Morris and Baker were rich, bold, indomitable, enterprising, self-made, proficient, cool in a crisis, and incapable of despair. Each was an unshakable optimist on the American future. “While you may make many mistakes,” J.P. Morgan’s father advised his son, “never be a bear on your country or you will surely go broke.” Baker, who heard the story directly from the younger Morgan, was always a bull, too. Morris, who died in 1806, seven years before the birth of the elder Morgan, was no less an optimist. Indeed, Morris’s heavily encumbered purchases of millions of acres of American wilderness in the 1790s ultimately cost him his fortune.

Historians have thought the less of Morris for dying broke, but the financier was a nonpareil, rich or poor: successful merchant and ship owner; early opponent of overbearing British colonial rule; tireless advocate of American independence; logistical, commercial, and maritime genius of the Second Continental Congress. “For three critical months in the winter of 1777,” wrote his biographer, Charles Rappleye, “when Congress fled Philadelphia for the relative safety of Baltimore, Morris ran the operations of the American government virtually single-handed.”

The one-man government retired from the Continental Congress in 1778, but in 1781 he became the Superintendent of Finance—in effect, the secretary of the treasury of the revolutionary government, though of treasure the infant nation had none. Lacking the power to tax, the national government could only appeal. Morris begged and requisitioned the states but to no avail; Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Maryland proving especially recalcitrant. He therefore improvised. He hired an engraver, procured copper plates, and printed his own currency—“Morris notes”—which, in testament to their originator’s good name, passed for money in the rebellious colonies. “My personal credit, which thank Heaven I have preserved through all the tempests of the War,” the superintendent advised a friend, “has been substituted for that which the Country has lost. I am now striving to transfer that Credit to the Public.”

To fill the credit void, Morris also founded the Bank of North America, the nation’s first commercial bank. His creation would take deposits, including the government’s. It would lend to the government and private business alike. Its officers would receive no remuneration except that which the stockholders voted them (the offices in Morris’s bank would be those of honor, not profit). As for the currency of the Bank of North America, a citizen could take it or leave it. Morris was as dead set against legal tender laws (which compel a creditor to accept the government’s money in payment of a debt) as he was against price controls. As he wrote to John Jay on July 13, 1781, he envisioned a bank “to unite the several states more closely together in one general money connection and indissolubly to attach many powerful individuals to the cause of their country by the strong principle of self-love and the immediate sense of private interest.” The bank, its founder expected, would become a permanent “Pillar of American Credit.”

Morris saw the enabling legislation through the Continental Congress and was on hand the day the bank opened—January 7, 1782—to borrow $100,000 in the name of Michael Hillegas, the first Treasurer of the United States. Morris was the bank’s largest stockholder—except for a brief moment late in 1782 when John Paul Jones invested his prize money. The Bank of North America paid high dividends from the start. It proved the predecessor to Alexander Hamilton’s Bank of the United States (established in 1791) and distant forebear of the Federal Reserve (established in 1913), whose interest-rate manipulations and fast-paced money printing would have left Morris, a gold-standard man, dumbfounded.

Success earned Morris not only acclaim, but also resentment and brickbats (“pecuniary dictator,” a detractor sneered). The superintendent amiably suffered his critics. “[A]ny abuse or misrepresentation which particular persons may indulge themselves in I consider the necessary trappings of office,” he told a correspondent in 1782, “and if they can obtain forgiveness from their country they will always have mine most freely.”

Sitting for his portrait a few years later, Morris presented the artist, Robert Edge Pine, with a broad determined face, a receding hairline (the subject was 51 years old), and exactly the boldness required of anyone who would amass $3 million of unrepayable debt in the course of conducting speculations in millions of virgin acres in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas (as well as 7,234 building lots in the brand new District of Columbia).

From debtors’ prison in 1798, eight years before his death, Morris gently deflected an importuning creditor: “I wish you would not write to me in such terms as you do. You wound me to the soul, and if that does you any good I will submit patiently, but if it does not ease you why wound me deeply when my most ardent wish is to relieve you?”

An old banker’s death led the front page of The New York Times on Sunday, May 3, 1931. The 1929 crash had long since knocked the banking profession off its bull-market pedestal, but the Times still made pride of place for a eulogy of George F. Baker.

