Three years ago my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer at the age of 55. Just two short months after her diagnosis, she died in hospice. I was standing on the cusp of my own personal history then--five months pregnant with my daughter as I held my mother's dying hands. Losing my mother while becoming one was so much complication wrapped into one moment that I don't think I have even processed how profound that was even now.
My mother would have been, had she lived, one of Barack's biggest supporters. His life was her dream for her children and for America. I tell her story below to give her voice on a day when we are all seeing the culmination of our speaking and acting come to fruition.
Born in 1950 in Atlanta, GA, I am sure my mother never thought that she would be able to vote growing up. I am sure her vision of what was possible for her, a black girl in the South, was limited. And though I know some will criticize what I see as her resistance to that as simplistic, it is in that context that she married my father, a white man born in Charleston, SC. He was the kind of guy that today people might call poor white trash.
They were married in 1970, just three years after Loving v. Virginia made it legal for them to do so in the South. My mother never believed in the pervasiveness of racism. She always thought it could be defeated, she always believed that ultimately all people were good. She didn't judge white folks immediately. She gave them a chance. This is a quality I inherited from her. Sometimes that backfired on her, but most of the time it didn't.
My father was a complex man. He loved my mother so much, so the story goes, that when she asked for a divorce he refused to give it to her. When she insisted, he killed himself. I remember the day because he killed himself at home. We were going to get shoes. My mother sent me up to my father's attic workshop to get the car keys. It was 1979. I was five years old. When I got to the attic it was dark and my father was hanging from a rope.
As a writer, I often think of how symbolic my father's death act was. He lynched himself, I think, turning the historical weight of the noose back upon his innocent, but white, body. He was guilty of being a bad husband. The weight of love, of failure, of letting down his (black) wife was too much for him. I often think my mother's death began then, the day he died, for she never fully recovered. Like so many she medicated herself--she drank and she smoked herself to death. My father's death took only moments. My mother's took 24 years.
What my mother was looking for in my father was an escape from the way race had negatively shaped her life. She grew up, for a portion of her childhood, across the street from Martin Luther King Jr. (My grandfather was a preacher too.) My aunts babysat the King children. She took to heart Dr. King's message that we should be judged by the content of our character and not by the color of our skin. She wanted to move herself, and her people, into an integrated space. She didn't want to be separate for she knew this was impossible. She wanted union with those other Americans who didn't look like her. She was full of forgiveness.
Yesterday while canvassing I thought a lot about my parents. If they were alive, what would they think of me now--knocking on doors for Barack Obama who I have so much in common with, who looks like one of my brothers, whose mother died of lung cancer, who like me is somewhat an orphan with both parents dead and grandparents also deceased? Watching Obama shed a quiet tear yesterday while speaking of his grandmother's passing ignited my own tears since I am standing on the brink of national and personal history.
Barack Obama, one of our own native American sons, has gathered from among us everything good about our country, and our grubby, golden desires and untarnished them. He has galvanized us to put our dreams on display and to make them real. I am Barack Obama and so are all of you. In this movement I bring to bear all my parent's deepest wishes for me and for their country. Today I celebrate my mother's life while I get out the vote. This America that we are shaping and building is the deliverance of a long awaited dream.
My mother died today 3 years ago. But tomorrow the world will be new, reborn.