The Tracks of Our Tears

By MAUREEN DOWD
NYT

WASHINGTON

I grew up in the nation’s capital, but I’ve never seen blacks and whites here intermingling as they have this week.

Everywhere I go, some white person is asking some black person how they feel.

I saw one white customer quiz his black waitress at length at a chic soul food restaurant downtown, over deviled eggs and fried chicken livers, about whether she cried when Barack Obama won. She said she did, and he said he wept like a baby.

He wondered how long she thought it would take the new president to scrape the government up off the floor. “Three years,” she replied authoritatively.

I saw three white women asking a black bartender at the Bombay Club, across Lafayette Park from the White House, if he was happy and what he thought about Jesse Jackson’s flowing tears at Grant Park, given his envious threat to cut off a sensitive part of Obama’s anatomy. “I think the tears were real,” the bartender said.

(More here.)