The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘Fresh-caught haddock!’
In an exclusive extract from his new book, David Sedaris recalls how he felt during 2020’s BLM protests
When George Floyd was killed, and seemingly overnight all of New York came to smell like fresh plywood, I thought of Schenectady.
“Why there?” my sister Amy asked. She was with Hugh and me on the terrace of our apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. From where we stood, we could hear the roiling cauldron 20 storeys below us: sirens, shouting, the distant sounds of breaking glass – all blended together into a furious, muffled roar.
“Years ago, I was on a plane, seated next to a middle-aged black woman who was reading a Bible,” I began. “I was working a crossword puzzle and said to the flight attendant – a white guy, not just gay but a queen – ‘Excuse me, but do you know how to spell Schenectady?’
“He told me that he had no idea, and just as I was sort of hating him for it, the woman with the Bible said, ‘S-c-h-e-n-e-c-t-a-d-y.’ She spelt it with her eyes shut, maybe to prove that she wasn’t cheating.”
Amy spat an olive stone into her palm. “Oops.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Why hadn’t
I turned to her in the first place? I told myself I’d asked the flight attendant because it was his job to serve me, but how true was that, really? Did I ask him because he was white or because he wasn’t reading a Bible?”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Amy asked.
I shrugged. “I guess I don’t think that people who read Bibles on planes are all that smart.”
“I don’t know that being smart really plays into it,” Amy said. “I’m sure there are plenty of dummies in Schenectady who have no problem spelling their town’s name. I mean, it’s part of their address.” She dropped the olive stone into a planter Hugh had just filled with pansies. “I can’t spell Minneapolis or Minnesota. Does that make me stupid?”
I said, “Yes.”
She sighed. “I know. I’m an idiot.” Hugh headed indoors to make fresh drinks for himself and Amy. “I could have spelt Schenectady for you.”
“Yes, well, you weren’t there, were you?” I said. “You’re never there when I really need you.”
He and I had just returned from two weeks at the Sea Section, our beach house in North Carolina. The New York we’d left behind us had already been changed by Covid-19, but now that we’d returned, it felt doubly different.
For the first time since February, the virus was no longer the only news: the unrest was. The country had gone from one massive headline story to another, and it felt like anything might happen next: a cataclysmic natural disaster, an alien invasion. If I was overreacting, it was because New York had borne a bigger brunt of the year 2020 than many other places – North Carolina, for instance.
“The coronavirus never happened on Emerald Isle,” I told Amy. “Or, OK, it almost didn’t happen. At the grocery stores hardly anyone had a mask on. Same at the Dairy Queen. Coming from Manhattan, where we can’t leave the house without our faces covered, it was a real...” I’d planned to say shock, but what came out instead was “vacation”.
“I want to go,” Amy said. And so we made plans to return in a few weeks with her and her friend
Adam. In the meantime, shops were being looted, and there were almost non-stop local protests, the moods of which varied from peaceful to confrontational. Five months earlier, I’d been in Hong Kong and asked people about the prodemocracy demonstrations there, surprised to learn that if you lived in certain parts of town and avoided your television, you could easily know nothing about them. That was certainly not the case in New York, where, no matter your neighbourhood, the protests were impossible to ignore.
I walked downtown the day after Amy came for dinner, and fell upon a crowd that had gathered in Union Square. A number of people had signs, but before I could make them out, I was stopped by a young woman with green hair who wanted to hand me a plastic bottle. “Water, sir?”
I shook my head no.
“How about some hand sanitiser? Or I have chips if you need a little something to eat.” I guessed that she was a college student and assumed she was selling these things. But no, it seemed they were free. “That’s all right, but thanks,” I said. The crowd at the southern edge of the park wasn’t doing anything in particular. Some of the people who had signs were hoisting them with no apparent sense of urgency in the direction of the police, who formed a ragged line on the other side of 14th Street, talking among themselves. Protest-wise, it seemed a good place to get started, so I went to Amy’s and returned with her half an hour later, noting as we wandered into the throng, “We look like we’re searching for our children.”
Grandchildren was probably more like it, as we were by far the oldest people I saw.
“Water?” an earnest woman with pigtails asked. “Do you want some pretzels? Something to get your blood sugar up?”
