With Black And Hopeful Ink

On Nov. 7, when I traveled home to the District of Columbia, my parents greeted me with steaming heaps of beef, a crock of buttered broccoli, and a side dish of questions.

My mother wanted to know about recent reports that the Harvard men’s soccer and cross country teams had produced sexually explicit documents rating their female counterparts. My father wanted to know about the all-male final clubs, and how I felt about them as a woman.

“Harvard can feel like an old boys’ club, it’s true,” I told my parents over second helpings. “But I think we’re making progress.”

My mother and I exchanged looks. We beamed. Without saying Hillary Clinton’s name, we both knew why we were smiling. We both knew why I was home.

***

The voting booths, tucked inside the neighborhood recreation center next to fields where I played soccer as an eight-year-old, opened at 7:00 a.m. I arrived at 6:30, feeling out of place in an already-long line of lawyers and government employees, uniformly clad in black wool topcoats.

Stiffly glamorous, these denizens of tony northwest D.C. double-fisted iPhones and Starbucks coffees as their ballot-white breath fogged their phone screens. (I launched “Candy Crush” on my phone, hoping others would think that I, too, had emails to check.)

Spots of color soon began to break up the black monotony. Women in bright-colored jackets and scarves joined the line, many towing sleepy, messy-haired children.

One voter, D.C. resident Christy H. Ross, approached the center holding hands with her tween-aged daughter, still clad in pink-and-green checkered pajamas. Ross was dressed all in white but for the bright blue “Hillary” sticker on her shirt.

“I dragged her out of bed early because I just feel like it’s so memorable,” Ross said, ruffling her daughter’s hair. “Being able to vote for a woman for the first time in our nation’s history—I mean, we’re almost 250 years old.”

Ross grinned. “I think when she’s older she’s going to remember that.”

Further down the line, a couple in matching electric-green windbreakers clutched their bikes and the hands of their young son. The woman reached inside her backpack for a drink, swigging from an “I’m With Her” water bottle.

Nearby, Laura R. Wigglesworth, a woman in her mid-forties, waited with her two high school-aged daughters, Molly and Claire. Wigglesworth watched with a smile as her children chattered and interrupted each other at high speed and top volume. I caught the words “Hillary” and “glass ceiling.”

All three sported “NASTY” writ large in black eyeliner on their foreheads, with a Venus symbol drawn on one cheek. When I asked Wigglesworth whether she’d had to roust her daughters from bed that morning, she chuckled.

“Oh no,” she said. “They brought me along.”

***

Reaching my voting booth, I felt a bit let down. I had been expecting something grand and momentous—something befitting my first-ever vote in a presidential election cast for the first-ever female nominee of a major political party.

Instead, I found myself in a repurposed basketball court. The line of voters snaked around a much-abused foosball table and past a dented red popcorn cart, littered with a few leftover kernels.

On one wall was a poster advertising karate lessons, held weekly at the center. A middle-aged white man in karategi, photoshopped in front of a wall of fire, stared down at me. (He bore a suspicious resemblance to the bumbling, overweight volunteer election official Frank, who guided me through the check-in process.)

No one was solemn or grave or silent. Children giggled and played; parents joked. One of the myriad lawyers removed her black overcoat, revealing a blindingly pink blazer that clashed with her red-and-blue “H” pin.

Just in front of me, a mother hoisted her two-year-old daughter onto her lap as she sat down to vote. The two held the pen together, heads bent over the ballot.

How fitting. In one deep breath, I colored the tiny circle next to “Hillary Clinton” with black and hopeful ink.

***

Less than 48 hours later, back in Cambridge, I watched in disbelief as Donald Trump claimed the presidency.

As I’ve done so many times before, I called my mother and waited for her to explain, to make everything intelligible. I’d thought we—me and Ross and the bikers and Wigglesworth and the pink-suited lawyer—were about to elect the nation’s first female president. Instead, we voted into office a man who boasted that he likes to “grab ‘em by the pussy.”

My mother, rarely at a loss for words, told me she didn’t know what to say.

I don’t know, either.

I do have a promise. One day, be it eight years from now or 16, I will take my own child by the hand. We will walk to a voting booth, and we will fill in the circle next to the name of the first female president.