Canvassing in Gary, Indiana - Part II

When I got to the Obama for America field office in downtown Gary, I found it packed full of in-state and out-of-state volunteers. Each of us got a clipboard full of voter registration forms as well as forms needed for requesting absentee ballots, and very explicit instructions. We were also given a map of the particular district within Gary to which we were supposed to go, as well as the names and addresses of those in that area who were over 18 but not registered to vote. They had really done their homework in that office. Some of the volunteers with me didn’t have cars as they had been bussed in from Chicago, so a couple of women standing near me asked me if they could get a ride with me. We decided that the best thing to do was for the three of us to go to one area and divide up the list of houses to knock on among the three of us.

Linda, Mable (unusual spelling, I know), and I drove around quite a bit trying to find our particular district within Gary (the one crucial thing they forgot to give the volunteers from out of state was a larger map of the town) but even getting lost in Gary was informative. There was no neighborhood that was exempt from total and complete decay. Not only were there buildings downtown that were empty and boarded up (and hardly any businesses to speak of -- I didn't even see a fast food place there), there were homes all over town that were abandoned. Also, most other towns in the U.S. have somewhat reasonably well-kept “in-between” spaces but here there was just overgrown shrubbery and land that looked like they were returning to the prairie land that they were 150 years ago. The entire place just looked like an old forgotten town. We asked a few people for directions with little luck; they had probably lived in Gary all their lives but perhaps only knew their own immediate neighborhoods. To add to the confusion, each numbered street also had avenues and ‘places’ with the same number (eg., 13th St., 13th Ave., 13th Pl.). It occurred to me that most other towns name their streets after someone or something, and perhaps that takes someone with some combination of civic duty and pomp, but clearly, Gary’s citizens had other things on their mind. We finally came across someone working at a gas station (Kenny) who seemed very confident about where we should be headed. (He was drunk so maybe that’s why he was confident but in the end his directions, and some further help from the local Obama office got us to where we needed to go).

Our neighborhood was a residential neighborhood with very small individual houses, with every third house or so being abandoned and in some cases, boarded up. People were out and about, washing their cars, hanging out on their lawns, etc. it being a Saturday morning. (Very different from say, a Chicago suburb where people hang out in their back yards and not a soul is seen out front). Fortunately, my fellow-canvasser Linda, on an extraversion scale of 1 – 10 was a 15, and before I had even parked the car she was calling out to people and asking them if they were registered to vote (adding that we were from the Obama campaign as a sort of afterthought). There were a couple of guys hanging out on the street (they were in their early 20’s, one of them with a do-rag on his head) and they told us that they were registered and they then pointed to their friend Albert, who by then had come out of his house and was approaching us, and told us to ask him. Albert, a slight 18-year-old with cornrows, sort of shyly told us that he too was registered. Linda quizzed them about whether they knew where to go to vote, and jokingly asked them if they were actually going to do so on November 4th. I should say here that Linda and Mable were both African-American women in their 50’s and it was interesting to watch the exchange because it set the tone for the next few hours of our canvassing. They exuded warmth and friendliness without any reservations, and they weren't in the least patronizing (despite what I later found out was a huge class difference). The tone was, "We're in this together and this is our chance to make it happen." I don't think we would have had the sort of reception and the open conversations that we ended up having otherwise.

We decided to start off knocking on doors together, just so we could all get the hang of it. (OK, we were all slightly nervous, even Linda). The first house on our list where someone was actually home had its front door was wide open with a baby in a stroller at the door and a young girl (12 or 13 years old) peering out at us. She let us in (the TV was on and a 15-year-old boy wearing just a towel stared at us from the couch) and we asked for ‘Gregory’ as his name was on our list. No adult to be seen in the house, still. Gregory, we were told, was her older brother and he was busy. After we insisted that we needed to talk to him because we were from the Obama campaign and that he needed to get registered to vote, Gregory answered from his bedroom that he was on the phone and that we should come back. So we said ok and left. The next few homes had people who were already registered to vote. Everyone we had spoken to so far were Obama supporters so there was an air of welcome in the neighborhood. (I had canvassed in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1992 elections and there were some neighborhoods in the valley beyond the Berkeley hills that did not want Democrats stepping on their lawns, so I still had a little residual cautiousness)! Our first ‘get’ was not really a get at first… the man (who was outside putting vinyl siding on his house to the sound of Bob Marley) was, he told us, registered to vote but his wife who was out at the moment taking the dog to the vet, had had some problems voting the last time around (the primaries, we figured). He (Roy) called her on his cell phone --how's that for a receptive audience? --and we spoke to her. It wasn’t clear what the issue had been but we recommended that she re-register to vote. She'd be home later so that was another home to go back to later. Roy was really friendly and told us that he owned an incense stand inside one of Chicago’s malls, selling incense, perfumed oils, etc. I figured they were doing alright financially: they could afford to have a dog (and take it to the vet) and they were doing house repairs at a time when most people didn’t have the cash or credit for that kind of thing. Roy, as I said was really friendly... he told us to be sure we didn't come back his way with a trail of men behind us because he'd call our husbands and tell them, otherwise! I didn’t take a picture of Roy's house but the picture above shows what was directly next door to him (you can see a bit of his house on the left with his car). The other picture above is of Mable (with white hat on) and Linda in front of two abandoned houses. (You can click on pictures to enlarge them if you'd like).

A few more knocks on empty houses, a few more people telling us that they were already registered to vote, and then we finally got to register someone! Two people together, actually. It turned out to be a little complicated so we were glad that the three of us were there together. The couple of the house (whom I later found out were not a couple at all but a 37-year-old mother who looked no more than 30, and her 18-year-old son who looked more like 28!!) had recently moved, and on top of that, he had changed his last name. They invited us in (I noticed that they had a computer) and we walked them through the voter registration forms as well as the absentee ballot requests as they would both be at work all day on November 4. There were a couple of very friendly toddlers running around (that added to my impression that the adults were a couple… you know, a family of four) but they weren’t even related to the two adults. The mother of the kids showed up while we were there. She was not registered to vote, and was actually on our list of people to talk to, but she didn’t have the time to deal with us. She had to go somewhere and wasn’t interested in filling out a form, even if we left it for her. It turned out that everyone there was living in this tiny this house together. The 18-year-old was in high school and his 37-year-old mother worked as a dealer in a casino. They had had problems with their previous landlord who wanted to charge them $600 per month for a badly-maintained house, so she and her son moved in with the (other) single mom, sharing in the rent. They were hoping it would be a temporary situation. The house they moved out of, they told us, was subsequently robbed because it was empty, the landlord not having been able to find any tenants for $600. The picture above shows Linda (with the child on her lap), Mable with the white cap, and the mother and son in their house.

(To be continued).