Anna was shocked to see police at the intersection where Pierrepont and Hicks Streets met. She would need to get by them in order to walk three blocks down Hicks to pick up Lettie, her nine-year-old daughter, from her friend’s home. It was a grayish but not dark day, warm but free of July’s usual humidity, and she’d been looking forward to the walk.
Approaching the barricade, she was reassured on seeing other people milling around. She shouldn’t feel alarmed.
“I don’t need your ID from this direction,” one of the cops said. “But will you be coming back this way?”
“I have to. I live here.”
“Do you have your ID with you?”
“Yes.” She’d learned of the plan four days earlier when the Brooklyn Heights Association’s latest newsletter alerted subscribers that they’d need to prove their residence on July 4th. As with so many public warnings, she’d taken in the advice without its implications.
“Come on through,” the cop said, waving her to one end of the long barricade.
This was Brooklyn Heights, an enclave that somehow maintained its small-town atmosphere between Wall Street, across the East River, and Downtown Brooklyn, a few blocks the other direction. Outsiders knew the Heights for its Promenade, overlooking a long stretch of Manhattan’s east shore, New York Bay, the Statue of Liberty, and still more landmarks. The view from the Promenade was fodder for television series and movies. Today it would also be the best vantage point from which to watch this year’s Independence Day fireworks, that barrage of red, white and blue streaks and patterns projected on to the sky, explosion by explosion. The temptation had been too great for someone high in City government, the someone one who decided to close off the Promenade to the locals and admit only invited guests, said to consist of four thousand city employees. It occurred to Anna that the police presence demonstrated the “someone’s” awareness that this action would not be welcomed.
She’d long felt a simmering anger, just as long suppressed by a quiet despair, over relentless media stories about ordinary people being accosted by masked men in the street, at schools, inside court buildings and other public places. She’d argued passionately to the choir—her similarly-minded friends—that America would soon stop being a nation where people got plucked off the street by unidentifiable men without warrants. America was a nation where the law operated according to rules, wasn’t it?
Well, yes, lots of things the government did dismayed her, but such injustices occurred beyond the fringes of everyday life. In everyday life, a law-abiding citizen didn’t fear arbitrary law enforcement. They didn’t used to, anyway.
But that was a problem in itself. Her anxiety was for people who lived outside her orbit. She distrusted it, worrying it said more about her state of mind than her capacity for empathy.
As she set off down Hicks, she noticed she was shaking her head. None of life’s questions had absolute answers.
About to cross Montague Street, she looked from the police to the barricade barring the way to the Promenade, a couple of blocks to her right. Over there were those four thousand city workers. Who exactly were they, and who had selected them? Whose idea had it been to ignore the neighborhood’s apartment dwellers who regarded the Promenade as their own backyard? Was the “someone” the City’s Trump-indebted mayor? Speaking of… That very afternoon in Washington, the President would be signing his “Big, Beautiful Bill” as military jets flew over the White House.
Now Anna was at Remsen. Once again, the barricade was a block or so over to the right. Remsen was normally a quiet street, but alive morning and late afternoon on school days with children and their parents or nannies. Anna found negotiating its sidewalks at those times exhilarating. Schoolchildren had a way of acting and sounding joyful even if they dreaded school, or so she’d convince herself when caught up in their frantic activity. She especially enjoyed seeing fathers hand-in-hand with their children, a welcome development she credited to her generation. Some were house husbands who didn’t mind being married to women who earned the family’s living. Anna’s husband sometimes took their daughter to school, although office hours limited how much he could contribute during the day. One of many reasons she loved him, a thought that comforted her in the midst of her anxiety this afternoon.
Now on the right came Grace Court, a dead-end street occupied on one side by Grace Church. Even though neither religious nor anti-religious, and not raised as an Episcopalian, Anna had once sat alone in the church’s wooden pews, a haven from the world’s freneticism. Pausing at the corner, she asked herself why people couldn’t just leave strife behind and live in peace. Silly question. Well, futile question.
Coming up now was Joralemon Street. Turn right to pick up her daughter. But here again were the police, this time behind five-inch-wide blue tape in lieu of barricades. Strange, since Joralemon didn’t take you to the Promenade. Then Anna remembered the City had also closed parts of the Brooklyn Bridge Park, down below, which you could get to from Joralemon.
“Your ID?” a cop exuding authority said.
“I live in the neighborhood.”
“Everyone is required to show IDs.”
The BHA’s newsletter may have prepared her to bring an ID with her, but she still didn’t feel prepared emotionally. She hesitated.
“I live here.” Her voice sounded feebler than she’d wanted, more a question than a statement.
The cop didn’t look like the stereotype of a tough guy policeman. He was tallish without being gigantic, filled out without being overtly muscular. Anna guessed his expression readily turned sympathetic. Right now he was staring at her with his own question on his face, as in, is this lady gonna give me trouble?
Anna dug inside her purse for the ID.
Briefly studying it, the cop said, “You don’t live on this block.”
“I live in the neighborhood. I’m here to pick up my daughter. She’s visiting a friend.”
At that moment, Anna noticed Lettie emerging from her friend’s brownstone, along with the friend and the friend’s mother.
Anna stayed focused on the cop. “She’s with a friend on this block and I’m here to bring her home.”
“Sorry, we can’t let you through.”
“Then what am I supposed—”
The friend’s mother called out, “It’s okay, Anna. We’ll come to you.” She fell into a half-run, the two girls keeping pace, Lettie’s ponytail swinging. They arrived at the tape, the mother slightly out of breath.
“Hi, guys,” Anna said.
“This is your daughter?” the cop asked, pointing somewhere between the two girls.
“Hi, Mom,” Lettie said, smiling warily.
“Are you okay?” Anna said.
“I’m fine, Mom.” Lettie’s tone hinted at a rebellious sarcasm that Anna dreaded would emerge in full force when her daughter was three or four years older.
“She’s your daughter?” the cop asked again.
“She is.”
“Here,” he said to Lettie, gesturing to the side, “go through that gap.”
Ignoring him, she ducked under the tape and came up standing before her mother. Without thinking, Anna pulled her close and ran her cheek next to her daughter’s.
“It’s okay, Mom, really.”
“See you on Sunday,” Lettie’s friend called.
“We’ll drop her off at 3, right?” the mother said.
Anna nodded. “See you then.”
“Have a great day,” the cop said.
Anna set off walking, refraining from grasping Lettie’s arm, knowing her daughter didn’t want her to make any more displays of affection.
But after a few paces, she told herself, “To hell with it,” and secured Lettie’s hand. Perhaps as an act of kindness, or perhaps because she also felt something of her mother’s disquiet, Lettie molded her hand to her mother’s.
Note: for the checkpoint details, I borrowed a friend’s account. However, Anna’s exchanges with the police and others, her political reflections, and the other details of her interior life are entirely my invention. So, too, is Lettie.
America was a country where the law operated according to rules, wasn’t it? Not any more.