Читать книгу Take a Lesson - Caroline V. Clarke - Страница 8

60th Mayor of Atlanta

She's a daddy's girl who lost precious years with her father, the late R&B star Major Lance, while he was in prison, and her own road to motherhood was complicated by infertility. So, life tested Keisha Lance Bottoms early but she overcame mightily.

Although she was not the first African American woman mayor of The ATL (she was in fact the second), Bottoms was the first mayor of any race or gender to earn her stripes having served in all three branches of the city's government—and to be swept into office on a wave of jubilant hashtags.

#MyMayorsNameIsKeisha was a shout‐out to her hard‐earned victory as a Black Gen X woman with a Black name in a chocolate city whose politics sparkled like a bright blue star in the state of Georgia's crimson sky. And her 2018 inauguration, one year into Trump's America, was an early sign of stunning political changes yet to come.

In 2020, she became one of the first Black women in history to seriously be vetted by a presidential candidate as a potential running mate. And no wonder. Lance had survived an incredibly tight runoff election to become mayor, only to face a more daunting and complex set of issues than she or any of her predecessors could have imagined.

From multiracially charged violence and the local unrest that followed, to a hailstorm of sociopolitical battles in which her intersectionality as a Black woman both compounded her challenges and informed her responses, she was catapulted onto the national stage. And then there was the COVID‐19 pandemic, in which she opposed Republican Governor Brian Kemp over state protocols, drawing his ire even as she and her family personally contended with the virus at home.

When Bottoms announced that she would not seek reelection, she admitted that she didn't have a plan. But having had plenty more mom time during quarantine, her four children, ages 12 to 20, are anxious to see what she'll do next. They are not alone.

Someone said to me when I was running for office many years ago: “You've always got to be able to go back home.” What they meant by that was, no matter what decision you make, as long as you're doing right by your community and you can go back home, then you've done the right thing. I've always kept that in my heart. I don't ever want to not be able to walk down the street in my community or be ashamed of anything that I've done.

Home has always meant everything to me. [Growing up,] because my dad was an entertainer, he worked at night and our family's income was inconsistent. But he was the one at home when I came from school every day. He was the one to greet us and cook for us, then he went to work after my mom got home. He was a wonderful, good‐hearted person, and I was a daddy's girl.

One day, when I got home, the police were taking Daddy away. They had completely torn up our apartment. We were in the process of moving, so a lot of things were packed up. They had ripped up all the boxes, including the one with my toys. And I remember my dad saying, “Don't worry, it's okay. I'll be home soon.”

My brother and sister came home from school (I was the youngest), and I remember the police officers saying we couldn't move from the sofa, that if we moved they would know and we'd get in trouble. And we couldn't call anybody. This was before cell phones, so it wasn't until my mom got home from work much later that we could tell her what happened.

I was eight, and it shaped everything about me. When my dad went to prison [for four years after a cocaine possession conviction], that was the hardest time in my life. It made me so sad. At points, it made me angry, and I just missed him so much.

For a very long time after that, I didn't have any gray in my life. Everything was good or bad, it was right or wrong. In a lot of ways, it made me pursue perfection in an unhealthy way. I didn't want to have to struggle [when I grew up], I didn't want to worry about how my bills would be paid, I didn't want to ever be at the mercy of somebody else. So, there were a lot of lessons that were very rigid: “Do this, don't do that.”

With age, I learned to moderate those lessons, but I didn't always have the ability to do that. And when you see things in black and white, there's no room for empathy—especially with addiction. You don't understand that if they could stop, they would stop. Learning that has given me empathy for a lot of the circumstances and people that I dealt with as mayor. I completely understand that really good people sometimes make bad decisions, and then there's an impact on the family that you can't always make immediately right.

When I was a little girl and my dad was still actively touring, I envisioned us being this new version of Natalie Cole and Nat King Cole. Seriously. I knew I couldn't sing. But when you're five or six, what are limitations?

