On January 20, 2009, my spouse Robert Lofthouse and I woke at dawn so we could walk from our rented apartment below Adams Morgan and near Dupont Circle all the way down to the Capitol. Because we intuitively sensed that we might get trapped on the Metro or in the tunnels (as we learned later that many thousands did!) we walked for miles, holding hands and waving to the gallant and quite happy (for dawn!) passersby on the dimly-lit Washington streets. Several times, women in my sorority, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., either nodded, hugged and waved at me as we made our way through the throngs of walkers. Almost everyone you passed was either smiling, waving or chatting about this historic day. It was amazing to be out among strangers that instantly felt like friends.
I was glad we were walking, as it gave me a chance to clear my head before we stood for long hours in line that we just knew were ahead. As we'd walked, I clutched my Blue Ticket feeling a bit like Charlie Bucket (yea, I know he had THE ticket and I had one of hundreds, but just humor me...) and thought deeply about all that had shaped this American, and that what was black and African and immigrant has shaped and built this country. As we strode along, I thought about all that had shaped and built America--particularly blacks, Africans, immigrants and the poor.
By the time we were close to the "line-up" for blue ticket holders (and we noted with sadness some two thousand people behind us, who would clearly NOT get in), I began to think deeply about all that was possible, even through the numbing cold below the steps of the Capitol, with throngs of thousands a around. Suffice it to say, I began believe in a new dream.
The world had changed around me. As a writer and speaker, I found myself without oddly at a loss for words or an ability to move beyond the crush of people against me. They were all on all sides and it gave the day a profound intimacy. I fretted over my husband, who was now chattering with cold.
Here in Washington, against the harsh wind and the biting cold, there was a fire in the belly, as if that was the warmth to draw upon, that was the warmth to fuel oneself with, as we stood gazing in the face of history.
While standing and shivering, I flashed back to my work on the Obama Campaign early last year, my successful run as delegate in the 22nd Congressional district of New York, the electrifying, history-altering primary season to my time in August as one of the thirty or more Vice-Chairs (still not sure what my duties were but it looks good, right?) of the New York State Delegation to the Democratic National Convention in Denver. Partly to keep us warm and also to share my joy, I hugged my spouse Robert, with robust enthusiasm.
Now staring at our national leaders (on the big Jumbo tron screens in our reserved ticketed "standing" area (note, I did not say seated) , I felt a flood of memories wash through me. I remembered the flush of joy when traveling to battleground states for the grassroots Obama campaign effort. I remember witnessing with pride the 1,000 area residents pouring themselves into our Historic State Theatre in Ithaca on a cold and blustery night prior to the February Democratic primary. I held tightly to the pride to the memory of when our very own Tompkins County Obama effort (led so nobly by Brian Hunt) took the one and only County-win for Obama in New York State.
Then I took many long moments to ponder deeply our country's past and its role in shaping and naming. I thought about what we have claimed and what we have hidden. I thought about Barack Obama being called our "first black president."
To borrow a line from my former teacher at Cave Canem and Inaugural Poet Elizabeth Alexander, I want to say it plainly:
That there were at least five other U.S. presidents with black ancestors (http://www.diversityinc.com/public/1461.cfm)—they just didn’t necessarily embrace their African heritage, for they lived during a time when blacks were either viewed as chattel, slaves and/or sub-human.
I also want to say plainly that I agree with Elizabeth Alexander. That typically, as Americans, we are as she described in her poem that day: noise and bramble, thorn and din, each of our ancestors on our tongue.”
But something about the Inaugural Day, made us still, contemplative and hushed. But I felt the ancestors speaking, I felt them rushing on the wind, as if they, too, were heralding this new day.
I felt a quiet music swell inside myself. I thought with gratitude of my in-laws staying home with our daughter Nina so that Robert and I could brave the cold and the lines without worry over our four year-old. I thought of our dear friends Ellen Grady and Peter DeMott who would take Nina the next day when we'd be on the road back home. I thought with deep gratitude of Ithaca, the place I love, with its complex history and peoples.
Everywhere I looked—down the Mall, along the streets, under branches slung with cold and beneath the mammoth Jumbo-trons, all I could see were people and faces and bodies and outstretched hands and booming hearts. That thousands with tickets weren’t admitted and that tensions could have risen over, but did not, was testament to the people of this country who respect and long for peace.
I knew Ithaca’s current Mayor and former Mayor were here, that delegates and elected officials and teens and leaders and unsung heroes and artists from my community were in the throngs of witnesses to this new day. I knew somewhere in the crowds were family I couldn't find, poets that I loved, my best friend Ben Jobes and so many others from around the country and world.
