Dressed up for our Christmas card photo on Nov. 7, the day the election was called.
My dad called me at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, saying Florida had gone to Biden. “It’s over!” he said. “I’m popping the champagne!”
I remained tepid. I hadn’t yet turned on the news. I had headed into Election Day in an almost comatose state of neutrality. The pandemic had taught me that people’s dreams and plans could be dashed against the rocks in an instant, and we would have no choice but to carry on.
I had also learned to listen to my Black and Brown brothers and sisters better. For many of us progressives, the renewed fight for racial equality was a wakeup call to the lived reality of our friends and neighbors.
As fellow Savannah writer and friend Ariel Felton wrote in an essay for The Progressive magazine that reflected on the 2016 election:
White liberals in particular were surprised that the nation would follow a Black President who spoke of hope and inclusion with a man whose campaign employed bullying on the basis of race, gender, immigration status, physical appearance, and disability.
Unfortunately, people of color in America do not have the luxury of disbelief.
As it turned out, Florida changed its tune. I watched as Twitter on Wednesday and Thursday devolved into near-despair. The fact that it wasn’t an automatic, decisive blue wave against Trump was shocking to us, even though it shouldn’t be.
My last shock had happened in 2016. At my wedding, a few weeks before the election, tipsy on champagne, I’d considered grabbing the mic and asking my guests to give me the gift of a vote for Hillary.
In the end, even the members of my own family didn’t.
Nursing my Wine Cube (TM), I fully prepared my heart to be trounced again. That white Christians would continue their deal with the devil in exchange for anti-abortion policies. That white women who had posted black squares, shared anti-racist reading lists, and turned inclusion into a marketing gimmick would continue to support Trump.
Though I dared not dream, a small part of me held fast to the predictions that the day-of ballots would favor the incumbent, while the early voting and mail-in counts would go in our favor.
And then Georgia began to turn blue.
The reason for this was not lost on me: It was thanks to Stacey Abrams, who had nearly been denied a ballot in her own gubernatorial race, which she lost to an opponent who had wrongfully purged hundreds of thousands of voters.
She spent the next two years registering nearly 1 million people to vote. She had managed to keep going in the face of overwhelming obstacles, not least as a Black woman in the South. She had given all of us Georgians a reason to feel proud.
I was left to take stock of just how much four years of bad news had taken up residence in my soul.
In the weeks before the election, I had gone to bed sobbing over the more than 500 children separated from their parents at the border who cannot be found. I still don’t know what to do with my grief over this. I think of the hope it represents to bring a child into this fallen world, only to have your child taken from you in an act of unimaginable cruelty. I watched my daughter sleeping safely and I wept.
Today, she woke up to a better world. The work of caring for each other continues anew.
It can feel terrifying to hope. It can feel smarter to protect your heart by closing it off. But it’s brave to believe that the future can be better than today.
Me, too! Then wrote waaaay too long of a response, so I’ll send you that via email at some point. From Tuesday to Saturday, I kept thinking of us at the March, especially when it looked like — after Trump’s reign of terror was even exponentially worse than we’d thought it could be be then — we’d have to do it again (but with a lot more righteous burn-it-down-iness this time.) Anyway, this piece was inspiring and just marvelous!
This essay made me cry, too. Well said.