America
"The very idea of America makes me shake and tremble and gives me nightmares." -- Josephine Baker
How do we hold a potentially infinite number of stories about a place or concept like America? The story of a prosperous immigrant family, the story of a poor-to-rich white family from the midlands, the story of a struggling black family in Georgia.
How do we hold all of these stories at the same time? None more or less real than the next, but all incomplete. In describing America, we are all grasping different parts of the whole elephant.
America is the patchwork of all of these stories, but they are messier than independent but adjacent squares. Some overlap, covering pieces of the one that lies partially below. Learning and exploring America and American history is a process of peeling back layers to discover the fullness of the stories beneath. Uncovering stories long-buried, long-ignored.