To A T

I never thought I’d see a black president in the White House in my lifetime. I didn’t even dare dream it. I feel like a child approaching Christmas, you can’t believe election day is finally here. It’s been so long since we’ve had people — Asian and black, white and Spanish-speaking — come together and say YES. Some did during the civil rights struggle but not as many as today. What it means if Mr Obama is voted in, is that my country has agreed to grow up, and move beyond the childish idea that human beings are different.

Maya Angelou, November 3, 2008

Last night I found myself in front of our computer monitor with our son and my partner watching the election returns on CNET. Catherine had come home late from seeing clients. Ian and I had spent the early evening together: he doing homework and drawing rich string tones from his bass. I had prepared a meal of burrito and refried beans and rice. It seemed, almost, like any other day in our week, except ….

Except Ian had not been to school. His school is a voting precinct in our township. With the election he was not in his classes. We spent the day finding things for him to do that hadn’t been provided by his teachers. He wrote on his class-project about Amelia Earhart. I picked up the house, cleaning what had been left by the weekend spent in Massachusetts. Except … that about 2 p.m. we drove to our voting precinct and Cat and I cast ballots in the Presidential, U.S. House and some state political races.

Just about 8 p.m. we all gathered around this 21-inch screen as Katie Couric told us about the election. We watched as New England, Pennsylvania, New York and finally Ohio went blue on the screen. Even then, although my home state, Tennessee, and other states in the former Confederacy turned red, keeping John McCain alive for a bit longer, I could feel tears rising behind my eyes.

At eleven California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii went blue and what had been unthinkable two years ago became true: Barack Obama would be President of the United States. Then the tears streamed down my face. The news coverage showed me a sea of people in Grant Park, Chicago, Illinois, screaming and waving flags and campaign-signs. The coverage showed a huge gathering in the temple of Civil Rights, Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, and a celebration at the student center at Howard University in D.C.

My tears flowed for about an hour, Catherine and Ian both asking “why are you crying, Radha?” All I could answer was “it has taken so long, o, so very long.” I’m not certain that either of them can understand my tears (they are here, the tears, again as I sit typing this.) O, so very long. The young have grown in a different world in so many ways than I grew into. 

There are within me very many memories that bring my tears. I recall an ancient great-great-aunt in Middle Tennessee when I was very young, four perhaps, sitting in a chair on her front-porch cursing a man who had been dead for close to a century, Braxton Bragg, a Confederate general, for the loss of the Battle of Stones River near Murfreesboro, TN. His defeat had paved the way for what became the next year Sherman’s drive to Atlanta and the Sea. She had drunk the curses from her mother and father. 

I thought of another aunt telling me around the same time that I couldn’t drink from an unused water-fountain when I was thirsty because it was for “coloreds” and a white child like myself might get some horrible germs from it’s use. Thus, I had to stand behind a line of adults and wait for my drink of water. 

I wept for the knowledge that a great-great-great-great-great Grandfather, Dewitt Clinton Smith, had owned a large plantation and many slaves in the 1840s and 1850s. I wept that what I’ve thought of as a family-shame has been, somehow, redeemed, at least in part, by the hope and the struggle of his great-great-great-great-great granddaughter.  

I saw, last night, the faces of a number of children I grew up near as they starred through the windows of the bus that drove them fifteen miles to a school while I walked three blocks to one in our neighborhood. I saw in my mind footage from the March on Washington and Dr. King’s immortal speech that came to me through the agency of CBS news back in the mid-sixties. “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'”   

I recalled Paul Rutledge and Allan Bradley, the only two people I went to high school with who were black. I recalled the horror of the evening of April 4, 1968 as Walter Cronkite informed our family that five-hundred miles west of our living-room, in Memphis, TN, Dr. King had been slain. I recalled the riots and the burning that followed as people found yet another of their leaders had been murdered. 

I recalled the mangled and scattered remains of James Byrd. I recalled a friend in college who had covered the Selma March talking of the white faces lining the road and how he’d thought at the time that perhaps the fact they didn’t fire their guns or throw the stones some held in their hands was important as a sign of change. 

So many memories and hopes: my campaigning for Jesse Jackson in 1988 thinking he would actually be nominated by the Democrats as their candidate for president and the disappointment of seeing Michael Dukakis chosen instead. 

I wept for the knowledge that now in some area of the United States that some mother and father can now tell, with conviction, their children that they can aspire to our country’s highest office because they now have some proof that a human being of color can win a national election while losing the “Solid South.”  

But mostly I wept because of all the work, the tears and toil, the hopes and the dreams of many of a generation of Americans have finally come to fruition with the election of Barack Obama. “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

Now I see that one black child has achieved Dr. King’s Dream. So, I weep. I weep for joy and the sorrows that have preceded the joy. I weep for the many years of hope that many people have carried with them under earth’s fertile lid as they made their journeys to Hades with that hope dashed. I weep for all of those people who, when faced, perhaps, with that solitariness of the voting booth found not a chance to do privately what they denied they would do. Instead they cast their votes for a man of color and helped to elect him.

I weep for the hope that has been made real-life. I weep for us all and feel within myself, one more time, the hope that somehow we can come together and build the political dream that Jefferson and Lincoln and Martin King shared blood, sweat and tears for. I hope for the end of hatred and the end of the dread of “The Other” might come to fruition somehow, some way, in this land.

I cannot know the origin of the tears of many of those faces I saw weeping with me last night. I’ve been fortunate, one might guess anyway, in the luck of my birth and my life as a Caucasian human living in the United States. But, I can know the origin of my own and can imagine that many of those people wept and are still weeping for the same reasons as I.

The struggle and the disappointments have been difficult and plentiful. The promise of youth has long disappeared from many of our lives. We travel now toward the darkness of the grave and another existence.But, when we walk the road to Hades we will have seen something those who walked that road before us did not: almost 53% of this nation hearing and following Lincoln’s hope:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.   

I weep for the knowledge that this time and in this place we have heeded the voices of the better angels of our nature. I weep in the hope that the experience might become so much appreciated that we will find it irresistable to do otherwise in our future. 

The hope and the tears are not vain and unreasoned ones. I can see the electoral map as well as any others. Having grown up and become an adult in The South I know deeply within myself that there are those who have yet to be touched and changed, in whose hearts and minds the hope of “one nation” with one purpose hasn’t yet come alive. I know that I have family, friends, neighbors who will not change with a single election.

But, there is reason for some hope, some faith, that by walking and learning of one another that the fear of The Other will abate and that we can find we are all at least able to recognize our basic humanity and our basic intersections with one another. We are enough alike that we can see and do our lives together and so go past our fears. Yes, we can. 

The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America – I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you – we as a people will get there. — Barack Obama

Yes, we can.