Paul Revere's Legacy

On the 18th of April in ‘75

Hardly a man is now alive

Who remembers that famous day and year

of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.

These words from Longfellow’s poem came back to me this morning, as I read the speech that Heather Cox Richardson gave last night at Old North Church in Boston, commemorating the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride and the start of the American Revolution. I didn’t have them quite right - the poem actually begins, “Listen my children and you shall hear/ of the midnight ride of Paul Revere” followed by the first three lines I remembered. That’s OK. What interested me most were the memories that flooded back as I thought about the poem.

My grandmother, Elizabeth, and her two sisters, Inez and Minerva, were all schoolteachers. They were all lovers of American history and proud of their early American heritage. I have Adamses on both sides of my family, maybe distant relatives of founding fathers John and Samuel Adams, or maybe not, but we do know that some of our ancestors were Revolutionary War soldiers.

My great aunt Inez never married, and taught American history in a high school in Endicott, New York, all her life. She loved words, music, and art, and could recite many poems and speeches by heart. Whenever she visited, I would sit with her in her favorite chair and she’d read to me, and tell me stories about the poems or prose and their writers. Sometimes we looked at art books, and often she’d set up her easel in her bedroom and work on a painting during an extended holiday stay with my grandparents and us; I was learning to play the piano and she’d often ask me to play for her as she read or painted.

When I was 9, Aunt Inez gave me a book of poems that she had written out, in her firm Palmer Method handwriting, or clipped from magazines. It was perhaps a peculiar gift for a nine-year-old, but she had seen me pretty clearly from the beginning. She’d be pleased to know that I’ve carried that book around with me ever since.

This morning I opened it to see if Paul Revere’s ride was in it. It wasn’t, but there were others by Longfellow, Tennyson, John Greenleaf Whittier, Emily Dickinson. I had followed her instructions and added to them: in the back, written or typed out by me, were adolescent favorites: Frost, Matthew Arnold, Shakespeare, e.e. cummings.

Today I stopped on the page where Whitman’s poem, “O Captain, My Captain!” was affixed, with ancient glue stains that looked like blood, and my great-aunt’s note at the bottom:

“The ship is the union, the prize is victory”, she wrote, meaning that the prize was the preservation of the Union, at a very high cost.

My great-aunt also gave me a series of books about American history for young readers, adding to them each birthday and at Christmas. One was a biography of Paul Revere, and I remember being fascinated by the descriptions of his trade as a silversmith. There was a story in it about how he suffered a very bad burn on his hand when he was an apprentice: I seem to recall binding up my own hand in rags, wearing a makeshift three-cornered hat and pretending to be him… Of course the main focus of that book was Revere’s role in the uprising against the King, unfair taxation, and colonial rule, that eventually became the American Revolution.

So I grew up, steeped in this history, as a little patriot, and not many years later became a vocal dissenter when Nixon tried to subvert American democracy. Similarly, I became a critic of Christianity when it deviates from the central original teaching of the Gospels: “love your neighbor as you would love yourself” and the State, as it has always done, co-opts and twists Christianity to suit its own purposes and power.

I am glad that my great-aunt isn’t alive to see what’s happening today, but, like me, she would speak out.

Earlier, I wrote here that I always hope for some clarity during Holy Week. One insight that’s strongly coalesced is this: it is primarily the responsibility of straight white citizens like me to carry the current resistance forward. So many members of minority and marginalized groups are terrified right now — and why shouldn’t they be? Should my friends who are people of color, obvious ethnicity, or of non-binary gender be expected to risk everything by signing a petition or a letter, or being identified at a demonstration? Do Black women have to continue to be the staunchest supporters and workers for the Democratic Party, when people of color are being axed from one federal and military position after another? Can we expect Hispanic people or Muslims to speak out when ICE agents are breaking their car windows with hammers in order to arrest the wrong man? The answer is no. Those of us with more security and less risk have to take up this cross and carry it, for all those who cannot.

You may think, well, that’s easy for you to say, you’re in Canada. It’s true, I am a dual citizen and I live here now. I have many ties that make me want to be able to travel between the two countries freely again. But it’s more than that: I care. A lot. The current trashing of democratic and human values is horrifying, even if the racism, misogyny, hatred and cruelty they represent have been predictable and brewing for decades. The whole world is affected: a world that has seen American excesses, wrong decisions, and hypocrisy, but has also admired the brightest and best aspects of the country, and expected the US to continue to lead and to be their partner. When I think of my family’s history as American pioneers, through centuries that include my father’s survival at Normandy and service during WWII, I am filled with shame at the present travesties, and feel a great sense of responsibility. I’m also, for better or worse, an optimist. It’s an American trait.

I’m proud to live in Canada, which will have a much greater role now in championing democracy and freedom — values we must protect at all costs. But, encouraged by the pushback I’m starting to see, I don’t think it’s too late to fight, not just to preserve 250 years of American democracy, but hopefully for reform that results in a better and fairer system for all the people. Each one of us who can needs to do our part, and that will be enough.