My paternal grandmother was very sparing with her words. She was always the last person to intervene in a discussion. Most often, she stayed quiet, despite the many questioning glances that were directed at her. Her silence irritated Uncle Abada, who was considered the head of the family because he was the first son.
Tired of waiting for her to say something, he would make the decision which he felt was in the best interest of the family. His mother didn’t say a word. “Voué,” which translates to “Friend”, as everyone called my grandmother, would play with her pipe (yes, in my village women used pipes to smoke a therapeutic herb), a gesture I came to interpret as her way of indicating that the decision was the wrong one. But Uncle Abada was oblivious. He strived in exchanges. He resented silence.
My father also dreaded his mother’s silence because it could be interpreted in different ways. Everyone saw and read into it what suited them, even if deep down they all seemed to think that it expressed disagreement. When Voué opened her mouth, every word was dissected to uncover any trace of wisdom. Most of the times, it was just plain, simple and straightforward. She enjoyed watching them scramble. She tortured them. She used to wink at me, inviting me to share in her pleasure. My grandma was deliciously facetious.
My uncle and father, who respected our traditions, wanted, like most boys in our tribes, to please their mother. Let’s just say that they didn’t want to upset her, because a single negative word from her could bring dishonor and bad luck into their lives, they believed. Over time, this desire had become stronger because they had all married women that she disliked. It was said that one could anger one’s father but not one’s mother because she held the keys to their happiness. In our traditions, we owe everything to our mothers. In our tribe, ignoring the rejection of the bride by the groom’s mother was seen as sacrilege. My father’s and Uncle Abada’s excuse was that they had given up great loves in the past because their mother had disapproved of the women in question. This was particularly the case from my father with my mother.
When Voué visited Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon where we lived during my childhood, my siblings and I would go to see her despite the fact that we were living with our mother. My parents had separated when I was less than three years old. We lived with our mother for most of our childhood. But for my grandmother, my brother and I were “hers” because we were boys. We were the living sign that her lineage would not die.
I had never seen Voué angry. I had never seen her raise her gravelly voice, which could be recognized among a thousand women. She always wore her Kaba Ngondo or Kaba, which is a traditional outfit made of fabric with emblems, worn by women in Cameroon. During one of her visits when I was eight years old, my father and his second wife had done everything to please Voué but she had avoided eating the food that was given to her. One evening, my father got fed up and asked her if there was a problem (even though he knew the problem was that his mother didn’t like his wife).
“Actually, there is one,” Voué replied.
Everyone present, including my father, was surprised to hear her verbally express her discontent.
“What is it?” my father asked.
“Your wife,” grandma said. “It is either her or me. Make your decision. I carried you in my womb and I think I know what’s best for you. Certainly not her,” she replied. She got up and disappeared into the bedroom.
She was heard mumbling.
I had never seen my father so miserable. After a few minutes he followed her.
“If I had been told that my own son would throw me out on the street for a woman, I would probably have had an abortion,” Voué was shouting from the bedroom where she burst out and threw herself on the floor. She took off her Kaba. My aunties threw themselves on her to prevent her from removing her underwear. Uncle Abada covered his face with his hands, while ordering us kids to look away. It was a mess. My father stayed in the bedroom. His mother was calling on the ancestors. She was chanting. It was obvious, even to us children, that she was asking the ancestors to punish my father and his wife.
“Unworthy son! Unworthy son. I curse you. I curse you,” she yelled.
My aunties had managed to get her dressed again. They picked her up and led her outside. Voué seemed lost. Her gaze was empty. She would never have imagined that her own child would choose “a stranger” over her. It seemed surreal to her. She was caught in her worst nightmare.
She had just been disowned by her own son. She had probably thought that, in the worst-case scenario, my father would beg her to withdraw her demand. She had hoped that he would choose to wall himself up in silence. No, he had chosen as she had asked him to. And it was she who had been rejected. The only consolation for her was to see that her other son, Uncle Abada, stood up and announced that he no longer felt welcome in my father’s house. My aunties made the same choice. Voué had just divided her family.
It is a similar painful divide that I’ve observed among my Black bros in St. Helena Parish, Louisiana, a rural community located a 90-minute drive from New Orleans, over former President Barack Obama and his successor and President-elect Donald Trump, just a few days away from Inauguration Day. Some of my bros, according to the local barber, say that Trump has done more for Black people than Obama, whose defenders here say that focusing on his actions for Black people would be to deny or forget that the President of the United States is the President of all races.
“A lot of Black people voted for Trump because they feel like he was the reason they were getting stimulus checks when he was in office,” Samuel Robinson, the local barber, told me, in a sunny morning of mid-January, in response to a question about Trump’s strong performance here on November 5. “They feel like they were gonna be getting them checks again.”
In March 2020, Congress passed a $2.2 trillion stimulus bill, signed immediately into law by then-President Trump, to address the economic damage caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Millions of taxpayers received around $1,200 in federal financial aid, either in the form of a debit card, a direct deposit into their bank account, or a check with President Trump’s name on it in big letters. Hard to miss the brilliant marketing strategy. So many associate Trump with this financial helping hand at one of the scariest times of their lives.
“You know, you can buy a lot of Black people here when you give them money, they don’t care about their morals [ideals,]” Robinson, who was born and raised in St. Helena Parish, said. “Here, people couldn’t wait for him to get back in there [the White House], not because of what he did and his policies. Because they believe he will give them checks again.”
