father wrapped around her little finger and I want a taste of that power.

Inside, the statue is a lot more metallic and mundane than I expect her to be. She’s a long staircase winding around and around. She’s the echo of labored breathing and beads of sweat painting my brow. She’s keep going, we’ll make it, we’re almost there and the sense of accomplishment once we reach the top.

The view is spectacular. My father finally picks me up so I can see out the windows of her crown a little better. My feet dangle above the ground, my head feels heavy, sinking a little into my neck, until my ears are sandwiched between my shoulders, as I stare at the glittering river, light bouncing off the grey surface. The water isn’t blue in New York. It’s grey, sometimes a pale shade of green that matches the statue’s robes.

I can’t remember what we talk about, but I know him, I know he likely tells me the statue’s history and maybe a little bit about our own family.

His people are always on the brink of death, of extermination, of pure exhaustion. They perish in the pogroms but keep marching on, bloodied footprints forging a trail through Russian snow. They’re rounded up in Poland and packed into trains, chugging along towards Auschwitz, gasping for breath the moment they’re released from their mobile cage only to suffocate in gas chambers. Some of them smuggle themselves across the Canadian border, some of them are welcomed into the country as refugees.

 

On a reservation in Florida, the youngest of twelve children is born to a woman of African-American, Cherokee and Seminole heritage, and a light skinned man from Morocco. He moves to New York City and marries the Indian Princess of Harlem, my maternal grandmother. She is the youngest of only ten children, and clearly an accident, her parents both old and hard of hearing. Her father has fled from Bombay, escaping religious persecution. Shedding the name Mohammed, he stows away on a ship headed to America and later adopts the surname of his captain, Edison. With skin dark enough to blend in, he passes for and marries into the African American community. His youngest daughter is mostly cared for by her older siblings and her godmother; a Jewish woman who lives in the same building.

 

One night, after the towers fall, a lot of families in the neighborhood seem to disappear. Remember a beautiful boy named Suleiman, who can mimic a lion’s roar and will do so repeatedly whenever I ask. Remember girls on the far end of the train being cornered by big looming men, swaying unsteadily, asking them if they’re hiding bombs in their hijabs. Remember kids in Hebrew School hissing slurs, scratching them into the desk, cursing Palestine. Remember go back to where you came from.

Remember the statue doesn’t crumble, remember she stands tall.

I stay up late a different night, texting everyone I know to calm down, stop panicking, there’s still hope even as the states start to bleed all across the screen.

A numbness sets in. The kind I feel with my nose pressed up against the glass, watching waves of smoke roll through the neighborhood, the echo of a building’s dying screams drowned out by its brother.

Walls go up that night. Not made of concrete.

Liberty seems to mean free speech, and free speech is just shouting at one another to leave.

But the little I know of the Statue of Liberty is this – it was gifted by the French. And that’s what liberty is – a gift meant for you and meant for me.

I simply don’t have the time right now to visit her outside of memory, but I live within walking distance of Greenwood Cemetery. Amidst the sea of tombstones, as grey as the water which sparkles at her ankles, I can plant myself on the grassy hill and stare at her alongside the ghosts she’s welcomed to her shore.

No matter how unrecognizable this country may be – she’ll reassure me this is still home.

~Amanda Jerido-Katz