Ribcages, History, and Obama

I’m on a bus to Boston, Massachusetts. The Indian girl next to me has been fiddling with her laptop for the past half hour and delivering a series of unsuppressed moans in my general direction while elbowing me in the left ribcage. I don’t mind. Obama is being sworn in almost as I write. She’s reading Middlemarch and has that disdainful attitude of someone who knows, already, I wouldn’t understand the book if I tried. I’d bet all the money in my recently opened savings account that she’s a freshman at Harvard. I don’t dare ask. She asked if I knew how to fix her wireless, so I tried to walk her through some basic troubleshooting, unsuccessfully. I find Windows Vista as useful as accidentally biting my own tongue.

The point is, however annoying it is, I’m sitting in the middle of the bus and not the back. I have the option to walk forward. A matter of years ago, this was absurd. This morning, hungover at work from birthday festivities last night, I made a point to take a drink from a single drinking fountain. I watched video clips on the New York Times website. I can’t help seeing Obama smile without welling up with pride. A professor e-mailed me, telling me she was in tears at the sight of the whole procession. Also demanding more pages from the novel.

The second most stupid thing I did all year was have the idea to write a novel on black history. The first most stupid thing I did all year was actually doing it. I’m too young; I know that. It’s probably not in me yet to write the book about my family members, from slavery to St. Louis cocaine habits to me, in a dorm in a university. 

I’m not done, not by a long shot, so technically I still belong to the genus of unduly-vain, sensitive “writers” who haven’t yet contributed a damn thing to the modern world of publishing. But I am trying. I’m black, and I felt entitled to it. The same way Spielberg felt entitled to the Holocaust, or Herman Melville felt entitled to whales, or Scorsese felt entitled to the entire city of New York. That history is mine—my blood is there. The importance of this moment, as I read in someone’s blog, is not that our president is black, but that the nation elected a black president. The evils of our American past are finally and palpably showing their corrosion. The word hope has never tasted so good when saying it. Makes me shiver. Dare we look forward? What is the next obstacle we can overcome? The next unsolvable social depravity to which we can respond, “Yes We Can”?

I’m still a little drunk from yesterday, but I’ve turned on the overhead light and a bit of Chopin and settled into a book of Billy Collins. A momentous day.

JMH