A letter to Hillary

Dear Hillary,

My heart swelled with girlish pride when you announced your candidacy for President. You weren’t going to let the big boys get you down.

I was reminded of the time I pummeled that skinny white boy on my Upper West Side block to win the inspired fear and awe of the other kids who hung out on 111th Street. I felt a little sick afterward, and wondered if he would still like me enough to steal a kiss behind the Cathedral. He didn’t. Still, I held a steady authority in the neighborhood for years after that minor beating.

My daughter will vote for the first time in November. The idea that she could pull the lever, or punch the chad for a woman President inspired me. You were our “El Ro” risen again! When you finally traded in those ankle-baring skirts for pant-suits, I knew you were unstoppable.

And that smile! How do you do it? If I had voted for that war, I don’t think I could show my face—even on 111th Street. But you used logic and a sly wink, and I forgave you. It was like that beating I gave the kid. What else was there to do? No one trusts a woman who can’t get down with the bad boys and fight once in a while. They would never give you the keys to the White House without a little blood on your hands.

I like that Obama guy all right. (He was right about the war—but who would trust a black guy who wanted to fight?) I even went to see him when he came to Scranton. In your “hometown,” he barely filled the Sports Center. Not like the 75,000 in Portland. Having heard Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King speak in person, I wasn’t “bowled over” ( get it?) by his oratory. It was okay.

It was those angry white women heckling at the entrance who really impressed me. They were there for you, Hill. They said—before you did—that America would never vote for a black man. We were doomed to McCain, they said, if we failed to put you on the ticket. That made me stop and think.

I used to be one of those hard-working (white) Americans you talked about in West Virginia. My mother came from Pittsburgh, PA. She was thrown in jail in the ‘40s for drinking in a black-owned bar on the South Side. She wasn’t making a statement, just having a good time.

But later, she joined the civil rights movement in Pittsburgh and New York City. She took us to rallies against segregation and to a Unitarian church where we heard our minister talk about marching with Dr. King in Selma. We grew up thinking that black men (and women like Shirley Chisholm) were just as hard-working and capable as white men (and women like Eleanor Roosevelt.) It was a radical upbringing, I suppose.

But when you reminded me that most of the country doesn’t think like me, I had to re-assess.

Was I going to vote for the white woman who had to fight to be taken seriously, or the black man who had to choose non-violence as a means to peace? And I had to ask myself, what would my mother have done?

I know she wouldn’t have been one of those women heckling me as I went to hear another man’s point of view.

Respectfully yours,

A white woman in New York

- Cass Collins