Page 68 of 107 Days
It was Doug’s birthday.
He and I were born seven days apart. We joke that he dropped down to Earth to check out the situation a week before I arrived.
We are both Libras, and friends who believe in astrology say it is totally unsurprising that we spend half an hour to an hour weighing the pros and cons of which TV show we will watch, and by the time we’ve settled it, it’s time to go to bed.
Doug started his birthday campaigning in Pennsylvania. His team had cupcakes and balloons, but the real birthday gift was having our daughter, Ella, at his side that day, campaigning with him.
I was in church at Koinonia Christian Center in Greenville, North Carolina, telling the congregation how inspired I’d been by a man from Hope Springs, Eddie, who had jumped into floodwaters to pull a woman to safety during Hurricane Helene.
He had told me he didn’t feel he had a choice.
I told the congregation, “Of course he had a choice… His choice was, in the words of Isaiah, to be ‘a refuge for the needy in their distress.’?”
After church I spoke at a rally and then had a meeting with Black farmers.
When pundits talk about rural America, the picture they paint is white.
But in the South especially, some rural counties are majority Black, including long-standing farming families who have persevered on the land for generations despite discrimination that began just after Reconstruction and continued right into this century.
Black farmers never got their forty acres and a mule, the promised reparation for their years of enslavement and the wealth their stolen labor had created for this country.
Worse, they were systematically discriminated against by governments both local and federal.
The US Department of Agriculture has only in recent years examined its shameful history of denying credit and subsidies to Black farmers while providing them to whites.
This was especially damaging in the crucial years of early-twentieth-century agricultural industrialization, when white farmers received subsidies and credit to buy the new machinery that would increase efficiency and raise yields.
The Inflation Reduction Act, for which I was the tiebreaking vote, provided funds to begin to compensate any farmer who had been discriminated against by the USDA.
The farmers I spoke with that day were resilient elderly couples and also young farmers full of ideas on how to get their fresh produce where it was needed, into urban food deserts.
On the front lines of the climate crisis, farmers see more clearly than anyone the changes in the frost-free date, growing seasons, pests. They were using high-tech methods to make water and fertilizer use more efficient.
We talked about the potential of city farms and of giving urban youth a chance to experience work on the land and learn agricultural skills, while incorporating the tech these young people already understood with the traditions of farming.
Our neighbor Mrs. Shelton had a sister who had a farm.
Maya and I would go to Aunt Bea’s to help pick up fallen plums in her orchard.
I was lucky, as a city kid, to have that experience, to learn the labor that brings us our food.
These were programs I was intent to support as president.
I knew that Doug would arrive back to the residence before I could get there, so I had the staff drape the entrance with a banner saying HAPPY BIRTHDAY DOUGIE .
I have to confess that since I didn’t get home till just after 7:00 p.m., I got a little help with the prep for his celebratory dinner. It was his favorite menu: chicken parm with spaghetti, followed by key lime pie.
I had bought his gift via FaceTime with his favorite menswear store in San Francisco. It was a sports coat, black and gray.
He looked great in it.