Chapter 12. The Canvasser.

You can learn a lot about a person when you spend some time canvassing with them, door to door, on a hot August afternoon in North Carolina. That was me, and Rhonda. She is a team captain, and canvasser for Down Home North Carolina, a rural, working class driven organization which has focused on rural issues and mobilizing the rural vote for the past eight years. We spent an afternoon together in the August heat, where she was canvassing a largely Hispanic and unaffiliated community in Cabarrus County, just east of Charlotte.

I learned that Rhonda wrestles with anxiety, that she doesn't do bugs, except for butterflies and ladybirds, (“When it comes to little critters, that are moving faster than me,” she says, “we have a problem”), that she grew up in Barbados, that she’s allergic to mushrooms. I learned that she’s a student, that she’s married, and that, one time she got pulled over by the cops because there was a spider on her dashboard. It was 11:30 at night, the streets were empty, “I was swerving all over the road,” trying to get it off the dashboard, she said, and a cop pulled her over. She had jumped out of the car, “so it kind of looked like, what am I about to do?” and he asked if she had been drinking. She hadn’t. “He said, ‘Ma'am, get back in the car, get back in the car.’ So I'm, like, crying, like ‘officer, there is a huge spider in my car. I can't get back in the car. Like, I can’t!’” ...

To continue reading, please go to “Dispatches,” my reporting column on Substack.