The Day After: Signs of a More Perfect Union

Day After: E. Schmidt – A More Perfect Union

MY FAMILY and friends were eager to see me go. They were starting to call me Scrooge. The more I heard of a landslide in the election, the more I wanted evidence. The more smiles, pats on the back, and thumbs up I got at the pick-up gatherings outside my children’s school or from neighbors in our elevator, the more I snarled for proof, some tangible sign that this election would be different.

Projections and good cheer weren’t working for me. New York, where I live and work, wasn’t working for me either. So I hit the road at four in the morning on Election Day, bound for Wynnefield, an affluent suburb in South Central Philadelphia. With me was a childhood friend, who was a trial lawyer registered as an Obama poll-watcher for the 15th district of Philadelphia, and a stranger, a photographer my friend knew. All of us were propelled by a general feeling of restlessness and the desire to be useful. All of us were eager to see what the election looked liked beyond New York.

By 6:30, we were driving around Wynnefield, noting the many long, orderly lines that had formed at the doors of schools and churches and apartment complexes. We soon pulled up to my friend’s polling location, The Pinn Memorial Baptist Church, where districts 15 and 19 voted and by 6:45 my inner Scrooge has gone packing. I’d been swept up by the volunteer staff of a local community organizer, Yvonne Williams, who greeted everyone warmly and knew everyone by name.

I helped people find the right line to vote in, made over-the-door signs for the two districts, stamped Yvonne Williams’s contact information on hundreds of 62nd Ward city contact lists. But mostly I reveled in the proof everywhere that a community was coming out in cheerful, orderly droves to make history, “to put their hands in the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day,” as Barack Obama put it so beautifully fifteen hours later in his victory speech in Chicago.

Elizabeth Schmidt is a poet and cultural critic. She has taught American literature at several colleges, most recently Barnard and Sarah Lawrence.