In their song are days to come (a Harlem celebration)
I am temporarily resident in the City that has voted for Barack Obama by a wider margin than any other city in America -- with the possible exception of Chicago. Tonight it was a joy to wander among the growing crowds in Times Square as the first results came in from CNN on giant screens there; to negotiate the well-dressed press at the New York State Democratic Party bash at the Sheraton on Seventh Avenue and 53rd Street. But when Obama broke the 200-electoral vote barrier, I knew it was time to head for Harlem.
On the ride over, those of us on the subway car heading for Harlem found one another and the vibe of community just grew stronger as we got off and walked out and down the long avenues, our many rivulets joining into streams joining into rivers. In the plaza outside the Adam Clayton Powell State Office Building where Bill Clinton minds his post-presidency, at 125th Street and Seventh Avenue (better known there as the corner of Martin Luther King and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevards), another two-story television screen had been put up, and a stage, and the place was so jammed it was almost impossible to move, and the crowd's growing overflow was running ten deep along MLK's far bank. The crowds were so packed that for the first few minutes I thought I may have made a mistake to leave Times Square, where the crowds though bigger had more room to spread out and more screens and better viewing angles -- but that notion soon vanished.
As Barack's count moved closer to the magic number the joy in the crowd just grew. Every race and ethnicity under the sun could be found there, in goodly numbers and every shade and shape and phys, it was a rainbow of humanity and it felt like a rainbow too, so many happy strangers newly minted brothers and sisters -- an awesome feeling, an awesome experience to see that fellow feeling overflow when the screen lit up and held on the words "Barack Obama Elected 44th President." There was a long beat before we reacted, as if everyone had to read it twice, and then the cry went up, and from that moment it seemed all the rest of Harlem that hadn't yet arrived at that intersection began hoofing it there at that moment, all traffic was diverted as the people took joyfully to the streets, the cops were great, they went with it, they ceded the ground and facilitated the redirection of traffic away, traffic honking like crazy everywhere. A brass band pressed through the people, trumpets singing "O-ba-ma," leading chants. Bands of drummers were everywhere. CNN and MSNBC with their talking heads and long views of the huge crowd at Chicago's Grant Park awaiting Obama alternated with feeds from our own stage, as the greatest black politicians of New York's recent past and present came out to talk to us, Charles Rangel and David Dinkins and several African-American members of the state assembly and senate, rap stars and Baptist minsters, a Moslem cleric and a rabbi, and finally New York Governor David Paterson, who spoke eloquently about how African peoples that had first come to this continent as chattel had now centuries later produced a man who had just been elected president of the United States, that a long-lingering wound was finally starting to heal; Paterson said it was only a matter of time before the first woman was elected president, the first Hispanic, the first Asian-American. And just as he finished, on the big screen Barack Obama and his family came out, and the roar we let was of such delight and relief and collective affirmation, affirmation of Obama but even more of one another, that very sense was most palpable of all, you could see it and hear it in every face -- we had done this thing together, and that was the foundation of meaning that would inflect anything and everything that Obama does from now on. Listening to Barack deliver a speech that bore no whiff of triumphalism or self-congratulation but was humble and thankful and calmly serious and full of eloquent reminders that the need for our collective work had not ended but only begun -- was to cry (for me and for others) and to shout and to listen, with full hearts. The inspiration is ours -- everything crucial to what we can create together is ours, and Obama's potential as a leader lies wholly in his ability to bring that out in us, something already innately in us, bring it out not for him but for us, for all of us, for the good we can make together, which is something we have long and often lost sight of. Let us find it again, in the making, in our uncommon common effort.
Afterwards the huge crowd streamed down the middle of Harlem's Martin Luther King Boulevard, block after block of it, laughing and hugging and high-fiving and shouting and beaming, so many glorious lovely human smiles, upturned and lit. And down in the subways, cheering at the passing trains, train conductors honking with us, and slowly the great human river breaks into streams which split into rivulets, and here now in the wee hours of a restored America, in the solitary tributary of living blood pulsing through me ten thousand foremothers sing, I hear them once again: ten thousand foremothers sing. And in their song are days to come, the myriad ways we modulate with dawn, the myriad ways dawn modulates in us: belong, they sing: be long.
