Remembering the Women's March

On the six year anniversary

This story was originally published in issue 17 of Stonecoast Review

Illustration by Stephanie Davidson

In bed with my laptop on Saturday morning, January 21st, 2017, I searched for the livestream of the Women’s March on Washington and clicked open a video window, mindlessly, the way I would flick on a light. My boyfriend sat next to me, thigh touching mine under the white and orange flower-covered comforter that I had lugged from college far into adulthood, and which I had intended to replace for years. I wanted to get something sophisticated and gender-neutral, perhaps a plain gray duvet cover, or one in rich royal blue, and a chair by the window to match. Maybe the comforter could be gray and the shams gray with a blue trim to match the chair. I entertained such banal comforter-related thoughts as a Black woman with shorn white hair and two long, silver earrings took the podium at the Women’s March rally and began to speak. 

“My name is Donna Hilton. I’m formerly known as inmate 86G0206.”

Her voice was full and deep and called my mind back from the question of sham color. 

“This march is about us,” she said, “the people, the women in this country who refused to be marginalized, sexualized, and abused, and silenced.” 

“March!” she said, or rather yelled, or not quite yelled but demanded, but not in a negative way. Sang. Shouted. What is the word for a strong woman’s speech? A call. A sermon. A heart on the table. A roar.

Donna Hilton finished, “Let’s walk in our greatness because we are beautiful. We are amazing. And we are not silent anymore.”

Recently I’ve had an urge to return to the memory of that day, because six years on, it is beginning to feel distant; so much else has happened—Trump is out of office, there was a pandemic, there is a war—and there’s a risk I might begin to think it didn’t matter.

Next up at the podium was a blonde woman wearing a shirt that said in big orange letters, RUN LIKE A GIRL. Around her stood a stage packed with women waving. She motioned around the stage and boomed in a low, raspy voice, “These are the brave women who fight for us every day in Washington.” She pointed to the audience and said, “Here’s the thing. YOU should be the ones writing the laws. YOU should be the ones writing the policies.” In between her sentences she seemed to whisper to me, You are powerful. My room and my comforter dropped away, and I existed fixated on her lips, desperate for the words like a dehydrated person at a dripping faucet. She introduced the next speaker, “Our brand-new, FABULOUS senator from California, Kamala Harris,” who climbed up and sang out: 

“All right! All right, all right, all right! What a beautiful sight I see.” 

A pressure rose quickly from my belly into my chest and up through my throat and head, and I was caught bewildered with tears dripping down my cheeks. I tugged the orange embroidered hem of my girly comforter up around my mouth and released three breathless sobs. My boyfriend sat next to me in a patient silence. I worked for a number of minutes to put the feeling into a coherent sentence, and then I said: “I can’t remember the last time I saw three women in a row speak on stage in strong voices.” 

When I heard myself say it out loud, I felt a fresh rush of hot tears. I stared at a blurry Kamala Harris through a layer of water and wondered how it was possible that I was twenty-nine years old and seeing three women speak powerfully on stage could shock me to tears.