Chasing Hillary by Amy Chozick

Author:Amy Chozick
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-04-24T04:00:00+00:00

27

“Saint Hillary”

Flint, Michigan, February 2016

“Saint or Sinner, Moralist or Machiavelli, Mother Theresa or Lady Macbeth,” Diane Blair wrote in a 1996 journal entry. “Hillary, like most of us, some of both and much in between.”

The black block letters on the low-hung billboard hovering over the awning of a MetroPCS store, the only vibrant retail I saw in Flint other than a pawn shop and a funeral home, if a funeral home can count as retail, read rejoice in hope. be patient in tribulation. romans 12:12.

It was Sunday morning, forty-eight hours before the polls opened in New Hampshire and 730 miles away. Most of the Travelers stayed behind in Manchester, but I’d made my way to Flint so I could go to church with Hillary. The water crisis had become a national health emergency, and Hillary was still one of the only politicians, and the only candidate, really talking about it.

I waited at the end of the second to last row of purple upholstered pews at the House of Prayer Missionary Baptist Church. The lead came from the Flint River and the corroded pipes had pumped the brown sludge into public schools and kitchens and bathrooms in homes that had once been aspirational middle-class bungalows but that now dotted the landscape of postindustrial blight. On the drive to Flint, I’d passed a truck propped up on cinder blocks and spray painted with the silvery sprawl of make america great again. If there were a travel poster advertising like a cruise getaway to this previously Great America, it would’ve looked like Flint, when it was white and before the factories closed.

In the church bathroom, as Rev. Kenneth L. Stewart delivered a sermon about Flint being on “God’s waiting list,” I saw a little girl in braids and a white dress perch on her patent-leather tippy toes to wash her hands. I ran into the stall and sobbed. The Flint trip slapped me upside the head and woke me up from my fights with The Guys, my wrestling over bylines, all my unimportant coastal concerns.

I went to Flint mostly because I wanted to see Hillary in a different setting after so many town halls in Iowa and New Hampshire, where almost everyone was white. The Flint trip signified the next stage of the race—when she would rely on black voters. Critics would describe the visit as the most jarring example of Brooklyn’s overreliance on “identity politics” and Hillary’s overreliance on the black voters who elected Obama twice. But when I got to Flint, it didn’t feel like pandering or identity politics. It didn’t feel like politics at all.

A young woman told me she’d miscarried twins. A mother of four said her eight-year-old son had been bright, smarter than most in his first-grade class, until the lead got into his blood. A man pulled up the sleeve of his maroon suit jacket to show me the chalky white rash that ran from his wrists up his arms and wouldn’t wash away. I asked Bobby

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