To my male relatives,

I’ve noticed that you’ve been quiet over the past forty days or so. Every time someone brings up the presidential election in our usually lively family text thread, you’ve said nothing, given no reaction, not weighted in on the change in candidates. Quiet is not the usual way our family behaves in the thread, so the silence has been quite loud. Too loud.

Let me guess why.

My mother, dubbed Queen Cousin by some because of her natural leadership role in the family as the first-born, told me a secret. Our former football player cousin, “The Baconfat,”, would gather all the male cousins in exclusive conversations and speak to them all about the ways of women: women are not to be trusted, women are tricky tempters and were meant to be ruled, not rulers.

Queen Cousin probably eavesdropped to find out the content of these closed door male cousin sessions, but she knew, as she knew most things. Maybe she gleaned a clue from the way he engaged with her, in the little things, like a game. Back in the 1980’s, both of them were playing some trivia board game and there was a fine point of difference with the answer she had given. They were the last two players left. Unfortunately back then, there was no Internet or way to check, but he protested her answer saying, with so much passion, “Oh no cuz!. I cannot let you waltz to a victory!”

She laughed but let him have the point since there was no way to check it and won anyway. Later, his too-spirited utterance became one of those ways we would tease one another in all future game playing as well as any other endeavor we Black women might achieve. Turning the phrase into joke or a punch line was her way of taking the hurt out of his disbelief in her answer. This way, it became a family saying whenever any one of us high-achieving Black women did something a Black woman wasn’t supposed to do, like how she became one of the first Black female executives in corporate Pittsburgh, or when my sister got her master’s degree or I got my doctorate, became a professor and wrote best-selling historical fiction novels.

That’s what he told you during those talks, didn’t he? To not let any “female” rise? To make sure that it was your job, as Black men, to stop any progressing Black woman and make sure she didn’t win, no matter what. You needed to make certain that, at any sign of success, one of you would sound out The Baconfat’s lament: “Oh no! I cannot let you waltz to a victory!”

For, his main objection was that Black women who were winning had it easy in some way. That our wins were given to us—that we had somehow, “waltzed” to our successes. But that’s just not true. All of our Black woman success was hard won and hard fought because there are lots of places where men were taken aside for private talks and were told the same thing about not letting women advance, and to ensure that we knew that we were not good enough or deserving enough to have earned those achievements.

He would tell you that in those secret, male conversations that women must be stopped, in any way possible, to be the ones to raise your objections if you Black women trying to get to success in a waltz.

That’s what you think is happening with Kamala Harris isn’t it? You think her success came easy. President Biden handed it to her. She hasn’t worked hard enough to become president and is on her way to waltzing to a victory (with a guy named Walz at her side) and that you, as a cadre of Black men in an important battleground state, can stop her by withholding your support, your efforts, and your vote.

I suppose that is your right. You have that power. You can sit there and not go vote, not say anything in all of the places where you gather, shake your heads, keep silent, while you sit back and marvel at the ease with which this Black and Asian woman will just slip into the world’s most powerful office. Since, it is as the Baconfat told you in those secret, masculine conversations: Black women have always have it easy.

You will hold her success against her, or withhold the contribution toward victory from her, because of your spite and resentment at the entire situation—a situation that Black women did not create.

When November 6 dawns and if the race doesn’t come out in her favor, do you know who will know what you didn’t do, what you didn’t say, what you didn’t vote for?

The Black women in your lives.

All of us.

Your daughters.

Your granddaughters.

Your wives, if that matters to you.

We will know. Even with her win, and she will, we will know how you really feel about all of it in your heart of hearts because you were silent the whole time.

How sad.

Still, you can fix this. You could speak now, since Kamala Harris has a chance to win. You could do the right thing and cast your vote to put her in the highest office in the land. Do it so that you can look all of us in the eye and say, truthfully, that the Baconfat, God rest his soul, is a relic of the twentieth century and that his archaic beliefs have no place in the fast-changing world that we live in today.

This time, do what Queen Cousin would want. Do it for her and for those of us who carry her spirit.

Make her smile.

Make her proud.

Make Kamala Harris president of the United States.

Named in 2015 as one of the top ten historical romance novelists in Publisher’s Weekly, Piper Huguley is the author of the Reconstruction era “Home to Milford College” series. She is a 2013 & 2014 Golden Heart finalist for two novels in the “Migrations of the Heart” series about the Bledsoe sisters, set in the early twentieth century. Huguley is a professor of English and modern foreign languages at Clark Atlanta University.