I can barely remember a time when I did not feel the lure of America – the dream of it. For me, as a child growing up in a very troubled Northern Ireland, America was always the promise of a sunny day. My grandmother was responsible for this. Although she died when I was very young, she is vibrant in my mind’s eye. I can still hear her voice, gentle but urgent, coaxing her daughter – my mother – to follow the sun as she had once done.

In the 1920s, she and my grandfather had emigrated to America, settling in Connecticut. They loved the boundless opportunities before them and knew they had made the right move, but a relentless stream of letters from back home, guilt-spiced reminders of familial obligation, ultimately pulled them back across the ocean to rural Derry, with their American-born children – four sons and a daughter.

My grandmother isn’t smiling in the photograph that would be placed in the family passport and stamped as she boarded the boat to return to a part of the world that would one day enchant the global literati as Nobel Laureate poet Seamus Heaney’s HomePlace. But in 1932, the farmhouse on the Broagh road was an austere and unwelcoming place for my grandmother and her young American children.

Defeated, with an air of resignation that stayed with her always, she and my grandfather resumed the known and expected ways of ‘home,’ abandoning forever the glittering possibilities in America. Within six years, their family was complete with two more daughters, one of whom is my mother.

There was little opportunity and no easy money for them. As a matter of economic necessity, the family was ‘off the grid,’ all of them resigned to hard work. There was, my mother tells me, a vague awareness of education as a way up and out, but it wasn’t really enforced beyond my grandmother’s mantra that “the pen was easier handled than the spade.” For my grandmother, America would always be the best option. She urged my parents to go for it, knowing my dad’s entrepreneurial spirit would have paid off. Yes, it would. But the right time to leave Northern Ireland eluded my parents.

A Spectacular Risk

For me, it was different. I grew up unafraid to take what Doris Kearns Goodwin once called that “spectacular risk” – to leave my home country. In the late 1980s, as Northern Ireland’s Troubles raged around me, I left. I suppose I was something of a cliche, part of the “brain drain.” Young, well-educated, a bit wild, I couldn’t wait to get out of there and maybe live out my grandmother’s dream. I remember I wrote a clever poem to the local bank manager – I really did – and subsequently got an overdraft to pay my fare to New York.

I packed my backpack and off I went, looking for America. Just like that.

I loved what awaited me. I loved diners and convenience stores that were conveniently open 24 hours a day and roads that went on forever. I loved cars that I had only seen in movies and I loved percolated coffee and bagels and New York style pizza by the slice. I loved bowling alleys, and I loved baseball. I didn’t understand it, but I loved it. I loved the Champion store in Hyde Park or maybe it was Poughkeepsie, where I bought T-shirts with the names of baseball teams emblazoned on them. I loved the road-trip that would eventually take me from upstate New York to Phoenix, Arizona.

I thought I was in a Bruce Springsteen song.

Much to the chagrin of my parents, my first job was in a Phoenix bar. A dive bar by any other name. With my Northern Ireland accent and the right amount of naiveté about America, I was the main source of amusement for the men who stopped by for a shot and a beer after their shift at a nearby manufacturing plant. They greeted me every day with “Hey Irish, gimme a beer.” And, I’d ask what color because I hadn’t memorized yellow for Coors, silver for Coors Light, blue for Miller Lite etc. My beer knowledge was limited to Guinness, Harp, or Bass. Those avuncular guys taught me how to play liar’s poker and cribbage, and they took care of me, making sure I got home safely to my apartment every night. The best part of the job was that I was also in charge of the jukebox and every couple of weeks I’d go to a big warehouse somewhere in Phoenix, where I perused aisles of 45s and brought back the ones I liked. That jukebox had a new lease on life by the time I was finished.

The worst part of the job happened one morning, following a hasty tutorial on how to make cocktails. The bartender had decided it was high time I graduated from serving beer in colored cans to making mixed drinks. When Cliff, one of my favorite customers walked in at 10am, instead of serving up his regular bourbon, I offered him one of my new concoctions. I don’t remember what he chose, but he thought it was cute that I had written down all the recipes in my little notebook and that I was planning to learn them off by heart.

Casting the Stones of Silence

While he drank his free cocktail, pretending to like it, we chatted about nothing important, mostly about how hot it was already. It was quiet, the jukebox silent, the AC humming. Two men I didn’t know were at the other end of the bar, smoking and talking low. As I stood there, cutting lemons and limes to garnish my new cocktails, not a care in the world, one of those men called out to the owner, back in the kitchen and out of sight. “Hey Bud, since when do you allow the help to talk to n****ers?” Silence. Again. “I said since when do you allow the help to talk to n***ers?”

I froze.

