Newspapers are how I first noticed the world.
From a young age, my brother and I were expected to read at least one of the four dailies that were delivered to our home in the mornings. Sometimes our father merely discussed the parts that we’d found interesting and wanted to know why we were drawn to that particular news item. At other times we were subjected to a veritable grilling about the news in every section. And although our father was always kind and patient, I found it hard to perform under such pressure while my brother excelled at recalling exact details and, at times, quoting whole passages of information. Since our father cared more for the act of learning, for his children to engage with the world, and less for a task being completed in the manner he originally set, I began to read one section of the paper more thoroughly and discuss it with him. Eight pages of international news. Even at a young age I was looking outside my inhabited space, fascinated by the disparate pieces of information and what they represented. At boarding school, I continued this ingrained habit in the free half hour before bedtime when the area around the lectern was most likely to be deserted. And when it came time for students to volunteer to read a selection of the daily news at the school assembly I raised my hand. What had seemed like a chore became a crucial part of my young identity.
Our father’s expectations changed as my brother and I grew older. It was no longer enough to parrot what we read. Context mattered. Was there a slant to what was being reported? Did the choice to place an article about trade in China next to an article about immigrant influence on Russia’s borders mean there was a connection between the two? Since my intelligence is naturally associative, I teased out the implications. Within those pages I found a route through independence movements in countries like Ireland and India, and the formation of new democracies within the African continent just as it was clear that Trump’s rise to power allowed for right-wing leaders like Modi, Bolsonaro, and Erdoğan to flourish. No nation operates independently no matter what the machinery of the state tells us. A vote in one country, I realized, carries weight in another.
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In April 2017, for the first and only time, I had the opportunity to watch proceedings in the Florida Legislature. I was back in Tallahassee to defend my dissertation, having been away for a fellowship year. I was staying with my mentor and his wife, First Amendment rights lawyer, Barbara Peterson. Although I ate dinner with them every evening, I spent the bulk of my visit saying goodbye to friends, visiting places that were special to me. One morning as I prepared to go out on another one of my goodbye sojourns, Barbara appeared in the doorway of my room.
“C’mon,” she said. “You have to see this.”
At the Florida House of Representatives Barbara led us to our seats. The floor below was filling up and where we were in the galleries there was quiet chatter. Behind us sat Gilbert King, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of New America. Later, I would find out that seated next to him were families of the four Black men—Ernest Thomas, Charles Greenlee, Samuel Shepherd, and Walter Irvin—falsely accused of raping a seventeen-year-old White woman in 1949. The Groveland Boys: one of whom was shot 400 times and the other three were convicted by an all-White jury, pertinent exculpatory evidence having been held back. As Barbara made quick, hushed introductions I noticed a Black woman, on the easy side of middle age, leaning towards King. He kept moving in his seat, extending his arms, checking to see that the families were comfortable. Then the proceedings began.
We were there to witness a historic moment. Voted 117 to 0, a unanimous vote, every representative on the floor stood up to offer a formal and heartfelt apology to these victims of racial hatred and their families, urging the Governor and the Cabinet to perform an expedited clemency review and grant full pardons to the wrongly accused. It would take another two years and a newly appointed Governor, Ron DeSantis, to grant posthumous pardons—Rick Scott never took action. Finally, here was a moment, propelled by King’s essential book, Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of New America, that made a step towards convalescence possible. Forensically accurate in details about Thurgood Marshall’s defense of the suspects, the narrative King stitched together with never-before-published-material using FBI redacted case files, as well as NAACP’s legal defense fund files, demonstrated what a writer could accomplish if they chose to expose and correct justice denied. Behind me I heard that same Black woman say, “My whole life I thought my father was a rapist. Like there was something wrong with us.” She would repeat those same words several times, as if chanting those words would add to their already proven negation.
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By assembling essays and multi-media art from many nations about what the vote means in those countries, Art And The Moment is an attempt to memorialize the act of voting by these artists in this particular moment and through history. Conceived in the month leading up to the 2020 Presidential election in the United States, part of the inspiration for this special project came from Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s essay “Things Ain’t Always Gone Be This Way” published in the Nov/Dec issue of KROnline. Told through the lens of her own family’s relationship to the vote, her piece fleshes out more than the intricacies of the suppressed vote in the state of Georgia, it tells the story of education in her family and how the two are interlinked. At one point in the essay Jeffers writes, “I am not a politician or an activist: I’m a poet and writer . . .” Similarly, Art And The Moment is not about policy or even the history of the vote, but space to consider testimony of citizens casting their ballots and to acknowledge the sometimes volatile and precarious conditions under which these votes are cast. We hope to demonstrate the capacity of bearing witness in the form of writing to transform and how it can be a tool for justice. Fully aware that these narratives are sometimes dangerous to tell, at the time of writing this introduction, I have delayed the publication date of an essay because the writer is in danger of being arrested by the government of their country. And yet, that essay will be published—on the insistence of the writer—and our collective hope is that like King’s seminal book that chronicles racial injustice in exceptional detail, the pieces that make up this project will mete out the humanity behind every vote cast.
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My father does not vote. I don’t recall how I found this out, all I remember is a sense of outrage in that moment. How could this man who had brought up his children to care so deeply for the world they lived in not actively participate in the making of it? Hypocrite! If my father gave me an answer and I don’t remember what it is, it’s because he told me some elliptical story meant to distract rather than grasp his motive. My brother and I have speculated often about what his reasons are, and this is what we have arrived at: to survive and excel in his profession—as an Indian Police Services officer beholden to the whims of ministers of state—our father chose not to make a choice. To vote would have meant to favor. It didn’t matter what government was in power, if they got in the way of what needed doing, my father took them on with varying degrees of success and failure. Even now in his retirement he cannot stop challenging and criticizing the Modi government in the columns he writes for various newspapers. His Facebook feed is full of sly wit aimed at the corruptions of the day.
My father will neither confirm nor deny our theory. I often wonder if in this too there is a lesson where one choice is forgiveness. Voting and forgiveness are not so different. They are acts of denial, in a certain way, denial of a candidate, of a narrative. I imagine, unlike me, the act of forgiveness and ascribing respect is infinitely more complicated for that daughter of one of the Groveland Boys. This comparison is fraught not least because my father was part of the justice system and hers was subject to the most horrific injustice meted out. And still, I can’t help but think about how my father built me up, her father was never given that chance. My father is privileged enough to think that his vote can be withheld; all the Groveland Boys lost that right. What must it have been like for her to have spent her whole life being told one thing, possibly believing that dominant narrative about her father—even for a second—when things got hard, and justice seemed futile? And then finally having the state machinery apologize years too late. How do you forgive yourself that doubt? How does one begin to form an identity when you’ve been marked with an act of violence your father never committed? How does one begin to heal and build from that? It is not nearly enough, but I take solace in the titular words of Jeffers’s essay, “Things Ain’t Always Gone Be This Way,” because her family’s story is also about how change is a constant as long as we keep asking questions, casting votes, and telling the truth.