On November 7, 2008, three days after we the people elected Barack Obama to be President of the United States, Martin Espada visited the grave of Frederick Douglass at Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York. The poem Espada wrote there, "Litany at the Tomb of Frederick Douglass," from his book, The Trouble Ball, concludes with these words, which I pray may be a boon to our faith and courage:

"This is the stillness at the heart of the storm that began in the body of the first slave, dragged aboard the first ship to America. Yellow leaves descend in waves, and the newspaper flutters on the tomb, like the sails Douglass saw in the bay, like the eyes of a slave closing to watch himself escape with the tide. Believers in spirits would see the pages trembling on the stone and say: look how the slave boy teaches himself to read. I say a prayer, the first in years: that here we bury what we call the impossible, the unthinkable, the unimaginable, now and forever. Amen."