Today’s Voices of Philadelphia is brought to you by James William Ijames.  I first met James on November 4 at the election watch party hosted by yours truly.   After adding him on Facebook, I realized that he worked at a rather spectacular museum and I was curious to see how the new President-Elect impacted the ways in which he viewed his job.  But, I will let him tell you….

Performance of Freedom
By James William Ijames

I am an actor. Organizations pay me to become someone else for “two hours traffic” of a stage. My craft is disappearance and reappearance. I am a modern magician, inside a tradition that stretches all the way back to the beginning of human communication. Acting is all about choices. As a boy, I was told by those who loved me I could be whatever and whom ever I chose. This I suppose was the start of my pretending, the start of my journey to play as many different persons as possible, to plum the depths of the human animal through words, movement, and breath.

My day job is performing a massive show at a museum in Philadelphia, home of the American Government, called Freedom Rising. Going into that huge three hundred seat theater on November 6th and saying “What makes us Americans? What makes us a nation? A stubborn human insistence on independence, Connected to the most powerful vision of human free ever expressed” had new meaning. I think, perhaps, for the first time, I meant those words. The “vision” of the fore fathers is now more complete.

Nothing in my wildest imaginations could have prepared me for the developments of November 4th 2008. Time stopped, the ground moved and everything I hoped for suddenly became true.

The dramatis personae inside this moment were a black man of Kenyan and Caucasian descent, his African American wife from the working class south side of Chicago and his two young daughters, destined to become the benefactors of this point in time. The stage? America’s perfectly flawed political machine. The audience? The entire world. It is only now, some days later that I can begin to put into context this international performance.

Newly elected president Barack Obama strode on his stage in Grant Park waving at the masses, reminded me of Shakespeare’s Mark Anthony speaking over the dead body of tyranny. It was one of the most theatrical experiences of my life, and hundreds of miles away I was in the audience. The audience for this spectacle stretched out over the face of the earth. Sudden outbursts of collective joy dotted the globe. An entire segment of the species gathered together in the name of hope. As Martha and the Vandellas put it there was literally “dancing in the streets.” A truly worldwide moment of theater, focused squarely on a young, idealistic junior senator from Illinois, bringing to mind another great politician from the same state that aided in making this moment possible.

The journey of people of African descent in this country is easily likened to the epic journey of Odysseus. Blinding the Cyclops of Slavery, defeating the hurricane of Jim Crow and Lynching, and overcoming the Siren songs of crack cocaine, poverty, and institutional racism, finally reaching the shores of the promised land. As we look over, and begin work on moving forward we can not forget the past. Nor can we rest and become complacent. The last stretch of the journey is before us. The curtain has not yet descended on our story. The final act has not been written. Our story is the story of humanity at its absolute strongest and fittest. What the future holds is entirely up to the choice we, the players, make and the commitments we make to change.