Dolley's Mandarinquat
Why going “back to normal” is just a tad scary
Not everyone can draw a parallel between the exotic citrus aisle at Whole Foods and Dolley Madison, but not every observer sees the word as keenly as Jessie Daniels. Besides, we hear vitamin C is good for one’s eyesight.
by Jessie Daniels
Let me explain. It was last March, just before the bright lights of Broadway went dark, before ambulance sirens hung endlessly on air, before the city that never sleeps scheduled a wakeup call for more than a year later. I had gone to the doctor for a routine visit, during which he warned me about the coronavirus. “Don’t get crazy,” he said, “just start preparing, stocking up on food. Because you never know.”
So I headed directly to the supermarket, and it was Manifest Destiny, Whole Foods edition – New York hipsters seizing bread and toilet paper and canned goods off shelves emptying in real time. Among the limited items still available were mandarinquats – a hybrid of a mandarin and a kumquat – so I grabbed them. Because you never know.
What we choose to keep and what we leave behind in a crisis can be symbolic in that they tell us a lot about who we are – as individuals, as members of a community, as a country. Consider, for example, another take-it-or-leave-it moment: in 1814, as British troops advanced on the nation’s capital during the War of 1812, first lady Dolley Madison had the presence of mind to grab Gilbert Stuart’s iconic portrait of George Washington before escaping from the White House, afraid of its desecration should the Redcoats get their hands on it.
Later accounts called the story into question, including one from President Madison’s formerly enslaved manservant, Paul Jennings, who wrote in 1865 that it was actually two members of the staff who rescued the Washington portrait. The first lady “had no time for doing it. It would have required a ladder to get it down. All she carried off was the silver in her reticule, as the British were thought to be but a few squares off, and were expected every moment.”
Why is going “back to normal” just a tad scary?
But by then the story of Dolley Madison saving the eight-foot-tall portrait, told and retold, had become an eight-foot-tall legend. As the White House Historical Association noted, the myth had already been cemented by 1831, when a visitor saw the portrait in the White House and recalled that, “[W]hen the British came here in the last war, the President was obliged to fly. His wife, Mrs. Madison, cut the picture from the frame and took it with her – the only article she took.”
Myths say a lot about who we want to be. The first lady keeping a piece of our history safe from barbarians at the gate sounds a lot better than putting silver before country.
While mandarinquats may not carry the same prominence as a portrait of the nation’s first president, they are symbolic of our current time. Within weeks of the first shutdowns, the chaotic hustle over whatever remained in the supermarket that night would come to resemble governors fighting over personal protective equipment, or patchworks of guidelines dependent on state lines. We often didn’t look very united; we just looked like a lot of people trying to survive.
The pandemic also tore the lid off a burgeoning set of long-standing problems that we can’t just put back in the box. Mapping the spread and toll of the virus starkly laid bare racial and health disparities. Snaking lines at food banks captured the breadth of economic insecurity. Insurrectionists storming the Capitol revealed our democracy’s fragility. The limits of rugged individualism left Texas shivering in the cold and the dark.
But on the precipice of a new spring, there is hope on the horizon after a year of loss, and loss of control. Why then is the idea of going “back to normal” just a tad scary too? In part, it’s because it sounds like going back to accepting the myth that everything is fine when we know it isn’t. We may have ignored it before, but now we can’t.
It’s easy to see how a new myth of widespread institutional failure can take hold in this atmosphere.But it doesn’t have to because we can also take something else from this crisis. Turns out mandarinquats are pretty versatile – and, as it also turns out, so are we. As time slowly marched on through our pandemic year, we adapted. The shelves are once again stocked. We buy items that correspond to what we need for our next recipe. Now we know.
Moreover, this new remote-everything landscape hasn’t made us immune to the virtues of community; if anything, we may value it more. Look at every reunion between parents and children, grandparents and grandkids. Look at neighbors helping neighbors get essential items. Look at rival drugmakers working together to increase vaccine supply. Look at all the people we now see as essential.
It’s the duality of the American thing, and we’ve just lived through a year where it has hit us square in the face. For the first time in more than a generation, however, there’s a chance to reframe the national identity. It all depends on what we take from this crisis and – most importantly – who we want to be.
Jessie Daniels is a policy professional and writer based in New York. Daniels previously worked in the U.S. Senate as a national security legislative aide to Majority Leader Harry Reid. Daniels writes frequently on foreign policy and political issues. Her writing has been published in outlets including The Guardian, The Orlando Sentinel, and The San Francisco Chronicle. This is her third piece for The Experiment. Her previous contributions are last August’s “Roll Call Bracketology” and “What it Takes Now.”
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