He was the “dean of American bankers.” When he was a young man, Baker could perform one-arm pull-ups. As an old man, with his silver muttonchop whiskers and black top hat, regally seated in his custom Pierce-Arrow town car (the elevated roof of which accommodated the banker’s hat), he might have inspired the creators of the Monopoly game’s Rich Uncle Pennybags. His blue eyes welled with tears whenever he recalled the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

A philanthropist and investor, Baker was president of the First National Bank of New York at the corner of Broadway and Wall Street. Federally uninsured, lightly regulated, and by no means too big to fail, the First was an institution that harked back to Alexander Hamilton’s time as much as it anticipated our own. Some judged the First to be impregnable, and, indeed, the Bank of England chose it over the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as the safest institution in which to place a large deposit in the darkest days of the Great Depression.

Baker, born in 1840, was 23 when he joined the newly organized First National Bank and 33 in the year of the panic that ruined Jay Cooke and the Union Pacific Railroad, and threatened every New York City bank, not excluding the First. What should we do if frightened depositors came running? Baker was asked. “Pay every claim presented as long as the money lasts,” the stout young man declared. “When we stop paying it will be because there is not another dollar in the till, and none obtainable.” The First survived and Baker, within four years, was its president.

The First was a moneymaking hybrid, unusual for its time and extinct today, thanks to federal banking regulations: part investment bank, part venture capitalist fund, part bond-trading house, and part commercial bank. The bank was engaged, in the words of a starstruck federal bank examiner, “in many undertakings of that character which generally turn out favorably.”

And in the words of another federal examiner, circa 1877, concerning the First’s $2 million infusion of emergency aid in a needy Rochester bank: “[T]here is not a single Bank in our City who would or could have helped a country correspondent to such gigantic figures and on such short notice!” And during the long-lingering depression of 1873–79 to boot.

Baker accumulated directorships, wealth, and accolades. From the April 14, 1924, edition of Time magazine: “True, he is twice as rich as the original J.P. Morgan, having a fortune estimated at 200 millions. True, at the age of 84 when he has retired from many directorates, he dominates half a dozen railroads, several banks, [and] scores of industrial concerns.” The banker donated $5 million to the founding of the Harvard Business School, $2 million to Cornell University, and $1 million to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is the namesake of the Baker Memorial Library at Dartmouth College (expanded in 2002 to become the Baker-Berry Library).

A bull “who always bought and very rarely sold,” Baker showed best in a crisis. The bank and the nation always snapped back from panics and depressions, even the close call of 1873, stronger than before. Surely, he reasoned, the post-1929 slump would prove no different.

His younger colleagues were not so sure, and they begged him to reduce the bank’s exposure to the overvalued stock market. Baker turned a deaf ear and went into the crash fully invested, a decision that sawed his peak net worth in half. “I was a damn fool,” his biographer, Sheridan Logan, quotes Baker as saying at some post-crash low moment, though who, no matter how deep-rooted his faith in the American future, wouldn’t have at least thought it in 1930?

Even so, his Wall Street admirers agreed: The famously lucky banker had salvaged a kind of victory even from that unforced error. Dying at a low ebb in the stock market, he lightened his heirs’ estate-tax liability.

“His death,” said The New York Times, “leaves only John D. Rockefeller Sr. to represent the leaders of an era that saw the passing of the last frontier and the flowering of a new civilization which they and their contemporaries helped to build.” The Times’ article cast no political aspersions on the capitalist’s substantial remaining wealth, still less on his faith in the market system, and praised his contributions to the making of modern America: “Although Mr. Baker’s chief interest was in banking and finance, he was among the group which in the last century flung rails of steel across the continent and helped this nation prepare for the transition from an agrarian age to one of machines and mass production.”

America today is rich beyond imagining. The sky-high level of household net worth expressed as a percentage of gross domestic product only confirms what the untrained eye can see. For the owners of stocks, bonds, and houses, these are the good old days, gasoline prices and political fracturing (and, yes, elevated valuations and heavy indebtedness) notwithstanding. Baker, the beau ideal of the banker-cum-investor, and Morris, the avatar of the patriot financier, set posterity brave and inspiring examples.

A Gilded Age contemporary of Baker’s, George G. Williams, president of the Chemical National Bank, left a legacy in four words. The Chemical had earned for itself the moniker “Old Bullion” for faithfully paying out gold coin to nervous depositors in the Panic of 1857. Like Baker, Williams had managed to combine profits and safety in the inherently risky business of lending and borrowing. Asked for the secret of his decades-long success, the banker replied, “The fear of God.”

