Inside the Inheritance

America turns 250 tomorrow, and most of what will be said about it will arrive already sorted. Some will speak of greatness. Some will speak of failure. Some will reach for nostalgia, others for indictment. I understand the pull of each response.

In 1976, I celebrated the bicentennial with the uncomplicated joy available to a seven-year-old boy in a safe suburb, surrounded by flags, two-dollar bills, and the easy certainty that the country's story belonged to me.

I meet the semiquincentennial with less innocence, but not less love. If anything, that love is deeper now and more serious. I have seen too much of what has been excluded, defended, buried, and carried to mistake America for either the story it tells about itself or the verdict its critics sometimes want to deliver. The country I have seen will not fit inside either performance. It lives in the distance between the promise and the record, and so do I.

Four years ago, I packed what fit into a carry-on and one checked bag, put the rest in storage, and drove to Newark Airport, believing I was starting over. My sons were in college, and I was leaving for the road and wherever it would take me.

In the days leading up to this anniversary, I kept returning to the places that had stayed with me. Three returned most insistently: Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, Philadelphia, and Arlington National Cemetery. One showed me the people the promise was never meant to include. One showed me where the promise was made. One showed me what people had sacrificed for it.

I went to Standing Rock Sioux Reservation because of the pipeline fight. The land and the river had been at the center of a national argument the news had covered intensely and then largely left behind. I wanted to understand what sacred ground looks like. I also wanted to learn more about Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake, known to most Americans as Sitting Bull, the Hunkpapa Lakota holy man and leader whose name I had encountered in history books.

When I reached out to Jennifer Martel at the Sitting Bull Visitor Center to ask permission to visit, I expected to spend an hour. I spent three. Jennifer's Lakota name is Wahukaze Nunpa Win, which means Two Lance Woman, and she is a citizen of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. Over the afternoon, she spoke about Sitting Bull as legacy rather than myth, about Standing Rock as a living community, about the river and the pipeline, and about forms of knowledge that did not fit easily inside the vocabulary I had been given. She spoke, too, about her children and grandchildren, and what she wants them to carry.

I remember listening with respect, but also with a shame I did not know what to do with. The longer she spoke, the more aware I became of how little I knew about what had been done to the people whose land I was standing on.

I also remember trying, probably more than once, to bring my own family story into the room, how the Irish had their own history of colonial dispossession and famine. Looking back I can hear what I was actually doing. I was trying to locate myself outside the story of what had happened to Indigenous peoples, to say without quite saying it that my people had arrived later, that they had not written the treaties or broken them.

More than a year would pass after Standing Rock before I found myself in Philadelphia. My son had taken a job there after college, and it gave me a reason to walk the streets where this experiment in democracy began.

Philadelphia was not only a founding city for me. My grandfather left Belfast in 1923 and came to Philadelphia before making his way to New York. I do not know what he saw first, or how long he stayed, or whether the city felt like arrival or interruption. But knowing he entered America here changed something about how I moved through those streets. My grandfather passed through Philadelphia on his way to becoming part of the American story. So, in a different way, did I.

The center of it all is Independence Hall itself, which is smaller than the paintings suggest. The room where the Declaration was adopted and the Constitution was debated is large enough to hold history, but small enough for men to hear one another across the floor without raising their voices. Ordinary afternoon light comes through the windows. The wooden chairs look uncomfortable in the way old chairs often do. The scale still matters. These were men making a statement of rebellion against the most powerful empire in the world, arguing about authority, representation, and the terms by which a people might actually govern themselves.

They were not drafting language for posterity. They were committing treason in the name of political beginning. The Declaration was not a commemorative document when it was written. It was a revolution. Later, in the same building, another group of men argued over a Constitution meant to make that rebellion governable, trying to turn rupture into structure, to begin again by designing a new political order on different ground.

The language that later became national inheritance began there as ambition, fear, and nerve. It is easy, from two and a half centuries away, to question what they missed. Could they ever have imagined what America would be like in two hundred and fifty years? Its size and diversity, or its role in the global economy and international order. The room reminds you they could not.

But founding rooms are not the only places where a country explains itself. Cemeteries do too. The rows of white markers at Arlington National Cemetery stretch further than you expect when you are standing among them. Each marker holds a name, and each name is the remainder of a life that did not return to whoever was waiting for it.

At the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the ceremony reduces remembrance to discipline. Twenty-one steps. A turn. A pause. Twenty-one seconds. Another turn. Another pause. Twenty-one steps back across the mat. The number is not decorative. It echoes the 21-gun salute, the highest military honor, and the guard performs the ritual with a precision that makes the crowd feel almost incidental. Since 1937, the Tomb has been guarded without interruption. Weather changes. Presidents change. Wars begin and end. The guard walks anyway.

Arlington asked nothing of me except presence, the willingness to slow down and stay long enough to understand that some people found the country's promise serious enough to give everything for it. Not the promise as it was extended equally, because it was not. Not the promise as it was made to everyone, because it was not. But the promise as an idea that someone, in some year, under some circumstances, found worth dying for.

For a long time, I thought the hardest part of this odyssey was learning how to see America clearly. I moved through city after city, watching the arguments on screens and then the lives around them. I convinced myself that if I stayed long enough and listened carefully enough, I would find the country as it really was.

I was wrong. I thought I was excavating the ruins of America. It took me years to realize I was excavating my own. I wrote about buried histories, broken promises, conditional bargains, and the things omitted because they made the story harder to tell. I wrote about all of it as if it belonged only to the country.

That was the story I preferred to tell because it kept me safe.

What I had been writing about all along was not only America. I was writing about the arrangement I had made with America: the parts I claimed and the parts I kept trying to place at a safe distance from myself. I was using America's complexity to avoid reckoning with the harder complexity in myself.

I will spend July 4th with friends in another room in another American city, with one thing I have carried for four years: my grandparents' wedding photograph.

It is a sepia-toned studio portrait, with the beveled border mat photographers used in the late 1920s and early 1930s. They look happy in a way that does not announce itself. My grandmother left Broadford, County Clare in 1926 to cross the Atlantic into a country that had not yet decided what to do with the Irish. They were caricatured, suspected of divided loyalty, and treated as a moral threat to the country's existing order. They were admitted, eventually, through a bargain that later generations often preferred not to examine.

She built a life anyway. She met my grandfather in New York, which is its own kind of American story. She had my father. She had grandchildren. She did not live to know that one of them would carry her photograph across the country she crossed an ocean to reach.

I went back to our family farm in Broadford many years ago. I stood in the fields on a gray afternoon, the kind of gray that is specific to the west of Ireland, low and close, the cold coming up from the ground. I tried to imagine the version of her life in which she never left. I still do. But the imagined life keeps dissolving. She built something in America that outlasted her, and I have spent these years trying to understand what I owe to that and what it asks of me beyond gratitude.

I think about her every time I put the photograph out in a new city. She did not have the luxury of deciding whether to belong. She built belonging from what was available. That is where I am writing from now. Not from innocence. Not from exile. Not from the comfort of being above the argument. I am writing from inside the inheritance, which means inside the debt as well as the gift, still trying to figure out what honest love for a complicated country actually requires.

It turns 250 tomorrow.

The work is not finished.

Neither am I.