The dream becomes reality

I can't find the words.

Just can't.

The enormity of this moment is too big to articulate. Tears, hugs and prayers express more.

But let me try.

This election was about America taking a hard look at itself and, in one of its most trying times, deciding to put its future in the hands of its first African American president.

Barack Hussein Obama. A black man.

History hasn't allowed African Americans to get their hopes up too high. See, I've watched my parents and grandparents keep their heads up through a lifetime of dashed dreams.

Through segregation. Having to work harder for no reward. Living most of their lives without a clear path to vote. Having hope against all odds. Offering the promise of America to their children without believing it could be delivered.

Yesterday, so many of us, and especially African Americans, were overcome by the magnitude of this journey.

A friend related how, for the first time, she got dressed up to vote - her personal nod to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Another showed me a snapshot of her parents, now deceased, that she had hidden under her blouse, cradled close to her heart when she voted.

"I took them in the polling place with me," she said.

That's when the gravity of the moment hit.

And the tears began to flow.

I had been on the verge all day. I couldn't sleep the night before. At 7 a.m., I went into the voting booth and said a prayer after I hit the button for Barack.

Participating in a piece of history to break down barriers that divide us, I felt a surge of emotion so strong it almost felt spiritual.

Mine were not unlike the feelings of plenty of African Americans, I suspect. But this is too big to be just relegated to a Black History moment.

We all closed the deal on this.

Blacks, whites, Asians, Latinos, Native Americans, rural, urban, young, old. Waiting in lines five hours long to vote. Waiting as long as it took to fight back fear and choose hope.

Exhorted to the mountaintop by a community organizer who constantly asked us to believe in ourselves.

That's how movements get started.

One thing's for sure - the outcome of this, the longest presidential campaign in history, was far from anticlimactic. History seldom is.

But the added value of Obama's historical run is that it has forced us to reexamine our attitudes about race. And patriotism. And intolerance. And we're all better for it.

From flag pins to Muslim slurs. Rev. Wright and "real" Americans. Was Barack Obama too black for whites or not black enough for blacks?

"We don't want to get too excited about the prospect" of an African American president," Obama told a group of black journalists last year, "because we don't want to be let down in the end. ... My attitude is, let's try it. Let's take a chance and see what happens."

And so, through 21 months of slings and arrows, he conducted himself with a steady grace and resolve from which we all can learn.

Please indulge me while I have my hallelujah moment.

This is for my grandfather, a son of the South, who never got the chance to vote, suppressed into invisibility. For my father, who never reaped the benefit of his hard-earned vote.

For my mother, who, God bless her, will see a black first lady, one with sophistication and education who has already redefined the typical notion of black womanhood - no anger, no bitterness, no sass. Just a devoted wife and mother who stands by her man without diminishing her own power.

Most of all, this is for my children. I've told them, as my parents told me, that they can be anything they want to be. Malia and Sasha playing on the South Lawn at the White House will tell them so.

It's a visual no one could have ever imagined.

Until now.