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For expelling the British from Boston in March 1776, George Washington received many plaudits: the thanks of the Massachusetts legislature; the promise of a medal from the Continental Congress; and his very first college degree—an honorary doctor of laws from Harvard College. Unfortunately for all involved, when a representative from Harvard called to present the degree on April 4, he discovered he was too late: Washington had already left town hours earlier for New York City. Credit the Ivy League of old with at least trying to honor the military.

Although there were credible reports of the British sailing for Nova Scotia, Washington could only guess where they would strike after refitting there. Trying to think as the enemy would, he bet on New York City for the exact reasons the British had longed eyed the place: its reputation as a bastion of loyalism and its strategic location at the mouth of the Hudson River. As a glance at a map will show, the British could use that waterway to help link up with their forces in Canada while using its eastern bank to quarantine the particularly rebellious New England colonies from the rest. New York City, Washington wrote, “is the object worthy [of] their attention, and it is the place that we must use every endeavor to keep from them.”

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Invoking Dr. King in any conversation about the act of protesting is appropriate because he is the Henry Ford of protesting. Of course, Ford did not invent the automobile, nor did Dr. King invent protesting. But Ford taught the world how to efficiently build a car by applying his assembly line idea to the process. Similarly, Dr. King taught Americans how to properly protest by applying his philosophy of nonviolence to the act of resistance.

The last few years have seen a potent number of protest movements sweep America: Black Lives Matter, the January 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill, the “Free Palestine” movement, the “No Kings” rallies, and the ongoing protests against the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). All claimed to be acting in the great spirit and grand tradition of Dr. King. But the only thing these have in common with the protest demonstrations of the Civil Rights Movement is that they gathered a crowd of people together.

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—The Editors

As America begins to celebrate our 250th anniversary, I’m pleased to have been asked to write about George Washington’s leadership. As president, I found great comfort and inspiration in reading about my predecessors and the qualities they embodied. Abraham Lincoln’s resolve, Harry Truman’s decisiveness, Ronald Reagan’s optimism, and others reminded me of the challenges America has faced—and of the values that have helped us overcome them.

Few qualities have inspired me more than Washington’s humility. I have studied the corrupting nature of power, and how retaining power for power’s sake has infected politics for generations. Our first president could have remained all-powerful, but twice he chose not to. In so doing, he set a standard for all presidents to live up to. His life, with all its flaws and achievements, should be studied by all who aspire to leadership. Washington’s humility in giving up power willingly remains among the most consequential decisions and important examples in American politics.

After leading the United States to victory over Great Britain in the Revolutionary War, Washington was at the height of his power. Some suggested that he should become king. Instead, General Washington resigned his military commission in 1783. When King George III of Great Britain learned of his vanquisher’s intentions, he reportedly said that if he did, “he will be the greatest man in the world.” What Washington did on that cold December afternoon in Annapolis, Maryland, shaped the foundation and future of American democracy. And he was just getting started.

Washington’s path to greatness wasn’t always easy. His father died when he was 11. Rather than receiving a classical education in London like his older half-brothers, young George had to help his mother on Ferry Farm, where he learned the value of hard work. His father’s death and his own lack of education bred an insecurity. That insecurity, in turn, led to an insatiable hunger for knowledge. Largely self-taught, he became a voracious reader.

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Hosted and curated by fearless veteran comic Judy Gold, the …

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Alex English

John F. Kennedy fucked Marilyn Monroe. Matter of fact, John and his brother Bobby fucked Marilyn Monroe. And you know why history doesn’t talk about that? Because those two pages in history are stuck together.

Alex English is a stand-up comedian, actor, and writer.

Colin Quinn

A man is sitting in his chair at his house and his wife walks up and smashes him in the head with a frying pan.

He goes, “What’d you do that for?”

And she says, “I saw the name Mary Lou on a piece of paper with a phone number.”

He says, “It’s not a phone number. It’s the race number and the horse that I’m betting on.”

She apologizes.

Two days later, she smashes him in the head again with a frying pan.

“What’d you do that for?” he asks.

“Your horse called.”

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The oldest recorded joke may be a Sumerian proverb dating to somewhere around 2000 BCE: “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial: A young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.” You had to be there.

