Quite Early One Morning...

There are so many people on U Street that traffic has been blocked off. Firecrackers go off. Chinese sparklers are lit. A college girl with a Trini accent carries and American flag bigger than she is. I stand in the middle of celebration continually fighting off tears. I could barely speak when my cell finally connected with my father. The rain began to come down in a cooling mist as My Dad ans I spoke with joy and disbelief. Neither of us thought that we would live to see this. And yet there we were, bearing witness together in the same lifetime.

And there I was, standing on U Street, the once burned-out, cracked-out corridor my parents generation set fire to when they killed Martin 40 years ago. Now it's all gentrified and done up, a center of culture and nightlife. But we took it back in celebration. We made it ours long enough to embrace one another in one of the greatest victories this country has seen in the last 200 years.

As I took a pic with my girl, Zee, who is from the same neighborhood as me and who went to high school and college with me, she held me tight.

"I thought you were in LA," she said.
"Not yet," I replied with a smile, a little frustrated by having to explain why I'm still here. It's so far away to them that it's almost like another planet.
"Well good," she said to me. "You're supposed to be here. This is your home."

On that same stretch of street I ran into a guy from the third grade, old crushes, new friends and strangers white, black and Arab who embraced me like one of their own. Seeing the Middle Eastern cat parked in front of the Reeves Center with wife at shotgun and an Obama sticker on his minivan, I was glad to know that this was just about Black people, that the best of this country was tired of having our land run into the ground by stupid rich white men seeking only to serve themselves.

And I thought about the moment when our new president stepped to that stage in Grant Park, holding his wife's hand with his two daughters in tow. I marvelled at the fact that the world would get to see this, that some five year-old in the favelas of Rio, an elderly woman deep within Yorubaland, a father of four in Santiago de Cuba, and I had one less reason to ever believe that anything is possible.

I don't have any excuses anymore. I don't have a reason to every stop swinging.

As we took over ther 24/7 cafe, jamming to the Stevie Wonder mix and forming a Soul Train line that welcome the groups of gay men, white women and all kinds of Blacks folks all happy for the same thing, I talked to DJ Stylus, a dude that's been a degree away for more than a decade. And as we and his lady chopped it up about how the ideal for some little kid in the street is now so far past going platinum or popping bottles, as we looked at how now there's no mother in the worst project in the country who can put limits on what her baby can do, I know that no matter what happens to me, no matter have to face, I will get there.

As I drove home through empty streets and pulled onto my mother's block, there was a space right in front of my house for me to park the car, a space that's never been available at that time of night for all the years she's lived there. There is possibility. There is change. One Death Star is gone. But there are many more to replace it. The rebellion continues, one target at a time. Out ;)