The Black Gun Owner Next Door
At last, I was left having to examine myself. “You’re not anti-gun,” Mr. Toure told me. “Ask yourself this. It’s a zombie apocalypse. Tomorrow, you wake up, and you can’t find your children. You go out to search for them. Do you want a gun now?” His analogy was not outlandish. This was, of course, the constant threat enslaved people endured. Had I been fooling myself about my anti-gun stance? I don’t think so, but I did come to realize through a series of unexpected exchanges that the issue was more complicated than I had allowed and that my views of just coexistence and human flourishing might not require the absolute prohibition of arms.
I concede that Lewis Hayden could be viewed as a champion of the right to bear arms in defense of freedom. But more than that, he dedicated himself to community building, forging a complex, self-funded, interracial network of people joined in common cause. Guns were there to defend those things. The home he made with Harriet was a gathering place for the Boston Vigilance Committee, for progressive white Bostonians and for members of the enslaved and free black population. Mr. Kantrowitz observed that Hayden sought to build “a world of common struggle against slavery in which racial hierarchy seemed to dissolve into human unity and affection.” Together, Lewis and Harriet Hayden opened their doors to those on the run, turning their home into a haven for strangers whom the federal government deemed illegals.
This is the essence of his example that I hope our community and country will follow. After sipping tea at the Hayden House, I am still suspicious of the N.R.A., and I would not abide having a gun inside my dwelling or my children’s schools. But where would I want to be if civil society topples and 2020 feels like 1820? In a home like the Haydens’, in a neighborhood like the North Slope of 19th-century Beacon Hill, in a community fortified by love in action and maybe a powder keg beneath the floorboards.
