Page 74 of 107 Days
When I was growing up, birthdays were a very big deal. My mother used to joke that my birthday was her birthday as well, since she was the one who’d done the birthing.
I think about my mother every day. But that morning she was especially on my mind, since my birthday fell on Pink Sunday, the day in Breast Cancer Awareness Month when churches pray for those who are suffering, or who have passed, from the disease.
My mother had two goals in her life: to raise Maya and me, and to cure breast cancer.
When we were little, we knew that often “Mommy had to go to Bethesda.” We didn’t know that she went to that Maryland neighborhood as an adviser to the National Institutes of Health.
As I pinned the pink awareness pin to my lapel, I thought of her and her uncompromising dedication to the cause of women’s health.
I made a silent promise never to let up and never to let her down in my commitment to that issue.
I was heading to New Birth Missionary Baptist Church that Sunday morning—a megachurch in Atlanta’s suburbs.
Chrisette, who had flown in to be with me on my birthday, was there, wide-eyed.
Chrisette comes from a different faith tradition, what she describes as “a quiet little Presbyterian church.” This was not that.
The sanctuary seats over seven thousand souls.
We arrived as the choir was singing and made my way to my seat past throngs of women in pink, some in frothy tulle or sparkly pink sequined church hats.
There were more than fifty elected officials at that service, as well as my friend Opal Lee, the grandmother of Juneteenth, and Reverend Amos Brown, who had flown in as a surprise.
When the pastor, Jamal Bryant, called on me to speak, someone in the congregation called out, “Happy birthday!” which was the cue for the whole church to burst into song for me.
In my remarks, I talked about my mother’s dedication to breast cancer research, and then I turned to one of my favorite Scriptures, Luke 10:29–37, the parable of the Good Samaritan.
To me, it is the antithesis of the corrosive “otherizing” message, calling on us to look at a stranger and see a neighbor, and then to love that neighbor as ourselves.
Many years earlier, Pastor Bryant and I had been on a panel together, celebrating emerging Black leaders.
The panel before ours was made up of senior leaders, notable men and women like Harry Belafonte and Sheila Jackson Lee.
Jamal and I waited in the wings as they talked on.
And on. Like a living metaphor, the old guard would not get off the stage.
Jamal and I had shared a laugh about that.
In his sermon, he called on the men in the congregation, in particular, to vote for me.
“It takes a real man to support a woman,” he said.
Men “who are not intimidated by an educated woman.” Echoing the words of my own pastor when he had prayed with us two months earlier, he said I was born for a time such as this.
Then he asked that vast congregation to move their right hand toward me and pray over me for strength in these last weeks of the campaign.
There is so much love in that tradition.
The people in that congregation understood very well the forces working against me.
I could feel the power of their prayer for my protection.
Brimming with the emotion of the moment as I stood under those sheltering hands, I recalled the words of Isaiah: “No weapon formed against you shall prosper, And every tongue which rises against you in judgment You shall condemn.”
The day before, Trump had called me “a shit vice president.” It was the same speech at a rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, in which he’d lauded the penis size of Arnold Palmer, to the distress of the late golfer’s daughter.
His ravings were becoming increasingly unhinged.
I wish he understood that in trying to demean me, he instead demeaned the office he sought to hold.
From New Birth Missionary Baptist we headed across town to a Souls to the Polls event being organized at a smaller church, Divine Faith Ministries.
When I arrived, Stevie Wonder was singing and speaking to the congregation, warning of the perils so clearly set out in the Project 2025 plan.
(Trump was still saying he had “nothing to do” with it, and yet as president he has moved to implement its agenda with stunning speed.)
An item I wouldn’t have even imagined putting on my bucket list was having Stevie Wonder sing “Happy Birthday” to me, but it happened that afternoon.
And then Reverend Raphael Warnock rose to address the congregation.
He also spoke of the need for Black men to support me, saying he didn’t believe the rumors that they’d be voting for the other guy.
“The real enemy,” he said, “is not Trump. It’s not showing up.
” There was something in the way he looked at me, so caring and so knowledgeable.
It was a look from a friend that expressed gratitude for all that he knew I was going through.
Extreme highs and extreme lows—I wouldn’t allow myself to fully experience them.
I refused to ride that roller coaster. I couldn’t, for the sake of all those people turning up at my rallies, allow myself to dwell on my own emotions.
There would be time later, I told myself, to reflect. I had to get on with the business.
And then Reverend Warnock led the crowd in a chant: “Real men vote.”
I had one more stop in Atlanta, to tape an interview with Reverend Al Sharpton that would air on MSNBC that night. He had founded the National Action Network, one of the biggest civil rights organizations in the country and an effective advocate for voting rights.
I had known Reverend Sharpton for many years, working with him for criminal justice reform, praying with him at funerals for young Black men killed in police shootings.
He was aware of my record as a prosecutor and how it had been mischaracterized.
When I became a district attorney, this country was in an even worse place than it is now on criminal justice.
I was one of the first elected progressive district attorneys, looking for ways to keep nonviolent offenders out of jail rather than put them in it.
I didn’t seek jail time for simple marijuana offenses.
