Five more days.
People get ready, there's a train a-comin'
You don't need no baggage, you just get on board
All you need is faith to hear the diesels hummin'
You don't need no ticket
You just thank the Lord...
For me, this election is about my ancestors. So many generations of African-Americans before me, so many prophets and righteous men who desired to see what I see, and did not see it... who longed to hear what I hear, and did not hear it. So very many who rocked my cradle, who stood in front of my classrooms, who mentored me, guided me, fed me, loved me, and provided a hedge of protection for me in one of the most troubled places in late 20th century America.
I've been pretty even-tempered, almost stoic all year about this thing. Meanwhile, everyone back home in Detroit is going all emotional. All my liberal friends here in Ann Arbor are rejoicing and planning lavish victory parties that I'm sure I'll tell my grandchildren about someday. I keep hearing from folks of all ages about how much they've been crying throughout 2008. I understand why. This campaign has been miraculous. But me? No tears here... only volunteering and donating and working whenever I could without much emotion... until recently.
The first time I broke down was when I listened to King's "I Have a Dream" speech a few weeks ago, a speech that my Silent Generation teachers spoon-fed to me as a small child. As a result, I know most of it by heart, and have quoted it in speeches, papers, and exhortations from grade school to graduate school. But this part of it, right before the most famous and quoted excerpt, never made me break down until now...
I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.
Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.
I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.
King's speech was the very last symbolic act of the American High. Three months later, the death of JFK would usher in a new national mood. But the marchers didn't know that. The marchers went home, knowing that they were entering a new world. Many achieved great things in the four decades since those first barriers fell. But many, many others "went back" into a dream deferred. They expected immediate results and were disappointed, then angered. The results are evident today in the African-American community. Not a single one of us has escaped from the wilderness unscathed. I do not think there are enough words in the English language to describe the extent of the burden we still carry, even those of us born after the mid-sixties, who were told it was finished when it had merely just begun.
When I heard the words of King a few weeks ago, I thought about the hope of so many of the elders I know, about their tears... and I realized why I could not cry. Growing up in the city of Detroit in the late 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, I saw the dream deferred do all of the things that Langston Hughes said that it would. I am 13 years younger than Michelle Obama, and I agree with her even more -- for the first time in living memory, I am proud of my country. But I do not trust it.
When I said that in a DKos comment, I got my head chewed off by a couple of folks who pulled their elder card on me. The great thing is that a fellow traveler from my time and place came to my rescue on those threads. When someone implied that my doubts and fears somehow made me less worthy of this moment than their late African-American housekeeper (IIRC), that person sprang to my defense.
I survived the Crack Wars too, said my defender. You have absolutely no idea what you are saying to her. Back off.
In the words of Pablo Neruda, from one of his most famous poems..."I do not know what to answer: there are so many dead, so many sea walls that the red sun split, and so many heads that beat against the ships, and so many hands that have cradled kisses, and so many things that I want to forget." I love No Hay Olvido so much because it tells my life story... "If you ask me where I come from, I have to converse with broken things..."
People are weeping at the prospect of the mending of a breach in our nation and in our world that has been nearly 500 years in the making, and I cannot cry because there are so many dead. So many broken. So many consumed in the wilderness, so many in my own family. My great-grandfather, lynched. My grandfather, forced to start over three times thanks to racism and urban renewal and redlining, and died without seeing the promise. My father, shell-shocked at 18 in Vietnam, knowing that this was (to quote Cormac McCarthy) no place for old men by his early 20s. The boys of my generation, many of whom who might have been husbands, fathers, and stellar career folks, in the grave, incarcerated, unemployed.
And me, a young survivor of the dark side of supply-side economics, the Reagan Revolution, and the conservative backlash. Growing up in a place that I thought was normal until I went away to college and learned that not everyone had war zone instincts, not everyone knew what government cheese was, not everyone had murdered friends and relatives, or had bullets strike their home without warning. Not everyone believed that America absolutely loathed them and blamed them for all its problems. Not everyone had internalized that kind of self-hatred, and had to learn how to find their own voice and confidence and sense of self.
There ain't no room for the hopeless sinner
Whom would hurt all mankind
Just to save his own
Have pity on those whose chances grow thinner
For there is no hiding place
Against the Kingdom's throne
My generation and socioeconomic class of black America has feelings, but to feel them means to risk a complete unraveling. We can't afford it. So a lot of us just don't feel at all. It's easier that way.
Still, a lot of us work hard for progressive causes, even if we aren't much for the grand gestures and don't expect big solutions. I worked hard to get out of the old neighborhood, never questioning why my family had to start over every generation, why this society chose to destroy whatever we built. I became a teacher, which politicized me. Over the past 10 years, I've volunteered and supported Buddy McKay, Howard Dean, John Kerry, and a slew of local politicians... but I never, ever once asked for anything for my people. That was because I think I pretty much wrote us off as a young child. Like some of my former students, in my worst moments, I didn't think people of African descent had much of a longterm future in the millennia to come. (Katrina and 2004-2005 were a low point for me.) Dramatic, perhaps, but I think I saw too much, too young, and will always retain the scars.
But just when I thought we were down for the count... just when I thought there was no hope...
I've never seen this kind of hope in the African American community in my lifetime. And to be honest, I don't trust it. For me, in my scant three decades of living, hope is ephemeral. I remember the great line from one of my favorite childhood movies, "Life is pain. Anyone who says something differently is selling something." I want to rejoice, but I'm only filled with this sense of duty and obligation. I work because I ought to. I have a bit of joy, but all this overwhelming emotion? That's reserved for mourning.
Yet... something is happening inside of me. I cried like a baby listening to King's speech a few weeks ago. Now, tonight? I can't stop listening to Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions. And I can't stop crying... longing so much for my dad, who used to sing the songs of a movement that was lost in the wilderness for his wife and little girls. What would he have thought about this?
People get ready, there's a train to Jordan
Picking up passengers coast to coast
Faith is the key, open the doors and board them
There's hope for all
Among those loved the most.
I have my ticket into this strange new world that we seem to be entering. Do you know how many ghosts pressed them into my hand?
I'm not worthy of this. They should rightfully be here. I'm so angry and sad and hurt that they didn't make it to see this moment. I miss them so much, and I can't stop thinking about them. Instead of their pain, they gave me hope.
There's only one thing to do in their honor. I'll keep on volunteering, donating time, money, and energy, just as I did along with millions of fellow passengers during the primary and general... carving out time to foot soldier this weekend and on Tuesday. I'm letting my students out of class early Tuesday to go vote -- I'd cancel it entirely if I could without getting reprimanded or fired. I'm going to help the staff here in any way I can.
Because you know what? As long as I have the slightest bit of faith -- a seed of faith, tiny yet full of potential -- I'll be able to board that train on November 4th. For Dad. For Granddad. For Great-Granddad. For all the boys and girls, and men and women who were lost in the wilderness.
Thank You, Lord. With tears running down my face as I type this diary, no matter what happens next week, thank You. Thank You...
People get ready there's a train comin'
You don't need no baggage, just get on board
All you need is faith to hear the diesels hummin'
You don't need no ticket
Just thank the Lord...
I'll board that train... and the loud whistle of millions crying out for change will cause the walls of Jericho to come tumbling down!