Timothy Garton Ash in Missouri
The Guardian,
Thursday October 30 2008
In Warsaw, Missouri, there's a ghost who keeps talking to me through the mouths of strangers. He is the ghost of slavery past, and he casts a long shadow, even across the streets of this cheerful little lakeside town on a sunny autumn day. A local Obama campaign volunteer tells me about a woman she had canvassed who said she personally would vote for Barack but that her daughter wouldn't - and then the mother lowered her voice - "because he's black". Nor would her son: "he's even more racist". How horrible to feel impelled to say that of your own children. The jokey-scary commercial paraphernalia of Halloween is all around, but here are America's real ghosts and witches ...
Another recalls how in her childhood, not so far from here, the Ku Klux Klan was still active, and there were roads a black man could not safely walk.
They add that 19th-century Warsaw was a slave town, but Cole Camp, founded by German Lutherans just a few miles to the north in the same county, was not. So Missourians fought about it during the civil war, in the course of which Warsaw was several times burned and razed to the ground.
Up the road in Sedalia a former army officer, for many years a staunch Republican, tells me he will vote for Obama. He's disgusted at the way the Bush administration lied to them about Iraq. But it would be easier if Obama were white. In fact, he would find it difficult to vote for him if he were really African-American "That's black slave American", he helpfully explains to this foreigner. Those people are so "mad" inside, he says, using the word in the colloquial American sense. Fortunately, Obama's not really an African-American, just an American with an African father. But still, he feels "queasy" about that ...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/30/us-elections-barack-obama
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