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GEORGIA POSTCARD
WHISTLE STOPL
ast week, Stacey Abrams headed
north from Atlanta, in a big white
bus, to persuade rural Georgians to vote
for her in the state’s gubernatorial pri-
mary. On Tuesday, she faces Stacey Evans,he is.” (The text was from Abrams’s cam-
paign.) Gross had voted early, for Abrams.
“Her being black and a woman—nei-
ther has a bearing,” she said. “Anybody
raised with two preachers in the house”—
she was referring to Abrams’s parents—
“you’ve got to be all right. I think her
candidacy is based on the Word. Trying
to be a blessing to others.”
“I don’t vote straight anything,” Frost,
who wore a peach-colored dress, said.
“I’m here to learn. I’m looking at her
views on the Hope Scholarship”—a
financial-assistance program for Geor-
gia college students, including Evans,
when she was younger—“and what she’s
doing for the underprivileged.” Frost
added, “I didn’t vote for Trump. He
speaks without thinking, and a lot of
things he worries about aren’t impor-
tant.” She insisted that a visitor try one
of the spareribs on her plate.
John and Kathy Raisin, a white cou-
ple who run a property-management
company, sat nearby. “I don’t know how
they got our number, either,” Kathy
told Gross. “We just wanted to see
what her platform is,” John said. Health
care concerned them. “We’ve got pri-
vate insurance,” John said, “and it’s our
highest bill.” Kathy added, “Having
two women on the Democratic side is
good. But Abrams is for recreational
marijuana. I’m not sure what I think
about that.”
Abrams showed up, and after admir-
ing a man’s lunch—“Don’t let me inter-
rupt,” she said. “Get back to your fish”—
she took questions from the diners.
“I have a child on the Hope,” Frost
said. “Is it going to end? Or change?”
“That’s never been on the table,”
Abrams replied. “I grew up with noth-
ing. My parents struggled to stay above
the poverty line. And we fell a lot. A
college scholarship doesn’t save the
world. We’ve got family challenges—I’ve
got a brother who went to college and
he’s still a two-time ex-felon. We’ve got
to talk about criminal-justice reform.”
“Amen,” Gross said.
“I feel like I got a lot more questions
than answers,” Frost said later.
At one point during Abrams’ s rural
tour, a white customer walked into a
restaurant she’d just left, and asked a
visitor who “the black woman” was. He
looked at the side of her bus, which
read “A Georgia where everyone hasothers never saw the painting,” Hopt-
man said. “They heard about the paint-
ing.” (Floyd Abrams added, “I think the
best proof he never saw it is he never
mentioned the rather graphic pictures
pasted onto the work. You know he
would have talked about that had he
known that they were there.”) At the
time, press coverage of the fracas noted
Giuliani’s spotty relationship with Ca-
tholicism, including the fact that he had
his first marriage, to his second cousin,
annulled after fourteen years.
“It’s a great thing that this work came
back to New York, so that New York-
ers can see it again,” Hoptman said.
In the two years since his settle-
ment with the Securities and Exchange
Commission, Cohen joined MOMA’s
board of trustees, and donated fifty
million dollars to the museum, in ad-
dition to the Ofili. “He said it seemed
to him that this was a museum paint-
ing,” Temkin said.
An armchair psychologist might find
his motive more complex. In 1986, twen-
ty-seven years before his own firm was
charged with insider trading, Cohen was
deposed as part of a securities-fraud in-
vestigation initiated by the U.S. Attor-
ney for the Southern District of New
York—Rudolph Giuliani. Cohen declined
to comment.
As for Giuliani, nineteen years after
he tried to ban a Madonna propped up
by excrement, strewn with glitter, and
surrounded by pornographic figures, he
is working for a man whose critics might
describe him exactly the same way. And
Ofili’s Holy Virgin Mary is headed for
MoMA, to live out her days in the com-
pany of Picassos and Cézannes.
Peering at the painting, Hoptman
said, “You can almost believe in magic.”
—Tyler FoggattStacey Abramsthe other Democrat who’s running for
governor, and who is known as White
Stacey. They’re both young, progressive
former state representatives who grew
up poor and are willing to denounce
Donald Trump. Abrams is the state’s for-
mer House minority leader, a graduate
of Yale Law School, and an eight-time
published romance novelist (sample ti-
tles: “Hidden Sins,” “Power of Persua-
sion”), and she would become the first
African-American woman to govern a
state. She has been endorsed by Bernie
Sanders and Rashida Jones; Evans, on
the other hand, has the backing of the
Georgia Federation of Teachers and
many state reps. On the way to the town
of Dalton, which calls itself “the carpet
capital of the world,” Abrams passed a
billboard that read “Help Us Jesus. Drain
the Swamp. Save America!!”
Patricia Gross, a pastor at Grace Fel-
lowship Ministries, and Alycia Frost, a
parishioner, sat at a table inside Miller
Brothers Rib Shack, in Dalton, eating
barbecue and waiting to meet Abrams.
The walls were covered with pictures
of heroes: Parks, Tubman, Malcolm X,
Ali. At the counter, a whiteboard quoted
Genesis—“And I will put enmity be-
tween thee and the woman, And be-
tween thy seed and her seed; it shall
crush thy head, and thou shalt bruise
his heel”—and noted a special dish
(smoked-chicken sandwich). The
women eat there every Friday.
“There was a young fella who texted
and asked me to come today,” Gross, who
is African-American, and wore a silk
rose pinned to her blouse, and rings on
every finger, said. “I don’t even know who