In a letter to her future great-grandchildren, Lynn Beisner recalls the day she and the nation made history by voting the first black President into office.
To my dear great-grandchildren,
I don’t know what stories have filtered down to you. I imagine they’re stories of my sometimes outrageous feistiness or of my unorthodox way of raising your grandparents. But if you could know only one story from life, I would want it to be the story of what happened on November 4, 2008. I spent much of the day standing in a cemetery in a cold relentless rain. But it was one of the most meaningful and magical days of my life, and by far the best birthday I could have ever hoped for.
As I write this letter to you on the fourth anniversary of that day, I have to stop from time to time to wipe away the tears. I still cry with joy when I think of all that I experienced that day, and of what it meant to me and to all of us. But I am also crying because I am deeply saddened that we have already allowed our complacency, partisan savagery, and covert racism to rob us of our memory of that day and its importance in our national history.
No doubt you have been told the day that changed the world in my generation was September 11, 2001. While it is true that 9/11 changed many things, the day that rocked the foundations of our world was the day we elected a black President. You might be wondering why the election would be important to people who were not racial minorities. Here is what you must understand if you are to continue this family’s legacy of social justice work: racism and sexism are twins conjoined at the vital organ of white male supremacy—the belief that white men have gained the power they enjoy because of their unique capabilities or moral authority. If you kill one twin you have mortally wounded the other. It may take a little time for the second one to perish, but it will. It is similar to what happens when one kid takes on the lunchroom bully and wins. When one person breaks the monopoly of power, others are emboldened to defiance. So it was not just my ethic of social justice that made me happy to see a symbolically huge fracture in the barrier of racism, my self-interest as a woman gave me reason to rejoice.
There was only one thing that I wanted for my birthday in 2008: an Obama victory. I could not sleep the night before, and so I decided to be at the polls half an hour before they opened at 6am. My plan was to be the first in line, vote, and return home in time for a birthday breakfast with your great-grandfather, Pete.
The polling place for our district was the tiny “fellowship hall” of an all-white church. It was so small it could hold no more than three voting booths. But this was no ordinary church. The sanctuary building in which the small congregation still met had been built in the early 1800s. The plaque on the front of the building declared the church’s gratitude to two prominent families who had “donated the labor” for the building of the church. In other words, it had been built by slave laborers. Inside the sanctuary, above the modern pews, slave galleries ran along the side walls as mute testimony to the oppression that had occurred within those very walls.
The families that had “donated” slave labor and generations of their progeny were laid to rest in a sprawling cemetery located on the north side of the church. It snugged against a Civil War battlefield. No trees had been allowed to grow on that ground so that the trenches in which confederate soldiers had once hunkered could remain a visible scab at which the South still picked.
I was more than a mile from the church when I realized that my plan was not going to work. Cars were lined up on the slick and narrow shoulder of the road north of the church. Three cars had already slid into the ditch. I drove past the church creeping forward carefully to avoid the pedestrians clogging the narrow road. I found parking more than two miles south of the church, where the road snaked around trenches in tight S-curves.
I joined a silent stream of voters marching between the Confederate trenches. When I entered the church yard, I saw that the line had already stretched out of the door of the fellowship hall, past the old sanctuary, and was looping up and down the rows of the cemetery. I expected to find a crowd of miserable people, loudly complaining about being forced to stand in a muddy cemetery in the pouring rain for hours. Instead the crowd of mostly black voters was cheerful.
During the hours we spent inching through the cemetery, I got to know the people around me in line. Behind me were members of a choir who had come together in their church’s van. A young man in front of me had brought his frail great-grandmother to cast what would likely be her last Presidential ballot. We urged her to go sit in a warm dry car while we held her place in line, but she firmly rebuffed us. She had been waiting all of her life for this moment, and was afraid she would be turned away at the door if someone thought she was cutting in line. As we passed various grave markers, she told us about the people buried beneath them. At one tombstone: “He owned a factory in town, and some of my brothers worked for him—at half the wages of the white boys.” At another, “My aunt worked for that family. They were good to her.” At a headstone near the church marking the resting place of a husband and wife she said quietly: “I think they owned some of my people on my mother’s side.”
We were all quiet for a long moment after she said that. Then one of the women behind me piped up and said: “What do you want to bet that one of these fools said, ‘There will be a black President in the White House over my dead body’? And here we are standing over their dead bodies, waiting to vote for the first black President of the United States.” We all laughed, but it sent a thrill through me. I was deeply touched and humbled to be a witness to that moment of pure poetry when the sons and daughters of slaves voted for a black President over the dead bodies of those who had denied the very humanity of their ancestors.
When we reached the place where we were about to exit the cemetery, I thanked the people around me for coming to my birthday party. One of the women from the choir suggested that they sing “Happy Birthday” for me. I asked if instead they would sing my favorite song, “What a Wonderful World.” The man in front of us used his smart-phone to find the lyrics. The long line went silent as the voices of the women wove a hauntingly beautiful harmony. When they were done, the choir mistress called “Again, but this time everyone sings.”
As Louis Armstrong’s song of hope for a segregated nation rang through the cemetery, I was filled with a deep conviction that we were doing more than voting for the first black President, we were changing the world. We were creating a new normal, one in which the highest offices no longer had a sign on them reading “White men only.” And as the last notes of our song echoed across the trenches, it felt as if we were healing the very land on which the great bloody battle for equality had been waged.
That night we ate my birthday dinner as we watched election coverage. During a commercial break, I blew out the candles on my cake, with one fervent wish. I had braced myself for the possibility that we would not know the results before my birthday ended.
My hopes were raised when at 10:30pm the network we were watching began a countdown clock to 11pm. When it reached one minute, we counted down the seconds aloud as we would on New Year’s Eve.
At 11pm on the nose, a banner bearing the words “Breaking News” came up, and we knew that the vote had been decisive. An announcer confirmed what I had felt that morning in the cemetery. The world had changed. I thought of you in that moment, my great grandchildren who will grow up in a post-11/4 world. I wondered if you would learn that date in your history classes or if you would only learn the dates of national tragedies. That was when I resolved to make sure that in our family, the day would be remembered for generations to come.
And so I ask of you one thing: Tell this story to your grandchildren. Tell them of a day when the hand of oppression was so bruised, it would never again be able to hold us in its death-grip. Tell them of a song that transformed a cemetery filled with the shame of a nation and a battlefield still dripping pain into a sanctuary of hope. Tell them of that day so that they will not be discouraged by the injustice of their age, but filled with a deep faith in our nation’s infinite ability to transform in ways that bring forward what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”
With love and hope,
Your great-grandmother
Lynn Beisner is the pseudonym for a mother, a writer, a feminist, and an academic living somewhere East of the Mississippi. You can find her on Facebook and Twitter.
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