By Wayne Brown
Well, wasn’t that something, in The Land that Slavery Begat!
Exactly 200 years after the US ended its traffic in African slaves – and a mere half-century after the Civil Rights movement began – there was the lanky son of a black Kenyan and a white Kansan, joined by his classy African-American wife on stage in Minnesota last Tuesday night, and the two of them tall, beautiful, smiling and young, as Barack Obama confirmed to a huge, ecstatic – and mainly white – crowd that he was indeed now the Democratic nominee for president of the world’s lone superpower, in our time.
Most of the rest of the world knows only too well the ugly America, the deployer of big bombs and brutally arm-twisting diplomats abroad, with its bewilderingly ignorant, guns-and-churches masses at home. But America as an Idea of Possibility without parallel in world history, America the Wonderful – after seven years of the Bush administration’s systematic debasement of that country, the world – and even more so, perhaps, Americans themselves – needed nothing less than a miracle to reaffirm that America. And last Tuesday they and we got it. Enter Barack Obama.
That, actually, was the title of a column this columnist wrote four years ago, in the wake of the Democratic Convention that propelled the Golden Boy onto the US national stage. The rest of this column is an extract from that one. It appeared in the Jamaica Observer on August 1, 2004.
“Yet – as has so often been the case at critical moments in American culture – it fell to two African-American speakers to give [the Democrats’] outrage and idealism inspired voice.”
Speaking at a time when, as he put it, “a vicious spirit in the body politic of this country attempts to undermine America’s freedoms,” Al Sharpton told this story. A few days after 9-11, he was at a radio station when the host told him that, in synchrony with 990 other stations, they were going to play a song dedicated to the victims. The song was America the Beautiful, and the version played by Sharpton’s station was Ray Charles’s.
Sharpton: “As you know, we lost Ray a few weeks ago, but I sat there that morning and listened to Ray sing through those speakers, ‘Oh beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountains’ majesty across the fruited plain.’ And it occurred to me that Ray wasn’t singing about what he knew, because Ray had been blind since he was a child. He hadn’t seen many purple mountains. He hadn’t seen many fruited plains. He was singing about what he believed to be.”
(Sharpton’s speech was quickly denounced by neo-conservative commentators as ‘shrill.’)
And then there was Barack Obama, the young Democratic senatorial candidate.
I had never seen Obama, though for months, mention of him on this or that talk show had set his figure dawdling at backstage left in my mind. And I wasn’t prepared for the tall, skinny, mixed-race kid with the big ears who strode briskly up to the podium on Wednesday night, waving to the audience with no especial inflection of either irony or pleasure, and not looking quite like anyone I’ve ever seen – though I’d be hard-pressed to say why.
But then Obama began to speak, and the hall gradually fell silent. And this columnist too fell silent, inside.
Writing two days later in the New York Times, actress/ playwright Anna Deavere Smith reported the same thing. “His speech did not,” wrote Ms Smith, “elicit the traditional call and response we associate with powerful black speech.” Instead it “evoked speechlessness.”
“‘That guy’s amazing,’ said the blonde model sitting next to me in the hall.”
“Obama: ‘Tonight we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation – not because of the height of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy. Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over 200 years ago: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident…’ That is the true genius of America, faith in simple dreams, an insistence on small miracles.”
At the time, I was myself too in thrall to what I was witnessing to analyze it. But later I thought: I’ve felt that silence before: in Trinidad.
The year was 1984, the oil boom had busted, and, though no one comprehended it yet, Trinidad was facing a traumatic socio-economic downsizing. That was the context in which, on Carnival Tuesday afternoon, Peter Minshall sent his band ‘Danse Macabre’ pouring onto the stage. Trinidad Carnival has long been a riotous, over-loud, over-drinking and ‘wining’ affair. But that afternoon, as – without music, with no sound but the rhythmic stamping of bare feet – Minshall’s drably-clad hordes filled up the stage, the packed stands rose gradually to their feet, and a silence came over them.
I looked around and saw that the faces around me were almost expressionless. On them was the abstracted, dead-still stare of people ‘listening’ to what they were seeing, sensing it was something both important and new. With that stillness, I imagined, Neanderthal eyes must once have watched from the forest the dancing descent of Homo sapiens onto the plains.
Obama: “There are those who are preparing to divide us: the spinmasters, the negative ad peddlers. Well, I say to them tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America – there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America – there’s the United States of America.”
You’d have had to have heard him – to have heard the sardonic African-American stress on the first syllable of ‘United’ – ‘there’s the You-knighted States’ – to feel the whole world of the American Civil War opening up from a single word, and to intuit Obama’s flashing dismissal of the defeated, still largely racist – and Republican – South.
Ms Smith writes that, watching and listening to Obama, she thought: “Oh, we will all be measured from here on by this.”
And then she cites a colleague’s likening of Obama to Brando in Streetcar, and notes that Brando changed acting forever with that performance “because he was mind, body and heart in a way we hadn’t seen before.”
Obama: “The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States.”
Ms Smith’s invocation of Brando was accurate. The silence of the packed hall (and this columnist) derived from this, that we were watching and listening to a single mind, body and heart, acting in concert in a way we hadn’t seen before. So, like Neanderthals watching from the forest…
By comparison with the revelation of Obama, the Convention’s other speeches fell away. In Obama, we were intuiting the future of the race. (The human race, as Obama himself would no doubt have added.) That was what produced in us that stillness.
“…I’m talking about something more substantial [than blind optimism]. It’s the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs, the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores…The audacity of hope! I believe that we have a righteous wind at our backs…”