All around me, I could feel a spirited anticipation and I witnessed the disbelief and joy on the tender faces of the elderly black men and women (some with canes and walkers), who had ascended that steep hill to the foot of the Capitol, so very determined to see the history that they’d been fighting for since they first began their work in our struggle.
I saw them here, in 1963 at that famous March on Washington with Dr. King, four years before my tumultuous birth. I saw the lunchrooms, dogs, hoses, whips and chains and the Four Little Girls in Birmingham. I saw, too, faces creased with pride and a mighty fortitude. I saw lines of worry across the brows of several around me, including my spouse’s. They are worried about Barack Obama’s safety, I thought to myself.
Yet I heard on the wind, the ancestors trumpeting, We Shall Overcome and I heard Bob Marley singing, everything's gonna be alright. I longed to see my father alive again. I ached to see him here, not in the Veteran’s Hospital morgue where he lay in New Jersey, some 17 years ago when I had just graduated from Cornell University, the world at my feet, my heart aching.
I saw again, the photos of my father so tall and proud in all his many uniforms—Tuskegee Football, Army, suited up on his wedding day. I remember him saying that when he grew up in Weedsport, NY, he was a stand out on almost every varsity team, yet he and his brothers Victor and Norris had to fight every day because they didn’t want to be called the n-word by their peers.
I remembered once exalting my Irish and Native American heritage over my African one in my high school history class. I recalled a teacher comparing blacks to monkeys and my mother’s successful petition drive to remove him from his teaching post. I remembered hearing the n-word uttered and shouted (not every day, thankfully), but most often on the school buses at day's end. And I remembered that this is why the Ithaca City School District's lack of appropriate and compassionate responses to the distress of Epiphany Kearney as she was attacked on its school buses, had so rocked my soul.
As I closed my eyes on that day, I saw again the faces of some upperclassmen in my high school in Narrowsburg, NY, that I had once admired, laughing as they ran through the halls dressed as members of the KKK for Halloween. Say it plainly: They probably didn’t know that members of my family had been terrorized and attacked in the South by Klansmen. They probably did not know that the sight of their mock display rendered me to my small knees.
But I wondered, on that day that Barack Obama was to be America's President, did those boys in my school remember that small brown girl, new to class, the one from the black neighborhood three miles from town, the one with the father who drove the school bus, the one who played clarinet and tried not to cry, the one who was the only other black in their class and the one who graduated first in her class?
I gripped my white husband’s hand. He squeezed it gently, instinctively understanding the power of this day for me, for all of us. As I held his hand, I remembered then the blacks and whites who married against form, against law, against custom. I thought of Alice Walker, who married the white Jewish Civil Rights activist Mel Leventhal, in 1967, the year I was born.
Say it plainly: that many have died for this day.
On the wind, I felt the call of the ancestors, J. Diann Sams, Rere Hassett, Phyllis Wheatley, Frederick Douglas, Harvey Milk, Fannie Lou Hamer, Sojourner Truth, Gwendolyn Brooks, Harriet Tubman, Martin and Coretta, Malcolm and all of our ancestors of every color and hue who toiled so that we could be here. I felt them all surrounding the newly-elected President.
My heart hummed.
I watched the Congressman who opposed the Iraq War from the start, New York Congressman Maurice Hinchey from my district (CD-22) bopping a little beside civil rights stalwart and icon Congressman John Lewis.
I witnessed the eye-dropping flood of celebrities (many that I’d gaped at in Denver) and the cheers for the likes of Cory Booker, Newark's up and coming star Mayor, Oprah, Jay-Z, Magic, Denzel Washington, Jay-Z, Beyonce, ...and I joined the cheers for the Carters and Clinton's and the Biden's.
I heard the swelling joy in the applause for the Tuskegee Airmen and a surprisingly warm greeting for the first Bush family in the White House. A black woman standing next to me turned to her husband and said “who know he’d be the good one?”
I felt the boos in my bones as the crowd reverberated their dislike most particularly for the likes of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Senator Joe Lieberman and Vice President Dick Cheney.
Then the gaffes. For instance, one I recall most distinctly was when there was leap between the introduction of the 39 and 41st president, several next to me called out, “hey, what happened to the 40th President?” Um, how to answer?
Say it plainly: Americans need to really study history more intently.
And of course there was, Aretha in her grand hat tearing up America the Beautiful, Yo Yo Ma and Itzak Pearlman and the stately grace of Michelle Obama, Malia and Sasha (whom my daughter tells me on the phone she has to meet) and of course, Barack Obama, the statesman who is helping a nation heal and forward in one of the most challenging times in world history, be it the economy, the environment and discord among nations, to just name a few.
