My brother's grave in Georgia is covered by pine needles and cones, thick magnolia leaves and grenade-like magnolia seedpods. As I lie here next to it and think about him, yellowjackets hover around my head and tiny black ants crawl through the sparsely vegetated red dirt—partly the result of a two-year drought in the South that is seldom spoken of in the national news. In the distance, the kudzu seems to be the only thing growing, inching toward the sprawl of outer Atlanta like the Blob.
Jeb was five years older than I, a hippy intellectual who got out of the South as fast as he could, joining the Peace Corps and being posted to Afghanistan and Thailand in the 1970s. Outside of the profound influence his album and book collection had on shaping my worldview, Jeb seemed a stranger to me until we got to know each other through letters during his globetrotting years. I am 14 years older than he was when he died, and now his grave serves as an anchor to my sisters and myself in a place of endless change.
Change is indeed coming to Georgia, I learned this week on a visit home. Change is coming to the South—this time, change for the better. The demise of the Republican Party is like a virus spreading through the Southern body politic. It is like the slow-moving kudzu that descends on the sprawl of Greater Atlanta. A state where black people were lynched for little more than the color of their skins stands on the verge of giving its electoral votes to a black man. Georgia may not get to that mountaintop this November, but it is mighty close, and that in itself is a minor miracle.
This much seems clear: the Republican incumbent Senator (Saxby Chambliss) is going to lose his seat to the mild-mannered Jim Martin, a relative novice, who happens to be a Vietnam veteran. Chambliss, you may recall, is the guy who in the last election maligned the patriotism of incumbent Sen. Max Cleland, who lost three limbs in Vietnam. Chambliss, like most of the other saber-rattling Republicans who've wrecked our nation, never served in uniform. This was considered one of the safest states for the Republican Party, standing behind only three states in its Republicanism.
My friend Steve Carmichael, a documentary filmmaker in Atlanta, nearly broke down in tears this week when he told me about growing up in pre-civil rights Alabama. Steve, a white man in his 60s, is working the phones for the Obama campaign. He has already voted, as have 40 percent of all black voters in Georgia, so that he can have his election day free to shuttle people to the polls. People in Georgia who have been eligible to vote for half their lives or more are voting for the first time in this election.
"I never thought I'd live long enough to see this," he tells me. "We have to do this, as a nation, to get past this stain on our souls. That the best person for the job of our president happens to have black skin will never matter again after this. And, next, a woman must be elected, and an Asian and so on&"
We all saw and heard frightening scenes of racism growing up in the South, but Steve saw the worst of the worst: fire hoses, police dogs, National Guardsmen, bombed black churches, white sheets hiding the faces of grown white men whose idea of a Christian mission was to scare the bejesus out of a black family. It may be hard for people in New England to understand how these latest changes in the political landscape, seemingly small up here, bespeak a profound shift in the American character.
National problems will never be solved overnight, of course—and especially not the profound problems the Bush and Cheney years have saddled us with. But, as I learned on my trip back in time to Georgia, the unifying power of the Obama campaign has done some things that I did not think were possible.
I only wish my brother could be here to see this for himself.
