Last week we had to take a road trip (one of many to come) to Arkansas to pick up Michelle’s mom. She is starting to show the first signs of dementia at 86. In August she nearly drove through a restaurant window, luckily, she was not hurt and the barriers out front stopped her from it being a lot worse. The trek is 9-10 hours, once you are out of Illinois, Missouri and Arkansas are red states. I’ve taken this trip a handful of times and one of our favorite road trip games is “count the Black folks”, once we pass St. Louis. We play this game all the way to Mt. Home, I think the high-water mark is 10. This trip Michelle decided we would incorporate a new layer to the game, counting the number of Trump signs vs. number of Black people. In 2020 we would have lost count of the signs 50 miles into Missouri, they dotted the landscape like dandelions back then.
As we passed Six Flags, we saw something I never would have imagined, a huge billboard for Kamala Harris! To that point we had not seen any Trump signs. As we got closer to the Missouri/Arkansas border the giant billboard proclaiming – Trump Won and directly underneath another one saying Biden Cheated for 2020 was still there but faded.
For the three days I was in Mt. Home, Arkansas I only saw a smattering of Trump signs and to my absolute surprise a Harris/Walz sign here and there.
The most surprising part of the trip happened on the way back in Lichtfield, Illinois (way too close to lynch for comfort). We stopped at Huddle House about 10AM for breakfast. Michelle, her mom, her brother who looks like a combination of ZZ Top and Grizzy Adams, and me walk in together. The stares I got may have made me uncomfortable in the past, I can honestly say I used to mute my Blackness and always tried to make white folks comfortable in my presence. Now it’s the complete opposite, I low key enjoy seeing the discomfort on their faces when I walk into an all-white space. We sit down in a booth, the Jesse James rule in effect. I look up and at the next table was an old man looking dead at me with a Trump 2024 hat, orange (ironically) and camouflage perched on his head. We ordered as I watched and was watched by the white senior citizens crowd filling up the restaurant. The old me may have diverted my gaze and been mindful not to keep eye contact for too long, but those days are over. As we were finishing breakfast the old man in the MAGA hat stood up and started towards our table, I kept eye contact during his slow journey. When he got to the table he said, “I think our team is going to win this week”, now to be fair he may have said weekend, but I missed that part. For a second or two, in my head planning how I was about to verbally dismantle this old bastard in front of the restaurant filled with his fellow Trumpers, I then realized I was wearing my bright yellow Chiefs hat and t-shirt with the logo emblazoned on the front. I then remembered that we had barely closed the border by only a few miles, so these people are Chiefs fans. We talked for a few minutes about the team, our team, and at the end he said it might be a close game and I got the sense he wasn’t talking about football anymore and told him it would only be close if THEY cheated, maybe a little louder than necessary.
All this to say maybe the signs are indicators, it may be wishful thinking that people in the red states are tired of being associated with such a flawed man or it could be that they might just be a little embarrassed about their upcoming vote.
