The Morning After

I woke up with a jerk and a peculiar sensation of conflicting emotions. I wanted to be hopeful but that want was framed in a dark cloud of despair. My body seemed to be willing me out of bed and onto my feet but my head hung desperately onto the pillow. I laid there almost as if in paralysis for a few minutes, then threw the covers back and swung my feet onto the floor. The cool bedroom air shocked my skin and urged me to get up and get dressed.

Lilly nuzzled me as she always does when I first get up, her cold nose and soft fur against my knee seeming to reassure me that the really important things in life hadn’t changed. I scritched behind her ears and stared into her soft, brown eyes for a moment before finishing getting dressed and heading down the stairs.

My iPad laying on the table next to my chair offered a siren call as I walked into the living room, promising an immediate answer to my fearful, anxious question. I determinedly walked past it and into the kitchen, turned on the boiler and put a spoonful of instant coffee into my cup. When the pulse of the heating water turned into a rolling boil and the switch turned off, I filled my cup and walked slowly, deliberately to my chair.

I took a sip of my hot coffee as I waited for my iPad to boot, the steam fogging my glasses a bit. I started the Washington Post App and then, after a moment, there it was, in enormous black letters: “Trump Triumphs.” I scanned the article a bit. When I saw that 20% of Black men voted for him, I closed my iPad and sat there with my coffee in the dim early morning light, my eyes half closed and a peculiar tightness in my chest.

My memory drifted back 50 years to the time when I walked into a large auditorium and scanned the faces of all the people already seated. One of them – just one – was different. He was a Black man.

I looked again at the others and then back to him. I tried to imagine what a peculiar sensation it would have been if I would have seen only black faces. Just the thought made my stomach tighten and my breath quicken.

I found a seat not far from him and studied his face and features, feeling more than a little self-conscious of my impolite staring. He was clean shaven and his dark hair was mostly straight and shiny except for a few places where his naturally kinky hair had escaped the discipline of his hair straightener. His nostrils were a bit wider and his lips a little thicker than any of the other students. Unlike me and the rest of the men in the room, he was impeccably dressed in suit and tie.

I had such a clear sense that there were two different people sitting in that chair. One was a man who had probably been through all the joys, challenges, and racial disparagement of his black community. The other was a man striving for a better future by trying to assume an identity acceptable to the White society around him.

Lilly brought me back to the dark, cloudy November morning with a bit of squirming as she snuggled more deeply into my lap. I stroked her tummy as I took another sip of coffee. Could it be that the perceived need to satisfy White expectations in order to be successful had anything to do with the 20% that voted for Trump?