My great-grandfather owned a slave, just one, a young male whom he named Sidney, after himself. There is a family legend attached to Sidney which I am going to repeat here, but with the caveat that there is no transcript, no video tape of this event, and there is a tendency in all people to shade stories to their favor. In other words, I am not sure if I completely believe it or not.

It was the end of the Civil War and Sherman was marching through Georgia. War is a terrible thing even when God is on your side, and the Union troops were stealing everything they found, then burning the houses to the ground, even the small ones of those too poor to own more than one slave. Slaves were told that they were free men and now proud members of the Union Army.

We've all read about how news traveled at the speed of light through the slave network. Sidney knew the Union Army was coming and he ran off and hid. Several days later he returned, to find my great-grandparents packing what little they had left into a covered wagon. Here is the dialog as it has been handed down through the generations:

"Where are you going?"

"We're going to Texas. There's nothing here for us anymore."

"Then I'm going with you."

"No, you can't, you're a free man now."

"But you're my family."

However the conversation went -- and who knows, maybe it actually did go that way -- Sidney came to Texas with my ancestors and lived to be an old man. I have seen a picture of him sitting on my grandmother's front porch, holding my father when he was an infant and my grandmother somewhere well into her forties. A little thought convinces me that he was fed and clothed and sheltered, but the shelter was a separate hut or possibly a sleeping porch, the clothing was castoffs from family members, and the meals, while the same food as the family ate, were always solitary. I'm sure that he continued to labor for them, and that they never paid him wages. They were all aware that he was free, yet at least for my relatives, he wasn't a person they could associate with in the way they associated with other whites. But I'm also sure they were genuinely fond of him, and certainly the picture I have seen indicates that they took good care of him when he was far too old to work for them. I am not trying to make them seem either evil or saintly. I think they simply did the best they could.

I guess it takes generations for things to change. I have chronicled here before how my unthinking acceptance of the segregated world I grew up in was shattered. I have watched a lot of racial strife in this country, sometimes turning into violence. But yesterday we elected a President whose father was African. That could not have happened 100, 50, even 20 years ago. I happen to really, really like Obama's politics, but I think that even if he were diametrically opposed to my views -- say, if we had elected Clarence Thomas -- I would still be very proud to live in an America that can elect a man without regard to the color of his skin.