By the time the luminous and witty Dr. John Lowery delivered the Benediction, I felt too numb to move. I was frozen, no longer from cold, but from the supreme force of destiny that brought us together, not only in this one place but in TV screens around the globe.
Suddenly, there was a jolt as the helicopter overhead took the now former President Bush away. This was president who lied and plunged our nation and our military men and women into an unbelievable quagmire of untenable losses. Instead of cheering, as many did, I was somber. I also felt a twinge of compassion for the man. What is it like to be so unpopular, to have such low approval ratings? Though well-deserved as his ratings were, I felt sorry for his limitations and the pall they cast over Americ, and by extension, the world.
I called my mother who still lives in the Catskills, where I was raised. She wasn’t entirely overcome, but she was happy. She talked about her life in South before she moved to Manhattan where I was born.
She talked about being beaten or pushed or shoved and not being able to fight back. Or having to pick cotton and work all day in fields as a child my daughter’s age until she was a teenager. She recounted ten years of hard labor AND schooling AND poverty. She shared how she was spat on and had to run home in the fields to avoid whites in cars who tried to run she and her sisters over with their cars. She railed against the indignities of separate restaurants, drinking photos and constant racial slurs.
A truth like a volcano spilled over me as I saw our new President, Barack Obama and the towering force that is Michelle Obama, rise from their seats with their two beautiful girls alongside them. I thought of Dr. King’s dream: all around us were the sons of daughters of slaves and slaveholders shoulder to shoulder. The moment, so long in coming, had arrived.
Everything I had achieved had been on the backs of ancestors at carried me and my dear friends who breathed life into me and held my hands when I despaired. My husband and I cried together as Barack Obama was named President.
My mother is 76. She ended her phone conversation with me like this:
“Well, Michelle, I have a black Mayor, a black Governor and a black President. Wow. Who would have imagined?”
Who would have imagined indeed.
Amen Momma for your struggle to bring me here when you did not at first want any children.
Amen Momma to your praise song.
Amen to your early lessons in politics that served me well in my own life in politics and the arts.
Amen to this great country.
Amen to the Obamas.
May we go forward in the light of this new day.
I was glad we were walking, as it gave me a chance to clear my head before we stood for long hours in line that we just knew were ahead. As we'd walked, I clutched my Blue Ticket feeling a bit like Charlie Bucket (yea, I know he had THE ticket and I had one of hundreds, but just humor me...) and thought deeply about all that had shaped this American, and that what was black and African and immigrant has shaped and built this country. As we strode along, I thought about all that had shaped and built America--particularly blacks, Africans, immigrants and the poor.
By the time we were close to the "line-up" for blue ticket holders (and we noted with sadness some two thousand people behind us, who would clearly NOT get in), I began to think deeply about all that was possible, even through the numbing cold below the steps of the Capitol, with throngs of thousands a around. Suffice it to say, I began believe in a new dream.
The world had changed around me. As a writer and speaker, I found myself without oddly at a loss for words or an ability to move beyond the crush of people against me. They were all on all sides and it gave the day a profound intimacy. I fretted over my husband, who was now chattering with cold.
Here in Washington, against the harsh wind and the biting cold, there was a fire in the belly, as if that was the warmth to draw upon, that was the warmth to fuel oneself with, as we stood gazing in the face of history.
While standing and shivering, I flashed back to my work on the Obama Campaign early last year, my successful run as delegate in the 22nd Congressional district of New York, the electrifying, history-altering primary season to my time in August as one of the thirty or more Vice-Chairs (still not sure what my duties were but it looks good, right?) of the New York State Delegation to the Democratic National Convention in Denver. Partly to keep us warm and also to share my joy, I hugged my spouse Robert, with robust enthusiasm.
Now staring at our national leaders (on the big Jumbo tron screens in our reserved ticketed "standing" area (note, I did not say seated) , I felt a flood of memories wash through me. I remembered the flush of joy when traveling to battleground states for the grassroots Obama campaign effort. I remember witnessing with pride the 1,000 area residents pouring themselves into our Historic State Theatre in Ithaca on a cold and blustery night prior to the February Democratic primary. I held tightly to the pride to the memory of when our very own Tompkins County Obama effort (led so nobly by Brian Hunt) took the one and only County-win for Obama in New York State.
Then I took many long moments to ponder deeply our country's past and its role in shaping and naming. I thought about what we have claimed and what we have hidden. I thought about Barack Obama being called our "first black president."