Even if you were there, the first Biblical joke falls flat. When God told Sarah she was pregnant at age 90, she “laughed to herself.” This is the first recorded response to a joke that isn’t funny.

Plato noted that changes in musical taste predict changes in political arrangements. The same goes for America’s sense of humor. Something was shifting in American comedy in the 1960s and 1970s, and sometime around 1980 it changed for good, or at least forever. The political symbol of this change was the election of Ronald Reagan. But the mentality of the professional merrymaker altered years before Bonzo’s gag-feeder ascended to the White House.

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My first novel was published in 1986. It opens on January 20, 1989, as the president-elect’s motorcade pulls up to the White House to collect about-to-be-ex-president Ronald Reagan for the trip to the Capitol and the swearing-in ceremony of his successor. But there’s a problem: President Reagan has gone a bit, well, dotty. He’s still in his pajamas and just doesn’t feel like going out. It’s not a power grab. The old guy just isn’t up for leaving today. Maybe tomorrow.

Forty years ago, the idea of the U.S. president refusing to leave office was a quaint notion. The opening scene got the novel noticed, and the book made the bestseller lists.

I confessed to an interviewer that I was somewhat nervous about how President Reagan—much less Mrs. Reagan—might feel about it. I’d worked for two years in his administration and had known the Reagans, through my parents, since I was a teenager.

Three days after the interview appeared, a letter arrived, franked, the upper left corner embossed in gold: “The President.” My bowels loosened. But its theme wasn’t Et tu, Brute. It was a handwritten note congratulating me on the book’s success. Reagan was “delighted that I was able to play some small role in it.”

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Such peculiarly vague locutions, an adjective without a noun, are everywhere in this year’s civic festivities. We say “America’s 250th” or “America at 250.” In 1976, people did something similar by calling that year’s celebrations simply “the bicentennial.” Some call this year “the semiquincentennial,” which is just as indeterminate as “the 250th” but harder to pronounce.

This vagueness is not a coincidence. It points to our uncertainty about how to approach what ought to be a year of patriotic celebration. When you mark a wedding anniversary, you don’t just call it “the 25th.” When you wish someone a happy 40th, they know perfectly well you mean a birthday. But as we approach this civic milestone, we are oddly at a loss for words—because we are unsure quite what kind of occasion we are marking, and therefore how we should mark it.

So let’s ask plainly: What kind of occasion is “America’s 250th”?

The natural answer is that we are celebrating a birthday. America is turning 250 years old, and that calls for a national birthday party.

This is almost instinctively how a lot of our plans are taking shape. The first image projected onto the Washington Monument on New Year’s Eve was a 250-foot birthday candle. Many of the grandest public events being planned aim to feel like a birthday party.

And it makes sense. Abraham Lincoln thought about the founding this way. In 1863, he opened the Gettysburg Address with words so familiar that we can forget what image they were meant to convey: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” What happened in 1776, Lincoln said, was that a new nation was conceived and brought forth. And he closed by urging that the Civil War might yield “a new birth of freedom,” echoing that first birth at the founding.

Yet the limits of the birthday metaphor are already implicit in Lincoln’s language. The new nation, he said, was not merely conceived and born; it was dedicated to a proposition. Lincoln wanted to point beyond a beginning to an achievement: a distinct commitment, an ambition meant to exert a lasting pull on the minds of later Americans.

That is not how a birthday usually works. Birthday celebrations do not really mark the meaning of the birth itself; they mark the time since that moment—the path traveled, the age achieved, the growth and development that followed birth.

To be sure, 250 years of growth is part of what we celebrate this year. The sheer age of our republic is an achievement. Ours is among the oldest regimes in today’s world, and that is nothing to sneer at. Long life is a mark of health.

Still, the birthday of an older person is rarely an occasion to look forward. And even at its most appropriate, the comparison to a birthday doesn’t capture what we celebrate on the Fourth of July. When we mark that day, we point to what was said and done in 1776, and what it made possible.

What you and I did on the day we were born was not very impressive. What happened in the founding era was. So while there is nothing wrong with a birthday party for the nation, it is not exactly the right way to express our admiration.

America’s 250th isn’t just a birthday.

