I’m just back from watching the swearing in of our 44th president, Barack Obama. It’s a proud day for me as an American,. I also take some vicarious pride in this truly historic event for some long at rest in these Tennessee hills.At the heart of our house is a one room log cabin once the home to a family of freed slaves. The cabin has an earlier history, reputed to have served as a toll house when the road outside our door was the main highway through the area. In my own research, though, the earliest deed I could find is for purchase of the this property by Stephen Sellars, colored a few years after the Civil War
I know from census records, before the war the same Stephen was slave to a Sellars family in the area, and that from 1870 onward, the Sellars family, with as many as seven children, made their home in this humble cabin. In fact, they named one of their daughters “America,” perhaps reflecting family pride in the country which struck their chains for freedom. On the hill near my office, within 100 yards of where I sit, there is an old black cemetery. Most gravestones are mere slate slabs set upright in the ground, but of the few carved with dates, several mark the birth of people born into slavery.
As I headed down the hill to vote for President Obama last November, I thought of all sleeping there, and what such a day and opportunity would have meant. Seated by those cabin walls watching our new President take his oath this morning my thoughts returned to them again, and all their years of suffering, endurance and hope had finally wrought., Here was a moment certainly beyond their dreams, but a dream fulfilled for all who recognize the basic dignity of all.
So in their memory, our flag proudly hangs today on the cabin wall they once recognized as home, to greet and remind wall who pass this way how far we’ve come as Americans.