“Need a list of all the local bathrooms?” another student-aged person asked, offering me a clearly marked map. This was nothing like what the TV news had been showing. Here, there were no crowbars, just candy bars. And chips and Cheetos and dried fruit slices. “Are you sure I can’t give you a little something to eat?” asked a dogged young snacktivist.
I reckoned there were maybe 300 people in the park. Signs included WHITE SILENCE NO MORE, DEFUND NYPD, NO EXCUSE 4 ABUSE, and BLM, an abbreviation for Black Lives Matter.
A person I couldn’t see was beating a drum, and while it felt like something should kick off, nothing did. Every so often applause would break out, though I was never sure why.
“It’s just a gathering, really,” the young woman standing next to me explained. She had a ring in her nose, and like most everyone around us, she was white.
It’s an odd spot to occupy – the ally. On some website that morning, I’d watched a video of two identical-looking blondes spraypainting I CAN’T BREATHE on the facade of a Starbucks in Los Angeles.
“What are you doing?” a black protester shouted. “That’s something I’m going to get blamed for. My people. Who asked for your help, anyway?”
The girls stopped, but only because they were finished. In another video, a white guy with silver hair was using a pick – the sort gold miners hoist in movies – to break up paving stones he could hurl at the police.
A black protester intervened, saying, much like the woman in LA had, that he was going to get blamed for it. But the guy with the pick continued until he was tackled to the ground by the black fellow and a few of his friends, who subsequently delivered him to the very cops he’d intended to stone.
I thought I’d support the movement the way I had become accustomed to: by donating money and then telling people I’d donated twice as much. The moment I sent off my contributions, I saw the protests differently, for now I had done something and could feel superior to those who hadn’t.
In the early days of the protests there was looting, and the news coverage made me anxious. My fear was that my favourite stores would be emptied and that when the city finally opened back up again after the Covid restrictions, there’d be nothing left for me to buy. Amy shared my concern, so we left Union Square and walked to SoHo, where two of the shops we most cared about were located. Both were boarded up, but I wasn’t sure if that was preventative or the result of smashed windows.
“It’s not like I really need anything,” I said sulkily as we headed back uptown. Neither of us had ever gone so long without shopping – close to 100 days, it had been – and I wasn’t quite sure who I was any more. When my agent’s birthday rolled around, I wound up giving her two bottles of wine and a gift card from a pharmacy she likes. “Those are, like, presents that Lisa would come up with,” I said to Amy.
She’s not necessarily cheap, our sister, just unimaginative.
There were just so many questions I wanted answered. How, for instance, did people find the shoe style they were looking for, let alone the proper size, when looting big Nike stores? “You’re an amateur wandering around a massive, probably dark stockroom with 10 minutes at most, while the sales clerks, who are pros, seem to need twice that amount of time,” I said to Amy.
Just then, we ran into a protest march, an actual moving one. It was heading our way – west on Houston Street – so we joined it. Again, it was hard to estimate the crowd size.
A thousand people? More? Social distancing was in practice, sort of, and most everyone I saw had the lower half of their face covered. In this particular case, I actually welcomed my mask, as it relieved some of the pressure of chanting, which is something I’ve never been comfortable with. It’s the same with prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance. I even lip-synch “Happy Birthday”, so I was glad that my mouth was obscured and no one could see whether or not I was joining in.
“Hey, hey/ Ho, ho/ Racist cops have got to go!” the crowd shouted as Amy and I merged into it. This template has been around since the 1950s and has to be my least favourite. True, it can be easily tailored to any cause, but you always know the word that’s going to rhyme with ho will be go. It’s lazy.
Next came “Whose streets?” “Our streets!”
Then it was “NYPD, suck my d---.”
I’m not sure how I feel about that one. Is someone performing fellatio on you really the greatest punishment you can imagine? I wanted to ask. I was thinking they might change it to “NYPD, kiss my ass,” but that has its place as well. “Eat me out”? “Drink my p---”? Anything sexual is going to step on someone’s toes.
“Black Lives Matter!” followed “Suck my d---!” and then we were back to “Whose Streets? Our Streets!” It’s always interesting to watch a chant die, like a match going out. Some can burn for decent stretches of time, but with this crowd there appeared to be a strict 45-second policy.
Everyone seemed to have their phones out, and I noticed a lot of people taking selfies. This struck me as vulgar, but what isn’t a background for an Instagram post any more? I know that people are now taking pictures of themselves at funerals, because when I looked
How did people find their shoe size when looting big Nike stores?