Confession Station

A vote for him gave me confidence but

I’ll confess I hold fear for what others might do with their guns and hate and spit.
How can I dismiss those undercurrents that drag down hope?
Many incidents told me I was marked or not welcome here:

The cop who said Shut the Fuck Up! when I started to speak for a friend during a stoplight intervention; the busboy who spat in my bread basket at a restaurant after 911; the passengers who got up promptly then moved away when I entered the CTA car; the times I got picked out of airport security lines and drilled; the Federal Marshall who cut in line and followed me to the plane then took the seat at my side, asking questions, asking questions; the woman who phoned the police to come pat me down on her street as I walked to my teacher’s house for a piano class; the car of rowdy flag-bearing young men near downtown who screamed the N-word and told me to Go Home as they sped past; the female guest at a bridal shower hosted in my home who asked if I was the hired help; the plainclothes officers who patted me down one evening as I walked to the park with my unlit flashlight held down; the man at the farmer’s market who ignored me and continued to serve customers on a sunny Saturday morning in Autumn.

Steely as I am, I hold fear for what others do with their prejudices. I confess, too, that I’d worked hard to dispel my own.

But that late night in early November

I felt the repair begin. I felt it begin, relief that no aspirin could quantify. We’d stayed up to watch the results pour in, state after state from east coast to west. Afterwards we fell asleep, you and I, our hearts pulsing—with new hope won—fingers sewn together, not letting go, as if our plunge into this ocean of euphoria, of national joy, was the most blessed and satisfying thing to do.

It felt so good because

We championed a Black man to lead us in victory and wanted him to rise up, rise way up to the top among the scars. We wanted him with the kind of desperation that famine brings to the soul. For had we not remained unsatisfied so long, dispirited and abandoned to fend for ourselves in the nightmare resources of recent years and harsh todays?

In this new convergence of fairness we

See much more clearly how the world perceives us with acrimony and suspicion for our aggression and wars—no, occupations! There’s our supreme power; it does not bring our good soldiers back home. It does not. Do we show it because we fear humility and a lessening empire weak for oil? See how hemispheres succumb to the tidal waves we’ve sent outward as we bleed. My America has hemorrhaged from greed; my country spurts unstaunched wounds. Meanwhile, its executives float in the grease of their license and decadence as we succumb.

In this Blessed November

You and I were not alone. Out there in the openness, in the firelight roused by human persistence and deep fatigue, an empowered people cheered in tears and quivers for their native son, reaching for his eloquence and his truth. When he spoke we all believed and understood, but we believed most of all that history’s oppression would repeal its grip and pain—because that time had come, here and now. Hope will not be proven wrong, though many are challenged by the idea of it all, by the very idea of him, a Black man in the House.

When he spoke, I tell you

I wept as a child and stirred completely. Did you not? I cried and cried and let his words draw a river of goodness out from the mountain drip that began in the seat of my being. You see, my god lives there in silence—any god if you will—but my god of righteousness and infallibility, a god of decency and correction who knows and reads the stories of my heart when I am nice, corrupted, or mean, and a god who knows when I am stupidly ignorant or not awake enough to gather the purpose of the world into love. I have always feared love. That’s it then!

I have feared love but

It moved me so beautifully this time, because I found recourse on the shores of an honest and intelligent voice that the future promised us, the voice of a human made for all ages and constitutions. He moved me not because I am, like him, also made of color and with panting, but because I know that he respects the nature of the outside world to which I was born, a diverse world that thrives and struggles by its variance. My President-elect is more than welcome and,

Now, I am more at home in America than ever before.

~Ignatius Valentine Aloysius
Chicago, November 2008