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Join The Free Press and the legendary Comedy Cellar for an afternoon of stand-up from comedians who still believe in saying …

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Juliana is Jewish, and I’m Christian. We’re both devout, and we’re happily married. Although we were young when we got married and our religious views were immature, we knew that we did not want a secular ceremony. We sensed that whatever compromises our marriage might require, we wanted to hold fast to our respective faiths.

Juliana’s rabbi could not officiate at an interfaith ceremony. In those days, constrained by a strict prohibition, very few rabbis would perform an interfaith marriage. We both dismissed the idea of helicoptering in a compliant rabbi. So, our wedding ceremony took place in the Church of the Redeemer in Baltimore, the Episcopal parish where I grew up, on a cold night in late December.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in 1803 and raised within the liberal Protestant culture of New England. Abraham Joshua Heschel was born in Warsaw in 1907, scion of two Hasidic dynasties.

Emerson was born into his language, crafting sentences whose sturdy majesty shaped the American idiom. Heschel learned English as an adult yet he, too, grew into an extraordinary American writer. Emerson left his position as a pastor and became an independent lecturer. Heschel remained a devout rabbi his entire life, tied to an academic institution, producing books of scholarship in Hebrew and Yiddish as well as more popular works in English.

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Today, Matthew Walther, editor of Catholic literary journal “The Lamp,” explores what he calls the “attic” of American religious history: the Jews, Catholics, Buddhists, Muslims, and Swedenborgians who helped pave the way for our modern religious pluralism. That pluralism, Walther writes, is wild, weird, and inherently paradoxical—and it is the very lifeblood of this nation. —The Editors

In the land that the Native Americans called “the place of the bad smell,” a great city arose by the lake, and in this city was a golden hall, and in this hall, in the presence of the sage who had come from Serendip, the Island of Dharma, the merchant bowed and pledged himself to the Awakened One.

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But as the year winds down, there’s no better moment to pause, reflect, and rediscover meaning. Sometimes, that pause begins with something as simple, and as powerful, as a book.

To that end, we turned to three of our friends from different religious traditions and asked them to recommend titles that nourish the spirit, and may bring readers closer to God. Rabbi David Wolpe, Timothy Cardinal Dolan, and Eboo Patel, the Muslim founder of Interfaith America, made some wonderful—and surprising—selections. Together, they form a rich reading list for 2026. Enjoy! —The Editors

The Imitation of Christ (1441) by Thomas à Kempis

A devotional book like no other, Thomas à Kempis’s great work teaches how we can find God through simple devotion and turning away from material things. The passing of 600 years have done nothing to dim its power.

—Timothy Cardinal Dolan

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I can’t remember when I first heard David Foster Wallace’s famous 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College in Ohio, but once I had heard it and read the transcript over and over again, it was an earworm that I never got rid of.

“In the day-to-day trenches …

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For this month’s installment of our America at 250 series, a yearlong celebration of the country’s big birthday, we’re spotlighting faith and how it helped build our nation. You’ll hear from Catholic magazine editor R. R. Reno on how his marriage to a Jewish woman drew him closer to God; from David Wolpe on two towering prophets of history; from Matthew Walther on the kaleidoscope of American religious life; and more.

Today, we kick things off with the great Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, who explains why the flourishing of biblical faith in the new country provided the basis for American equality. For, he writes, “In rejecting monarchy, Americans were not insisting that they had no king, but that their king was God.” —The Editors

A rabbi and a minister march in a parade.

This is not the opening of a joke. It is, instead, the description of an event that marked the advent of a wholly new approach to the role of religion in society. A rabbi and a minister, joined in unison, comprised a sublime symbol of the role that faith would play in the nascent nation known as the United States.

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Jonathan is the perfect man to have behind the wheel of our capacious station wagon—a historian who has shown himself comfortable in all the centuries of our nation’s history. His latest book, “The Fate of the Generals,” tells the amazing story of the doomed stand that General Jonathan Wainwright and his men made in the Philippines in 1942 and the great courage he showed afterward as the highest-ranking American prisoner of World War II. Even more relevant for our divided times, though, is his immensely compelling account of George Washington’s final years, showing the twilight of the father of our country and his battles against its new (and violently divisive) politics.

Jonathan begins his inaugural newsletter with the 300th birthday of the “forgotten” founder who planted the seeds for the Bill of Rights and was a major inspiration for parts of the Declaration of Independence, too. To get this newsletter in your inbox every week, sign up here.

