Before the sun came up on primary day, a generator was already humming on Panther Creek Road. The zero tape was signed before most people rolled over and went back to sleep.
A miscommunication between the electric company and the election board had left the precinct dark. By 5:30 a.m., Doyle Teague of the Haywood County Board of Elections had a representative on the road with a generator. Extension cords ran in through a window. Machines got plugged in. The zero tape got signed.
When the doors opened at 6:30 AM, you would never have known.
That is how democracy works in small places. Quietly. Without fanfare. With somebody willing to get up before dawn and make sure it happens.
Sixty Years and Counting of Service
Geraldine Parkins, 82, has been showing up to the little one-room concrete block building on Panther Creek for as long as she can remember. When I asked her how long, she laughed softly and said, “I don’t remember exactly. It’s been years.”
She said her eldest son was eight when the family moved into their house two hillsides over. By her estimation she had been assisting with Haywood County Elections for well over 60 years.
When asked what made her get into working the polls she said, “It was DB Arrington who asked me if I would come do it, and he said I could make a little money doing it. For a woman, back in that time, any extra income was a good thing,” she said simply.
Having not yet started the familiar Parkins Dairy nearby, and with two children, and her husband working it was an easy way to make some money without traveling far.
“I mean, you see, I never worked, nowhere, never made no money like that,” she stated.
No elaboration needed. Anyone who knows anything about mountain women and mountain economics understands exactly what she meant.
What She Found Inside: Memories of Community Members
What she found in that building has kept her going back long past any need for extra income. She found community and continuity. A table covered in the carved names of people who voted and worked in the small building before I was born. She found a slatted church bench from the old Panther Creek Missionary Baptist Church.
Reminiscing about those who ran the precinct before her she began to name community members who have long left us such as DB and Diane Arrington, Edith Russell and Edith Beasley, as well as, Marvin and Faye Arrington.
The building itself is humble to the point of austerity. Concrete block walls. Windows that won’t raise. A cast iron wood stove, an Atlanta model, standing on the floor beside a vintage metal voting booth with a white curtain.
The Day of the Primary
Walking in one feels like they have stepped back in time several years, but you quickly notice the newer voting equipment against, what may appear to be a Currier and Ives creation. Thankfully, Ms. Parkins was not alone last Tuesday as she had Charlie and Keturah with her.
Keturah Buchanan, owner of 42 Rue Salon, worked the polls there for the first time this primary cycle, after taking a course on Christian citizenship that made a plain argument: if people of integrity are not willing to staff the polls, they cannot expect others to do it for them. What she found when she walked through that door was not what she expected.
“Instead of contention there was an overwhelming air of community and respect,” she wrote to me afterward. “It felt cozy and warm. It was like seeing family that you had not seen in a good while.” There was percolated coffee. Geraldine’s breakfast casserole and tater soup. Blueberry crumble from Charlie Hornbostel. A fruit, vegetable, and cheese tray from Keturah herself.
Twenty-nine people voted in that primary. Some years, Geraldine said, there have been only two.
Quietly, she said, “Writing this will cause them to move this to the Fines Creek Fire Station. They will close this precinct.”
Yet, come a presidential election, most of the precincts turn out. Those are not small numbers when you consider what it takes to get down that road, what it means to the people who live there to cast their ballot in a place they know, even remotely, among people who know them and that they trust.
“People have said if they move their precinct they wouldn’t go to Fines Creek,” she told me. “They’d just early vote. Or not vote at all.”
What We Stand to Lose
You cannot replicate that at a larger location down the road. Keturah said it plainly: “Certainly the others are not as homey and inviting as this one. Not even close.”
The purple three-ring binder they call “the Bible” has every instruction down to the smallest detail. Doyle Teague coordinates all the districts, answers every call all day, delivers generators before sunrise, and is there to greet the workers when they report in that night. He deserves more than a mention. He deserves what Keturah said about him: “that poor man must have been worn slap out by the end of the day.”
I stood in that building and I looked at the wood stove and the voting booth curtain standing three feet apart from each other, and I thought about what it means to preserve a thing not because it is convenient but because it is true. That building is not efficient. It is essential and a mark of pride for those who live near the Panther Creek Community.
Geraldine Parkins has been keeping it open since before most of us were paying attention. She showed up before dawn and she will show up again. All she is asking is that the rest of us notice what we have before it is gone.