My mom always tells the story that I would go to my grandmother's house, dress up in everything I could find, and put on shows for her. So there was always this innate showmanship part of me, which is really interesting because it's one of the things that I don't like about the job of being mayor. It's also a reminder that I was just always different.

I majored in journalism at FAMU [Florida A&M University] and I really wanted to be a sportscaster, but at that time, there weren't many women doing that. Going to law school was kind of a fluke. I used to hang out with a group of friends from Morehouse, and they were all applying to law school. And I thought, Oh, that's what we're doing now? Okay. So I applied to law school, and with my journalism background, my plan was to be a legal analyst.

Before the kids came, I used to drive down to Macon, Georgia, and do a newscast [on the] radio in the morning [while] still practicing law full time. You know when we don't have kids, we have a lot of capacity. I think back on the schedule now and, my God, that's probably why I couldn't [conceive] a biological child. I was completely stretched.

I never really liked practicing law. So I always tried to do something different with it and at some point, I concluded that perhaps the whole point of my getting this law degree was that I met my husband, Derek, in law school.

It was not until I got on the city council that I began to see the value in my law degree. I realized lawyers really do think differently, they process differently and they plan differently. And I thought, Okay, well in addition to meeting my husband, this is what that was all about. It definitely helped me as a mayor, too.

I didn't write it down, but there was definitely a day, a date, a moment when I knew I had to run for mayor. I'd been praying about it. I have a great team and, from a data metric standpoint, I knew that I could win. The question was, did I want it? I'd been praying and talking, and praying and talking, and I was sitting in church one day and, at the end of the sermon, I couldn't get out of my seat.

Church was over, and I just sat there and cried because I knew that I was to run for mayor. In my spirit, I knew that it was going to be a heavy burden to run. But I also was just struck by the power of God for making my path so clear to me at that moment. And the reason I wanted to do it, selfishly, was that I wanted Atlanta to be better for my kids. The only way I could make Atlanta better for my children was if I made it better for everybody else's children.

It was such a hard, ugly, long race. One part was really countering the misconception that people had of who I was. Having the support of a previous mayor [Kasim Reed] was a double‐edged sword. It had its benefits, but there were cons as well. And the thing that used to really just irritate me was this notion that, somehow, I didn't stand on my own. I've been standing on my own for a long, long time, and this notion that someone else thought for me, or made me, was infuriating—and I still deal with that.

As mayor, I had people say—and this comes from men—“I don't know who's advising you, but…” or, when I endorsed Joe Biden, “Whoever advised you to do that…”

How about, I advised myself?

The other part was, as the only African American woman in the race, it wasn't just about me running for mayor, it was about how I represented Black women day to day. I have a very good sense of how people feel about me, and I always say to my team, “The streets don't lie.” I could feel it when I was running. You can feel it when you walk into the grocery store or the bank, when you go into the mall. [At first,] people didn't dislike me, but they were very neutral on me. And then I could feel it when they started to shift, when people were with me.

The nature of that campaign was physically grueling. I did forum after forum, going from 7 in the morning until 10 at night, and then I had to do it all over again. I keep a picture of myself at the first forum that I attended, and I look at how thin I was and how healthy my hair was and, by the end of the campaign, I literally had pulled out the front of my hair because when I'm tired and stressed, I pull on my hair. By the end of the campaign, the woman who does my hair put little tabs in to fill in where I was pulling on my hair all day. So, the physical part of it was probably the most stressful of all.

Being mayor was the first time I had [only] one job. Even as a teenager, I always worked in my mom's shop in addition to school and whatever other jobs I had. And between work study and internships in college, I always did multiple things. Being mayor, in many ways, fed into that ADHD that I have, which can be a wonderful thing when it's used for good, because you're constantly having to switch gears and think through multiple things. As mayor, you're dealing with the here and now and the crisis of the day, but you're also planning ahead and addressing issues from multiple constituencies. So for someone like me who really thrives on doing multiple things, if you have to have one job, it's a great one to have.

