Breaking Down the Black Vote

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For many African Americans, however, the issue of Obama's race is not tidily packaged. One delicate issue, rarely broached by white commentators but avidly discussed among blacks, is Obama's biracial identity. "For some reason, if you're biracial and part African American, you're African American where the masses are concerned," says Williams, who has a biracial niece. "My thought is, he is really as much white as he is black." For her part, Marjorie Hammock, 72, a professor of social work at Benedict College who is also undecided, fears that a Clinton presidency would be "K Street all over again." But she's not sure about Obama. "Where are his points of reference, his experiences?" she asks. "It comes out of both of those worlds, I gather. I don't expect him to have a perspective on the world, say, as a Jesse Jackson might. I can want all I want to for him to be a candidate who would be steeped in the black tradition and understands totally the issues in the black community. But he probably represents what this world is going to look like, and I don't fault him for who he is."

The nation's increasingly polychromatic mix could be an advantage for Obama. As with many social changes, though, the multiracial reality precedes the vocabulary we usually deploy in talking about race. All his life, Obama has faced both the challenges and the advantages of being biracial--the subtle hints in the African-American community that he isn't black enough, the racism in the white community that, thank goodness, he isn't too black. In his autobiography, Dreams from My Father, Obama wrote that "when people who don't know me well, black or white, discover my background ... I see the split-second adjustments they have to make, the searching of my eyes for some telltale sign. They no longer know who I am."

The challenge for Obama and candidates like him is to establish a connection with traditional black constituencies while still maintaining a postracial profile. It's fitting that Obama often closes his stump speeches with an anecdote drawn from a campaign stop in South Carolina that reveals something about how he sees his identity.

As Obama tells it, he was at an event in tiny Greenwood County, S.C., last year, having driven hours out of his way through the rain in pursuit of an endorsement from a state representative, when someone started leading the group in a cheer. "I turn back. There's this little lady standing there," he recalled in Aiken, S.C., not long ago. "She got a big hat. And she's smiling at me. She says, 'Fired up! Ready to go!' And it turns out that this young lady's name is Edith Childs, and she's a councilwoman from Greenwood. And she is famous for her chant. They call her the chant lady. And for the next, it seemed like, five minutes, she just kept chanting. I don't really know what to do. But here's the thing, Aiken: after about a minute or two, I'm feeling kind of fired up." He goes on to say that the point of the story is that "one voice can change a room."

Possibly, but for Obama, the point of the story is also to signal to black South Carolinians that he has learned to be one of them, not only a black man in appearance but also one comfortable with the call-and-response folkways of African-American Southern life.

"I think it's a sort of defining moment in his campaign, and not just because he got a slogan out of it," says Robert Tinsley, 54, a white attorney who was at the meeting where Childs, 59, started the chant. "He was mesmerized by the enthusiasm he received, and I think it helped him connect better with the Southern black voter." Tinsley is leaning toward Obama but is still considering Clinton and Edwards because Obama can be "a little vague."

That could become a bigger liability for Obama as the race tightens in South Carolina and beyond. Clinton's victory in New Hampshire showed that Obama's effort to cast his campaign as a broad, generational crusade may not be enough to win the nomination. Still, Childs says she supports Obama because "the sincerity this man shows is what I don't see in Hillary." She adds that Obama has inspired her to work harder to bring people together in a county that still has two American Legion posts--one favored by whites and one by blacks. On Jan. 21, for the local observance of King's birthday, she has made sure that the integrated choir from nearby Emerald High School will be a featured attraction so that both white and black families attend. "If nothing else," says Childs, "Obama has reminded us that we've got a lot to do in Greenwood in that area still."

Although pundits and campaign staffers alike will spend the days leading up to the South Carolina primary attempting to predict the outcome of the "black vote," the voters themselves prove the folly of such an exercise. Hammock says she will end up making what she calls a highly "political" choice: she wants to give "this one little ole vote" to whichever Democrat she believes is going to win the nomination so that he or she has the most resounding mandate possible going into the general election. Meanwhile, Anderson told me in Columbia that she didn't yet have enough information to make up her mind. "I still need to hear about the issues in depth from Senator Obama as well as from Senator Clinton." She will decide her vote, possibly in the booth, on the basis of the candidates' positions on health care and jobs.

The Rev. Fred Armfield, pastor of the Little Zion AME Church in Greenwood, says the black church has all but lost its electoral influence over African-American voters, and he's glad. "This generation has grown and is intelligent enough that it doesn't need a driver at the polls," says Armfield. "I don't take a position from the pulpit. I know the people in my congregation are independent thinkers." That said, however, he's backing Clinton. "The Clintons have always been good to the African-American community, and I'm staying with them," he says. He knows many black voters in Greenwood are torn between Clinton and Obama but says that's a good thing if it raises black turnout.

Twenty-two states will hold Democratic primaries or caucuses on Feb. 5. The racial politics of New York, California and many of the other states voting that day are so riverine that they make South Carolina's racial divide look simple. But if Obama can persuade enough black and white South Carolinians to give him a resounding victory, he may be able to claim that he knows not only how to fire up an American crowd but also how to dampen its lingering prejudices.