Come on Baby, Sit by Me

Come on Baby, Sit by Me
Anne B. Butterfield, January 25, 2009 (Daily Camera)

In Boulder we live in a sea of mostly white faces, and with over 70% of us voting for Obama in November, we helped make this Inauguration be a teeming sea of brown, deliriously happy faces. And in the midst of that national group hug, I was there.

In spite of growing up answering to monikers like “punkinhead”from the African Americans who took care of my family’s home, and going to school with many black students including our new president, my chances of being close with people of color have been the same as most whites’ -- few and far between.

So it was with excitement that I entered Reagan Airport and its sea of relaxed, happy, brown faces. I was giddy for their initiation to come with this Inauguration, but I was anxious whether the communing would be blunder-free.

To this day I wince at my blunder trying to befriend a strongly dignified black girl in 7th grade, whom I complimented as I might anyone my age: "Hey Gina you have weird hair". She replied icily that's the hair that black people have and strode away. I was mortified and never spoke with her again.

In Los Angeles in the 90’s I called out to a woman in a restroom who was heading into trouble; she shot me a dirty look and bustled by. I tapped her again, insistent.

“What?” she demanded.

“I am sorry -- but the back of your skirt is tucked into your panty hose!”

When she saw that all of her rear end was about to be sashayed through a large restaurant, she melted her hands onto my shoulders, saying, "Oh my honeychile, I am sorry!"

I have stayed leery of the trap door of misunderstanding that creaks beneath all people in inter-racial settings. So when the reservation lady at Super Shuttle at Reagan swooped down to pick up my coat where it had slid to the floor, a gesture that from a black person to a white person might seem a bit too servile, I was hopeful that the times had been a-changin’.

Gentleness among strangers kept coming through the Inauguration festivities as if the metropolis had been sprinkled with fairy dust. Going to a run-down part of DC for National Service Day, I was led nine blocks by a young white woman who I met on the bus. Then, waiting at the bus stop to return, I was exhorted by an older black man about the values he’d been teaching in his “hood”. To every black male passerby he bellowed, “To God be the Glory!”

On a previous night my friend Kellie and I landed up at the wrong Smithsonian building in search of that night’s ball, and in our fussing over finery forgot our papers. With much effort the staff tracked down our ball and when it was known to be several blocks away, a building engineer named Vaughn Judd offered take us there. We thought he would walk us a bit and point it out. No. He drove us right to the door in his outsized pick up truck.

On Inauguration, Day I spied a Metro seat next to a woman who had splayed out her belongings; I asked her about it, as it would be the last sit for a long day. Dressed in seven shades of red down to her oversized glasses, she said, “Come on Baby, sit by me.” She told me about her grandchildren, her health issues, her journey from South Carolina. I told her about mountaintop removal mining and the pollution that comes with flicking on the lights. She had me write down notes for her of my reminders.

Where we exited at L’Enfant Plaza, movement in the crush of bodies soon came to a halt. Fully packed trains sped through in search of space to unload. We were several thousand people jammed wall to wall in a dimly lit crypt. An announcement implored us not to push as there was a medical emergency ahead. Twenty minutes later no movement. A few began a chant of Let Us Go, and an elder man gave his sonorous voice to warn us to quell any sort of panic. A woman was led up beside me crying with chest pains. Another woman collapsed. An elderly woman fell into the track behind us. It was a full hour until we trudged up two stories worth of paralyzed escalator stairs to the open street.

Out on the Mall, the crowds were every bit as tight. But the air was open and the cold was tempered by our packed bodies. Men let women lean up on their shoulders, binoculars were passed around, and women took turns stepping up on barricades to gain height. I was completely unconcerned about my wallet in my pack on my back. Among the 1.8 million people there, no arrests came that day. Our numbers made for danger in the most packed spaces, but each person assured safety and welcome.

Elizabeth Alexander’s poem foretold the esprit de corps: “In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun…walking forward in that light.”