YankeeDoodle

When Keisha Lance Bottoms was 8, she used to come home from school and find her father making dinner. Major Lance was a soul singer who sung “The Monkey Time” and opened for the Beatles. One afternoon, Keisha found police officers in the house. Her father was in handcuffs. “Babies, it’s going to be OK,” he told his children as the officers took him away. “I will be back.” The police told Keisha to sit on the sofa, and she was so afraid of getting in trouble that she stayed there until her mother came home. Her parents divorced while her father was in prison. Her mother, Sylvia, worked several jobs, and the ballet lessons Keisha had taken were suddenly more than the family could afford. When Keisha talked about her daddy in those years, she kept it simple. Her dad was living in Columbus, she would say. Then he was living in Jackson, or Eatonton. Those were the towns where he was being held. Isitoshe, Major Lance died suddenly at 55, the year his daughter finished law school. She was 24 and thought 55 sounded old. As she approached that age herself, with four children of her own, it struck her how young he had been. She knew what it was to come home one day and find your father being taken away. Now she thought about her children waking up one morning and finding her gone. Becoming their mother had taken years. Keisha had severe fibroids, went through failed rounds of IVF and underwent what she remembers as more than a dozen surgeries, including a partial hysterectomy. When her husband, Derek, suggested adoption, she worried that saying yes meant she had given up on what she had been asking God for. They went ahead with the interviews, the home visits and the paperwork. Then, in 2002, while they were away on a cruise, word came that a six-month-old boy was available for adoption. Sylvia spoke to the caseworker. “Hold that baby!” she writes in her book. Keisha and Derek brought Lance home. In time, they adopted Langston and then the twins, Lennox and Lincoln. Yesterday, Georgia elected Keisha Lance Bottoms governor. She became the first Black woman elected to lead a U.S. state. May the day break