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TOM GRALISH / Inquirer Staff Photographer
Leslie and Stephen Pierce watch Sen. Barack Obama's speech. When Obama opened his campaign, they never thought he would get this far.
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Their can-you-believe-this feeling
An African American couple, recalling racism of their youth, watch Obama's speech with excitement.
During the long drumroll of speeches and music, Stephen and Leslie Pierce watched their 4-year-old granddaughter get down to Stevie Wonder and wondered aloud what, possibly, could Barack Obama have to say in his much-anticipated acceptance speech.
By 10:30 p.m., when the senator from Illinois was nearly halfway through, Stephen Pierce, a 50-year-old lay minister raised by a single mom in a North Philadelphia housing project, and Leslie Pierce, the daughter of a city cop from West Oak Lane, had their answer.
"He's on fire!" declared their 13-year-old son, Stephen, who had been ordered to turn off the Eagles game to witness history.
There was something personal, some intimate connection to their lives, in almost everything Obama had to say.
When he talked about education and opportunity for all American children, Stephen Pierce's 25-year-old daughter Shelli, a public school teacher, threw her hands in the air and said, "Thank you!"
And when he talked with pride of his single mother's sacrifices, Leslie gently tapped her husband's shoulder.
Admiration. Anxiety. Disbelief. Elation. Obama's candidacy has not merely touched the lives of African American families such as the Pierces, it has become a turning point.
And like any major celebration, it has stirred a delta of memories both fond and bitter.
In the days leading up to the convention, the Pierces reminisced about the long, pitted road that got them where they are today and looked forward, with equal measures of hope and concern.
Last night, the family stayed up to catch every syllable, every applause break, every can-you-believe-this-is-actually-happening second of The Speech.
They will never forget when they sat in the living room of their spotless, brick home in Cheltenham, Stephen leaning forward as though he were reaching for the stadium, his children beside him on the couch, and watched Obama become the first black man to accept the Democratic nomination for president of the United States.
They applauded, and nodded, and hmm'd, and laughed, and choked up, marveling that only last winter, when Obama joined the race, they did not dare believe this day would ever come.
"We thought . . . " said Leslie Pierce, and, catching her husband's eye, began to laugh as he chimed in: "He doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell."
"Then he won Iowa," said Leslie, 47, a regional manager for the Pennsylvania Department of Insurance.
Both she and her husband are lifelong Democrats, although Stephen said he could understand Republicans' insistence upon self-reliance. "I have to remember to have a sympathetic ear," he said.
The youngest of five children, he grew up in the Raymond Rosen projects under the care of his single mother and a crew of attentive uncles who taught him basic civility.
"It was a real it-takes-a-village situation," he said. "They taught me how to carry myself. The value of a firm handshake. How to look someone in the eye when you speak to them."
After he started first grade, his mother went to work as a social worker. "I never thought of us as poor," he said. "We had a roof over our head, we each had a bed, and we had clothes to wear to church every Sunday."
But those clothes were hand-me-downs, his wife reminded him. And the food on the table was government-issued bricks of American cheese, powdered milk, canned peanut butter, and Spam.
The plight of poor blacks in Philadelphia seems to have worsened, he said, since the days when his mother would come home from work telling stories of the abusive couples and neglected children she had tried to help.