To borrow a line from my former teacher at Cave Canem and Inaugural Poet Elizabeth Alexander, I want to say it plainly:
That there were at least five other U.S. presidents with black ancestors (http://www.diversityinc.com/public/1461.cfm)—they just didn’t necessarily embrace their African heritage, for they lived during a time when blacks were either viewed as chattel, slaves and/or sub-human.
I also want to say plainly that I agree with Elizabeth Alexander. That typically, as Americans, we are as she described in her poem that day: noise and bramble, thorn and din, each of our ancestors on our tongue.”
But something about the Inaugural Day, made us still, contemplative and hushed. But I felt the ancestors speaking, I felt them rushing on the wind, as if they, too, were heralding this new day.
I felt a quiet music swell inside myself. I thought with gratitude of my in-laws staying home with our daughter Nina so that Robert and I could brave the cold and the lines without worry over our four year-old. I thought of our dear friends Ellen Grady and Peter DeMott who would take Nina the next day when we'd be on the road back home. I thought with deep gratitude of Ithaca, the place I love, with its complex history and peoples.
Everywhere I looked—down the Mall, along the streets, under branches slung with cold and beneath the mammoth Jumbo-trons, all I could see were people and faces and bodies and outstretched hands and booming hearts. That thousands with tickets weren’t admitted and that tensions could have risen over, but did not, was testament to the people of this country who respect and long for peace.
I knew Ithaca’s current Mayor and former Mayor were here, that delegates and elected officials and teens and leaders and unsung heroes and artists from my community were in the throngs of witnesses to this new day. I knew somewhere in the crowds were family I couldn't find, poets that I loved, my best friend Ben Jobes and so many others from around the country and world.
All around me, I could feel a spirited anticipation and I witnessed the disbelief and joy on the tender faces of the elderly black men and women (some with canes and walkers), who had ascended that steep hill to the foot of the Capitol, so very determined to see the history that they’d been fighting for since they first began their work in our struggle.
I saw them here, in 1963 at that famous March on Washington with Dr. King, four years before my tumultuous birth. I saw the lunchrooms, dogs, hoses, whips and chains and the Four Little Girls in Birmingham. I saw, too, faces creased with pride and a mighty fortitude. I saw lines of worry across the brows of several around me, including my spouse’s. They are worried about Barack Obama’s safety, I thought to myself.
Yet I heard on the wind, the ancestors trumpeting, We Shall Overcome and I heard Bob Marley singing, everything's gonna be alright. I longed to see my father alive again. I ached to see him here, not in the Veteran’s Hospital morgue where he lay in New Jersey, some 17 years ago when I had just graduated from Cornell University, the world at my feet, my heart aching.
I saw again, the photos of my father so tall and proud in all his many uniforms—Tuskegee Football, Army, suited up on his wedding day. I remember him saying that when he grew up in Weedsport, NY, he was a stand out on almost every varsity team, yet he and his brothers Victor and Norris had to fight every day because they didn’t want to be called the n-word by their peers.
I remembered once exalting my Irish and Native American heritage over my African one in my high school history class. I recalled a teacher comparing blacks to monkeys and my mother’s successful petition drive to remove him from his teaching post. I remembered hearing the n-word uttered and shouted (not every day, thankfully), but most often on the school buses at day's end. And I remembered that this is why the Ithaca City School District's lack of appropriate and compassionate responses to the distress of Epiphany Kearney as she was attacked on its school buses, had so rocked my soul.
As I closed my eyes on that day, I saw again the faces of some upperclassmen in my high school in Narrowsburg, NY, that I had once admired, laughing as they ran through the halls dressed as members of the KKK for Halloween. Say it plainly: They probably didn’t know that members of my family had been terrorized and attacked in the South by Klansmen. They probably did not know that the sight of their mock display rendered me to my small knees.
But I wondered, on that day that Barack Obama was to be America's President, did those boys in my school remember that small brown girl, new to class, the one from the black neighborhood three miles from town, the one with the father who drove the school bus, the one who played clarinet and tried not to cry, the one who was the only other black in their class and the one who graduated first in her class?
I gripped my white husband’s hand. He squeezed it gently, instinctively understanding the power of this day for me, for all of us. As I held his hand, I remembered then the blacks and whites who married against form, against law, against custom. I thought of Alice Walker, who married the white Jewish Civil Rights activist Mel Leventhal, in 1967, the year I was born.
Say it plainly: that many have died for this day.
