My 9/11

There are a some events in my life that I don’t talk about very often, and 9/11 is one of them. I was living in Fort Greene/Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, on that day. I was an undergrad at NYU, and I didn’t have class until the afternoon on Tuesdays. I hadn’t taken the train to the Village yet and was in fact fast asleep when my friend Brian was able to get a call through to my landline (no phone lines were reliable that day — I remember my parents were so worried when they couldn’t get through to me as they called repeatedly from Louisiana).

Brian told me to stay home and gave me a quick synopsis of what had happened. I ran upstairs to my landlord’s apartment and watched the news with them for a bit, then I went back down to my apartment, dressed, and walked outside. I lived at the corner of Lafayette Ave. and Washington Ave., and I remember that as I walked down Lafayette towards Brooklyn Heights, I could see a giant plume of black smoke over downtown Manhattan. It was striking in its size and density against the bright blue September sky.

I remember thinking that Brooklyn looked strangely normal given what had just happened. People were walking about at a normal pace, but maybe a bit more distracted than usual. I ended up somewhere near Jay St. and Tillary St. and what I saw next astonished me.

A sea of human beings, all covered in this tan-colored dust, crossing over the Manhattan bridge into Brooklyn. It looked like something out of a zombie apocalypse movie. There were so many people. They weren’t running. They were trudging. Men in suits looking like they’d seen the end of the world, and it wasn’t the crash of the stock market. Women with no shoes (I remember hearing a story about how women couldn’t run in their high heels so many of them had chosen to go barefoot, and there was a kind vendor somewhere along the way who had given some of them free flip-flops). The fabric of New York City, all covered in this same dust, all indistinguishable from each other.

I headed over to a nearby park where a number of ambulances were stationed, and started handing out cups of water provided by some agency or other, and talking with those who had crossed the bridge. Many were in tears. Far more were in shock. I met a woman about my age who had brought her dog. Both were coated in dust.

She and I sat down and she told me she lived in a building right next to the WTC and had just barely managed to escape with her dog. She was trying to get in touch with her mom who lived outside the city, but couldn’t. I told her that I would wait with her, and if she needed, she could crash at my place. I gave her some water and my phone number (which may not have been all that helpful given the phone situation) and I checked in with her periodically while she tried to reach her mom. I talked with many more people that day, and comforted and held enough of them that I came away covered in dust too. But I remember her and her dog the most for some reason.

Eventually her mom arrived later that evening. The woman and I promised to stay in touch, but as with so many friendships forged in trauma, we never did.

NYU cancelled classes for a week. Eventually I got in touch with my parents, and my mom mailed me a bottle of Cipro because of the subway anthrax scares. And thus began our life under constant scrutiny. Armed National Guard on every train. Frequent bag checks. Everyone looking over their shoulders.

When classes resumed and I headed back into the city, I walked down the island as far as I could until I reached a barricade. I don’t remember the street that marked the line between civilization and utter destruction. But I do remember the smell of burning fuel and paper. It’s a funny thing about smells. They stick with you forever. The other smell that sticks with me is the smell of New Orleans shortly after Hurricane Katrina, but that’s a story for another time.

What I remember most about 9/11 is how much the city and my country changed after that. I didn’t get abused as badly as brown men, or women and men who could be visibly identified as Muslim, but I did get told to go back to where I came from, and I got a lot of nasty looks.

Americans are not known for nuance when it comes to understanding ethnic differences (which doesn’t excuse the violence that Muslim men and women faced in the aftermath — that was wrong too). My fellow Americans became really hateful and paranoid overnight. All they saw in me was brown, and then they saw red.

This city that I had always believed to be welcoming, where anyone could be anything, had suddenly become cold and unfriendly to me. The city my parents had moved to when they first emigrated to the United States, the city of promise, the city that so deeply typified what it means to be an American, didn’t want me anymore. I graduated in 2002 and hung around for a bit, but I was directionless and wounded. Something profound shifted in all of us. I don’t know that I ever found my proper direction after that. To some degree I’m still flailing about so many years later.

None of us could have anticipated the twisted chain of events that was triggered on that day. But here we are. Reeling. I know that my view of myself, as damaged as it was from growing up in southern Louisiana, worsened after that day. If I was held at a distance before, there was now an ocean between me and whiteness, and American-ness. I always felt it, even if I didn’t see it right away.

But now I can see it, dark and foreboding, right in front of me. Only these days I’m trying to build some boats so we can meet in the middle of this ocean. Or even better, build a fire to evaporate it away altogether.