Republic or Death! (13 page)

Key stood on his ship's deck on the morning of 14 September, his spyglass trained on the fort. The rain had stopped, but he still couldn't see a lot – there was too much smoke from the cannons drifting over the water, and it was still too dark. ‘You may imagine what a state of anxiety I endured,' he wrote to a friend shortly afterwards, saying his mind had been jumping throughout the night, one moment thinking the city's cause was hopeless (he partly thought God would allow its destruction for being a ‘lump of wickedness', its residents having beaten those opposed to war), the next being sure it would survive. ‘The awful stillness and suspense were unbearable.' But deep down he knew what the outcome must have been. His heart sank as he began to accept the reality. He had probably just seen his country lose the war.

But then, as the sun rose, he saw two things: firstly British soldiers sailing back, dejected, and then, at the fort, the storm flag coming down and another one being raised. It was limp at first, but it unfurled in the wind as it was pulled higher. And Key saw it wasn't British. It was those fifteen red and white stripes. Those fifteen stars. And the blood rushed to his head, his despair replaced with an elation the heights of which he'd never experience again.

In fact, as Key later learned, in spite of the firepower deployed by the British, hardly any damage had been done to the fort. Some wood had been splintered and a roof had caved in, but just four soldiers had been killed and one cannon knocked over. The bombs had turned out to be more an embarrassment to the British than a threat to the Americans.

Key began desperately rummaging through his pockets, searching for an envelope, his orders, any scrap of paper he could write on. He'd been writing poems and songs all his life, for friends and family, and he couldn't calm the impulse to record what he'd witnessed. ‘If it'd been a hanging matter to make a song, [I'd still have] made it,' he later said of that moment. But this song wasn't going to be like any of his others, he knew. It wasn't going to be a ‘To my Steed' or a ‘To a Rose-bud'. He realised he already knew the perfect tune for the lyrics too: ‘To Anacreon in Heaven'. He'd loved it for years and had even used it for songs before. Everyone knew its soaring melody. The fact it was originally a posh British drinking song – sung at meetings of a London gentlemen's club, the Anacreontic Society, with words about entwining ‘the myrtle of Venus with Bacchus' vine' – apparently didn't cross his mind as making it a somewhat inappropriate choice.

*

Everyone knows the first verse of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner', but few seem to realise that it's the description of a battle half fought. ‘And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air, / Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there', it goes, but then it ends on a question:

O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,

O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Key is writing it as if still uncertain on the boat, praying for victory. It's only when people sing it now and remove that question mark that it becomes a triumph.

There are actually three more verses (like most anthems, only the first is sung now), and it's those that are most revealing about what Key went through that night. In the second, he finally sees the flag:

Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam,

In full glory reflected now shines in the stream.

But then look at the third. It's the words of a man spewing out his anger, his hatred and disgust at people he previously admired. ‘Where is that band who so vauntingly swore [to destroy us?]', he writes, the British no better than a band of thugs. ‘Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution,' he adds, revelling in their deaths. He goes on to call them ‘hirelings' and ‘slaves', saying they've fled in terror, because, ultimately, they're cowards, the lowest of the low. It's eight lines of the purest invective. Eight lines you wouldn't expect from a good Christian, a lawyer and a father of five. The final verse is always going to be a let-down after that. Key seems to check himself, realising that the British might come back after all and he should probably end on a few words to inspire in case they do. ‘Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,' he writes, ‘And this be our motto: “In God is our trust.”'

Key didn't set out to promote his song. He simply finished it off in a hotel when he got back to Baltimore then made his way home. But once in the city, he showed it to friends and one of them rushed it to a printer's. Within days, most of the city seemed to be singing it.

I ask Vince if he thinks the song's immediate popularity had anything to do with the third, violent verse. After all, he earlier told me that Baltimoreans were so angry after the battle, they'd tied dead British soldiers, victims of the land campaign, to fences so people could mutilate them. Any song that called the British thieves and cowards was bound to go down well. ‘There was an anti-British sentiment he capitalised on, sure,' he says, his voice having calmed down slightly. ‘But it was nationalism that made it popular. I mean, this was a war that didn't go as well as we hoped. There were so many American defeats. The Capitol was lost. The Treasury was all but bankrupt. All the invasions into Canada failed. So we needed something that made us feel good, something to latch on to and really play up the success. And this song was it.' From Baltimore, Key's song spread rapidly across America. Within six weeks, it was being sung in nine of the country's then eighteen states.

