#27 — Sunday, 6th July 1901
The heat knows where you live.
It knows the difference between a brownstone with a garden and a tenement on Orchard Street with no windows and six bodies to a room. It knows which floor you sleep on — the fifth, where the air is so thick and still it might as well be soil. It knows whether you can afford ice, or whether you stand in line at the police station with a bucket, hoping. It knows if you have a country house to flee to, or a rooftop to crawl onto at midnight, praying for a breeze that does not come, trying not to fall asleep because sleep, on a rooftop, can kill you. People have fallen. People are falling now.
New York is dying this week and the dying is not subtle.
The heat arrived in the last days of June and it has not left. By the time this Sunday arrives — the 6th of July, the century’s twenty-seventh week — nearly a thousand people will be dead in the five boroughs alone. A thousand. Not from plague. Not from war. Not from some great and nameable catastrophe that will make the history books shudder. From temperature. From the simple, unforgiving fact that the air inside a tenement on the Lower East Side is a hundred and twenty degrees and the family inside it has no window, no running water, no ice, and no choice.
Two hundred and fifty horses died in a single day. Their carcasses lie bloating in the streets, blocking ambulances, which is a problem because the ambulances are needed and will not stop being needed. The streetcars have ceased to run because the horses that pull them are dead or too broken to stand. The Stock Exchange has shut its doors — not from panic this time, not from Harriman and Hill clawing at each other’s throats over railway shares, but because the heat inside the building is unbearable even for men whose business is abstraction. Factories have closed. The ones that remain open have permitted their workers — permitted, as though it were a gift — to remove their three-piece suits and wear what the newspapers delicately call “light gymnastic costumes.”
The morgues are full. Special boats have been commissioned to carry infants out to sea, in the hope that the ocean air might keep them alive a few hours longer. On the rooftops, families sleep in rows like refugees, and some roll off in the dark and are found in the morning in the courtyards below.
I have seen plagues. I will see worse ones. But I want you to understand something about this week in New York City: the heat is not a natural disaster. The heat is a revelation. It reveals what is always true — that the poor live in boxes, that the boxes have no air, that no one with the power to change this has any intention of doing so, and that when the poor die in sufficient numbers, the newspapers will count the bodies with the same clinical fascination they bring to livestock.
Some lives are counted in pounds and some in pennies. I said that six weeks ago. The heat does not argue with me.
On Friday — the Fourth of July, American Independence Day, the hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of the Declaration that all men are created equal — two things happen simultaneously.
In New York, fifty-seven people die of the heat. This is actually considered an improvement. The day before, three hundred and seventeen died. So: progress. The republic has learned to measure freedom in the declining rate of death.
And in Manila, seven thousand miles away, a large man in a white suit takes an oath. William Howard Taft — judge, Republican, three hundred pounds of Ohio certainty — becomes the first civilian governor of the Philippine Islands. The military governor, General MacArthur, is relieved. Not that MacArthur. His son. The one who will wade ashore in the Philippines forty-three years from now, saying I have returned, as though the islands had been waiting.
The father is merely pushed aside. Civilian rule, McKinley has decided, will replace military rule. The war is officially calming down. The insurrection is officially weakening. The Filipinos are officially being prepared for self-government, which Taft sees as something decades away, the way a parent sees a toddler’s readiness to drive — theoretically inevitable, practically absurd.
He is not a cruel man. That is the most dangerous thing about him. He does not impose racial segregation at official events. He socialises with Filipinos as equals. His wife is gracious. He genuinely believes he is doing good. He refers to the Filipinos as his “little brown brothers,” and if you hear tenderness in that phrase — and you should, because there is tenderness in it — then you understand exactly how empire works. It works through love. Through the sincere belief that you are helping. Through the absolute inability to notice that the hand extended in friendship is the same hand holding the leash.
It is the Fourth of July. Independence Day. And in Manila, a civilian governor swears to govern a people who did not ask to be governed, on the birthday of a nation that was born by refusing to be governed.
Aguinaldo surrendered in English, ten weeks ago. I noticed it then. I notice it again now.
In four months, the advocacy of Philippine independence will be made punishable by death.
I want to make sure you heard that. Not punishable by fine. Not punishable by imprisonment. By death. The Sedition Law of November 1901 will make it a capital crime to argue — in speech, in writing, in print — that the Philippines should be free.
On the Fourth of July, the land of the free celebrates its birthday by installing a governor over a people who will soon be forbidden, on pain of execution, from wanting what America has.
Three republics: born, killed, leashed. I said that too.
And in Zurich, tomorrow — the 7th of July, while New York buries its dead and Manila adjusts to its new civilian master — a seventy-four-year-old woman named Johanna Spyri will die of cancer in her apartment on the Zeltweg.
She is not famous in the way that matters to newspapers. She wrote a book about a girl on a mountain. The girl’s name is Heidi, and she lives with her grandfather in the Swiss Alps, and the air is clean, and the meadows are wide, and the goats wander freely, and the child is happy because she has space and sky and no ceiling pressing down on her.
Johanna Spyri wrote Heidi in four weeks. It was published in 1881 and has not been out of print since. It has been translated into fifty languages. Millions of children have read it. The book’s great secret — the reason it survives — is not sentimentality. It is that Spyri understood what a child needs. A child needs air. A child needs ground under her feet and room to move and the freedom to be unimportant without being unsafe.
On the rooftops of the Lower East Side tonight, children are sleeping in rows. Some will not wake up. Some will roll off in the dark. In the tenements below, the air is so hot it cannot be called air — it is just heat with a name. There are no Alps. There are no meadows. There is no grandfather with a wooden hut and a view of the valley. There is a room, twelve feet by twelve, with six people in it and no window, and outside that room there is a dead horse in the street.
Johanna Spyri imagined freedom as a mountain. She was right. Freedom is elevation. Freedom is altitude. Freedom is the luxury of enough air.
The people dying in New York this week do not have enough air.
I count things because I have no other way to touch them. Nine hundred and eighty-nine dead in one city in one week. Two hundred and fifty horses in a single day. Nine thousand five hundred across the eastern half of a continent by the time the heat finally breaks in August. One civilian governor installed over ten million people who did not choose him. One woman dying in Zurich who understood that the most important thing in the world is a child with room to breathe. One hundred and twenty-five years since a group of men in Philadelphia declared that freedom was self-evident, then went home to their slaves.
The century is twenty-seven weeks old. It is already too hot.
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