AUSTIN, Texas — Tension mounted in the SXSW online chat for Stacey Abrams' keynote as the minutes ticked on. Ten minutes late. Then 20, then 30.
About every 60 seconds, a SXSW chatbot would assuredly chime in with the same message of "technical issues" being experienced on the back end.
It was becoming a concern that the conference's first and forced foray into an online-only format might start with a fail on day with eager online registrants waiting, and waiting, for the most anticipated speaker of the day.
The minutes ticked on as did the drone of SXSW's "please wait" music that began to feel like a dirge.
And then emerged Janelle Monae, who very figuratively turned the tables on any doubts with a surprise music video of her song "Turntables," which she created exclusively for this event, delivering something approaching those vintage SXSW moments. Even with no physical audience, the response in the chat box was an abundance of excitement.
And just like that, things were back on track.
After some mutual adoration, N.K. Jemisin and Abrams' session began. Jemisin, a Hugo Award-winning fantasy and fiction author, jumped right into asking Abrams about her work not as a voting rights advocate or politician, but as a novelist.
Abrams is a Nobel Peace Prize nominee who and has ascended to rock star status among progressives and is widely credited with delivering the state of Georgia to President Joe Biden and its two senators to the Democrats.
But she also writes romance novels, which she said are supposed to be suspense books. In 1999, no one was publishing suspense books from Black women, so she used romance as a way to tell the thrillers she had constructed. It would be a lesson for her as she applied the tenets of storytelling to voter engagement.
"You have to center the voter, center the citizen, center the person in that narrative," she said. "If it is about someone else and they can't see themselves either benefiting from or being victimized by, then you give them a reason not to pay attention."
For the 2020 election and Georgia's special election that followed, the story Abrams said she told voters was about their power and their ability to deliver things like COVID-19 relief, voting rights and criminal justice reform. To tell that story, Abrams submitted, voters would need to engage and make plans to ensure family members and friends went to the polls with them.
After the election, the next chapter for Abrams is working against the more than 250 bills across the country that have been proposed in the name of election security, though Abrams would say they are tools of voter suppression. In Houston on Monday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott touted a slate of proposed legislation he called election integrity laws, which would require voters to provide further proof of proper voter registration beyond an ID and standardize early voting hours statewide.
Abrams' political struggle is also about fighting certain narratives. As she noted in a 2020 Washington Post profile, Abrams deliberately chose to not contest her narrow loss in 2018's Georgia gubernatorial election because she was afraid the story would become about "her fight" instead of the fight against voter suppression.
And last year, when she emerged as a front-runner to be a nominee for vice president, Abrams fought the narrative of her as ambitious, clawing and performative amid questions about her qualifications had she been elected to federal or a statewide office.
"There only have been two Black women senators in American history. There's never been a Black woman governor," she said. "I was asked the question white men don't get asked: Are you qualified?"
And of course, it wouldn't be an Austin-centric SXSW panel without a nod to the show "Supernatural," which started Austin boy Jared Paledecki and Jensen Ackles as Sam and Dean Winchester, respectively.
Abrams noted that the demon-hunting Winchesters often failed when they tried to go it alone, which she used as a metaphor about everyone's responsibility to move forward together.
"Ultimately, our responsibility is to tell the best story possible to get to the next frame, to get to the next episode, to get to the next victory."