America didn't have an anthem at the time. It also wasn't apparently ready for one – most people in the country feeling they belonged more to their state than the nation. Instead it just became one of the handful of big patriotic songs you could never escape, alongside the likes of the comedic ‘Yankee Doodle' (actually played at Fort McHenry after the flag rose) and ‘Hail, Columbia' (an instantly forgettable march from the first days of independence). Key simply went back to his wife, though now a well-known songwriter as well as a lawyer. He had a few more children, wrote a few more poems. But he rarely spoke about the song. The one documented time he did in public, twenty years later, he simply thanked people for enjoying it then said any plaudits should go to ‘the heroism of those who made me make it'.

*

After visiting Fort McHenry, I spent a couple of days in Baltimore talking to people about the anthem, trying to find out what it meant to them. Just like in Nashville, most of the teenagers I met saw it as a singing contest. Outside the Baltimore School for the Arts, the place that gave the world the rapper Tupac, a drama student, hoodie up, said, ‘People say they're proud it came from here, like Phillies are proud of cheese steak. But that's it. Boasting. We don't
feel
it.' Then he asked me what the main difference between America and the UK was. We don't have guns, I said. ‘How'd you do drive-bys without guns?' he asked.

But I also met plenty of people who actually did feel the song – people with real personal connections to it. Lisa Sherwood, Francis Scott Key's descendant, was the first. Her feelings for it had nothing to do with being his ancestor, she insisted; it was more memories of her father. When she was a child he worked in New York, ‘but he'd be at our apartment at weekends and when he'd drink too much – or maybe he was just happy – he'd go out on our balcony, on the fourth floor of this building in the middle of Baltimore, and sing “The Star-Spangled Banner”. He'd do the “Marseillaise” too. It was so cool.'

Then there was a former Navy Seal, Chanelle Johnson, whose young son was by her side dressed as an astronaut in a bright blue NASA suit. The boy couldn't stop smiling because his dad was coming home from Afghanistan that weekend. ‘When I sing, I get choked up,' she said. ‘Every time, I'm in tears. I had friends who died in Iraq, Afghanistan, all those places.'

There was a cop too. He was Greek, almost comically so. Fat and small with a bushy moustache, he looked as if he should be pushing handfuls of feta and olives into his mouth, not boredly walking a beat. He refused to tell me his name – ‘Police regulations' – but said he moved to America aged six and felt it had given him a life he wouldn't otherwise have had. ‘I can't explain it, but when I hear the anthem, I try to sit really still. I don't stand up. I just sit, silent, and try to think about what it means. I think maybe I have too much respect for it,' he added, with a laugh.

But the person I know I'll never forget is Stretch. I was walking past a project, the ‘safest in Baltimore', I'd been told, and decided if I didn't speak to someone there I'd regret it. So I walked up to an old man with greying hair and a cracked face, sitting on the stoop outside his door. I introduced myself. ‘Of course you can ask about the anthem,' he said languidly. Then he started to get up, and this small, cracked old man seemed to unfurl himself, becoming bigger and bigger until he was looming over me. He was six foot five at least. And he wasn't an old man at all: he was about thirty. He just had the yellow teeth and eyes, and the worn-out skin, of an addict. Crack or meth, I don't know, but he had a plastic cup between his legs filled with a bright purple liquid, probably sizzurp, a drug made by mixing codeine-filled cough medicines with Sprite.

‘Yessir,' he said, ‘I like the anthem. Now I tell you why. I tell you why. I was born Four July.' Independence Day, of course, a time where the flag is everywhere, the anthem too. ‘You got me? FOUR JULY. IT'S MY SONG.'

