Observing the 4th of July

Sometimes in 101 we have assigned a personal essay about observing the 4th of July.  Most of the students wrote about family celebrations with a few references to parades and community fireworks.  There was a domestic, happy quality to these tales.  That is the sort of event on the surface of the poem, "Immigrant Picnic," by Gregory Djanikian, though the poem also hints at the personal loses involved in even the least traumatic relocation. 

The custom of public orations for the 4th seems to have fallen out of practice.  Only at Holden Village have I experienced a public reading of the Declaration of Independence such I have read about in descriptions of historical and fictional Independence Day observations in the 19th and early 20th century.  A powerful example, surely one of the great American speeches, is Frederick Douglass' "What to the American Negro is the Fourth of July?"  He lauds the nation's ideals, honors its founders, and points directly at its failure to enact its best commitments.  Here is James Earl Jones' reading the speech. VIDEO LINK

Even if slavery is outlawed, there is much in these words to inspire us decades later, to remind us that even as declaring independence was followed by a war to achieve it, so too proclaiming equality and freedom requires daily effort to make those ideals into reality.

We are all pioneers, or maybe not

In the opening scene of Angels in a America, the funeral of Louis' grandmother, the rabbi speaks about the immigrant journey and asserts that the descendents can not make the same journey.  " You can never make that crossing that she made, for such Great Voyages in this world do not any more exist." 

One commentator remarks that all the major characters in the play are pioneers of some sort, perhaps contradicting the rabbi.  Certainly the Mormon characters bring to mind their own ancestors who made the 19th century journey from New York state to Utah across the western plains.  Even if Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier hypothesis is out of fashion and the frontier was not the most important experience in shaping American character, the mythology of journey--both immigrant and pioneer in the west--remains powerful.  

This poem allows us to think about the value of a slow journey at ground level from the perspective of those who more often travel rapidly in the air.   (Remember Harper's final speech delivered through the window of an airplane.)  Nye encourages us to consider what we miss as we travel fast and high, but she does not avoid noticing that the old journey also had its cost.

 

Full Day

by Naomi Shihab Nye

The pilot on the plane says:
In one minute and fifty seconds
we're going as far
as the covered wagon went
in a full day.
We look down
on clouds,
mountains of froth and foam.
We eat a neat
and subdivided lunch.
How was it for the people in
the covered wagon?
They bumped and jostled.
Their wheels broke.
Their biscuits were tough.
They got hot and cold and old.
Their shirts tore on the branches
they passed.
But they saw the pebbles
and the long grass
and the sweet shine of evening
settling on the fields.
They knew the ruts and the rocks.
They threw their furniture out
to make the wagons lighter.
They carried their treasures
in a crooked box.

"Full Day" by Naomi Shihab Nye, from Come With Me. © Greenwillow, 2000.