E Pluribus Unum
(This essay is included in the Denver Public Library archive of the 2017 Denver Women’s March)
When my friend Lois showed up at Zook's Cafe, our rendezvous point before the Women's March on Denver on January 21, 2017, she told me that she and the friends who were joining us had made signs to bring along for the march. They included her cousin Linda, a second (and mutual) friend, Linda B., and Joan, an old friend of Lois’s. They’d worked on the signs the night before, and during a brainstorming session to come up with wording, Lois and Joan had blurted out E Pluribus Unum!
“Do you want to carry a sign?” Lois asked.
“No,” I answered. An estimated 38,000 – 40,000 people were supposed to show up and march through downtown Denver. I wanted to walk unencumbered. For me this was a pilgrimage. A time to be within myself, even within the crowd. I also wanted to be able to escape, if need be, from tear gas, or a stampede, as it so easily could (I have always considered myself to be a good contingency planner—a re-engineered Disaster Queen). But I helped Lois remove the signs from the back of her station wagon, parked half a block away, and bring them into the cafe. The proprietors (and mutual friends) Dave and Annie Zook, had opened their shop half an hour early so we could get a coffee and a sandwich if we wanted to before the husband of another friend arrived to shuttle us downtown.
The big sign had been hand-painted in blue bubble letters, in tempera by Linda B. She was marching with another group of friends that day but had left her signature piece with us. Its improvised canvas was a pull-down shade big enough to stretch across a living room window—the kind with a piece of lath inside that slipped out easily even before we upended it. Six feet long? Eight feet? I groaned inwardly at the thought of unfolding that bulky thing, much less of carrying it through a crowd of swiftly moving human beings. The other signs were hand-lettered scraps of cardboard. One was just long enough to bash into people walking either side of you. It read: “We Are All Equal.” A smaller one, a little wider than an average human body, read “We The People Deserve Better.”
We arrived at Civic Center Park in downtown Denver around nine a.m. The march was scheduled to begin at 9:30. About forty-five minutes later, we were still waiting to make our way the few hundred feet or so onto 15th Street and the march route. Unbeknownst to us, the crowds spilling into the park from all sides of the city would grow to nearly 200,000 people. Yet except for the wait, you'd never have known there were that many. Marchers were patient. Jovial. Even exuberant. There was no pushing and shoving. Participants went out of their way to help one another step over a small steel fence that bordered the park near the street. I heard the words “please” and “thank you” spoken all around me. It felt more like a carnival parade than a march in defiance of a president whose values did not align with ours. Our march wasn't so much against what he stood for—though those motifs were present, No Torture, for example—as it was for: equality; the support of education and science; a woman's right to control her own health care choices, including abortion; the urge toward kindness; the acceptance of all who gather under the human tent—all races, all creeds, all persuasions of religion and family choice . . . as our sign read when Lois and Joan, the shortest one among us, unfolded it: E Pluribus Unum.
Lois brought along a supply of Sharpie markers. Red. Green. Blue. Black. Orange. As the crowd began to move and we began to be drawn along in its tidal pull, Joan and Lois unfurled the banner and invited passers-by to stop and “sign the sign.” Most were reluctant at first, eager to get going on the march. But Joan, in her quiet way, persuaded several. And kept persuading. Our little group of four signed first, to encourage the strangers around us. It worked.
E Pluribus Unum. What does it mean, someone finally asked? We didn't say that it was a phrase that appeared in the journals of the Continental Congress for June 20, 1782. I'm not sure any of us knew that bit of detail, for certain. Or that the wording was adopted for use on the Great Seal, that very day.
It didn't take long before two of us offering markers wasn't enough. But Lois had brought plenty, so all four of us shared the sharing. And though I'm a quintessential introvert for whom ten people can be a stifling crowd, I could see that my friends needed help. Lois gave me a handful of markers, and following Joan's example, I began to solicit signatures from strangers. Some said, “No thanks, I'm good.” But little by little, as they saw others stop and consider it, many joined in.
