Chapter 19
My dad’s hands were attached to his hips, bunching his shirt around his waist, as he paced the living room.
CNN was turned all the way up. There were so many red, white, and blue graphics, spinning block letters, stars arranging themselves into ladders leading absolutely fucking nowhere, that I wanted to scream.
My dad dropped into his armchair, flexing his fist, then came to stand behind the sofa.
“Do you have to stand right behind me?” my mom said, eating popcorn like we were at the movies.
“I’m trynna see the television.”
John King called Vermont for Kamala Harris, which no one cared about. We were waiting for North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania, places nobody normally cared about.
I ate a fistful of popcorn. “Why can’t they just count the votes per person.”
My dad grunted. “Slavery.”
By eleven o’clock, a cough-medicine drowsiness swept over me. I closed my eyes, still hearing John King’s voice.
T*ump won Louisiana by a landslide. My dad stared at the TV, a frown tugging at his mouth that looked only marginally different from his regular frown. “Democrats are too soft. At least the Republicans got guns to defend themselves. Democrats got nothing. That’s why they’re ’bout to lose.”
Agitated, I said, “You don’t think they could lose because they put up a woman at the last minute who had two seconds to pull together a campaign? Or because they couldn’t just not support Israel’s bombing campaign?”
“I don’t like guns,” my mom said. She sounded like a child to me then.
They didn’t even call DC; our tiny speck simply flashed blue on the map.
Feeling caged, I grabbed my coat and threw it over my pajamas.
When I stepped into the cold, the wind cut across my face.
The streetlamps struck light onto the dark pavement, and an owlish creature purred throatily from a nearby tree.
All the windows on our block glowed blue.
Our living room curtains were parted, so I could see my parents, like stone statues, stuck in their spots.
When I walked back inside, my dad said, “Where have you been?”
I shrugged my coat off and hung it in the closet. “Outside.”
“Don’t be going outside in the dark.” He turned back to the TV, chewing his flaking lip. “No way in heck this country was gonna give us a Black woman.”
When North Carolina was called for T*ump, Jay texted, It’s okay!! We expected this. There’s still GA :) I wanted to bottle up his optimism and sell it for $1 million on eBay, then use that $1 million to leave this country.
I must’ve fallen asleep because I shuddered suddenly awake to the sound of people booing out their windows. Pennsylvania had been called. Softly, my mom said, “He won.”
My dad barreled through the front door in his rumpled T-shirt. His engine cut on, his wheels crunched over the pavement, a nighttime silence filling the street as he drove away.
We didn’t talk about what this meant for their jobs.
My mom reached for the empty bowl on the table.
“Clean those kernels off the floor, please.” I’d never heard her sound so exhausted.
I didn’t even argue that she was the one who’d dropped kernels everywhere and collapsed onto the rug to pick them up while she trudged upstairs.
Cameras cut to Howard’s campus with salacious timing, panning across faces with stony stares, women in pink, crestfallen.
Music played in the background, but no one was dancing anymore.
Miniature American flags people had waved earlier were left on the grass.
My shock was swallowed by a violent embarrassment.
How embarrassing to believe there was any other outcome but this.
How embarrassing to believe I could have more when I couldn’t even have the minimum.
To have believed anything different about my place in this country.
I was too embarrassed to even cry about it.
By the time T*ump appeared, grimace-grinning under a thin billow of yellow hair, I was alone on the sofa.
He promised not just a wall but mass deportations.
He promised the end of DEI. He promised to root out his liberal opponents.
He promised to support Israel. He promised the police one violent, really rough hour.
He promised to make America great, again.