American Flamingo

Snow Storm

12 Snow Storm Washington, D.C. The taxi driver from Sierra Leone, who missed his home, but doubted he would ever go back, maneuvered the cab on its bald tires in the snow and slush like a fish through the sparse traffic from Washington Circle to the Museum of Natural History. The people in charge of my country, he said, are killers. He left me standing on the curb in the snow, thinking: he can’t go home, this man from the Lion Mountains driving away in a taxi on the icy streets of D.C. And though I wanted to see the great up-thrust tusks of the mammoth, and feel something of the tidal pull of time outside the small hotel room where I’d been working—reading and commenting on other people’s writing, one woman whose name stayed with me, Memuna Sillah, from Sierra Leone, who wrote gracefully about her arranged marriage that involved a whole village, her immigration to New York, her subsequent divorce—though I wanted to rest my eyes on fossils and bones, gaze at dioramas, ease away awhile from the human, a security guard and a snow-plow driver welcomed me into the museum’s vestibule with the news the museum was closed: “Whole government’s shut down,” one said. And the other joked, “They knew you was comin’, man.” Snow piled on the shoulders of Rochambeau, on the blowing cape sculpted in bronze of the woman, I thought, Memuna Sillah, standing with her left hand 13 full of banners, and in her right hand a sword, who seemed to be guarding the guardian eagle of the republic, which might as well have been a lion. And snow piled on the wide green leaves of a magnolia protected, between buildings, from the wind. Hours it seemed, her name, Memuna Sillah, accompanied me on my walk through the storm. I stopped to watch the Washington Monument, dressed in scaffolding, its spire fading and sharpening, in sheets of blowing snow. Closer, on the curb, under a big mound of trash bags, plastic bottles tied with string, overlaid with cardboard, carpet scraps, and snow— under all this, waiting out the storm, I supposed the dream of freedom persisted. And the snow blowing and drifting, holding this hostage face down on the curb, settled softly, all around, against stone walls. ...