A Paradise Built in Hell (31 page)

Temma Kaplan, a historian at Rutgers University who had participated in the civil rights movement’s 1964 Freedom Summer, recalls, “Everybody wanted to respond. I went back to my block and some of my neighbors were on a street corner raising money; we didn’t know what [for] but they thought that people would need things, and so they started raising money.” They raised about sixteen thousand dollars from passersby in a few hours. She stayed out-of-doors, among the people who were almost all outside together. “By afternoon, Amsterdam Avenue had become like a river. People covered in dust were walking up the avenue—up Broadway, Amsterdam and Columbus avenues. It was as if they were getting as far away from the World Trade Center as possible and just walking north. It was a very warm day, like a summer day, but everybody was mourning, and people were in shock. The afternoon went on and on like a series of sequences of people trying alternately to comfort each other and get information about where people were and what we could do. Word would go out: somebody in the street said the rescue workers needed boots and they needed masks. Signs went up listing things workers needed and where, at what church, you could drop them off. Then a sign went up about cough drops. The rescue workers were choking on the smoke. Everybody cleaned out all of the drug store. People set out as if on a treasure hunt to find things.”

She concluded, “On 9/11 I just needed to reaffirm that there was left a community, that people believed in things that were good, that we could go on and that there would be a going on. I felt that everybody was holding on to each other in order to try to brace and embrace each other, and it was both a horrible and wonderful experience at the same time. I felt that sense of collectivity I’ve experienced only rarely in my life, and it’s always been in the face of tremendous horror. For a short time, during the first few days after 9/11, I felt that ‘beloved community’ that we talked about in the Civil Rights Movement.” The next night she went downtown and handed out bottles of water to rescue workers, grateful she could be of use. For search-and-rescue teams, welders and others, there were urgent and specific tasks, but most New Yorkers milled around raising money, laying flowers in front of firehouses, giving away what they could, talking, making small gestures of care, solidarity, and generosity to each other when they couldn’t reach the epicenter and its workers. As in Halifax, the generosity went beyond mutual aid: altruism itself became an urgent need.

In her book on altruism and democracy,
The Samaritan’s Dilemma
, Deborah Stone writes, “From the voice of altruists, a more remarkable paradox emerges: Most people don’t experience altruism as self-sacrifice. They experience it as a two-way street, as giving and receiving at the same time. When they help others, they gain a sense of connection with other people. Giving and helping make them feel a part of something larger than themselves. Helping others makes them feel needed and valuable and that their time on earth is well spent. Helping others gives them a sense of purpose.” The difference in disaster is how many become altruists and how urgent their need becomes. The streets of New York were flooded with people desperate to find something to give, to do, someone to help, some way to matter. In a sense they were taking care of themselves, but a society in which this was how people ordinarily did so would be a paradise indeed, one in which every corner of suffering and lack would have been scoured by generosity.

Ilene Sameth, who worked at a gay and lesbian synagogue in the West Village, went south to volunteer, ended up first placing fresh flowers around a church altar and keeping the candles there lighted, then working in a tent that provided food for the workers at the Trade Center site. “I left there having felt like I did something incredibly important, even though it was just feeding people and giving them comfort in some way. I felt like I had seen something that very few people had seen, and certainly at that point, very few people had seen it. It gave me a way of moving on, because it gave me—I did something that gave me a sense of control. My partner, Amy, and I went that Saturday out to Jersey, and we bought a hundred sweatshirts and we bought twenty-five pairs of work boots, and we piled them up into our car and drove back into the city.” Sameth concluded, “And as we were unpacking them, people were coming off the site, hearing that we had gotten the supplies they needed, and they were coming in with boots that were burnt, you know, melted and broken, and pulling them off and putting on new boots and grabbing sweatshirts. It was great to feel like we were really doing something.”