—The Editors

Happy Birthday, George (Not That One)

In 1825, the year before the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, an elderly Thomas Jefferson received what must have been a most unwelcome letter. Henry “Black-Horse Harry” Lee, best remembered today for being the half brother of Robert E. Lee but known back then for his scandalous marital indiscretions, wrote to insinuate that the credit Jefferson had received for the Declaration more properly belonged to a fellow Virginian, George Mason. Mason wasn’t among the Declaration’s signers, but with this week marking his 300th birthday, it’s time to acknowledge his great influence.

Born on December 11, 1725, Mason was widely admired by his fellow founders. Jefferson called him “one of our really great men and of the first order of greatness.” Though George Washington himself may never have called Mason a mentor, historians have often viewed their relationship that way. When the master of Mount Vernon sought advice on political developments in the run-up to the revolution, it was only natural to look a few plantations down the Potomac to Gunston Hall, where the erudite older Mason lived.

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I can’t remember the moment I started thinking in English.

I was 11 when I arrived at Miami Airport with my parents and sister, one more family among the multitudes seeking to escape Fidel Castro’s Cuba. I knew a few words of English—“home run,” for example, and “strike three.” Beyond baseball, I was at sea.

It was October 1960, and I was dropped, without much ado, into a sixth-grade class at a school called, for some unknown reason, Merrick Demonstration. (What did we demonstrate? To this day, I have no idea.) My father, knowing how foreign students were treated in Cuba, warned me that I would be bullied mercilessly.

I was not bullied; I was treated with amazing kindness. That was my first experience of America, my first immigrant experience. And forgive me if I give away the plot of this story: From sixth grade to this late season of my life, I have never once been insulted, attacked, sneered at, rejected, or discriminated against because I wasn’t born an American. It worked the other way. I feel like a privileged character—and though I love most things Cuban, not least the food, whole days and weeks go by when I forget I’m an immigrant.

This simply could not happen in any other country.

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I grew up in London and came to New York on a tourist visa in October 1975. I was 24 and had vague plans of making films. After running out of money in my second week, I found a job at an ice cream parlor on East 60th Street called Serendipity. I was a busboy and working illegally.

While I was stacking chairs onto tables after my shift one night, a group of the waiters offered to take me to a place they called the Village. It was after midnight when the five of us squeezed into a Checker Cab. The taxi sped down Fifth Avenue more than 50 blocks to Washington Square without stopping at a single light. Each time we approached a red stoplight, it effortlessly gave way to green. This seemed to me, a young, working-class Englishman, a small miracle and to represent a world denied to me in England. The world of easy access and equal opportunity, where success was the result of ambition and hard work and not—as it was in England—of class and the right accent. It was the world of liberty, freedom, and blissful unencumberedness. It was America. The land where anything could happen.

After stepping out of the cab into the Village that night, I was shocked by the number of people still out. At this hour in London the streets would be deserted. As Bette Midler once said: “When it’s 3 o’clock in New York, it’s still 1938 in London.”

Like many immigrants, my desire to live in New York came from watching films. In my case, it was one film in particular: Klute. There’s a terrific scene early on in which the two leads, Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland, are out past midnight buying fruit from a sidewalk produce stand. As Sutherland reaches for some luscious-looking peaches, Fonda’s sexual desire for him explodes onto the screen. This was the exact moment when I longed to live in New York City. But it wasn’t the scene’s eroticism that prompted the longing. It was the idea that you could buy fresh fruit in Manhattan after midnight.

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“In America, you can pick money up off the floor.”

That is what my friend Nata told me in 1987. He had just moved to New York City from our native Senegal. When we would talk on the phone, he would tell me how great life was there: “If you have a chance to come to New York,” he said, “you must come.”

I wanted a better life than the one I had. My childhood was a humble one. My family was poor. There were 11 of us living on a small farm where we grew corn, beans, and nuts. At 18, I moved to Dakar, Senegal’s largest city, and sold jewelry to help support my family. I wanted something more. After Nata’s calls, I dreamed about a place where the streets were full of money and opportunity. So I saved up to buy a one-way plane ticket. I was 26 when I left. My father had just died, and the journey felt urgent. I was certain that in America, I could make enough money to support my mother, four brothers, and four sisters. I didn’t speak any English, only my native Wolof. But I knew how to say “Hotel Bryant.” That was where Nata had told me to meet him, and I would figure out the rest from there.

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