Diary

28 October 2006

My son pulled back the curtains and took in the full splendour of the twilit canyons. Lights were coming on all across Manhattan.

Iraq intrudes into daily life far more than it did a year ago. On Sunday, we took ourselves to see the Harlem Gospel Choir at the BB King Blues Club. Midway through the hallelujahs the choir leader, Brother Earl, called on the audience to remember the troops overseas. The silence that followed was among the most emotionally charged I can remember in a long time.

I have a ritual that I perform every time I come to New York. It involves going to Spring Street in Greenwich Village and saying a short prayer. Back in the early 1970s I had a beloved uncle who lived here. Mike was my mother’s younger brother and had taken a ship to the USA after he left school. The cousins who had gone before him had sent the customary letters filled with emigrant wonder at the opportunities on offer. America gave my uncle Mike a good job and a college education. By the year of his death â” 1972 â” he was directing plays off Broadway. The fire that killed him in his flat on Spring Street broke my grandmother’s heart. In the late Sixties she had visited him in Manhattan and came back urging me to go there when I was old enough. After Mike’s death it would have been understandable had she decided never to set foot in America again. But she kept going back, drawn by the allure of a place for which the future has never been circumscribed. On Spring Street, with the murmuring ghosts of 9/11 only a few blocks away, I said my prayer and then walked quickly uptown in the direction of the crowds.

Fergal Keane is a BBC special correspondent. His series Taking a Stand starts on Radio 4 on 14 November.