My Back on Track initiative, connecting offenders with services and jobs, and also taking care of their mental health by doing things like hooking them up with counseling and gym memberships, worked so well it became a model for other jurisdictions.
It is true that prosecution rates for violent crime increased on my watch.
If you rape a woman, molest a child, or take a life, consequences should be serious and swift. I don’t apologize for that.
Although since becoming top of the ticket, we’d improved our standing with Black men by 20 points, some polls showed a slight drift. The trope that I’d been a punitive prosecutor was dusted off in explanation. Reporters seemed to love that narrative.
I was particularly grateful to the talented actor and comedian D.
L. Hughley, a member of the Divine Nine fraternity Omega Psi Phi, for pushing back on it so strongly.
He apologized in every forum he could, and eventually at the podium of the Democratic National Convention, for having formerly mischaracterized my record.
“I feel repentant in the fact that I was so strident against a really amazing woman, and it doesn’t matter how much you apologize or what forum you use…
it’s hard to pull your knife out of somebody,” he told Don Lemon in one of the many interviews he did during the campaign.
“Mostly I don’t understand how it is I made those assertions without even looking” into it.
I certainly didn’t think I was entitled to anyone’s vote.
In fact, I resented the assumption that Democrats, me in particular, would have certain votes in our back pocket.
I knew very well that I had no more right to the vote of a Black man than to anyone else’s vote.
I knew I would have to argue my case and earn those votes. Every single one.
That afternoon, when I climbed the steps to the plane, I discovered it had been decorated in streamers.
My team on board were wearing gold party hats and presented me with a deliciously rich German chocolate cake, my favorite birthday cake.
They had red velvet cupcakes for the press.
There was also a big helium balloon with fat numerals: 60.
My team knew that I stopped counting birthdays a long time ago.
So I looked at them with a big smile when I landed my stiletto heel in the middle of that balloon. Then I went to find my Uggs.
Throughout the flight, I was looking forward to a special evening with Doug. Though we were apart a lot those days, campaigning in different cities, for my birthday our staff conspired so that we’d meet up in Philadelphia. I was wondering what he’d planned for our evening.
The simple answer: Nothing. Not a thing.
Doug had been keeping to his own grueling schedule and had flown in from a campaign event in Michigan. He was tired and preoccupied. What I didn’t realize: the attacks on me and the many personal assaults he’d been experiencing were finally taking a toll.
He hadn’t put any thought into where we’d stay that night, so staff had picked a place for us that they thought would be a bit more special than the usual campaign hotel.
It turned out to be a bland establishment whose red-and-black decor looked like it hadn’t been redone since the ’70s.
The only distinguishing feature of the room was its larger size, but the curtains were broken.
Storm, knowing how much I love good food, had picked two possible restaurants from which to order dinner.
She thought it would be nice if the meal was a bit of a surprise for me.
So, on the plane, she knocked on Doug’s door to ask him to choose the menu.
He’d shrugged and told her to ask me. So she picked the menu herself.
Ordered a cake. Dressed the table with candles. My girlfriends had sent flowers.
Doug at least had thought to get a gift for me.
It was a necklace by a designer I admired from Ojai, California, Jes MaHarry, the same designer who’d made the piece he’d chosen for my anniversary gift.
This one featured a set of baroque pearls nestled in a gold setting.
When I turned it over, I saw that the pearls’ backing had been engraved with the date.
How thoughtful, to commemorate the milestone of my big birthday. But then I looked closer.
The date was not my birthday. It was the date of our wedding anniversary.
He’d obviously intended to give me both pieces on our anniversary, until it occurred to him that by repurposing one piece, he could kill two birds with one stone.
He could practice thrift and also save himself the bother of shopping for a birthday gift.
I went to take a bath. It’s one of the things I did at the end of those long days to help me slow down enough to get to sleep.
In the warm steam, I managed to relax and get over my disappointment.
I was about to climb out of the tub when I noticed that all the bath towels were hanging on the far side of the room, unreachable.
I called to Doug to ask him to bring me one.
No answer. He was in the other room, watching the Dodgers eliminate the Mets in the playoffs.
He couldn’t hear me over the television. I called his phone.
His answer: a casual “What’s up?”
Really?! It was a bridge too far.
And then we got into it. The stress had finally gotten to both of us. It was one of those fights that every married couple has had.
But we weren’t every married couple.
Doug stopped the argument cold. As soon as his words were out, the truth of them landed on me like a bucket of ice water.
“ We can’t turn on each other.”
With the hits coming from every direction, we had to stay united. Back-to-back, swords raised against all outside attacks. We had to protect each other, be each other’s pillar of strength, givers and receivers of patience and unconditional love.
I noted earlier that Storm speaks bluntly but always with correct protocol.
The next day she told Doug, “Mr. Second Gentleman, you have to fix this.” She handed him a set of note cards.
She’d numbered them one through five, for the nights we’d be apart through the end of the campaign.
She instructed him to write a note on each one.
From then till the election, no matter what city each of us had landed in, at the end of the day I would find a note on my pillow, in Doug’s chicken scratch, telling me how much he loved me.