Look Closer — Our Long Walk to the Polls
“You’ve got stuck in a moment and now you can’t get out of it. Don’t say that later will be better, now you’re stuck in a moment and you can’t get out of it.” Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of, U2
I walked to my voting place this past election day. I put on my fleece and my walking shoes and stepped out into the grey, 50-degree day. I turned left out of my driveway and walked out of my subdivision and toward the elementary school where I’ve voted for the past 16 years.
The fall colors are bold and bright in my precinct right now, and the grey, drizzly day threw autumn into sharper relief. I walked past my neighbor’s sign-filled yard, touting every Democratic candidate, including herself for the County Commissioner of Revenue. I felt admiration and respect for her effort, hope, and optimism, but last year’s election had pushed hope and optimism to the back corner of my mind for most every day since. I hoped my neighbor and everyone else on those signs would win, but I also wondered how hard it would be for her to go back to her old life tomorrow.
I live on the edge of my subdivision and I quickly walked into the slightly older neighboring subdivision, with its smaller yards, wider road, and broader view of the spitting sky. I walked through a precinct that’s still mostly white but increasingly diverse with every passing election. The Latino population in particular is noticeably greater than it was 15 years ago. I walked through a precinct that is a mixture of blue collar and white collar. I walked through a precinct that includes one trailer park and one subdivision where the houses are worth a good bit more than the county median, but most of the houses are right around or slightly below the median value for the county. I walked through a precinct that was considered 50/50 by the county political parties, within a county that had transformed from solidly Republican to barely Republican over the 16 years I have lived here.
I passed out of the 60s neighborhood of brick ranchers and small tri-levels and into the 80s neighborhood of brighter colors, more trees, and more manicured yards, along with more vinyl siding. My voting place lays within the heart of this subdivision. I walked into the school gym, showed my license, and I voted. I walked out satisfied that I had controlled what little I could control on this fateful day, and pushing aside the hope that had tried to peek out from the back corner of my mind. I zipped up my fleece, put on my hat, bent my head into the thickening drizzle, and I walked toward home.
On the way home I thought about sitting in the car while my Mom went into my elementary school to vote in the 1976 presidential election. That precinct was solidly blue collar, also mostly white at the time but with a growing African American population with each passing year. I thought about the first black family to move onto my block in that precinct a few years later. I thought about how someone pitched a smoke bomb through their front door within the first two weeks of their moving in. I remembered standing in the front yard beneath our two beautiful maple trees and watching the fire trucks light up the street two houses down from our own. The new neighbors, a young family of four, were gathered outside in their own front yard looking in, scared out of their own house. I thought about how that precinct is mostly African American now. I thought about how those two maple trees in my old yard are long gone.
Walking in the grey drizzle, I wondered about my grandfather Clarke’s trip to the polls. I imagine him stopping into a polling place set up in the secondary school on the edge of his small town on his way home from his office. I imagine him greeting most everyone he meets warmly and by name, just as he did throughout his life, and then stepping into that voting booth and going against the community norm by voting for John F. Kennedy in 1960. I expect no one he met in that polling place was black because that portion of the community probably had to vote farther out in the country at the school for colored people. With farther to go and less access to cars, I expect the voter participation rate among African Americans in my grandfather’s precinct was pretty low. I imagine my grandfather Clarke went home to dinner with his wife and three young sons and heard about my grandmother’s own vote for JFK and the hope it gave them for America, a precursor to the same conversation my wife and I had on election day 2008.
My writer’s mind cranking up and my pace quickening, I began to wonder about my grandfather’s grandfather going to vote. In the election of 1908 my second great-grandfather probably said goodbye to his wife and rode a horse among the remaining fall foliage and sandy country lanes the four miles to the county courthouse to vote with all the other white males of some means willing to make the trip to vote that day. No women were voting at the King George County Courthouse in Virginia in 1908; perhaps my second great-grandmother knew of and even supported the women’s suffrage movement of the time, but the 19th Amendment granting her the right to vote was still 12 years away. In addition, I believe few if any African Americans were voting alongside my ancestor that day, thanks to the poll taxes. White men with money got to make the choices that every other resident had to live with, even in 1908.
Closing in on home, slowing my pace because I don’t want my fall walk to end, my mind goes farther back, to 1856. My mind has gone to the decade of 1850–1860 many times over these past few years. My third great-grandfather would have been 26 years old in November 1856. He had been married just less than a year, and his first child, a daughter, was well on her way. My third great-grandfather Stephen Clarke may have said goodbye to his pregnant wife after a large midday meal prepared by his family’s domestic slave, a 28-year-old woman inherited from his father who took care of all the cooking and household chores while keeping her own two-year-old daughter out of the way. Her eight-year-old daughter is of an age to be of use around the Clarke house and farm, on the other hand, and may have even cleared the plates from my ancestor’s table when he finished his meal.
I imagine my ancestor Stephen going out to the barn to saddle up his horse. While there he offers instruction regarding the afternoon’s work to his other slave, an 18-year-old male. And then he mounts his horse and rides out the country lane leading to the farm on a drizzly, low-40s day, with the fall colors still popping but most of the leaves on the ground. The maple trees marking the edge of his property are entirely bare by this point in the season, unlike the warmer climate I am walking through 160 years later.
Turning at the end of his lane and after a short ride past his sister’s small farm, my ancestor Stephen begins the long ride past his neighbors, the Robb family estate. The harvest is mostly done and the fields are bare, but many of the Robb family’s nearly 30 slaves are visible working — repairing the out-buildings, preparing the soil for the winter, maintaining the tools, and splitting firewood for the coming winter. My ancestor Stephen does not acknowledge the slave workers as he rides by; they are merely another feature in the grey landscape, like the neighbors’ livestock.
After a four-mile ride to the King George County Courthouse, the same four-mile ride his son would take in 1908, Stephen Clarke casts his vote. I imagine and expect that he casts his vote for James Buchanan, the Democratic candidate for president that favored the status quo on slavery and carried Virginia in the election of 1856. History now tells us that James Buchanan was probably the worst choice America has ever made for president. Well, so far…
Postlude
So my neighbor, who is an immigrant and naturalized citizen, who has never run for office in her life, who ran as a Democrat in a Republican county, won her race for local office. Every other name on the signs in her yard won, too. Many, many of us have been fighting a little more since that bright, warm election day blew open our perception of America last year and sent us into this national nightmare; some brave few people went all in, and some of them won elections on Tuesday, the first step in a long road back. Today I am thinking about my grandmother voting for JFK, because the women a generation ahead of her fought to earn that right. I am thinking about the descendants of my ancestor Stephen Clarke’s slaves, and I hope they voted on Tuesday because hundreds of thousands of people fought a long, dark, bloody fight for that right. I am wondering what I can do to think a little less, and fight a little more, between now and my next walk to the polls. The sun is shining bright on the yellow leaves of the oak trees this morning, and that little light of hope I had been keeping in the back corner of my mind has dared to step out, just a tad; if you look closely you may see it there behind my eyes.
“Remember Red, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.” The Shawshank Redemption, screenplay by Frank Darabont
**Most of the above is based on educated guesses layered under my own imagination; reality almost certainly differed greatly.
