At an Obama victory party on Tuesday night, during McCain's concession speech shown on overhead large-screen TV, I glimpsed a young black woman, showing large the whites of her eyes. She wasn't brown-black like Barack Obama, or mocha-black like Colin Powell, she was pure-blood Tanzania-black, with bright pink flesh exposed through thick African lips. And as John McCain paid homage to her ancestry, she started crying.
Not choked-back, dripping drops of tears, but real gushers, like symbolic bowls of liberation saltwater from a Passover table, spilling down her jet-black cheeks to the floor. And it kept coming, springs finding the surface, until McCain finished, when she caught me looking straight at her eyes, and she realized, I was staring because she was so beautiful.
She came over my way, and stood behind my chair, talking to a friend, making clear that John McCain's concession speech, to her, was like Frederik Willem de Klerk, handing over the post-apartheid reins of power to Nelson Mandela. She said to her friend, just behind my head: "Now we get to lead the country we built."
That made me turn around and offer to buy these two African-American women a drink. And we got to talking. The one I had been watching is Jennifer Williams. She's 27, finishing a psychology degree at Ohio University, and she had an English paper due in the morning.
She told me that her nephew, Michael Swift, who is now six years old, had said a year ago that he wished he was white. But Barack Obama's presidential campaign has changed his mind, and now Michael is proud to be black.
I confess I did not directly see Barack Obama's victory address, or hear it either. I only watched it reflected in Jennifer's big brown crying eyes, while I listend to the sounds of her upwelling. I think I got the gist.
The story of Jennifer's nephew made me think back twenty years, to a time when I visited with a Cherokee family in Oklahoma. They were watching Rambo on the TV set, because all of the friends of their six-year old son had already seen it. At one point I was left alone with the boy, as the movie still played, with the noise of Sylvester Stallone machine-gunning Vietnamese soldiers out of trees. I asked the boy what he thought of Rambo, and the boy said, "Rambo is good, he's my hero!" I asked whether it was good to kill all those people, and he said "yes!" I asked why, and he said, "because they are black!"
The horrifying thing is that the boy's own skin tone was darker than that of the Vietnamese portrayed in the film.
The real transformation of Tuesday night is that Michael Swift will never remember or believe that he once wished he were another color. And the enemies of this nation will never again be identifiable by their skin.
Driving home late on Tuesday night (early Wednesday morning), I knew what I would have to do. I live in a very old house on the Scioto Trail built by an abolitionist family named Barnes, that became a principal Underground Railroad Station between the early 1800s and the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln visited the house in late 1848, which may have prompted him to first propose a piece of abolitionist legislation in January of 1849 (a bill that would have outlawed slavery in the District of Columbia). It was a Barnes who became the first south Ohio recruit and casualty of the Civil War. The ritual of leaving flowers at his monument in Portsmouth, Ohio, gave rise to the national holiday of Memorial Day.
So there's a lot of lore about my house. Credible area residents including the former editor of the county paper, have seen a ghostly image through the shutters of my upstairs balustrade doors, outside the room where Lincoln slept, backlit when the house was vacant with no electric power. The "ghost" has the image, according to reports, of a black girl hanging in a noose. And the funny thing is, though this is serious business, that none of the witnesses knew anything about this house serving as an Underground Railroad station.
Nor is there any record of blacks residing in this house (though in 1850, the county served as official refuge for over five hundred fugitive slaves). Raiding parties of southern slave-owners did come through, fought by the Barnes through political and religious agitation.
Whether a black girl really was lynched on the property is something beyond current documentation. But at dawn on Wednesday morning, I went upstairs, and I opened those balustrade doors to the fresh cool air. If any ancestral spirits were still captive at this station, they are free, at last.
___________________________________________
In dedication to the memory of John and Elizabeth Boydston Barnes, Isaac Newton and Mary Magdalene Barnes, John Milton Barnes, Henry Clay Barnes, and Blanche Richardson Barnes. They made Tuesday night possible, more than we.