Genelle Guzman-McMillan, Angel in the Rubble (2011)
Visit any bookstore and you may be surprised at how much memoir is on offer. Most of the time, there is more space devoted to autobiography than to biography. Perhaps this is further evidence of a narcissistic culture. Many of these memoirs have a short shelf life. They are formulaic and follow a predictable pattern. An eminent career does not always lead to an eminent book. An exciting sportsperson does not always produce an exciting memoir. These days, writing careers sometimes start where they used to end: with some kind of personal narrative. There is so much fiction in everyday life that readers are hungry for authenticity.
There are exceptions. Angel in the Rubble by Genelle Guzman-McMillan (born 1971) is not a great work of literature: it was produced with the help of a ghostwriter, William Croyle. You may find it hard to locate a copy now. That’s a pity. Like John Hersey’s Hiroshima (1946) and Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man (1947), it is an act of witness to one of the pivotal moments in the history of humanity’s darkness. Genelle was the last person rescued alive from the wreckage of the Twin Towers in New York after the attacks of September 11, 2001. As she was stretchered from the ruins after a wait of twenty-seven hours, bystanders burst into applause. So did the people who were still glued to the TV, transfixed by anxiety. What was going to happen next?
I had the good fortune to spend an evening with Genelle Guzman-McMillan in 2011, a couple of weeks from the tenth anniversary of 9/11. It had been a disturbing year. Osama bin Laden was killed in May; Muammar Gaddafi was killed in October. My own mother had died in March; I was turning fifty. The world felt fragile. My sixteen-year-old students were telling me that the images from 9/11 were their earliest memories of anything outside their own families. They had grown up in a world of hostility.
For Genelle, that day started happily: it was a beautiful late summer’s morning. She had moved to New York from Trinidad, had just patched up an argument with her boyfriend and was looking forward to her twelve-year-old daughter coming to join her in the United States. As she arrived for work on the sixty-fourth floor of the North Tower, she thought the sun was shining on her world. It didn’t matter to her that she was five minutes late. She logged on at the Port Authority, the same organisation for which Herman Melville had once worked (see Chapter 28) and went in search of coffee.
Shortly afterwards, a plane hit the building. Genelle was probably one of the last people to understand what had happened. She and her colleagues waited a while, perhaps too long, before taking to the stairwell; they got as far as the thirteenth floor before the building fell on top of them. All the way down, Genelle held the hand of her friend Rosa Gonzalez. The pair had been planning a trip to Miami together. They were both single mums in promising new relationships. They both liked nightclubs. Genelle stopped to remove her shoes and lost Rosa’s grip. That brief pause probably saved Genelle’s life. Rosa was not so lucky.
Eventually a person called Paul took hold of Genelle’s hand and held it for hour after hour, saying reassuring words. He was the angel in the rubble. ‘As I held on to Paul, the pain throughout my body stopped.’
To the day we met, Genelle had never met Paul. Not waiting for thanks, he slipped away as she was freed.
Genelle, who is a quiet and modest woman, was slow to recognise her place at the heart of the catastrophe at the heart of the new century. Don DeLillo’s novel about September 11, Falling Man (2007), begins with the line: ‘It was not a street anymore but a world.’
Richard Dawkins has remarked that September 11 turned him into a radical atheist and, certainly, he has spent much of the time since trying to rid the world of religion. Genelle Guzman-McMillan has at least as much reason to be bitter about what happened. After all, her friends died, and she was left with a painful recovery involving many weeks in hospital and much rehabilitation. Yet, while nations went to war in retaliation, Genelle’s own response was the discovery of peace. September 11 led her to think long and hard about nobody’s beliefs but her own.
While she was buried under the rubble, something shifted in Genelle’s guts. In the dark, unable to open her eyes, she turned to prayer, something she had not done for a long time. The prayer she discovered did not involve saying very much. On the contrary, it was a kind of listening. Genelle began to ponder all the ways in which her own life lacked peace. She resolved to change a number of things and to live less for herself. She had no way to know yet that the disaster she was caught up in had been meant to create terror. She rested in the words of a psalm her mother had taught her: ‘Whom shall I fear?’
Genelle resolved that the only way she could respond to her situation, if she survived, was to try to live in a more loving way. Towards the end of the evening I spent with her, I asked Genelle how she felt when she heard that Osama bin Laden was killed, a couple of months earlier.
‘I really don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’m just grateful for life.’