Restaurants, cooks, volunteers who ended up working with food for days to months converged in impromptu kitchens, canteens, and dining rooms; bodyworkers and therapists converged to offer support; ministers, rabbis, and priests offered their services on the site; a group of bike messengers became couriers and delivery experts on-site. Most people were unable to do anything so direct. A young Asian American blog ger aptly named Edmund J. Song gathered a group of singers from New York University and they strolled the city singing “Amazing Grace” and “America the Beautiful.” A group of music students from Oakwood College in Huntsville, Alabama, took out their instruments when it turned out they too could not gain entry to Ground Zero as volunteers. Many people struggled to get past security to the Trade Center site, urgently wanting to be where they could be of use. They needed to contribute, and so any task, no matter how obscure or grueling, met their own needs as well as others’. A volunteer up in the middle of the night ended up helping a woman he didn’t know push a cart of food to Ground Zero. They passed a woman standing alone in the night tearing pieces off bedsheets to give people as primitive respirators against the still-terrible dust and smoke. She had found her niche. Out of fear of further acts of violence and a desire to create order, the authorities—there were many of them, and they too were chaotic at first—attempted to keep all unauthorized people out of a slowly shrinking perimeter area. Many people sneaked in and became so valuable they stayed on for days, weeks, or months, given official recognition and passes or hired on in some capacity. A temporary community arose around the site of the fallen towers. But communities arose elsewhere in the city as well.

Emira Habiby Browne, a Christian born in Palestine and raised in Cairo, ran the Brooklyn Arab American Family Support Center, and she and her staff were at work the morning of September 11. They were doubly horrified—that the atrocity had happened and that it was going to have dreadful consequences for their communities. They immediately took the sign off their door and started getting threatening phone calls. Four staff people quit, Browne relates, “and at that point, we realized that people were very frightened, that nobody wanted to go out of the house, that women didn’t want to walk in the streets, that children were not going to school, that the community was just terrorized. First of all they were very traumatized by what had happened like every other New Yorker and every other American because it was such a shock and it was so horrible.” And they were afraid for themselves and their families. “So we sent out an SOS, so to speak, on the Internet, asking for volunteers who would be willing to escort children to school, women outside, and we were just deluged. I mean there was an unbelievable response. We had like twelve hundred people. We had to stop because we didn’t know what to do with all these people who were saying they wanted to help. It was just amazing. It was really beautiful. I mean, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Within two days of the attacks, others began organizing against the war they feared, rightly, would come. One of the organizers wrote me, “We in New York did not see the world or anyone as our enemy and that same sense of solidarity and mutual aid within the city also extended to our wanting with all our might to prevent war and further killing in the world.” For years afterward, New Yorkers raised some of the loudest opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was an argument about foreign policy and sometimes about the legitimacy of war and violence, but it was also an expression of empathy for the civilians on the other side of the world who would bear the brunt of it. So while some took care of people standing next to them, others in that extraordinary upheaval in New York reached out across the globe.

Desire to help and grief at the loss of life were the overwhelming responses, but some saw the attacks not as crimes but as an act of war and called for vengeance—mostly against Al-Qaeda, but some also wanted retaliation against Afghanistan or other parts of the Middle East. Those who believed in collective guilt wanted revenge on Islam or on Islamic or Arab émigrés in the United States. The latter were a minority, but enough to cause considerable danger and dismay for anyone who was or looked Middle Eastern. Thinking about the attacks and their consequences also became a public process. During that long pause when everyone roamed the streets and everything south of Fourteenth Street was shut off to those without a picture identification proving they were residents, Union Square, just north of that border, became the city’s great public forum. For three weeks, it exemplified what cities can be at their best, a place where strangers come to meet, discuss, and debate, to be present in the public life of their city and country. There, people became citizens in a way they rarely do in this age. Urbanist and lifelong New Yorker Marshall Berman wrote of his city, “Many of its grand old places were born again. My favorite was Union Square, which overnight became the kind of thriving agora it was said to have been a hundred years ago.”

It was largely a spontaneous gathering in the southernmost accessible open space in the city in those first days, but a group of young people nurtured the public life there. They didn’t make it happen or control it, but they tended it like gardeners, weeding out conflicts and invasive media, encouraging expression to bloom, providing supplies and support. The central figure in this activity was Jordan Schuster, a rave organizer from the San Francisco Bay Area, attending New York University, living in a dorm facing the square, and experimenting with the social possibilities of the events he organized. A cheerful, intense, fast-talking young man even six years later, he was only nineteen when the planes hit the towers. His weeping drag-queen roommate woke him up, and they watched TV for a little while. Like thousands of others, Schuster went out and spent a few hours going to hospitals trying to help, putting his names on lists with everyone else. Then he turned his attention to his own front yard, Union Square, and his particular talents for encouraging social events to flourish.

