If you've ever read The Audacity of Hope, you will remember the chapter about a man that Obama met in Southern Illinois who had been invited to the local "private dinner club." When he arrived, he noticed that no one from the town's large and generally well-received black community was present. He asked about it and was informed that it was a whites-only "private dinner club." He walked out. Barack Obama then writes about the importance of lending each other a hand to help each other across the racial divide left by the Three-Fifths Compromise, Slavery, Jim Crow and institutional racism. He writes that resisting this terrible history can be like swimming across a river, and that it's good to give someone a hand to get them out of the river, The River of Our Racial Divide.
In the words of another famous story from the campaign, "I'm doing it for Ashley."
One of my best friends here in DC was the woman who reached across the racial divide and helped a greenhorn Hoosier white boy out of that River. She reached out to me, took me at face value, smacked me down when I was being insensitive, forgave me, and treated me like a son.
My friend went through desegregation. She is only two generations from slavery. And she has a very special power: she gives nicknames that stick. She gave me one, and I'll be damned if I'll share it with you all for fear it would overtake my beloved moniker.
She gave her daughter the nickname "Twink," which perfectly descibes her elfin, gamine grace and the way she pounds her drums. Yes, she's a drummer in a go-go band. Twink rocks.
My friend and Twink are watching a lot of MSNB these days. Keith Olbermann is now a permanent houseguest. Rachel Maddow has become a close friend of the family.
"Shortstack" is Twink's son, named because when he was a baby he was as cute and sweet as a stack of blueberry buttermild pancakes. He's grown up from being a baby over the past three years pretty much inundated in Barack Obama. With a child's rhymthmic timing, calls President-Elect Obama (damn that's good to write) "Racky-Bama."
Yesterday Shorstack was watching the election with them and looked up to say "When I grow up I want to be like Racky-Bama."
My friend and Twink looked at each other--and I'm sure they nearly burst out crying the way I am as I write this--and responded "Yes Shortstack, you sure can."