It was finally time to scream

The early part of Tuesday had been feverishly repressed, the voting queues serious and patient. Just after noon the cracks started to show and by nighttime every single cliche of mass public joy could be seen on the streets of New York. By Emma Brockes
Barack Obama supporters cheer and embrace each other after hearing that Ohio would be called for Obama

There came a point, during the earliest hours of yesterday morning, when talking was no longer adequate. After the weeks of qualified expectation, the months of sober analysis and, in the last tapering days a restraint in the Barack Obama camp so disciplined as to amount almost to condescension now, after all of that, it was finally time to scream.

I emerged from the subway in central Harlem at half-past midnight to what sounded like the seconds after the whistle at a World Cup final. (One of the many subsidiary victories being celebrated was the death of ice hockey as the country's presiding sports metaphor). On Martin Luther King Boulevard the traffic congealed around thousands of pedestrians, who rapped on car windows to embrace the inhabitants, climbed on to fenders and generally met and exceeded every cliche of mass public joy in existence, including the D-day celebrations and the final scenes from Fame.

Every stereo in the neighbourhood was jacked to full volume; every car bonnet drummed on. People weren't dancing with but at each other, in undulating circles that admitted new members as they flowed up the street and must have looked, from the air, like cell biology. Three women climbed on to the roof of a bus shelter and gyrated outwards to a roar from the crowd, and as I walked east past the Apollo Theatre, a man came towards me engaged in what might just be the prime indicator of emotional overload: banging two saucepans together.

The scale of the joy, which started when the election was called and not a moment before, was a mark of just how feverishly repressed the earlier part of the day had been. If Obama's candidacy had been a tightrope walk through preconceptions, a constant awareness that on the other side of legitimate-sounding criticisms such as "cocky" lay words such as "uppity", then it was still being walked well into voting day. At 7.30am in my downtown neighbourhood the queue outside the polling station wasn't jubilant: it was quiet, serious, patient, about 45 minutes long and the only joy permitted came from the fact that, after a cold spell, the weather was a balmy 16C and the pleasing sense of suffering for democracy was realised without having actually to suffer much.

Around the corner in the local park, the group of men who gather every day to play chess on the public boards and sort through their plastic-bottle collections were talking in muted tones about what might happen. The best way to ward off the evil eye was, by their calculation, not to anticipate a John McCain victory, but to go with the polls and anticipate for Obama, then flatten their optimism under a tonne of doubt over what he might actually achieve. "You can't change things in four years," said Silkey, an African-American street trader who had managed to get himself on the electoral register, despite haphazard lodging arrangements. "He's just one man."

But a good man? "Yeah," he said. There was a pause. "I love to listen to the way he talks. He talks honest. If you ask him a question, he doesn't make you go from New York to Chicago and back for the answer." And in the event of a victory that night ...? Another pause and Silkey grinned: "I'll jump out of these clothes and have a ball."

In the yuppie coffee shop around the corner they were observing what the Republicans would call an elitist version of the park dwellers' superstition. "If one more person asks me if I've voted ...!" yawned a woman in an unnecessary hat and, bemoaning her election fatigue, wondered whether it would be possible to go to the polling stations after hours and get some memorabilia for her apartment.

After days of anticipating electoral meltdown, even the news channels had to submit to a quieter narrative on the morning of the vote. At one point CNN cut live to a polling station in Denver, where a desperate-looking reporter stood in front of a queue of eight people. "It's certainly getting busier," he said hopefully. "Wow, what a melting pot." The camera cut to an alarmed looking Asian-American before swishing mercifully back to the studio.

A little after noon I took a train up to Harlem and it was then, I think, that the first cracks - the first, allowable peckings of excitement - started to show. At the Obama field office on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, people were having their photo taken with a three-quarter size cutout of the senator. In the street, every snatch of conversation seemed to refer to him. "I'm gonna find myself an Obama Mamma!" Ancient voters were being unfolded by relatives from the backs of cars that pulled up outside polling stations, in scenes that made even the police on site gulp with emotion.

"I've never campaigned for anyone before," said Michelle Collins, canvassing on a corner, and repeated a refrain I heard often that day. "It's not only about the African-American community. Obama wants to bring the world together and to make the world like us again after President Bush disgraced us."

