By FRANK DELANO
The Associated Press

KINSALE, Va.— Thousands of jubilant people celebrated President-elect Barack Obama’s election victory Tuesday night on big-city streets.

Inez Selden Johnson, a 94-year-old black woman, celebrated it alone — and with reservations — in her old farmhouse by a creek in Kinsale.

“I wanted Hillary like 18 or 19 million other people. I was pulling for her as hard as I could. I didn’t think Obama had enough experience to be president,” Johnson said.

“Hillary’s experience was better and she had her husband to help her. Bill Clinton knew how to run a country.”

When the time came for her to cast her absentee vote, she said she thought about writing in Hillary Clinton’s name. But Johnson, who served 16 years as the secretary of the Westmoreland County Electoral Board, finally decided against it.

“I didn’t want to do that to all the poll workers who have to stay longer to count write-in votes,” she said.
In the end, she voted for Obama. She said his election “doesn’t mean as much to me as it should mean. It wasn’t that I wanted Obama so much to be president. It’s because I didn’t want (John) McCain. I’ve never been a Republican.”

Johnson was born in 1916 on the property she owns today. Her grandfather bought it in 1875 with money he made hauling lumber, produce, fertilizer and other freight on a sailing schooner.

He anchored his boat in the cove in front of Johnson’s house.

“I remember when I was growing up, everybody in my family was a Republican. Lincoln was a Republican, wasn’t he?”

Her mother was a teacher who died when Johnson was six. She lived with an aunt in Washington until her father and stepmother also moved to the city. Her father worked as a waiter on a steamer that carried passengers between Washington and Norfolk.

“Washington wasn’t segregated like Virginia was. I never felt hard segregation in Washington until I had to move to the back of a bus going to Maryland or Virginia. That was enough to make me pretty damn mad, if you’ll excuse my French,” she said.

Once home in Westmoreland, “If you stayed at home and at church with your people, you weren’t segregated,” she said.

But the few times she ventured to local movie theaters, she said she and her friends had to sit in the balconies with other blacks.

In Virginia, only blacks who owned property could vote. In Washington, nobody could vote in national elections, she said.

She was a teenager in the hard times of the Great Depression. She remembers her father coming home one day after a trip to Norfolk and showing the family the 17 cents he had made in tips on the boat.

Her parents had bought a house in Washington, but they lost it when they couldn’t make the mortgage payments. They lived in rented houses for the rest of their lives.

“But thanks to my stepmother, I’ve never been hungry and I’ve never been cold. She could go down to the market and get a soup bone and put an unlimited amount of nutrients into a pot of soup,” Johnson said.

Johnson worked her way through teacher’s college operating an elevator at a hospital from 11 p.m. until 7 a.m. She made $45 a month.

Eventually, she received a master’s degree in education from Howard University and taught science and math classes at a junior high school.

When she was 36, she married Augustus R. Johnson, a young Army officer from Illinois. They lived in France, Japan and other places before retiring to the family home in the 1960s.

Her husband, who died in 1995, was the first black supervisor in Westmoreland County history. He served two terms from 1976 until 1984. They had no children.

Johnson said she now spends most of her time on her computer and watching the news on TV. She watched the returns Tuesday night until she fell asleep in her easy chair.

“I was for Hillary, but I never felt bad about Obama. His election has got to be one of the greatest events in the history of the country, something you put a star beside. God knows, I wish only the best for him,” she said.

She calls him “a brilliant orator.” She said the tone of his acceptance speech Tuesday night to the multitude in Chicago was “different from other politicians. It was a great speech aimed at the future.”

Now, she worries that Obama may be assassinated like her heroes John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. “There are a lot of evil people in this world,” she said.

“So we must all hope and pray for him and hope for a future that’s a little brighter. It’s going to take a lot to turn this country around.”
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Information from: The Free Lance-Star, http://www.fredericksburg.com/