I came to St. Helena Parish because this community, where 52 percent of its nearly 11,000 residents are Black, according to the latest U.S. Bureau Census, almost voted for Trump in 2024, after overwhelmingly supporting Democratic presidential candidates since 1976. Kamala Harris won by just 44 votes, far fewer votes than any Democrat here received in nearly half a century. The sheriff is a Democrat. The previous sheriff, a Black man, was a Democrat too. Most elected officials are Democrats or independents, making St. Helena Parish a blue island in a very conservative state.
Robinson, who says he is a Democrat, compared Trump to Obama and for him, as for many of his customers who confide in him, the choice is simple. They prefer Trump by a mile, which amount to treason for many Black folks.
“The only people who feel that Obama was good for Black people are the old people. The only people that was happy about that,” he explained. “Young people feel like he didn’t do nothing for them, like I don’t know one thing Obama did [for the Black community].”
The clippers stopped. I could hear his heart beating. There were just he and I in the barbershop, Tru Cutz, located in Greensburg, the biggest town of St. Helena Parish. There was a customer before me but he had left a few minutes earlier.
Talking about Obama makes Robinson very sad. Maybe, me being Black helped him not to hold back and to be blunt. He was clearly struggling between ripping the legacy of the first Black President and his frustrations and disappointment.
“When he was President, I was happy, just because he’s Black, not because of his policies or anything, because I feel like it was finally our turn to have somebody in there that represented us, and he didn’t do that," he continued. "He was busy trying to save face instead of representing the people that look like him, to actually give us a voice for once.”
There is some pride due to the fact, as he said, that never in his wildest dreams he thought that a Black person could rule America given the history of the racial divide in the country. But this pride was immediately replaced by staunch regrets of what Obama’s eight years could have been for him. A lost opportunity, he believes.
“It was wasted, because I feel like he was supposed to be the voice of every Black man in America, and he wasn’t," Robinson said. "He was just another President,”
Jeremy Williams, clerk of the court, and Jerome Forbes, his aide, both Democrats, acknowledged that the situation of Black folks in the parish is worrisome and didn’t get better under Obama’s presidency. But the issue for them was individual responsibility, not Obama’s.
“Most Black people feel like, you know, you’re a Black man, you know, just give us something. Nobody wants to do their part,” Williams pushed back. “Everybody is always looking for a handout. If you do your part and do what you’re supposed to do, I think you can get a shot at life. He couldn’t be President just for one race. He represented the whole country.”
It was clear to me that it was not the first time in this community that Williams had defended Obama’s legacy. It seemed like he has had enough of the comparison between Trump and Obama. It was like with grandma Voué, talking about Trump and the stimulus checks meant favoring him over Obama. Picking Trump meant abandoning your own “blood.”
“We have to do our part too, because a lot of times in our community we think that things are going to be given to us," Williams said as we talked in his office inside the courthouse, which is less than a 5-minute walk from Robinson’s barbershop. "We don’t want to work.”
“A lot of Black guys around here don’t want to work,” Forbes chimed in.
“Why don’t they want to work?” I asked, aware that such remarks are often used against Black people to justify racism and discrimination.
“That’s a good question,” Williams said.
“Great question,” Forbes added.
They both took some time to reflect.
The unemployment rate in St. Helena Parish was 5.3 percent in November, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, higher than the 4.2 percent nationwide. There is no industry in the area. Most people are farmers. You have to go to Baton Rouge, a one-hour drive away, or to New Orleans to improve your chances of finding a job, Williams and Forbes said. As a result, the few young people who leave the community to attend college never come back.
The problem is that in this rural community, according to the people I spoke to, there are more college and high school dropouts who more often than not end up falling into the vicious cycle of drugs and prison, which then makes it difficult for them to find a job because of their criminal record.
“We’ve got a lot of drugs," Forbes said. "It’s a lot of meth here, crystal meth. Lot of people are dying from overdose, from Fentanyl.”
This was one more argument for Robinson against the Obama presidency, which should have tackled this problem which, according to him, undermines Black communities across the country. For Robinson and many others, reform of the justice system which today crushes minority men, reform of the police, who today see minority men as criminals, and an emphasis on education are some of the things they use to assess President Obama’ presidency. They were hoping that Obama would help change the stereotypes about Black people, and Black men in particular, that are the cornerstone of the discrimination they face every day.
“We are treated like visitors in our own country,” he said. “But the visitors get treated better. We get treated like we don’t belong here, but you let everyone else come in. You treat them better than you treat your own citizens.”
He paused.
“Like you don’t belong here. They still look at us, like workers,” a word he used for second class citizens.
For my Black bros in St. Helena Parish, talking about Trump is often linked to Obama as a pair they can’t separate. Saying something positive about Trump forces one to examine the actions of the country’s first Black President in a way that reawakens the buried wounds of disappointment. It is like choosing a stranger over your own blood. It is almost like assessing the two options through the lens of small personal gain that some find unacceptable. This triggers a natural reflex to protect Obama’s presidency. It is like a Pandora’s box that must be kept from being opened.
Unlike my father, who turned his back on his mother, some of my Black bros believe in protecting their “blood.” But for many Black folks, the exhilaration and hope that came with the election of Barack Obama evaporated a long time ago. Maybe when you struggle to survive, the symbolic meaning of the election of the first Black President in the history of this country takes a back seat. For sure, there are many hopes tied to the new President-elect, but these hopes will only be realized if real, lasting change follows.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Luc Olinga's work on Medium.