No Kings: One Week After
by Carrie Frye
When I stepped out of the line at the No Kings march in Asheville last Saturday evening to take a couple more photos, I saw that the line of marchers that stretched behind was far, far longer than I’d realized. Blocks and blocks, thousands more people. There were whole different moods, cadres, vibes in motion. Asheville’s not a big place—you often run into people who, even if you don’t know their names, you at least recognize their faces. But I didn’t know anyone in this river of people streaming by. The rally had started at 6 p.m., and it was fully dark by the time the march through downtown finished.
A group of young women—resolute-looking, magnificent—marched past carrying an APPALACHIA ♥️s ANTIFA banner, and I thought, Who are you? Where did you spring from?
I don’t have to tell you how chilling and dismaying the news has continued to be in the week since (although “shackled” and “stockpiling chemical weapons” stand out). In her newsletter, the writer Mary Gaitskill asked whether such demonstrations of resistance are futile. She concluded that “one very basic reason that protest of any kind has value, even if it has no immediate practical effect” is that it helps keep a person’s “inner will” alive, and so makes that vital piece of their being “harder to destroy.”
While this is true and essential, the power for me in last Saturday lay in the assertion of a larger, communal will. The map of last weekend’s No Kings protests was lit up with circles, coast to coast. Tulsa. Fond du Lac. Las Cruces. (A couple of my family members attended a protest in Angola, Indiana, population 9,234). If you went, it means that somewhere in the process—maybe after you parked and started walking towards the meeting point—you began going from an “I” to a “we,” with people who stayed up making signs and stitching long beautiful banners, who met up to carpool in with all this band equipment, who dug out red handkerchiefs from the drawer to signal Appalachia, who trundled a 40-pound kid on one hip for the WHOLE MARCH thanks to apparent ARMS AND WILL OF STEEL. People who kept an eye out for deranged counterprotestors, and were active keeping the group safe. People who are nervy and joyful and loud and angry and determined, walking elbow to elbow with you and blocks deep.
And after you go home, that “we” is still there in your town—you can feel it.