To serve as mayor is an incredible honor, but professionally, it has been the most difficult thing I've ever done. It's still frightening to me the way people are influenced by false information or false narratives, and that quite often, the masses will latch on to something—true or not—and it becomes reality. We saw that with Donald Trump. I saw it on a smaller level during the mayor's campaign, and I saw it every day as mayor. Someone will create a story, a narrative, and then it becomes reality for hundreds of people—and there are people who do it for sport.

I knew what I was getting into, but the inability of people to see me for me—I think that was the biggest surprise I had.

My mom often tells me that I remind her of my dad in that he really was a homebody. He had a garden in the backyard; he coached the Little League baseball team; he was the one who always planned our family outings. At his core, he was very insular, but you would never know it because he would get on stage and perform for tens of thousands of people. He could turn it on and turn it off.

My team used to laugh when I was campaigning. They would set goals for the number of people I had to meet and shake hands with. They'd say, “Okay, in this room, you have to shake 50 hands.” I would do it, and say, “I'm at 50. Let's go.” That's something that I've come to understand about myself, and to be okay with.

I was talking with my minister one day and he said that he's an introvert who masks as an extrovert, and the lightbulb went off. That's what I am, too. But I think that's why, in many ways, I've been misunderstood.

In high school, people would say, “I thought you were really siddity until I got to know you,” which I always thought was interesting. But when I began to campaign, I realized that it really was about me being introverted, and for people to understand why I cared and why I wanted to be mayor, I was going to have to allow them to see me.

That was a big lesson—that it doesn't matter what's going on in my head and how I process, it's how I project. Another thing I learned is that the more exhausted I become, the more authentic I become, because it really does take energy to wear a mask.

There are a few things that a lot of people struggle with that I really don't. I'm not afraid to ask questions, and I am very forgiving of myself. When I say and do from a pure place, if it doesn't work out, at least I know what I intended, and I'm okay with that.

There's vulnerability in admitting what you don't know, especially for leaders, because you're usually the one people are looking to for answers. But at some point, I learned that the vast majority of people like educating you, and so, rather than being insecure about it, I'll just ask a lot of questions.

Part of that goes back to being on the City Council. You sit there and people are spouting out acronyms, and you could think, Well, maybe if I listen long enough, I'll figure it out. Let me write that down, let me Google it. Or you can just say, “Hey, what does that mean?” And at some point, you realize the people who will take exception with that are people who weren't for you anyway, so you can't worry about what they think.

Over time, you realize that if you don't know, probably nine out of 10 people in the room also don't know, and you'll have people say, “Oh, I'm so glad you asked that because I didn't know it either.” You gain wisdom and confidence by doing that. It's ultimately about being comfortable knowing what you know, and knowing what you don't know, and not being ashamed of what you don't know.

When I was considering running for mayor again, I kept waiting for that moment of clarity that I had the first time. I was like, Okay, Lord, I need one of those sitting‐in‐church moments. But I know God doesn't work the same way twice, and my husband, Derek, gave me this great lesson one day.

He was standing in the doorway and he said, “As long as I'm standing here, the only option I have is to look straight ahead of me. But if I step out, I can go to the right, I can go to the left, I can see what's over there. You're not going to be able to see it until you take that first step.”

My good friend Vicki Palmer also said to me, “It's really not faith if you know what's on the other side.”

What I do know, from any number of things that I've consulted with God on, is that He gives you peace about what's right for you, and I didn't have any peace in my heart about running again. As soon as I said publicly that I wouldn't run, I absolutely knew it was the right thing to do.

I made two versions of [my announcement] video—the good‐bye video and the stay video. When I did the stay video, I said all the right things, but I didn't feel it. When I did the good‐bye video, I felt it, and I knew it. I wish I had a better ability to articulate it, and I pray at some point I'll have the words to help people understand—but I just knew.