Schuster recalls of the crowd, “It was the first time that I had been in NYC that nobody knew where they were going. I mean,
nobody knew where they were going
. Everybody’s walking around but nobody had an intention. . . . People were aimless. It was a really eerie time. So I was in Union Square and I had called my friends to show up in Union Square, and I was with five of the people that I knew, deejay people who had helped me with parties, just good solid people, and I was like, ‘Look, we can’t volunteer because there’s not enough space and they don’t know how to handle all the people, there’s not enough structure in place for handling it and they don’t know what to do. We can’t sit and do nothing, and I hate TV, so I’m not going to sit at home and watch TV. So let’s figure out something to do that we can just do, maybe other people will join or whatever.’ ”

He thought of the AIDS Quilt that began in San Francisco and became a huge international project, one large square to commemorate each victim of the disease in a tapestry that eventually covered acres. The analogous collective artwork for the moment, he decided, would be a mural. He dispatched one member of his crew to get donations from the drugstores and office supply stores nearby, and they soon had rolls of butcher paper taped up around the square and piles of markers for people to write with, and people began to write out their fear, their grief, their speculations, their messages to the lost, and more. The panels filled up quickly on that first day; the crew kept adding more; “and by the end of the day, we’d filled up half the square.” The walls of writing begat conversations, and as it became dark people brought candles by which to see each other and the sheets of paper. Clusters of candles as memorials became one of the symbols of the public memorial that was one face of 9/11, and small shrines of flowers, candles, flags, and other offerings also proliferated across the square. Schuster recalls that another addition to the site was the talking stick, introduced by a social worker named James to moderate the heated conversations that arose. “Eventually they became art themselves, people would draw on them and there would be these conversation pockets all over the square. You had to have a stick if you wanted to respond, otherwise people would be, like, ‘It’s not your turn.’ ”

Everyone came to Union Square, the full range of ages and races in Manhattan, bringing griefs and gifts, and the people who were already there, says Schuster, found a new sense of belonging. Fifteen young homeless people became vital members of the teams tending the place. “The keepers of Union Square at the time were homeless people between the ages of fourteen and thirty. I knew without them it couldn’t have happened. They were on the ground maintaining, they were the support for this whole scene. And when I wasn’t there to help guide a decision about what was happening, they were the ones that were doing it and they did it brilliantly.” Referencing Hakim Bey, he concludes, “It was a very successful pirate utopia, or whatever you want to call it. It was like the golden age for the homeless people because they’d never seen so much food and resources.” For once, they didn’t have to hustle for food and they had a valuable social role: “And for them it was really healing to be able to give.”

Elizabeth Grace Burkhart, a therapist and photographer, sneaked into Ground Zero to take pictures that she displayed in Union Square. She recalled, “The George Washington statue was covered with graffiti reminiscent of the ’60s, and there were Tibetan prayer flags everywhere. There were thousands and thousands of candles, probably thousands of bouquets of flowers. People would come—There was a Buddhist contingent that came and took over a quarter of—a corner of the park, lit butter candles and did chanting, and had the prayer flags up. It was really remarkable. There were kids playing the guitar and people proselytizing about Jesus and the end of the world. It was, you know, New York City. Then there was this wonderful woman, Jennifer Stewart, who gets dressed up as the Statue of Liberty, and she raised, single-handedly, twelve thousand dollars cash for the fire department. Besides taking myself down there and digging with my own hands, or sitting in the hospital, what else could I do, that I knew?” People crowded around Burkhart’s photographs, eager for information, and one woman told her, “This is the closest I’ll ever get to my ex-husband again.” They formed a bond. The historian Temma Kaplan met a couple of people in their midtwenties who had lost a friend in the collapse, and they were giving away homemade cookies and brownies and asking for donations for their friend’s widow. Kaplan remembers that they were sad and that “people kept coming by taking cookies, and giving them money. People wanted to hear their story, which they wanted to tell as a way to keep the memory of their friend alive.” As so often happens in disaster, people need to give, and giving and receiving meld into a reciprocity that is the emotional equivalent of mutual aid. People shifted imperceptibly from needing to do something practical in response to the disaster to needing to participate, belong, and discuss, and Union Square became one arena where that need was met.