Their can-you-believe-this feeling

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.

He doesn't believe government, not even Obama, can legislate away those problems. Nor the loss of common decency.

But there are a few measures, critical ones, he said, that elected officials need to take - and he puts gun control near the top of the list.

Seated at the glass dining-room table earlier this week, the Pierces said that their memories of the civil-rights movement were vivid, and mostly harrowing. Stephen was bused to South Philadelphia in an attempt to integrate the schools.

"I remember white people standing on the corners, spitting and foaming at the mouth."

"At buses of schoolchildren," Leslie shook her head.

"A lot of stuff, you learn to live with," he said.

"People want you to overlook it." She touched his knee. "They say you should get past it."

"But most things that influenced you as a child, you carry through life."

The day the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, for example. "I was 7 years old," Leslie recalled. "We had just brought in groceries from the Pantry Pride on Stenton Avenue. My mother was putting the bags on the counter when I heard the news."

"And I remember the skies lighting up on Columbia Avenue during the riots," her husband said. "And the day after he was shot, I huddled in a corner at school. I was afraid that something might happen to us."

Racism has dogged him, he said, throughout his life, making him work against the presumption that because he is black, he has to prove his competence. "For the last 30 years," he said, "every single day, I've always had to work at this level." He stretched his long arm above his head.

"Ninety-nine percent of the time, I feel I'm guarding my color. . . . Now this man - this black man - is getting ready to accept the nomination to be president of the United States. If he coughs wrong, they're going to scrutinize every thing he does."

Through the lens of their own experience, the Pierces said, they can't help but have a more pessimistic view of racism in America.

Stephen's daughter, Shelli, however, is living in a different world. An English teacher, studying for her master's degree in school counseling at Villanova, she said that for her, racism had factored little into her friendships, school and career. Biracial couples, a shocking aberration in her father's day, are now commonplace. And unlike the college students of her parents' generation, whose formative political experiences were seared into memory by the acid of racism, she will have the extraordinary images from last night to recall.

"You sit in class and hear about the ways blacks were treated. You read about it and watch documentaries like Eyes on the Prize. Then you fast-forward 45 years to today with a black man running for president and wonder: Is this the same country with the fire hoses and dogs attacking blacks who were taking a nonviolent approach to civil rights?"

Don't misunderstand, she said. She knows racism persists. "But seeing where Obama is shows that America has grown. People's minds are open to something new."

As Obama finished his 40-minute speech, and the crowd erupted, the younger Stephen turned to his parents, surprised and disappointed.

"It's all over?" he asked.

His mother sunk back into her arm chair, emotionally exhausted, in a good way.

"All but the shoutin'," she said.