Those of our generation, the Medicare and Social Security crowd, knew what the words meant. We'd learned them in elementary school. Those who were much younger didn’t. A few said they'd seen the words somewhere but couldn't remember where. Within a few minutes, if one heard another ask, the question would usually follow: “Yeah, what does that mean?”
Our banner became a teachable moment. I spent thirty years in education, much of it teaching community college students how to do research more serious than crashing around on Google and trying to sort through 40,000 irrelevant hits. I asked a couple of times if someone knew what it meant and could see an embarrassed look in response. I didn't want to embarrass anybody, so I waited till they asked. Or, I prompted after I thanked each person who signed (and in nearly every instance received a thank-you in return).
E Pluribus Unum. We didn't say that the words have been on our coins since 1795—or to check the back of your one-dollar bills, where it's been since 1935.
“We're all in this together!” Linda offered, an answer that met with big smiles and “Awesome!” or “Cool!” in return.
“What language is that?” one twenty-something wanted to know. “Latin,” I answered.
“From many, one”—many people make up one people.
The questions kept coming, from young and old alike. “It's one of our national mottoes,” we each added, to different queries. “That's amazing!” “I love it! Thank you!” came the replies.
At one point it took nearly thirty minutes for us to travel about a hundred feet. We stopped so that people didn't have to sign on the run. So the mother with a toddler in a stroller, who had just learned to sign her name, had time to scrawl a tiny signature. We got stopped as the crowd surged around the banner like a stream flowing around a boulder. Lois and Linda switched places carrying the sign. Good solider in the cause, Joan refused to surrender her position. As momentum built, Lois and I worked the crowd and the markers—getting them to and from the marchers' hands, passing them along, and retrieving them from Linda and Joan to keep them circulating as fast as we could. We didn’t lose a single one, although the caps didn’t come back on a couple of them. At one point I wished I'd known how to juggle. My beige gloves are still streaked with red, orange, and green. I didn't care. It would make a good story. Having the crowd swirl around us made me giddy—the way I felt when I was dehydrated; light-headed, a little dizzy, out of it. But today I was light-headed and dizzy and out of it with joy. And though one of those anonymous Facebook critics would later claim we were nothing but a bunch of angry, middle-aged, women wearing pink ve-jay-jay hats on our heads who just wanted to march through the streets bashing men, the detractor obviously hadn't gotten within even a mile of any march—or any marcher—anywhere in the country.
E Pluribus Unum. Men and women marched together, engaging in call-and-response chants. Husbands, brothers, fathers, sons, and grandsons marched in support of the women in their lives. Families of every imaginable composition stood side by side. “We're here and we're queer!” chanted an exuberant group of gay, lesbian, and transgender participants, taking a stand at a point where the march turned from one street into another. Wiccans stood nearby on the curb, glittering crescent moons and stars visible on their cheeks. Taking turns, they rushed forward to sign.
E Pluribus Unum. People in wheelchairs. People using walkers. People wearing casts and on crutches. Generations. A group of elderly women, each wearing a sign around her neck that bore the name of a deceased friend who could not be here today but had long fought for equal rights for women. Presbyterians. Rabbis. Muslim men and women. African-Americans. Latina/o contingents chanting in Spanish the cry for “Esperanza!” Hope! Every country on earth must have been represented—since we are a nation of immigrants, I would expect no less.
E Pluribus Unum. Our banner began to resemble a Jackson Pollock painting—containing, Lois estimates, maybe 500-1,000 signatures. At first, people signed their full names. Some signed slogans. Love! Carry on. . . Peace Rocks! As canvas space shrank, signatures became initials. One elderly man tottered around the edge of the sign, and when he saw the words he said, “I want to sign that.” “Korean war veteran” was printed on his cap. He was in his eighties, at least. I offered my arm and he took it to steady himself as he approached the banner. He all but knelt down to sign, even making sure to dot the “i” in his name: Bill. When he stood up I gave him my arm again. We looked at each other briefly, our eyes glistening. I thanked him for his service. He thanked us for the sign. It was that kind of day. There were no arguments. No angry words. No red-faced men whipping up a crowd in a frenzy of unfocused anger. There was an overflow of generous humanity, out to show what we have been since the beginning: E Pluribus Unum. From many, one.