I Dream with Open Eyes by George Prochnik

Author:George Prochnik
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2022-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

My brother Jamie, who has become an ever more erudite, enlightening photographer of people and landscapes, lives in Bay Ridge and is married to a woman of Indian–Guyanese descent who designs toys and plays rock and roll. Her sister, who has worked in poorly compensated jobs at large, inconceivably rich auction houses, married a man from Morocco who died alone of a heart attack at home moments before she and their son walked in. The family’s past encloses other traumatic tragedies. Yet my brother’s nephew is a child of preternatural sweetness, gentle and thoughtful beyond words.

In early 2017, this boy was fourteen and in middle school. One sparkling winter day, I met Jamie in Fort Greene, and as we walked down Dekalb Avenue toward a chic Columbian restaurant, the diversity of its residents in the bright sunshine seemed a manifest refutation of what was happening in Washington. How resplendent and progressive our neighborhood was. What did we have to worry about? We were in Brooklyn.

That gush of feeling went into one file, while I listened to my brother’s account of a trip down to D.C. he’d just made to visit our father in Fairfax. He described the funereal mood in the nation’s capital, and some of the images he’d captured out the window of the train back to New York. He’d begun thinking of linking these photos together in a conceptual project, he added, and stopped to show me one photo he’d taken on the journey; but the first image that came up on his phone was a portrait of his nephew. I broke in to ask how he was doing, remarking how much my son missed him—it had been too long since they’d gotten together.

“Actually, he’s not doing very well,” Jamie said, with the slight, bashful smile he habitually adopts when he has grave news to report, as if he were somehow responsible for the injury, though he persistently sacrifices himself to sustain our whole family. I raised my face. “Yeah, he’s being bullied, really badly, since the election. Kids are coming up to him saying now that Trump’s been elected he’s going to be sent back to his country—he and his mom are going to get deported.”

“What!”

He shook his head. “They’re mocking him, threatening him.”

“My God.”

“He won’t let his mother speak to the school. He doesn’t want to become known as a snitch. But it’s getting worse . . . Honestly, it’s tough for him.”

This was Brooklyn. Bay Ridge, which had an increasingly obsolete reputation for being less diverse than most neighborhoods in the borough, yes, but anyway Brooklyn. All I could think, outside of my sorrow at what this boy was being subjected to, was that if this sort of harassment were happening to a student in the endemically heterogeneous New York City public school system, what was going on elsewhere in places where minorities actually stuck out?

That kind of testimony went in the other file. The file registering evidence that an irreclaimable rupture of America’s promise had already occurred.

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