I've done plenty of hard stuff, so it's not the challenge of the job that made me not run again. That's not it at all.

My dad died suddenly at 55. He died of congestive heart failure. He never stopped smoking, he didn't take care of himself, like so many other entertainers in his era. They lived hard and fast back then. I don't claim this for my life, but I thought, if I had four more years on this earth, is this how I would want to spend those next four years? The answer was no.

When I watched [tennis champion] Naomi Osaka [withdraw from the French Open last year], I wished I had her number to just send her a text and a hug. I think what we've all been through [recently] really has so many of us choosing peace, and it's giving us courage. I so understood what she did, and to be 22 or 23 and have the courage to do that is absolutely incredible.

The last few years were hard for all of America and the world. In Atlanta, we had hard on top of hard. There was a cyber attack, there was a federal investigation into the city's previous administration, there was the presidential election and insurrection and the attacks on voting rights, there was race‐based violence in our streets, and more. So people recognize that it's been a very challenging time, especially in leadership. For anybody who is sad that I chose not to continue as mayor, it's my prayer that whoever succeeds me will remove that sadness, and be a better mayor than I've been.

This job tested me on every level. What do I know now that I wish I'd known before? To follow my instincts—the first time. That you don't have to get knocked over the head six or seven times to get it. I wish I'd been more in tune to those things that I felt, and those subtleties that I tried to explain away.

I wish that I had trusted myself more. That's the biggest lesson.

How will my job as mayor be judged? I am very mindful—and I touched on this earlier—that there are people who really actively work to create a false narrative, but I can't walk out the door looking forward if I'm looking over my shoulder. So as long as my street committee is okay with the job that I've done, I'm okay with the job that I've done.

History will be the judge. As people look back at this time in our lives, they will look at leadership and whether we did right or we did wrong. Hopefully, whatever is written about this time in our country's history, and in our city's history, I will be judged kindly.

I am working very hard to not always focus on the things that I did wrong, or the things that I could have done better, recognizing that it's okay to pat myself on the back and say, “You did good.” That's really hard for me, but I am learning to be kind to myself.

It was helpful to me to write [my departure] letter to the city because, when I looked at it on paper, I thought, You should be very proud because there was no playbook. There was nobody to pick up the phone to call who could say, “this is how you manage through a pandemic.” So I'm proud of us, because there are so many cities that didn't get through it whole. It doesn't mean we don't have our share of challenges, but we didn't lay off employees, we didn't furlough employees, we didn't have to raise taxes, we didn't have to slash our city budget. We made it through whole, and it was because we did some things differently and we did it our way—the Atlanta way.

What next? I'll never say never about running for office again, but the opportunities are much more plentiful than I even knew to dream. I think it was Oprah Winfrey who I would always hear say, “God dreams bigger dreams for you than you can ever dream for yourself.” That's what this moment feels like.

Whatever it is, it will be one of purpose and passion. I don't want to trade one set of limitations for another set of limitations. I don't want to be restricted. I want to be able to chart my path, on my terms.

A guy I was talking to yesterday gave me a great exercise that I'm going to actually do. I have this running bucket list of things I want to do and he said, “Put each one on a piece of paper, write the pros and cons of each one and that will help you prioritize.” Some of it can be on the one‐year plan, the five‐year plan, the 10‐year plan. I have come to recognize, you don't have to do it all today. You get to decide. And sometimes you'll make decisions that don't make sense to anybody else. And they'll never make sense to everybody else. But as long as you're comfortable with it, that's all that matters.

It's okay to do things differently. It's okay to not follow the playbook. It's okay to be the one who writes the playbook.

I've never been ordinary. So, why at 50‐plus years old would I start trying to be ordinary? Especially when the most joy, the most success, and the most satisfaction I've ever gotten in life has been when I did things differently.