The classroom, cold with morning. Approaching eight. The rattle of the heater by the shelves, an insufficient heat. Cold orange light at the rear windows, throwing diamonds off the razor wire fence ringing the school, plying chainlink shadows to the concrete yard. In the back of the classroom, twenty-six coats on hooks: evidence of arrival, promise of another day. The bell rang in the tasks at hand. Every student at a desk, at work on the morning math: A dozen review problems, the nine multiplication table, some long division, the daily word problem: Lashawn buys 234 donuts. He fills boxes with a dozen donuts each. How many boxes will he have, and how many leftover donuts will he eat?

    The only sound in the room was pencil to paper. Only Terence, long finished, lolled in his seat, too-long legs twisted beneath the desk. I glanced at him, and he grinned, reached beneath his desk for his book, opened to the bookmarked page and began to read, performing for my benefit, lips forming the words to stress his effort. I hid my smile. Now a hand: Lashawn, big-eyed, enthusiastic about his word problem. “Mr. Copperman, what a dozen is?” He says dozen doe-zen, a dream of feng-shui deer. “Twelve,” I said, and he nodded, began to write. “One minute left,” I called to a collective intake of breath, the mounting scratch of pencil-lead. I’d wait two minutes. Terence’s mouth worked a hundred words per minute. Lashawn’s pencil clattered to the desk, and he reached a hand to his hair, slicked it back with satisfaction. Finished. More pencils followed, clatter of completion; I covertly watched Aronisha, my slowest math student, chew and chew at her eraser, turn her eyes to the ceiling, write something and lower her pencil.

    “Please stand.”

    A creaking of chairs, and two dozen straight backs, faces turned to the dangling red, white, and blue, and every hand to a heart except Terence, who’d somehow figured his heart on the right side. District policy and Mississippi State Law had us pledging to the country, under God and indivisible, even by the dozen, and liberty and justice and the freedom to live this life within razor-wire fences and shotgun shacks and flat, open fields. And then the expectant pause as I walked to the front of the room, hands clasped behind my back, and all of us began together: “I pledge allegiance to the class, to work together and never rest…” This pledge was always louder, reckless volume and declaration of intent. I knew they could hear us next door, the sound shivering through cinder block: some things couldn’t be fully muted. The call and response was roared: What’s today? An opportunity to learn. What’s tomorrow? Too late! When’s the time? Now. Whose education? Our education! Whose future? Ours!

    No-one missed the chance to go, every opportunity was bellowed and no voice not lifted. I spoke quietly, listened to make out each voice: the screech of Terence, Lashawn’s deep shout, Felicia’s voice ringing clearly, resonant, almost sung. At the end, the silence was pregnant for a moment, as we lingered in that promise, in everything that had been declared for this day, week, year, and then there was the complaint of metal and plastic as everyone settled to their seats and the work began in earnest, hands raising to offer answers, to be called on and declared right and so rewarded, so confirmed in imminent success.

    It has been four years since I taught in the Delta, and the years since have taken me far from that classroom, from that time when I dedicated everything to improving the uncertain future of those children born on the wrong side of the tracks. And yet, I can still feel the texture of those humid Delta mornings, hear the rhythm of the voices of black children echoing down the halls. I still remember the sense of purpose that I had each day, knowing that this, here, mattered: a child’s education, their best chance against bad odds to rise from those dusty streets and slumping tenements and find a better life. Opportunity. The word has been tossed around in this election. At the end of the debate, I heard Mr. McCain presume to claim the issue of educational inequality as his own, and even go so far as to mention Teach For America in service of his plan to institute a voucher system. And I shuddered.

    There’s no need for me to discuss why Mr. McCain, or indeed Republicans in general, have a lack of vision about education—it ought to be enough to say that the poor are not a central Republican concern. I am, at this late stage of the campaign, exhausted with the partisan. I’m exhausted with the character attacks, the Ayer-izing of the candidate, the Palinization of politics, the cries of “Kill him!” and “He’s an Arab!” and “Terrorist!” I’m exhausted with Joe-Six Pack and Joe the Plumber and even Joe Biden the everyman of Scranton. I’m not surprised to hear that Republicans think pictures of Mr. Obama with fried chicken and watermelon is ‘fine’, nor am I surprised that Republicans would defend those foods as, ahem, ‘food we all eat.’

    I wasn’t surprised to see, in a recent New York Times article wired from the Deep South, quotes from white folk interviewed in the parking lots of Kroger and Wal-Mart that said the problem with Mr. Obama is the miscegnegation that made him: the Bible told the Israelites to stay unto themselves, and so. I know those folks. They stared and ogled me, another fellow mixed racial background with roots in Hawaii, for two full years, sometimes approaching me with twisted lips to inquire, “What exactly is you, anyway?”

    My answer was always, with a grin: “American.” I am, I suppose, one of very few Americans who isn’t black and can say I’m voting Obama because of identity politics.

    No, no. I am not surprised at the racial overtones of the race, or at the overtness with which it has been wielded as weapon and wedge. I am not surprised at the ugliness of the fringe, or the acts of racists. But I am surprised to hear that Mr. McCain would mention my service in the classroom, and then suggest a sentence later that we ought to create charters and a broader voucher system—to privatize the public, a thinly veiled attempt to fund private schools which are havens of white flight and wealthy flight (which are sometimes the same, but not always). I would like, then, to suggest two things concerning Mr. Obama, and both of them concern race and are positives: tit for tat, in this case.

The first is that, whether or not Mr. Obama is the whitest black man in the history of America, he is nonetheless black, and that matters to the way we think about equality. There was a moment late in the debate with McCain, after the turn to education and health care, when Mr. Obama was speaking, and the words were flowing, his demeanor calm, his tone measured and resonant and confident, when I stopped listening and just watched. Here is excellence, I thought. Here is presidential timber. Here is change—change in symbols, in emblems and mythos, in our idea of what constitutes America’s finest.

    The second point relates to the first: As Obama has campaigned these last twenty months, speaking to crowds all across America, his face and voice have traveled through television screens. His rising star, through the airways and radiowaves, has been to the places that nobody visits—the places that are forgotten, that are out of our sight and mind. And in the rural ghettoes of Mississippi where the children I taught are beginning high school now and remain untouched by our first-world headaches ('What a financial cry sis is, and why they mention that Wall street all the time—and what all this bout where recess in and why do everybody care?'), even there, his voice echoes and echoes. In fact, I believe that on those sun-baked streets, Obama is amplified. I can picture it everywhere, a diffuse hum, an excitement, a new and unexpected possibility crackling through the air. Perhaps Terence, who wanted like most young black boys to be a basketball player or football star, is hearing that noise right now. It starts as a murmur, something about opportunity and equality. He turns, looks for its source. It’s the voice of a black man, sure, but more than that, it’s vigorous with success and confidence. It says: Yes, you can. And over time the volume swells and swells, it rises to a roar, and maybe Terence begins to think about what a leader looks like. Maybe he thinks about his future. Maybe he realizes the voice is his now-- and when he starts to speak, everybody turns and listens.