Featured Story

Jenifer’s Journal: Lincoln and the Lady

Equality is the soul of liberty; there is, in fact, no liberty without it. — Frances Wright

It’s Halloween this coming Monday. When I was a kid, Halloween nearly beat out Christmas as my favorite holiday. Even though it wasn’t a day off from school, with all the class parties and the costume parade across the stage, it felt like a school-free day.

At six or seven, I didn’t really care what character I was as long as the costume was glamorous and sparkly. Store-bought costumes were verboten in my house, so no Cinderella or Snow White for me — but my mother didn’t have time to make me one because she worked all day in her dress shop so she’d swath me in the silky and sequined remnants she’d bring home from the store’s sewing room, and tell me I was Sonja Henie or Mata Hari (whoever they were) which, as I say, was irrelevant to me as long as I sparkled.

Thinking of this Halloween, with the mid-term elections in such close proximity just a week later, I wonder if anybody dresses up as Lincoln anymore.

You’d always see some kid, maybe a couple of them, in fake beards and construction paper stovepipe hats marching in the big, nighttime parade, down Garden Street toward the high school. And a few little Betsy Rosses, too, in stars and stripes and mob caps. And at least one, of course, with her pointy, starburst crown spray-painted silver, interspersed among the witches and Frankensteins and Davy Crocketts.

Disney and Anime have co-opted Halloween these days, I guess. Besides, it gets harder and harder to be say, a Lincoln right now. Turns out he’s not just that straightforward “Honest Abe” American hero who freed this “land of the free” from the inconvenient embarrassment of slavery and then conveniently exited in a cloud of martyred glory.

For all his brilliance and vision, it seems he was a complex and often tortured man to whom slavery was morally anathema but by whom the concept of true equality for those he’d freed was never seriously considered. (FYI: All that complexity, that humanity, those contradictions are captured with the breathtaking simplicity of black and white by Island artist Roz Dimon, in her stunning exhibition of Lincoln portraits — “My Love Affair with Lincoln” — that opened last week at Greenport’s Floyd Memorial Library and will remain on display through Jan. 8, 2023. In a jarring counterpoint, Dimon has chosen to include a placard next to each portrait indicating the actual headlines from the day the piece was created — unsettling and provocative — catch it.) 

I’d like to think that if Lincoln had managed to serve his full second term instead of only 42 days of it, he well might have wrestled to the ground his own inconsistency regarding the connection between freedom and equality and come to see that we can’t have one without the other in this nation and still be this nation.

The precious union he was so intent upon saving at all costs cannot survive without recognizing the intrinsic equality of all its citizens. Except we don’t.

I’ll bet Lady Liberty knows that by now. It’s been a tough time to be her as well. There she is, an iconic beacon of freedom and equality who’s seen the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” that she welcomes to these shores ill-treated and used as political pawns.

She’s seen her sex abused and disrespected with impunity by the rich and powerful and now she’s seen citizens of her gender punished and criminalized for their biology. I’ll bet she’s saying: “Me, too.”

Maybe Halloween is as good a time as any to take off the masks we wear as Americans and finally grapple with what we really mean by equal. Equality is a founding principle of this nation, right?  It turns out, however, that our founding fathers were a little cavalier in their use of the term. I know now they didn’t plan to apply it to me, or any of my citizen sisters, or citizens of color, or of divergent gender identity or sexual preference.

I mean, I know life is not fair, nor in most ways is it “equal” — neither in wealth, health, intelligence, nor social standing, etc. But isn’t that part of the miracle of this democracy, that amidst all the unfairness and lack of parity that exists in the world, in this nation we all share equally in the unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and equal access to it? What would Lincoln and the Lady make of this nation’s hierarchy of citizenship, which we seem to have, where some of us are on the top tier while others are … not? 

Makes this Halloween really scary.