America the Beautiful...

I watched the inauguration, today, with tears in my eyes.

I had a whole thing about it all typed out, and ready to post.

But, just when I was ready to transfer my pre-written post over, I remembered something. And it's something pretty damn important. Yes, it's so important that I'm willing to overlook my normal policy of not cursing on this particular blog.

So, I'm sorry, but you're not going to see that post. I'm going to trash it. Nobody is ever going to see it.

You may ask yourselves, "What the hell could possibly be so important, that Miss DeeGee is willing to change up her day's post, and write a post to us live?" And the answer is simply this: I remembered that my mother was born in 1955, the year a 14-year-old African-American boy from Chicago named Emmett Till was murdered. And this was no regular murder. This was truly brutal. And the sad part? The two men known to have taken part were never punished.

Never had the misfortune of seeing pictures of him in school? Look him up. But be warned, it's not for people with a weak stomach, and may or may not be Nightmare Fuel, for some folks.

But, the thing is this: Emmett's mother, Mamie, decided that she was going to have an open-casket funeral, because she wanted the world to see what these men had done to her son. Photographs were taken, and published. And people were shocked into action.

See... This was part of what helped spark things in the early years of the Civil Rights Movement. My mother was born less than a month after Emmett Till's death, and less than two months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus.

My mother grew up during the years of that famous movement. She remembers when Martin Luther King and Malcom X were killed. And she knows exactly where she was (school), when Kennedy was killed. I was born years after these events occurred, of course, and it's only now that I'm able to truly and fully appreciate that she actually lived through the events, instead of having to hear about them in history classes.

I paused, during my typing, to ask her whether she remembered the deaths I mentioned above. King and Malcom X she remembers only vaguely, but Kennedy, she's a lot more clear on. She was eight, when Kennedy was killed. She was nine, when Malcom X was killed. And then, King was killed, when she was twelve. Our voices were both wavering, when we talked. And I almost choked up, and really started crying, when she said (and this is nowhere near an exact quote) "King was a good man, and he was killed. I really hope Obama makes it through this. It's so wonderful, to be able to see this happening."

My mother and I got to witness the inauguration together. Neither of us thought we would live to see the day when this would happen. We're so happy. America is truly becoming more beautiful, before our eyes. But, at the same time, my mother and I both remember times when it wasn't such a beautiful place, at all. My mother lived through the Civil Rights movement, and she and I both lived through 9-11. And now, we both are seeing this. It's so amazing... So absolutely, mind-bogglingly amazing, to think about.

I think I have to end this, with a line from Elizabeth Alexander's poem. It's the one line that truly reached out and struck me. When I heard it, a voice inside me replied "What if...? What if it really, truly is...?"

What was the line that seemed so profound, that struck me so hard?

"What if the mightiest word is 'love'?"