Red Admirable

Fear, I think, makes foreign what has been familiar.

This week marks the 40th anniversary of the 1967 Newark uprising–what I understand as the definitive event of recent North New Jersey history. I’ve always read Philip Roth and Amiri Baraka as telling the same stories, really; the distinction is that for the past four decades their protagonists have lived on opposite ends of the same county. Foreign/familiar.

Andrew Jacobs just published an article in the Times about the legacy of the violence. The idea of shifting boundaries between psychological nationhoods is a major preoccupation of those he quotes as reckoning with that legacy. A National Guardsman says that “it was ironic that we were trained to fight an enemy overseas, but we ended up fighting a civil disturbance in our own backyard.” And an old furniture-store owner: “I flew 35 bombing raids during the war, I was hit over Germany. But I was more scared that day in Newark.”

Their alienation was so profound because, as white male Newark residents–as white male anywhere residents–they had never needed to distinguish between the physical space they occupied and the social ownership of that space. It had been different, is different, for everyone else. The discrepancy meant that boys from the Ironbound wound up pointing guns at a littler boy from the Central Ward.

This morning, my mother said “and he looks like a ten year old.”

—

Amiri Baraka published “Monday in B-Flat” in 1996:

I can pray

all day
& God
wont come.

But if I call
911
The Devil
Be here

in a minute!