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Behind the American-­ History Curtain Wa s h i n g to n , d.c . , a nd t h e L e s s o n s o f M e m o ry August 2003 This summer, my husband and I went to Washington, d.c., for the first time. I had never approached a visit to a city with such leeriness; flying past Texas to Washington felt like sailing into the heart of darkness. My lifelong curiosity about d.c. that began with that serene postcard picture of the Capitol building in childhood had evolved over the decades into a cubist mixture of ancient awe and modern disdain; by 2003, Washington conjured up plenty of feeling, but no images at all. Still, wary as I was of Washington, I wanted to get the picture. Not cnn’s piecemeal offerings of the White House lawn, but the sense of a fairly small town that held a whole fractured country inside of it and always had. As much as I held d.c. and its symbology at arm’s length, I was in there somewhere. I wanted to go looking. I found myself instantly. The postcard part of d.c. was ringed with cherry blossom trees and luxe hotels, anchored by that surreal view of the Capitol that seemed visible from nearly everywhere we walked. Drifting amid the splendor were black people, chiefly men, ranging from poor to homeless, so much apart from the sparkle and bustle they appeared to be ghosts; I knew they likely lived across the river in the Chocolate City part of d.c., the less visible but nearly as famous half, but that they so clearly had no place in the other half riled me. Urban segregation is commonplace, especially in the South, but that the capital was no exception and made no attempt to be was, in spite of everything I knew and had braced for, disappointing. I carried that disappointment around the rest of the time, like a souvenir purchase in a plastic bag that you don’t really want to schlep but you don’t want to put down and lose either. We went to the National Mall and started with the war memorials—it seemed as good a place to start as any. I was somewhat mollified to see that neither the Korean nor the Vietnam memorial glorified war in the name of 82 State of a Nation liberation and democracy nearly as much as it simply recalled the dead (Vietnam had no glory to speak of in its day, much less any to remember now). The bronzed soldiers of the Korean War, frozen in flight across a treacherous enemy field, looked weary and uncertain, and that moved me. (I have always been moved by the less glamorous and more ambiguous aspects of militarism; when people proposed changing the national anthem after September 11 from “The Star-­ Spangled Banner” to “God Bless America,” I seethed. Francis Scott Key may have been writing about the glory of war, but it’s no accident that the whole account starts and ends with a question.) Walking past the engraved names of the Vietnam dead, I asked my husband, who teaches American history, where the Civil War monument was; it felt like an obvious omission. Here was a war, the war, in which over half a million people died and that made the country possible at all. Was the government, in its infinite wisdom, working backward from the twentieth century to the nineteenth? My husband laughed ruefully. “This whole city,” he said, “is a monument to the Civil War.” Nothing was more satisfying or disheartening than visiting the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials. Lincoln’s legendary troubled face, his bony hands gripping the armrests of the marble chair not in power but in a kind of panic, his words about slavery endangering the soul of the republic inscribed in the walls around him—this was the mecca I had hoped for, the place I was content to see myself in. Jefferson stood erect, but expressed the same caution and seemed no less troubled. These were true temples of American idealism that in 2003 were rife with thieves who were quartered in the White House and Capitol just down the street. Sitting in the blessed shade offered by the memorials—the weather was tolerable, but stultifyingly Southern—I felt the ghosts of both men and the reluctant acknowledgment beneath their golden words that America was fluid by...

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