Opening Day in New Britain
Opening Day in New Britain
By Aimee Pozorski
Lined up on home plate, we watch as a girl from the New Britain Madrigals prepares to sing our Anthem.
I will not cry. I have rejected displays of patriotism for too long now.
The newest members of New Britain Little League are the smallest—five-year-old boys and some brave girls wearing the jerseys and caps of their sponsors. On Eliot’s cap, a pawnshop logo. They have come from everywhere to live in this town, to stand here now, to play.
The mayor is here, and the commissioner, and Tebucky Jones, former NFL player and New Britain man, who says:
“Don’t let people tell you that you won’t amount to anything because of where you live.”
Children nod and smile, squinting in the sun, some a little bored, drawing pictures in the sand.
After the speeches, the boys take off their hats, and put them on their chests, like Tebucky Jones, like their dads.
I will not cry as they bring out the microphone and raise the flag. But then the girl begins to sing, her voice as clear as this day in May.
“Oh say can you see?” And I do see, and I do cry.
Tony Kushner gives the best lines in Angels in America to Belize, and I can hear them now, louder than the voice floating above the park:
The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing.
He set the word “free” to a note so high nobody can reach it.
Are we free, here, on Opening Day in New Britain? Some of us are more free than others.
Hands and caps over their hearts, the children sing The Star-Spangled Banner with mouths open and eyes wide shut.
They know what Ralph Ellison had known.
We were to affirm the principle the country was built upon and not the men who do the violence.
They know we must not reject our country on opening day – that the principle of freedom is bigger than all of us, and, also, more true.
They know it all somehow with a force that links them as they sway, dozens of them in sync with the voice beaming hope from the pitcher’s mound.
Aimee Pozorski is Professor and Assistant Chair of English and Director of English Graduate Studies at Central Connecticut State University. Her creative work has appeared in the Connecticut Literary Anthology, MERVox, Tiny Seed Journal, What Rough Beast, Paper Nautilus, and Bending Genres, among others. She lives in New Britain, Connecticut.