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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
In the wake of the most devastating election of my lifetime, I take comfort in the spirit of my 96-year-old neighbor.
Nov 5, 2004 | At 9 a.m. on Election Day, 2004, I do what I've done every Election Day since I moved to a street I'll call Fairlawn in North Oakland, Calif., in 1989: I call my neighbor, Ms. Anderson, and ask her when we're going to vote.
"Come get me now, baby," she says, but when I knock on the door of her sea-foam green stucco house, three houses down from my yellow clapboard Victorian, I hear her shuffling to the door, still in her slippers. She wrestles the door open, reaches up to wrap her matchstick arms around me, pulls me tight against her 4-foot-11, 85-pound body. "Sit with me while I finish my breakfast." I follow her into her bedroom. She lowers herself into the Naugahyde chair at the foot of her king-size bed. On the TV tray in front of her is a single scrambled egg, one slice of turkey bacon, a fist-size bowl of Grape Nuts in milk. She takes a bite, sets her fork down, shakes her head. "Everything takes so long now. It took me half an hour just to button my blouse."
Ms. Pauline Anderson is 96 years old. And until last year when her blood pressure roared up and sent her to bed, she was curbside each morning by 8, sweeping her gutter and her neighbors' with her stub of a straw broom, shooing off the BART commuters who tried to park in front of her house. "The mayor of Fairlawn Street" we've always called her, and still do, although since Ms. Anderson got sick she hasn't been convening the neighborhood meetings she used to call when a crack house on the corner was breeding break-ins, when a neighbor fell ill and needed help, when a lesbian couple was being harassed by their next-door neighbor -- prompting Ms. Anderson to announce to the harasser and the entire assemblage, "There's one thing we don't tolerate on Fairlawn Street. And that's intolerance."
Since Ms. Anderson got sick she hasn't even made it to the East Oakland church where, just last year, my middle-aged wife and I, along with 100 of her closest friends -- a lively crowd of elderly African-Americans -- celebrated her 95 years as a civil rights activist, member of America's first black sorority, oral historian, mother, and friend.
When Ms. Anderson can't get to church, church comes to Ms. Anderson. And so do we. In her living room, dropping off a plate of the treats she asks for -- homemade lemon bars, baked chicken, a bag of pre-washed spinach -- I often run into church members and neighbors doing the same thing.
It's three blocks to our polling place, the funky rec room of a dilapidated community center on Shattuck Avenue. Every Election Day until this one, Ms. Anderson rounded up and marched to the polls a troop of Fairlawn Street voters: her fellow widows, all of whom moved up from the South in the 1950s, all of whom bought their three-bedroom houses for $12,500, all of whose husbands died years ago of heart attacks and strokes; her niece, who lives next door; and the rest of us: the 30-to-50-year-old "newcomers," most of us white, many of us lesbian or gay. Along the way, Ms. Anderson would tell us our neighborhood's story: That's the house where Johnnie Mae lived till her daughter died; look how that renter is letting old Ms. Jackson's yard go; remember how quiet it was on Fairlawn Street before they put the BART station in. But this year I'm driving Ms. Anderson. This year she clings to me, her breath rattling sharply against her chest, taking careful baby steps as we hike from her front door to the curb.
