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12. Voting for the Girl: Some Thoughts on Sisterhood and Citizenship
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12 Voting for the Girl Some Thoughts on Sisterhood and Citizenship Pearl Cleage I, Too Langston Hughes I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong. Tomorrow, I’ll be at the table When company comes. Nobody’ll dare Say to me, “Eat in the kitchen” Then. Besides, They’ll see how beautiful I am And be ashamed. I, too, am America. 63 64 / Who Should Be First? It’s Friday night and I’m sharing our weekly pasta dinner with my daughter, Deignan, and my grandchildren, Michael, age six, and Chloe Pearl, age four. As we step up to the counter and place our order, one of the omnipresent televisions that now routinely share dinner table conversation with you in American family restaurants, begins to review the day’s political news. The split screen shows the two Democratic frontrunners. Chloe orders her own soda and looks up at the screen. “That’s Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama,” she says. I’m impressed with her knowledge, but before I can ask her what else she knows about the two, her older brother says confidently, in the way of older brothers since time began, “I’m voting for Barack Obama for president.” “Good choice,” I say as we slide into our favorite booth and he turns his attention to a drawing he’s working on for my office wall. “Who are you voting for?” I ask Chloe. “Is the girl running for president, too?” she says. I nod. “Okay,” she says. “Then I’m voting for the girl.” When Barack Obama first announced his candidacy, I was surprised because he had so little national experience, but as a person raised in a strictly Black nationalist household where my father rejected both major parties and founded his own, named it Freedom Now, and ran for governor of Michigan at the top of a slate of Black candidates, I took great pleasure in the fact that my grandson Michael could now vote for a candidate who looked just like him, down to the great, big, beautiful ears. Barack Obama represented the flesh and blood of my father’s dream, the same dream so many people gave their lives for, and I felt a deep racial pride that resonated at the very core of who I am. But as a dedicated and demonstrating feminist, Chloe’s decision to cast her vote unabashedly based on gender touched me just as deeply, and made me proud of the role I had played in making this Clinton candidacy possible, up to and including a generous contribution to her first Senate campaign even though I live in Georgia because I believed so strongly that she was capable of representing a national constituency with honor and integrity. Plus, I was married to a politician once and I was glad she had survived the experience with enough of herself intact to dream a different dream and invite us to share it with her. And now here was Chloe, casting a vote for a candidate I respected and who definitely shared some important physical characteristics with her, albeit ones less obvious to the naked eye then the ears her brother shared with the soon to be Democratic nominee. I started humming that Joni Mitchell song about The Circle Game, remembering Chloe’s mother, my daughter, as a six-year-old dynamo, fussing in the backseat on the way home from school because a five-year-old classmate [54.205.238.173] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 03:08 GMT) Voting for the Girl / 65 had told her he was stronger than she was just because he was a boy and she was a girl. “Who told him that?” she wanted to know. “People who think men are always stronger and smarter than we are,” I say. “Just because they’re men.” She frowned. “What do you think about that?” I said, remembering Mary Poppins’ advice about the spoonful of sugar and deciding a trip to Baskin Robbins was probably in order. “I hate it,” she said firmly. “I really hate it.” “Me, too,” I said, glad we were bonding but wishing it didn’t have to be about our shared gender oppression. After all, she was only six at the time and certainly had better things to do then worry about unenlightened little chauvinists prowling the playground when...