A Beautiful Sight

I saw one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen in Brooklyn in the early morning hours of November 4th, 2008.

A small note about my neighborhood: I live in the Bedford-Stuyvesant (usually shortened to Bed-Stuy) neighborhood; originally home to hip-hop stars like Jay-Z, Biggie Smalls, and Mos Def. The entire city of San Luis Obispo could fit inside Bed-Stuy's outline, and yet it's an average sized neighborhood in Brooklyn. It houses around 190,000 people, of which about 184,000 are black, about 4,000 are either Latino or Chinese (usually living above the stores they run) and about 2,000 are white. When we first moved here, you could easily lay eyes on 30,000 people just walking around, and absolutely ZERO were white...interesting days, for sure. Most people have been very kind.

Now, on November 4th, I had to be at work at 7:30 am, which meant I had to leave my house by 6:30 (generally need to slate an hour for subway traveling), but since the polls opened at 6 am, I thought I'd just get up a little earlier, vote, and get to work at a normal time. 

I left my house at one minute after six, and started walking down the six or eight blocks to the school that acted as this district's polling station. From a distance, it looked like there might have been some people waiting, and I thought, wow, cool, it certainly does take a lot to get black people interested in turning out to the polls. 

My view became less obstructed as I got closer, and I noticed a line coming out of the front of the school. With each step towards the scene, the line kept growing, down the school's steps, down towards the corner, and then, as I got the full view, it had snaked around the corner for a ways...maybe 300 people waiting in the cold dark for a chance and a hope. 

I almost fell to my knees and wept. These folks, black folks anyway, never felt like they mattered politically, and it would be tough for anyone to argue the fact that they did matter using evidence from any point in our history, besides, I guess, the Voting Rights Act of '64. 

As I stood in line, I could hear stuff like "I been coming to this school to vote for twenty years, and never seen a line! Never even waited" and the whole time the mood was happy(!) and hopeful and a level of historic awe had set in as the sun was starting to blue up the sky. 

Inside, after you figure out which of the three rooms you were in, then once inside the room, you find your precinct's machine, since here in New York State we use these old antiquated machine and switches and levers...each of the three rooms must have had like eight or nine of theses machines, and all three rooms were pretty crowded, and this scene was happening as close as two avenues away, and elsewhere all around the ghetto. 

After finding my precinct's machine, I was in line again, this time behind a woman with her bleary-eyed ten year old, bundled up in his school uniform. When she took him behind the curtain, I realized what she was doing: having him actually pull the lever, so he would remember that he had been a part of history. I looked around at all the youngsters who'd been woken up at unreal times to get dressed and go stand in line in the cold and then in line in the warmth, all being shuttled behind the curtain with their parents to do something meaningful for a change... 

I wasn't late to work, like so many other people in New York, and across the country. Corrie and I went to a bar to watch the returns since we don't have TV, and at 11 o'clock, when the west coast polls closed, and Obama was declared the winner, the rowdy bar erupted in a tearful shout. Everybody was hugging and choked up, some of us went outside and cars were honking with fists raised out the windows like it was New Year's Day. 

People from Kenya to the Stuy were dancing in the streets...