In the end, it was better being a regular citizen than a reporter Tuesday night.
For journalists, there’s always the desire to be a part of “the big story.” So while stuck at home recovering from knee surgery, this journalist agonized over being unable to participate in Tuesday night’s election coverage.
“What would I tell our (yet-to be-born) children?” I bemoaned to my spouse Monday, “That their mother – the journalist – was sitting at home in a knee brace while history was being made?”
Regardless of personal preferences, journalists are required to remain neutral while reporting and writing. There would be no cheering or booing in our newsroom.
But what goes on in the confines of one’s home is different.
Our home was subdued with anticipation.
“I’ll believe it when I see it, when it’s over. I’ll be up all night,” said my father over the phone from Queens, NY. A child of the segregated South and a Vietnam veteran, a president a few shades lighter than himself still seemed unimaginable, even when all of the Northeast and Virginia were in Obama’s column.
Similar sentiments were echoed by my spouse’s father in suburban Michigan, the son of a West Virginia coal-miner, turned Ford Motor Company shop worker. He even recalls visits to a plantation as a small child.
But when the West Coast polls closed and CNN projected Barack Obama the winner, there was an emotional release in this Congress Park home, one that wouldn’t have been possible in a newsroom.
The unthinkable happened. There were no “too close to call the race” reports, no recounts, no nail-biting. Any efforts to suppress the votes in minority communities had ultimately failed.
I thought about reporting from South Carolina before the January primary, about running around the floor of the Pepsi Center in August, about squeezing into a seat at Invesco Field with my laptop.
I couldn’t believe I wasn’t there on this night. Where “there” was, I didn’t know. There was a glass of Chianti in my hand instead of a reporter’s notebook.
But then I thought about my mother, who died in 2003 of cancer. I recalled her stories about growing up in Harlem, how her oldest brother took her to see Malcolm X giving a speech on a soapbox in the neighborhood. “I was too young to understand what he was talking about,” she once said.
As I re-dialed my father after CNN’s magic map revealed California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii in blue, I thought about his life and what he must have seen juxtaposed against this moment. I remembered our summer vacations to Virginia Beach. “Blacks weren’t allowed on this beach when I was a kid,” he reminded annually.
That painful history was evident in his voice when he picked up the phone, his voice choking. “All that we’ve endured, all the marching ” his voice trailed. “I have tears in my eyes.”
I felt the need to congratulate him. “I’m really happy that you lived to see this day,” I told him. He reminded me that my mother was watching this moment as well.
The call to the in-laws was nearly the same, with my spouse’s mother, a Jamaican immigrant also overwhelmed.
I then called one of my mother’s closest friends, my godmother, who lives in Denver. She was happy, but also asleep. Last month she said that she never believed anything like Obama’s rise would happen in her lifetime. She went to his rally at Civic Center Park, “just to get a glimpse of him.”
I’ll never know what it was to be an African-American in the 1950s and 60s. But I do know that Tuesday night was a poignant moment for blacks of that generation.
This is their victory. And one for future generations.
My spouse looked at me, then back to the TV after the election was called for Obama. “Now it’s not a bad thing to be black and intelligent,” referring to sentiments held in the black community that to be smart and successful amounted to “acting white.”
I thought about being teased by other black girls in 8th grade for being “smart” and on the steps of my Baptist church for “talking like a white person.”
“You’re right,” I said. “Our kids won’t be ridiculed (by other black kids) for being black and smart. Obama shatters all of that. That’s what I’ll tell them.”
Wednesday morning, my spouse tried to console me over the lack of reporting I did the night before.
“That’s OK,” I said. “Being an African-American woman last night was much better than being a neutral reporter.”
I finally realized that I was “there.”
Kimberly S. Johnson is a business reporter for The Denver Post.
