| We arrived in Racine, Wisconsin early in the morning on a Saturday. The four of us met with the coordinators of this signature drive and other citizens from neighboring towns. We were assigned our streets and given our clipboards and sign up sheets. We drove to our location and selected an area to park the car. While the others were gathering their things, I noticed the neighborhood and the few people on the street. I realized I was not familiar with this part of Racine, but I was among familiar people. I took my clipboard and started up the stairs of one house and then another. Fifteen minutes passed before I realized I was spending more time negotiating broken or missing wooden steps and pressing door bells that either did not ring or that did not exist. Cement steps were trickier, and I had to make sure I did not trip over a crack or gapping hole. I looked through taped windows, sometimes sheet-covered windows and thought we might be lucky to get a sheet of about twenty signatures. By the end of my second block, however, I approached a porch not much different from the others. The siding was clipped. A middle-aged man was stepping out the door. I thought he might want to know who was on his porch, so I was looking at his face as he looked at the clipboard I held out in front of him. He was reading. I said I was there to ask him if ... "Bring the troops home," he said, as he took the clipboard and pen from my hand. "You have to see my mother. She'll sign too." He handed me the clipboard and held the door open for me to come in. I stood in the living room while the man went to another room just out of my view. I heard him call his mother. I heard her voice. I looked around at the furniture, the carpet, the family photos, and the little end tables. I felt very young; everything was much older than I am, I thought, but solid and stable. "She has managed to keep home -- home for many years. Then the woman, small, with gray hair, came out to the living room. It is her home, I thought. The woman walked slowly toward me; she is talking. She wanted them home, she repeated twice, before I realized she is talking to me. It took her a minute or two to write her name on the sign-up sheet. I thanked her, and she thanked me as I left her house. Every door opened after that. Hands reached out for the clipboard as soon as I said "bring the troops home." "It's a damn shame." "They shouldn't be there." But more and more, it was personal. "I have a son there. "I have an uncle over there." "My boy ... " These families had members there ... in the war. I met the sister who called out to me. She was a stout woman. "Wait a minute." I stopped and she grabbed the clipboard. "Let me sign that." She was talking. "Girl, you gotta come to my house." And I am walking beside her, down a block where more people were outside their homes. We stopped where the woman invited me pass some children playing on the steps. "That's my niece," and she pointed to one of the little girls. "Her momma there." I was taken up the steps and stood just outside the door. "Wait. Let me get my momma," the woman said. After a couple of minutes, an older woman stepped out. She said she was not dressed, but wanted to sign so she could get her daughter home. I stood talking to the mother about her soldier-daughter while the sister called out to other neighbors to "come sign this sheet. Bring the troops home!" It was like a block party. People gathered at the bottom of the step. I realized I no longer had the clipboard. The woman was passing it around, and I heard snatches of the conversation. "They shouldn't be there." "She went to get money for college," the mother was telling me. I looked out at the people and saw folks never shown on the television when the families of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are discussed. I left thinking that they want to come back home -- those Black troops. Plenty needs to be done at home to repair what has been broken and covered over for too long. They had run from bad to worse, possibly even death. I was sure these soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan were thinking about home, envisioning that undemocratic situation that drove them there. |
| Voices/Dr. Jean Daniels Bring them home! |
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