On the wind, I felt the call of the ancestors, J. Diann Sams, Rere Hassett, Phyllis Wheatley, Frederick Douglas, Harvey Milk, Fannie Lou Hamer, Sojourner Truth, Gwendolyn Brooks, Harriet Tubman, Martin and Coretta, Malcolm and all of our ancestors of every color and hue who toiled so that we could be here. I felt them all surrounding the newly-elected President.
My heart hummed.
I watched the Congressman who opposed the Iraq War from the start, New York Congressman Maurice Hinchey from my district (CD-22) bopping a little beside civil rights stalwart and icon Congressman John Lewis.
I witnessed the eye-dropping flood of celebrities (many that I’d gaped at in Denver) and the cheers for the likes of Cory Booker, Newark's up and coming star Mayor, Oprah, Jay-Z, Magic, Denzel Washington, Jay-Z, Beyonce, ...and I joined the cheers for the Carters and Clinton's and the Biden's.
I heard the swelling joy in the applause for the Tuskegee Airmen and a surprisingly warm greeting for the first Bush family in the White House. A black woman standing next to me turned to her husband and said “who know he’d be the good one?”
I felt the boos in my bones as the crowd reverberated their dislike most particularly for the likes of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Senator Joe Lieberman and Vice President Dick Cheney.
Then the gaffes. For instance, one I recall most distinctly was when there was leap between the introduction of the 39 and 41st president, several next to me called out, “hey, what happened to the 40th President?” Um, how to answer?
Say it plainly: Americans need to really study history more intently.
And of course there was, Aretha in her grand hat tearing up America the Beautiful, Yo Yo Ma and Itzak Pearlman and the stately grace of Michelle Obama, Malia and Sasha (whom my daughter tells me on the phone she has to meet) and of course, Barack Obama, the statesman who is helping a nation heal and forward in one of the most challenging times in world history, be it the economy, the environment and discord among nations, to just name a few.
By the time the luminous and witty Dr. John Lowery delivered the Benediction, I felt too numb to move. I was frozen, no longer from cold, but from the supreme force of destiny that brought us together, not only in this one place but in TV screens around the globe.
Suddenly, there was a jolt as the helicopter overhead took the now former President Bush away. This was president who lied and plunged our nation and our military men and women into an unbelievable quagmire of untenable losses. Instead of cheering, as many did, I was somber. I also felt a twinge of compassion for the man. What is it like to be so unpopular, to have such low approval ratings? Though well-deserved as his ratings were, I felt sorry for his limitations and the pall they cast over Americ, and by extension, the world.
I called my mother who still lives in the Catskills, where I was raised. She wasn’t entirely overcome, but she was happy. She talked about her life in South before she moved to Manhattan where I was born.
She talked about being beaten or pushed or shoved and not being able to fight back. Or having to pick cotton and work all day in fields as a child my daughter’s age until she was a teenager. She recounted ten years of hard labor AND schooling AND poverty. She shared how she was spat on and had to run home in the fields to avoid whites in cars who tried to run she and her sisters over with their cars. She railed against the indignities of separate restaurants, drinking photos and constant racial slurs.
A truth like a volcano spilled over me as I saw our new President, Barack Obama and the towering force that is Michelle Obama, rise from their seats with their two beautiful girls alongside them. I thought of Dr. King’s dream: all around us were the sons of daughters of slaves and slaveholders shoulder to shoulder. The moment, so long in coming, had arrived.
Everything I had achieved had been on the backs of ancestors at carried me and my dear friends who breathed life into me and held my hands when I despaired. My husband and I cried together as Barack Obama was named President.
My mother is 76. She ended her phone conversation with me like this:
“Well, Michelle, I have a black Mayor, a black Governor and a black President. Wow. Who would have imagined?”
Who would have imagined indeed.
Amen Momma for your struggle to bring me here when you did not at first want any children.
Amen Momma to your praise song.
Amen to your early lessons in politics that served me well in my own life in politics and the arts.
Amen to this great country.
Amen to the Obamas.
May we go forward in the light of this new day.
To view the inaugural message from President Barack Obama:
Posts
I don't know what to say!!! This is a powerful message about a very important day!
ReplyDeleteBut I definitely want to thank you for being my "Friend" on Facebook, so I could follow this story as well as the other "little" things in your everyday life!!! Thank you so much! I'll be back in Ithaca soon and I hope to run into you and be able to chat about the emotions I felt as I read your column.
Hey Eric! Thanks so much for following this blog and I'm happy to be able to be friends with you in so many capacities. I searched for you in my Facebook today so I could also write there, but couldn't find you. Please let me know what I'm doing wrong?? I am excited to see you again when you're next in town and thanks again for your comments and interest!
ReplyDelete