On the ride over, those of us on the subway car heading for Harlem found one another and the vibe of community just grew stronger as we got off and walked out and down the long avenues, our many rivulets joining into streams joining into rivers. In the plaza outside the Adam Clayton Powell State Office Building where Bill Clinton minds his post-presidency, at 125th Street and Seventh Avenue (better known there as the corner of Martin Luther King and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevards), another two-story television screen had been put up, and a stage, and the place was so jammed it was almost impossible to move, and the crowd's growing overflow was running ten deep along MLK's far bank. The crowds were so packed that for the first few minutes I thought I may have made a mistake to leave Times Square, where the crowds though bigger had more room to spread out and more screens and better viewing angles -- but that notion soon vanished.
As Barack's count moved closer to the magic number the joy in the crowd just grew. Every race and ethnicity under the sun could be found there, in goodly numbers and every shade and shape and phys, it was a rainbow of humanity and it felt like a rainbow too, so many happy strangers newly minted brothers and sisters -- an awesome feeling, an awesome experience to see that fellow feeling overflow when the screen lit up and held on the words "Barack Obama Elected 44th President." There was a long beat before we reacted, as if everyone had to read it twice, and then the cry went up, and from that moment it seemed all the rest of Harlem that hadn't yet arrived at that intersection began hoofing it there at that moment, all traffic was diverted as the people took joyfully to the streets, the cops were great, they went with it, they ceded the ground and facilitated the redirection of traffic away, traffic honking like crazy everywhere. A brass band pressed through the people, trumpets singing "O-ba-ma," leading chants. Bands of drummers were everywhere. CNN and MSNBC with their talking heads and long views of the huge crowd at Chicago's Grant Park awaiting Obama alternated with feeds from our own stage, as the greatest black politicians of New York's recent past and present came out to talk to us, Charles Rangel and David Dinkins and several African-American members of the state assembly and senate, rap stars and Baptist minsters, a Moslem cleric and a rabbi, and finally New York Governor David Paterson, who spoke eloquently about how African peoples that had first come to this continent as chattel had now centuries later produced a man who had just been elected president of the United States, that a long-lingering wound was finally starting to heal; Paterson said it was only a matter of time before the first woman was elected president, the first Hispanic, the first Asian-American. And just as he finished, on the big screen Barack Obama and his family came out, and the roar we let was of such delight and relief and collective affirmation, affirmation of Obama but even more of one another, that very sense was most palpable of all, you could see it and hear it in every face -- we had done this thing together, and that was the foundation of meaning that would inflect anything and everything that Obama does from now on. Listening to Barack deliver a speech that bore no whiff of triumphalism or self-congratulation but was humble and thankful and calmly serious and full of eloquent reminders that the need for our collective work had not ended but only begun -- was to cry (for me and for others) and to shout and to listen, with full hearts. The inspiration is ours -- everything crucial to what we can create together is ours, and Obama's potential as a leader lies wholly in his ability to bring that out in us, something already innately in us, bring it out not for him but for us, for all of us, for the good we can make together, which is something we have long and often lost sight of. Let us find it again, in the making, in our uncommon common effort.
Afterwards the huge crowd streamed down the middle of Harlem's Martin Luther King Boulevard, block after block of it, laughing and hugging and high-fiving and shouting and beaming, so many glorious lovely human smiles, upturned and lit. And down in the subways, cheering at the passing trains, train conductors honking with us, and slowly the great human river breaks into streams which split into rivulets, and here now in the wee hours of a restored America, in the solitary tributary of living blood pulsing through me ten thousand foremothers sing, I hear them once again: ten thousand foremothers sing. And in their song are days to come, the myriad ways we modulate with dawn, the myriad ways dawn modulates in us: belong, they sing: be long.