I have been thinking about a woman whose name I don’t know. I may have known it at the time of our encounter, that seems likely, but I’ve long since forgotten it. My friend Jane Kirkpatrick, the NYT bestselling novelist, says when she’s writing a book she doesn’t research names. She calls her characters either Mary or John. She waits until later to research names for the time period she’s writing about and changes Mary and/or John’s names. So for the purpose of this story, let’s call the woman I met Miss Mora.

She lives in my hometown of Columbus, Georgia, Miss Mora does. The day we met was much like today – sunny and warm but with a bite of autumn chill in the air. The year was 2024 and I was canvassing, along with my friend Jane Wilson, on behalf of presidential candidate Kamala Harris. We were working the Carver Heights neighborhood.

If you have read Theo of Golden, you have some notion of my hometown because Golden is a fictionalized version of Columbus. The author and I share the same hometown, but there is nothing in Theo of Golden that reflects Carver Heights.

A bit of history: Columbus/Golden is now and has always been throughout my lifetime a very diverse, some might say polarized, community. There is a definite white/black divide that pretty much runs along Macon Road. The further north of Macon Road you go, the whiter it gets. The further south, the blacker. And that divide as Isabel Wilkerson so rightly notes in her book Caste is primarily economic.

Carver Heights was from its very inception designed to be a black neighborhood for low-to-just-barely-making-it families. Over 100,000 Black soldiers were stationed at nearby Fort Moore (Benning) during the course of World War II. Once the war ended, those soldiers had access to veteran loans via the GI Bill. However, since it was perfectly legal at the time to discriminate against Blacks and Jews, many banks would not issue home loans to blacks in white neighborhoods.

Carver Heights was designed specifically for Blacks, a deal negotiated between Columbus’s black and white civic leaders. It was and remains home to families of black veterans and active duty military members, and laborers, as well as retired folks and unemployed or underemployed youth.

Miss Mora lives in one of the post-war homes. There’s two bedrooms, a small kitchen and sitting room and one bath, about a 1,000 square feet. During our visit on that October afternoon in 2024, Miss Mora’s face was hidden in the darkness of her screened-in-porch. I stood on the front stoop as we swapped stories. She was worried about me, a white woman, going door-to-door in the Carver Heights neighborhood.

“It ain’t safe for you to be out here,” she said.

I responded that people had been very welcoming of me. Besides, I added, I’d spent my early years in a neighborhood on the south side of Macon Road. Miss Mora then told me a chilling story of how her son had been gunned down in broad daylight on the very street where I was canvassing.

“Police never did do anything about it,” she said. “Nobody was never arrested for it.”

“Did they not investigate who killed your son?” I asked.

“They didn’t care,” she said. She’d been home when her son was gunned down. She’d heard the pop-pop-pop of the gun. “I got into the bathtub.”

“The bathtub?” I inquired.

“Yes,” she explained. “For protection.” In case a bullet came through the walls of her post-war home. She was safe. Her son was not.

Other than a brief stay in Chicago during her working years, Miss Mora has lived in Carver Heights nearly her whole life. It used to be a neighborhood where a person knew their neighbors, neighbors who took care of one another, a safe neighborhood. Miss Mora doesn’t feel safe enough anymore to even open the screen door between us.

I didn’t blame her.

Her circle is small now. The only trips she makes are to church, the grocers and the doctors.

When we spoke Miss Mora has already turned in her ballot, like most everyone I spoke to that day in Carver Heights. Miss Mora and her neighbors, the ones she no longer knows, were hopeful that for the first time in their lives a Black woman was going to be elected president. We were all so hopeful. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz were going to build a better America. They were going to build a country of communities who cared for one another, a country of communities where everyone belonged.

But 90 million voters who hadn’t canvassed for a single candidate, hadn’t stood on the stoop of the home of a woman suffering from diabetes and mourning the death of her only son gunned down, couldn’t be bothered to vote. They understood that Trump was a danger to our country and our way of life, so there was no way they were going to vote for that bawbag of a bloated beggar. But no way would they bother to vote for a woman, and a black woman at that, so they just didn’t vote.
And nearly everyday since, I’ve mourned for the country I can no longer trust.

Not a day goes by that I don’t think of Miss Mora and the people I met on those days Jane Wilson and I went out and canvassed for Kamala Harris and TIm Walz.

What stays with me is how the people of Carver Heights have learned to reach for hope even as despair forms dark thunder clouds over them, and as 90 million Americans didn’t care enough to protect and care for Miss Mora and her neighbors from the demented and diminished man destroying our country.

Karen Spears Zacharias is author of After the Flag has been Folded (HarperCollins).