The Central District is rapidly gentrifying but I still live on a block with Floyd, Ms. Harris, Mother Moore's family, and the couple with a concrete lawn who rarely come outside—all black folks, all my immediate neighbors, all who've lived in these houses for four decades.

This morning I knocked on Ms. Harris's door—she moved here from Texas in 1965 with her husband, a police officer who died in the 1980s, and I think she's about 85 now—and when she answered it she had tears in her eyes. "I know why you come," she said. "To tell me about the president!"

Ms. Harris, mother of seven children, has an RFK/JFK/MLK tapestry on her wall and a black Last Supper above her fireplace. She says her husband bought those. She makes it sound like Obama's not such a big deal, but she's not really fooling me. "My parents, they worked. But I don't know anything about slavery. I didn't live through that. No, I just said, whoever gets its, I hope they do something for us, to make things better. I've never seen peoples lose their houses before."

When I ask how her husband would have felt today, she changes her tune a little. "There's a lot of people who didn't live to see this. That's the first thing I said last night."

I want to take her picture very much, but I can't bring myself to ask her because she doesn't have her teeth in and is holding her hand over her mouth the entire time she's talking.

The last thing she says about Obama is, "We'll just have to see what he does." She sounds like a great mother—one with tears of pride in her eyes, yes, but high expectations, too.