He introduced himself. ‘Yeah, Stretch, 'cause I'm so tall,' he said, his laugh giving way to a heavy cough. Then he put out his arm for a handshake and somehow managed to use it to swap our positions, blocking my only exit. Whether it was force of habit or preparation for mugging me, I couldn't tell, but there was nothing I could do about it, so I tried not to worry and simply asked him the question I'd wanted to ever since he'd said the anthem was his song: how on earth could he like ‘The Star-Spangled Banner' when it celebrates a country that had given him nothing? ‘I mean, I know this is rude, but you're obviously poor. I'm guessing you're an addict.'

He could have taken offence at that moment, used such a harsh question as an excuse to knock me over and steal my wallet. But he didn't. He gave me the most eloquent answer: ‘What would I be if I was living somewhere else? India? Imagine me there, man. Wouldn't have this.' He pointed at his cup. ‘Wouldn't be allowed to smoke. It's better to live in the place that causes the world's problems, than one that gets shot up by them.' He then elaborated for about fifteen minutes, expanding on his thoughts until they somehow involved Ronald Reagan, a potted history of the Beatles and several conspiracy theories about the international banking system, but I'd got his point.

He then started talking about the anthem again: when he'd first sung it and why it was important to him for reasons other than his birthday. I know he did. But I didn't pay attention as I could hear the flick of a lighter followed by a sucking sound coming from inside the house. I knew that was the noise of someone smoking something – heroin, probably – off silver foil. I'd heard it many times before on TV. I looked over Stretch's shoulder. The light from the lighter was making the wire mesh of the porch screen glow gold and behind it I could see an obese woman getting high. Her cheeks were sucked in and her breasts lifted up, as if she was pulling as much smoke into her lungs as she possibly could. There was enough light reflecting off the foil to see inside the house. The floor was bare wood. Some of the boards were missing. There was nothing.

As I looked, I realised that scene was exactly what I'd been hoping to witness ever since I approached Stretch in the first place, and I felt so guilty. I told him I'd come back the next day to finish our chat. When I walked past at 8 a.m., there were two chairs outside his home facing each other. I couldn't bring myself to knock.

Despite all those encounters, I didn't grasp the real importance of ‘The Banner' for Americans today until I left Baltimore. I was going to meet a man called Babatunde Ogunnaike, sixty-odd miles away in Newark, Delaware. The trip was actually a detour – nothing to do with ‘The Star-Spangled Banner'. Babatunde is one of the six men behind Nigeria's anthem, ‘Arise, O Compatriots', and I'd decided I had to say hello to him since I was so close. I just wanted to shake his hand and take a picture, to add him to my anthem collection like an adventurer closing his net over a butterfly. But the final person I spoke to in Baltimore convinced me that the trip could be significant after all.

I got in a cab to head to the bus station and the driver – black, thirties – heard my English accent. ‘You still drive on the left over there?' he asked. ‘I used to have a leftie. A Volkswagen. Worst car I ever been in.'

‘Where are you from?' I asked. He clearly wasn't from here.

‘Nigeria!' he shouted proudly. I laughed and told him who I was heading to meet. There was a pause, a ‘You serious?', a laugh just as big as mine had been, and then question after question about Babatunde started tumbling out of the man. ‘What's he doing in America? … How old's he? … You sure he's not, like, two hundred? Anthems are
old
… Why hasn't the Nigerian government given him a job?' Then he just started shaking his head in disbelief and repeating, ‘Wait until my wife hears this.'

I asked him if he knew the song. ‘Of course I know it,' he said, and started singing as loud as he could, ‘Arise, O compatriots, / Nigeria's call obey.' And once he'd finished that, he started on the country's old anthem, ‘Nigeria, We Hail Thee'. He was still going after I got out and had slammed the door.

*

Babatunde Ogunnaike is the dean of engineering at the University of Delaware, and he looks almost comically suited to the job. He's tiny with grey hair, wire-rimmed glasses and pens falling out of his pockets – every bit the cartoon professor. But he's also a man with a permanent glint in his eye and cheeky smile never far from his lips. When I walk into his office, my eyes are immediately drawn to a grand eighteenth-century painting of a scientist sitting at a desk. The desk is piled with test tubes, Bunsen burners and notes, but the scientist is ignoring them all to stare at a pretty woman by his side. ‘He's got his priorities right, hasn't he?' Babatunde says, appearing behind me.