Letter from Brooklyn

I find out the election has been called at 11:30 a.m., because there’s screaming on the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Someone shouts ‘273’, like a town caller, and cheers float from the brownstones, the stoops. One person’s got a metal pot that they bang over and over and over—catharsis after a stressful week and a darker four years. Downstairs, my neighbour turns his speaker toward the window and ‘FDT’ starts pouring out. The song is by YG and Nipsey Hussle, and the chorus is an impassioned ‘Fuck Donald Trump’. How’d he make it this far? How the fuck did it begin? A Trump rally sounds like Hitler in Berlin. I hear it no less than four times in the next hour of wandering the streets.

On the corner, drivers are leaning on their horns. I stop and watch, chat with a man standing nearby. ‘Congratulations to all of us. I’ll be so happy when he’s gone,’ he says, pausing to pull on his cigarette, mask hanging beneath his chin. ‘It’s such a relief.’ He turns to take a call, from a family member in another country calling to congratulate him, in turn.

At the next block, a woman speaks through a bullhorn: ‘How long must we suffer? We suffered four years. Four long years. Four long years. Why must we suffer?’ Behind her, car horns, a cowbell, the countless passers-by stopping to watch and cheer and fist bump. Jahmela Jacobson drafts me into filming her on her iPad, Facebook Live. It’s unseasonably warm and she speaks for an hour, the sun beating down on her, about four years of Trump’s cruelties: his racism, babies ripped from their parents at the border, women raped in migrant facilities, the divisions he’s exploited, the deep, unending, tragedy of an all but unaddressed pandemic.

‘You cannot stay silent. You have to let your voices be heard,’ she says. A battered minivan stuffed with children pulls past, honking in solidarity, small US flags fluttering in the windows, and it strikes me that this is the first time in a long time I haven’t thought of these flags as a proxy for Trumpism. A young man pops out of the bodega and leaves a bottle of water tucked next to Jacobson’s bag. ‘We are not accepting none of this any more. We are here for changes. We are praying that President Biden makes a big difference in our life. I truly believe that President Biden is going to change the way that American citizens and the way America should really be built up.’

When we part ways, I feel happier than I have in months, maybe years.

‘I feel like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders,’ Sharntai Harris tells me. She’s sitting on the stoop outside her apartment with her mother and friend. A beautician, her hair clipped close and bleached blond, a black mask neatly occluding her face.

Her mother, Lasharn Harris, tells me how terrified she has been by Trump’s reaction to Covid-19. Bedford Stuyvesant was hit particularly hard by the virus back in March. She, personally, knew thirty people who died. Because of social distancing guidelines, there weren’t even funerals: just the flat, digital Zoom memorials. The idea that this could be politicised, used to stoke more divisions, was horrifying to Tytiana Payne.

‘The one time when we should have been one collective front, he took advantage of it and split us all up … How do you build a country off of hate? We’re called the United States, therefore we should be united. Right now we’re the biggest joke in different countries. Right now you have people in Germany, Canada, saying we extend our hands to you guys, we’re praying for you guys, making sure you’re OK.’

But it’s more than just relief, it’s celebration. ‘I feel so proud to be a woman today, we got us a woman vice president.’ Lasharn says that last part slow, enunciating each word, lingering on it. Her daughter and friend chorus ‘Yeah’ almost wistfully. ‘A black woman,’ Sharntai says.

‘Who would’ve ever thought that a woman would be sitting in the White House called madame,’ asks her mother. ‘Hopefully we’ll heal again. We’ll fight to get rid of this. We’ll all get on the same page: wear these masks and fight to get rid of this so we can be united as one, prosper as a country and now we got a man and a woman to help us.’

‘We have hope,’ Payne intervenes.

‘We definitely didn’t have hope before,’ says Sharntai. ‘I took this very personally. I feel like, hopefully the world will go back to where it was.’

No one knows what the weeks and months before a Joe Biden inauguration will bring, and no one is overly optimistic on that front, but it feels like this is a reprieve, a moment to celebrate.

Lasharn says she and her children had been flipping back and forth between news stations when the announcement was made on CNN. ‘It was incredible to see Van Jones, he was on TV crying. We actually started crying. He was like, now maybe we can heal as a nation. He said: and now immigrants don’t have to worry about their babies being snatched out of their hands. Maybe we can finally bring peace to … ’

She’s cut off by a car driving by, passengers screaming joyfully.

‘You really just feel happy.’