We Are All We Have

 Our FREEDOM T-shirts came from when we were studying the Beats with Mr. D junior year and reading Jack Kerouac's On the Road. I complained that the main characters are just a bunch of sexist white dudes who get to do whatever they want, and all the women are called girls and get dumped. “Go ahead, rewrite it,” he told us.

 So I did. We performed our feminist version for Mr. D's Beat Café Night. Brooklyn Ra-Ra and Fa-Fa, we called ourselves. We sat on folding chairs, in black felt berets, on our own wild road trip to find America. At the end I got up and gave my last riff:

 The road is a licorice whip sliding down my throat
 red-bean buns in Sunset Park, watching the sky blush pink.
 West, go West, the Beats told us.
 What if the road isn't yours because the guys got there first?
 Maybe the road is your head bristling with possibilities,
 The America of me
 not the Mexican girl left behind in California,
 the jazz players of Denver.
 We want America too but our mothers say:
 Be careful. Watch out. Curb your mouth. Bring in the laundry.
 How do you find America when you've got dinner to make?
 When you can't kiss that boy under a Red Hook moon?
 I am not my mother I am me
 How do I find the America that is me?

 We got a lot of cheers, some howling, kids punching the air. Mr. D submitted that and some of my other writing to a contest. I won a scholarship for “literary promise,” which will help pay for Hunter College. Meanwhile, Fatima fought with her parents to go to FIT, the Fashion Institute of Technology, but her father put his foot down and said she was going to Brooklyn College, since it's closer to home, and she'll major in something more practical. Still we made promises to meet up in Prospect Park or rove around the city as much as we could.
 Our version of free. [...]

 “She was refused her stay,” Lidia, our lawyer, states, leaning forward on her desk. It's the morning after the ICE raid, and I'm in Lidia's office. [...]
 “A few weeks ago we found out her stay had been denied. I don't think she was expecting that.” [...]
 “Can I see her?” My voice cracks.
 “That's what I'm working on. They have her in a facility in Pennsylvania.”
 “Pennsylvania!” I can barely breathe.
 “I can't say whether that's better or worse. My clients who go to Elizabeth, New Jersey, right next to Newark Airport, are put on a plane home.”
 Home? Ammi often says, I would sooner die than step back into that country that took your father. [...]

 It's so green once Lidia and I leave the city, the road like a hungry tongue, lapping up trees. Bushes foam at the sides. All this air and glaring light rushing through the windshield. How can there be so much beauty when my mother is locked up in some detention center? I hate all of it – the green fields, the wide highway, the occasional flag stabbing the big sky. That's what had us fooled about this country. We sang it at school for assembly: This land is your land, this land is my land/From California to the New York island… I believed it, as did Ammi. I remember once we were driving to Bear Mountain and she said, “How beautiful! This place is settler country.”
 “Ammi!” I cried. “You're identifying with genocidal colonizers?”
 She gave me a sharp look. “All I'm saying is this is a big country. Vast. Not a place of corruption and bribes. They'll find room for us”
 “‘We're pointed toward the American continent,’” I quoted.
 “What was that?”
 “Just a book.”