I was afraid. Instantly, I recognized it as the same fear I had felt years before, when I turned a page of the Belfast Telegraph to see a black and white photo of a young Catholic woman who had been stripped and tied to a lamp-post, hot tar and feathers poured on her roughly shorn head, because she had committed the crime of falling in love with a British soldier. I wasn’t in America anymore – I was back in 1970s Northern Ireland.

I chose to say nothing to those two men. I was too scared, and I was also ashamed that I was too scared. To Cliff, I mouthed the words, “I’m sorry.” He looked right in my eyes, not with anger but with a kind of resignation that told me he was used to it. He picked up his hat, put it on his head, stood up, and walked out the door. He left a $20 tip. I never saw him again.

If you’re still reading, let me describe the scope of my naiveté. I had assumed there would be no racism in 1980s America. To explain this, let me take you back to my adolescence, to Sunday evenings in our Dublin Road living room, when my parents and I – along with everyone else we knew – gathered around a tiny television to watch ‘Roots.’ We were horrified when Kunta Kinte was sold into slavery in America and whipped within an inch of his life for trying to escape. Aghast, we watched every episode. As the entire country seemed to be galvanized by the story unfolding on Roots every Sunday night, I suppose we all held onto the notion that surely America would have learned and subsequently adopted a kinder, gentler attitude. And surely America would be kinder and gentler than 1980s Northern Ireland.

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free …”

But that morning in a dive bar in Phoenix, Arizona, I couldn’t have been farther away from Gambia, West Africa in 1750, Kunta Kinte’s place of birth. I couldn’t have been farther away from the Dream of America. I couldn’t have been further away from the right thing to do. I said nothing. I have never forgiven myself for casting the stones of silence.

You know where this is going. That morning in the bar taught me a hard reality about America – one that has resurfaced many times in recent years for all of us, captured on cell-phones and broadcast all over the world.

I stayed in America for almost 30 years, always confident that I find the Dream of it. I fell madly in love with an American man and married him and together we bought the house that would become the home where we raised our daughter. I eventually left the bar and found a grown-up job in public education. I was good at it too. I worked hard. I paid my taxes. Because I wasn’t a citizen, I couldn’t vote.

Earning the right to vote

I participated in civic live in other ways. I helped register voters, knowing that voting is perhaps the most important privilege of democracy in the USA. Maybe I delayed my decision to become a citizen because I felt a kind of guilt for all the other immigrants in Arizona – especially my immigrant students – who couldn’t vote. Even though they had lived there since they were very young, perhaps even taking their first steps or speaking their first words on American soil. Even though they pledged allegiance to the flag every day in school, they couldn’t vote, nor were they permitted to apply for a social security number which would allow them to work, drive, enjoy all the benefits afforded to those like my American daughter who was born here. I devoted a great deal of time to working on behalf of undocumented kids. That work is unfinished, and as I write, many of these immigrants are in jeopardy.

I couldn’t vote in the 2016 election that placed Donald Trump in the White House. His election is what finally motivated me to pursue American citizenship. I wanted to vote. I wanted my voice to be heard. Because I had the means to do so, I hired an immigration attorney to help me with the process. There was a lengthy application, a $670 fee, an interview during which a USCIS officer assessed my civic knowledge with 10 random questions from the 100 question citizenship test. Then there was the ceremony in November 2019, where, along with new Americans representing 70 countries, I raised my right hand and swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. I have no adequate words to describe the collective disappointed and disgusted groan that emanated from an audience of hundreds that morning when we were directed to watch the screen for a message from then President, Donald Trump. This is not hyperbole. It was the sound of damage done.

A woman from England stood next to me. She and I chose to look away from the screen, and afterwords we wondered if such a thing had ever happened at a swearing-in ceremony before. I doubt it. I couldn’t imagine a video message from Carter, Ford, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, or Obama eliciting such an immediate and negative response from a crowd of families and friends of freshly minted immigrants waving Old Glory.

America unfinished

I left the United States two months later. For better. And, on September 18, 2020, I voted for the first time in any election. Absentee voting is not an option in Ireland. And, because of rules about the length of time away between elections, I am also ineligible to vote in Northern Ireland/UK. I poured a cup of coffee and sat at the kitchen table in a house in Mexico to vote for Joe Biden. As I uploaded my vote, a news update flashed on my phone that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died. I remember wondering what would happen next to the Supreme Court. I know now.

The next part of my American story is unclear. My daughter lives there. My friends and her friends live there. I’m grateful to America for making possible some of the most beautiful and miraculous moments of my life. To ensure those kinds of moments are possible for my daughter and her generation, I know I will vote for the democratic nominee.

Do I like the choices before me for American President? No. Two old men. But even if I’m disappointed with the Democratic Party, especially because they wouldn’t expand the Supreme Court when they had the opportunity, and even if Joe Biden stays in the race, I’ll vote for the Democratic party again.

I’ll vote for that Constitution I swore to defend in 2019. I’ll vote for the America my grandmother wanted for me.

Yes. I dissent.

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