Back from a little Thanksgiving break, we bring you today Family Stories, the monthly column from Jacqueline Hudak.  Still stunned, energized, and moved, I think we’ll all be processing Obama’s victory for a long while. -Deborah

As GWP readers know, I am fascinated by which stories are told in our culture, which remain silenced, and what conditions bring certain ones to the fore. I often say my work as a family therapist entails listening to stories – stories that either cannot be spoken or heard outside of my office.  From the personal to the cultural, it’s often not a great leap.

As so brilliantly documented in a book by a former history prof of mine at BU, (A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present), Howard Zinn presents history through the eyes of those rarely heard in mainstream texts.  I was reminded of this the other week when my friend Trina Scordo, a longtime union organizer, began to tell stories she heard in North Carolina as she knocked on doors for the Obama campaign as the election approached. Trina asked one of her fellow union members why he chose to travel from New York to Charlotte for this election eve.  He told Trina that his father had said there would never be an African-American president in the United States.  He said, “My Father always told me racism was too strong.  My grandparents were slaves and my father faced racism on his job and in the neighborhood in which we lived.  My Dad always tried to avoid the discussion of race because he did not believe it would ever change.  He died believing that.  I had to be here on this day, on this night for him.”  When Barack Obama surpassed 270 electoral votes, Trina told me, this gentleman fell to his knees and wept.  He held in his hand a picture of his father.

Other stories came from those on the other side of the doors.  As Trina said, “African-Americans shared their histories with organizers at their front doors and porches.  It was a collective history of slavery, civil rights and unions.  Some told me it was the first time they had shared this history outside of their families and further, with a white person.”

This election gave a sense of liberation to the marginalized: youth, women, communities of color, the exploited and working class.  Yet it was a bittersweet victory – a victory tinged with sadness about the passage of California’s Prop 8. I asked in my column last month: How do we fill the gap between what we wanted and what we get in this election?

I found an analysis of the breakdown of who voted for Prop 8 at Pam’s House Blend, one that did not engage in racial scapegoating.   Hendrik Hertzberg (New Yorker, Dec 1) points to the tens of thousands of people who took to the streets all over this country in spontaneous protest, and believes “It wasn’t enough this time. But the time is coming.”

In the afterword of the young readers version of A People’s History, Howard Zinn asks youth to “imagine the American people united for the first time in a movement for fundamental change.”

We are on the cusp of such a movement.  May it be so.

—Jacqueline Hudak