People aren’t colors. People are stories. Their own stories.

When you sit down and talk with a person—anyone, anyone from anywhere in the world, and if you could, from any time in the past ten thousand years—you’re more likely than not going to hear their story. A part of it, anyway.

You may not fully understand the story a person tells you about themselves, especially if they’re from a long way away in distance or in time. Language is the main barrier, of course, but pretend for a moment you could overcome that. Then there are customs and beliefs, taboos and prejudices and faith practices, all of which might be treasured by your interlocutor but may also throw up barriers to mutual understanding.

But if you kept at it, both of you, you’d hear a bit of each other’s stories.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion famously wrote. A very Didion-esque thing to say; aphoristic, hard as a diamond, tinged with dread. And she’s right, of course. Our stories are how we explain the world to ourselves. We move through our days elaborating a narrative that we hold in our minds and hearts. It is both the lamp by which we travel through life, and the mirror in which we see who we are.

Listening to each other’s stories is, in a sense, the basis of all politics. Who are you? What do you need? What do you believe? What are your hopes? Even tyrants need to ask those questions, or else they might end up defenestrated from their palaces, or strung up on a lamppost by a mob, or locked in a prison cell, or any of the other unpleasant ways mad kings and corrupt authoritarians have discovered the end of their reigns. Our stories have power.

As a journalist, I have been so lucky, so blessed, to spend decades listening to people around the world tell me their stories.

Every good journalist is a born listener, curious about others, empathetic, and willing to risk something of themselves in the work. That empathy can cost a person. I have good friends, great journalists, who have been wounded, some of them damaged, by their passion and commitment to this work. We all have our ghosts.

My daughter Madeleine once asked me, after I returned from a week covering the terrible shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007, where a gunman killed 32 people and wounded 17 others before taking his own life, and where I looked into the eyes of survivors, and sat in the silence of the bottomless pain of a grieving sister, and found myself one night in a parking lot, in tears—“Daddy,” Madeleine asked, “does it make you sad to go see sad things like that?” I thought about it. Then I told her, “The day it doesn’t make me sad is the day I should quit.”

Different stories require different ways of listening. Covering American politics is, for me, not about this poll or that poll, or shifts in votes in key precincts, or how much money this candidate or that one has raised. Don’t get me wrong, I respect and rely on political reporters who master the intricacies of the practice of politics. I just don’t have a head for that stuff. I’m trying to listen to the voices, to the stories people are telling us in a campaign in order to understand the story of our country in an election year. That’s the beautiful thing about an American election; it’s a great big technicolor story about who we are as a people at a specific moment in our history.

Right now, the great conflict in our country might be best seen as a contest between two stories.

Donald Trump offers a dark vision of America under assault from within—from immigrants, from Democrats and liberals, from public servants and independent judges, from college professors and trans people, from black and brown Americans (those who do not “love Trump”), from most election officials and from most journalists. These “terrible people” will “destroy our country” if Trump is not obeyed in every attempt to exercise power, constitutional or not, if he is not indulged in every resentment and whim and desire of his ferocious and broken personality. Politics is a fight to the death for him and for the staunchest of his MAGA loyalists.

Trump’s opponents offer a more traditional story. Americans are and always have been a diverse and disputatious people of many backgrounds, many beliefs, many interests. Politics in America has not traditionally been seen as an apocalyptic struggle. Look over the generations of the American democracy, and mostly what you see is an endless, often exasperating, frequently disappointing civic conversation. People listening to each other, even when they infuriate each other. It’s not a mythic struggle to the death. It’s a democratic muddle, mostly. And it’s somehow made us the most successful society in history, for all our faults and shortcomings. We hold that long, muddled conversation precious. Our forebears fought and died to preserve it.

But one thing, above all, makes this democratic conversation impossible: Lies. Donald Trump is the greatest liar I have ever seen or read about; he is a font of flagrant, florid lies. It’s deliberate, of course. Trump wants to plunge the country into a darkness of falsehood, where he can be king: King of the Shadows. It’s been astonishingly successful for him. He spins a web of lies, and catches millions of Americans in it. They hang there, trapped, twisting and turning with every shift in the “weave” of Trump’s falsehoods. He devours their civic souls.

Last week, Trump indulged in another lie, the oldest American lie. He posted a racist image of Barack and Michelle Obama; you can look it up, if you don’t know about it. Trump claims he didn’t realize he was posting the image. Whatever; he’s a man who has not earned any credibility. But the image immediately triggered a huge international outcry—and Trump made the affirmative decision to leave it up on his social media, under his name, for twelve hours. His White House defended it—lying about what happened, of course. They changed their story three times. With every syllable of falsehood, the web was woven tighter around all those trapped in it.

How do they get out of it? How do all of us get out of this darkness, this shadow kingdom of lies?

The truth, of course. By listening to the true stories of our people. All of our people.

And that brings us to this week’s poem. It’s by the Black American poet Afaa Michael Weaver of Baltimore, and it’s called “Scrapple.” I came across it in the Library of America anthology African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song, edited by the poet Kevin Young, a marvelous and essential book.

This isn’t a political poem in any partisan sense.

It’s a true story. An American story.

—Terry

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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedIt was cousin Alvin who stole the liquor,slipped down Aunt Mabie's steps on the ice,fresh from jail for some small crime.Alvin liked to make us laugh while he tookthe liquor or other things we did not see,in Aunt Mabie's with her floors polished,wood she polished on her hands and kneesuntil they were truth itself and slipperyenough to trick you, Aunt Mabie who lovedher Calvert Extra and loved the bright insideof family, the way we come connected in webs,born in clusters of promises, dottedwith spots that mark our place in the karmaof good times, good times in the long ribbon of being colored I learned when coloredhad just given way to Negro and Negro wasleaving us because blackness chased it outof the house, made it slip on the ice, falldown and spill N-e-g-r-o all over the sidewalkuntil we were proud in a new avenue of pride,as thick as the scrapple on Saturday morningwith King syrup, in the good times, betweenthe strikes and layoffs at the mills when workwas too slack, and Pop sat around pretendingnot to worry, not to let the stream of sweathe wiped from his head be anything exceptthe natural way of things, keeping his habits,the paper in his chair by the window, the radiowith the Orioles, with Earl Weaver the screamerand Frank Robinson the gentle black man,keeping his habits, Mama keeping hers,the WSID gospel in the mornings, dustingthe encyclopedias she got from the A&P,collecting the secrets of neighbors, holdingmarriages together, putting golden silenceon children who took the wrong turns, brokethe laws of getting up and getting downon your knees. These brittle things we callmemories rise up, like the aroma of scrapple,beauty and ugliness, life's mixwhere the hard and painful things from folkwho know no boundaries live besidethe bright eyes that look into each other,searching their pupils for paths to prayer.