Like so many of us, I started the morning hopeful. But my daughter and I are quarantining in the Boston area, in a suburb that voted overwhelmingly for President-elect Joe Biden, and where still “Back the Blue” and “We Love America” signs are posted by at least one house per block. Yesterday afternoon, though, as my family watched Trump supporters storm the Capitol and police, on camera, moving the barricades to allow them in, my mother told me to shut my blinds. One of my joys is sitting on my bed in a pool of sunlight. When I got my own apartment, I always kept my blinds open. Keeping the blinds shut kept him protected from white people who had firebombed and harassed similar families in other towns. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized he lived by that rule because of his legacy as the first Black family to live on the block of our Boston-area suburb. The shades facing the street were always closed. The windows in my grandparents’ house were covered in golden velvet drapes and sheer white nylon curtains.
“We don’t want anyone to be able to see us inside,” he would tell me. When I was a kid, my grandfather would never let us open the blinds in his house.
