Cruces 1 We dreamed we were hers. The body of us thought that, because we built her, we belonged to her. We built her in pieces from our bodies, from the stories we held and the stories before that and the stories that might come. She arrived by boat in pieces. When the ship Isre finally reached port, we wept. The sailors too. They had been convinced that the tempests they''d endured on board would drown them in the ocean, and the cargo with them. The deck of the ship was nearly a farmer''s field in size.
The hold had been covered with huge black tarps for the journey. When the sailors pulled the tarps back, the hold looked dark and foreboding. I was asked to jump into that dark. Like plunging into the ocean''s deep. Down in the hold, my eyes began to adjust. Gigantic crates the size of houses filled with pieces of the colossus: a woman in slices, crated and shipped. One by one, we found her body parts. Hair.
Nose. Crown. Eyes. Mouth. Fingers, hand. Foot. Torch. She had arrived, in pieces of herself.
Later, while discussing her reassemblage, an engineer remarked that the "embryo lighthouse," as they called the interior skeleton of the statue, held clues to reconstructing her form. Yet many elements of her construction went unexplained, left us puzzled. We were left with our imaginations to create adaptations. During those months, we lived in the city and we labored on the island. We were woodworkers, ironworkers, roofers and plasterers and brick masons. We were pipe fitters and welders and carpenters. We mixed concrete, we pounded earth, we armed the saws and drills. We were sheet metal and copper specialists.
She arrived in our hands as thirty-one tons of copper and one hundred and twenty-five tons of steel. Three hundred copper sheets had been pressed to create the outer skin of her. We were cooks and cleaners and nuns and night watchpeople. We were nurses and artists and janitors, runners and messengers and thieves. Mothers and fathers and grandparents, sisters and brothers and children. During the day you could always hear the insistent hammering, the files grating, the chains clanking, the copper singing as it was being shaped over wooden scaffolds, the cacophonous orchestra of our labor. You could always see arms swinging, hands at work, shoulders and biceps and the jaws of the workers flexing and grinding. Those sounds were our bodies.
Her body coming to life from all of our hands. We the body took pride in our labor-as if we expected that someone would know our names, carry our stories. When the winds in the harbor grew too strong, we had to abandon scaffolding. We used pulleys and ropes. We took care to be gentle against the softer metal. We dangled ourselves around her body, swung around the pieces of her, like the swoop and lift of acrobats, or birds, or window washers-though all of us were tethered to her body. Sometimes, for just a moment, a body can feel real inside a story that way. As if each of us existed.
At night, when it was no body''s shift, some of us would stand around her head and stare at her giant rounded eyes. We thought she looked sad. Or angry and sad. Her eyes each much larger than a human head. Her face neither male nor female, or perhaps just both. We felt she had the stare of our labor but also our loss, our love, our lives. Sometimes, holding near to her, we thought or felt mother, but we meant it in some new way no one has imagined before. We were the impossible possible voice of bodies.
Some of us were born here and some of us were the sons and daughters of mothers and fathers not from here. They came from famine they came from poverty they came from occupations and brutalities and war. They came from something to leave, which is why they crossed land and water. They spoke of persecutions or poverty, but they also spoke of rolling hills or sunsets over the desert or flowers with names that made our hearts reach out. The leaving of a place carried sorrow as well as relief, and the coming here carried both as well. We spoke of both brutality and beauty-or remembered beauty-in our homelands, or in the hands of infants born here. We let go the hand of prior homes to reach this place. We were Jews and Italians and Lithuanians and Poles.
We were Irish and Native American and Chinese. We were Lebanese and African and Mexican. We were Germans and Trinidadians and Scots. There were hundreds of us over time and across distances; it is impossible to say how many. We were an ocean of laborers. We spoke Russian and French and Italian and English and Chinese and Irish and Yiddish, Swahili and Lakota and Spanish and a swirl of dialects. Our languages a kind of anthem. We understood that labor crossed oceans.
Some of us unloaded the statue pieces after her oceanic journey and some of us reassembled the pieces. Those of us who had unloaded pieces, and then reassembled them, felt a strange connection. Toward one another and toward her. Or we might have. The sum of us-the we that might have been-could have understood from the passing around of stories that our French colaborers meant for her to commemorate the abolition of slavery. The French sculptor''s early model had held a broken chain in her left hand. Our eyes saw the drawings. The model.
We knew what the chain meant. Some of us might have rubbed our wrists or ankles or necks at the thought or memory of it. But then the chain moved. On her body, and on our bodies. Down near her foot. We might have known then, in our bodies, that our states were stitched imperfectly-that war had ripped open a forever wound. That some of us would not be fully counted, our rights still pounded down on a daily basis. That children were being ground into dust everywhere, in the factories.
That laws were excluding us even as we the body built the means of transportation across the land. Stories were traveling between us that could have led anywhere, turned in any direction, in spite of our backbreaking work. That we could have been born from her, but small cracks began to appear in the story, just as in the materials of her body and our labor. Instead of a broken chain, she held a tablet. The tablet signified the rule of law. The broken chain and shackle were moved to the ground, all but hidden under her feet. You could barely see them, but we knew they were there-our labor had put them there-and we had thoughts about it. We wondered what story would emerge in place of emancipation, now that the chains were hidden.
We wondered what story would be drawn from the tablet, from the newly prominent rule of law. We wondered what the figure herself thought about these changes to her body, these shifts in the story. No one asked what we thought, or what she thought, for that matter. Statues don''t speak. A fear slid through some of our necks-that maybe she was not ours, or we were not hers-but no one wanted to say it out loud because we needed to make our livings. Once, when we were working on the head and the face at ground level, I saw a suffragist from a protest march spit on the face of her as we worked. Why should a female face represent freedom when women cannot yet vote, she asked. She shook as she yelled, as her question streaked down the hard copper cheek.
I thought about that streak for a very long time. After everyone was gone for the night, I took a rag to the copper there, crying briefly as I wiped it away. The suffragist was right. I saw her meaning. But I had been among those who''d worked to make that statue''s face, worked so that it could hold both the gravitas and the tenderness of an idea that I believed could be beautiful. In some future-not ours, but some day to come. A face that might become something we were not yet. A freedom obscured in the shackles hidden beneath her feet, rising up her body and arm all the way to the torch, the sky, the endless heavens.
I had an unusual dream in the form of her face. My face had its own markings. Our labor had a rhythm and shape and song that were larger and reached farther than our differences. Maybe the song of us helped us feel part of some whole that did and did not exist. The song of us helped to get the work done, helped our bodies not to give out or give in. The song of we the body met the air and the water around us differently from how any one person might; we the body were part of everything and nothing at the same time. In those days, for the first time in my weary life, I had people I loved. Endora and David, John Joseph-all of us from someplace else, all of us collected by her body.
Maybe because we were building her body, we felt our own bodies differently, and that welded some of our hearts together. Me with my patchwork-skin story. Endora''s barren gut and foul, funny mouth. The opalescent mosaic of scars on David''s back. The way John Joseph always talked with his hands, as if he were reaching for some meaning beyond words. The way his words would then return to his ancestors. Or maybe our labor made us love one another. That happens to workers sometimes, when you labor near other bodies.
Maybe we were looking so hard for something in this emerging place that we turned inside out a little. I don''t know. I only know that we built her in pieces from our bodies, from the stories we held and the stories before that and the stories that might come. She carried us in her. Or we thought she did. Some nights, after we worked together on her body, John Joseph, Endora,.