HomeLand by Rebecca Mead

Author:Rebecca Mead [Mead, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2022-02-08T00:00:00+00:00

On a bright sunny morning in September almost a quarter century after I first arrived in New York, I set out from my house early and walked briskly down my street to the park, where the dogs were still running off leash in the dust bowl and the prework joggers were still pounding in circles around the park’s perimeter. I climbed the hill, winding through Olmsted’s tree-edged paths to the paved plaza at the peak, then descended the wide staircase that leads down to the park’s northern border. Traffic was heavy along Myrtle Avenue, one of Brooklyn’s oldest thoroughfares, which had begun as a plank road through farmland and was now a busy street clogged with grinding trucks and wheezing buses. It was early fall, one of those beautiful warm days that come after the heat of summer has dissipated. Fall was my favorite season in New York: the time of year in which I had first got to know the city. Disoriented, I walked its streets in a flimsy dress and sandals, exulting over the fact that in England I would already have been bundling up in boots and sweaters. The fall in New York was a time of promise, of beginning. Much more than spring, it was the season in which I felt my own spirits rising.

As I headed to downtown Brooklyn that morning, though, I was anxious, jittery, unsure whether I was over- or undercaffeinated. I crossed Flatbush Avenue, named for a Dutch farming village in the seventeenth century, now an arterial route through Brooklyn that leads all the way to the ramp of the Manhattan Bridge, and headed west toward downtown Brooklyn. I had an appointment at the Federal Court Building, where, in a large, windowless room on the second floor, alongside several hundred strangers, I would that day become an American citizen.

During the more than two decades I had lived in New York, the question of whether or not I might ever take American citizenship had mostly been an abstraction—a far-off decision that might never need to be seriously addressed. Having arrived on a student visa that was converted into a series of temporary work visas, one of which granted me the delicious title “Alien of Extraordinary Ability,” I eventually qualified for a green card. My green card was actually pink, with the words “Resident Alien” in blue lettering across the top, and with a photograph in three-quarters profile in which I looked angular and severe. It granted me permission to live and work in the United States for as long as I liked, but it also granted me more than that. It gave me the freedom to remain uncommitted—to maintain a distance from the city and the country in which I had chosen to make my home.

For a long time, that lack of commitment suited me fine. I had arrived in New York not as an aspiring immigrant, but as a temporary visitor. While my stay in America had become more and more definitive

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