A block from Bill Clinton's Harlem office stood Terrance, leaning against a wall. He had never wanted to vote before and now that he wanted to, he couldn't. "Convicted felons can't vote," he said. "I wish I could." The thing that surprised him about Obama was the breadth of his appeal. "It's shocking for me to see all the Caucasians down with Obama - maybe it's him being biracial. That'll help." Terrance said he was 38, had just become a grandfather and that as he saw it, while Obama might be too late in coming for him, things were looking up for his grandchild. Had there been much interest in the campaign in prison? "Yeah," he said. "Obama and religion, the two biggest things."

For a short time after 9/11, psychiatrists in Manhattan registered a decrease in mental health complaints, as common cause expanded to embrace those people usually excluded from everything. There were weird echoes of that on Tuesday. In the early evening I rode the subway to the CNN election party. A heavily listing woman entered the carriage, rattling a cup beneath our noses and, after announcing her hunger, said in a scene that could have been directed by Frank Capra: "Have a great Obama day!"

When the calling of the election finally came in, hours later, it was greeted with total silence. Pennsylvannia had fallen to huge cheers; Obama's lead in Ohio announced to the same effect. At the CNN election centre by Central Park, the free burgers had been eaten, the free bar drained, and the mad deployment of technology, culminating in the "live by hologram" effect, roundly mocked, as well as the fact that Spanish-language CNN seemed to be calling the states earlier than the English one. We knew things were bad for the Republicans when a CNN political correspondent prefaced all references to John McCain with: "I don't mean to be mean, but ..."

Meanwhile all British journalists present made desultory comparisons between the Obama victory and the 97 Labour landslide, and between corn dogs and Scotch eggs. Friends texted little haikus of their whereabouts and feelings. And so we gathered on the edge of the studio to watch Wolf Blitzer, the CNN anchor, make his historic announcement, while a producer made huge flapping motions with his arms and hissed:

"No cheering, no cheering."

It was so hard to keep quiet that when it came, people made deranged gulping sounds and looked at each other with bulging eyes. I fled the studio and plunged five flights down to street level with a young producer who welled up and said: "Wow, it's over." Outside, cars blared their horns, pedestrians shrieked and two helicopters hovered overhead. I walked 15 blocks south to Times Square, where a huge crowd had gathered to watch Obama's acceptance speech on big screens. Chants of "Yes we can!" gave way to "Yes we did!" and finally to "What the fuck?" when, just before the president-elect started to speak, when the man standing next to me looked up at the scene being beamed in from Chicago and said: "Is that really a black family up there?", when a New Yorker looked pityingly at the foreigners in front of him and, reasserting an American pride that, for liberals at least, had been dormant for eight years, said, "They're about to witness history and they can't even understand it" (they were German, so obviously spoke better English than either of us) - that's when the satellite link broke and the screen went blank.

People began to move south to try to catch the speech on a screen further down Times Square, and as they moved, the cabs opened their windows, cranked up their radios and eventually came to a complete stop. For about 10 minutes, Times Square was a mass of yellow cars, each surrounded by large groups of people straining in at the windows to hear Obama's words.

The cab I attached myself to had a white woman in the front, dabbing her eyes with a folded-over hankie, two white men in the back, some Puerto Rican teenagers leaning in at the driver's window and the hot-dog guy leaning on the bonnet dripping fat from a spatula. When the speech was over and the cheers went up, everyone kissed the cab driver, which might be unprecedented in the history of New York cab drivers and, indeed, cab drivers the world over.

What was there left to say? "Now Palin can go back to Wasilla!" someone shouted. And, "The people SPOKE." And, "It's fine to be alive."

By 2am, we were at the stage of jerky public outbursts and mild admonishments from the police. On the subway up to Harlem for the final stage of the party, the driver came over the PA and said, "Obama!", and the whole train went crazy. Later I even heard, I swear, a strangulated "Obama" issue through a police car loudspeaker, followed by what sounded like a sock being stuffed in the speaker's mouth.

By yesterday morning a few pundits were already asking how Obama can possibly live up to this. But for one night at least, words that campaigning had turned into cliche seemed freshly minted, and nothing was too schmaltzy to fly. A teenager in a tracksuit, bandana and gold chains, who ordinarily on that particular corner in Harlem would have caused a heart attack in any stranger he attempted to hug at 1am, held up a hand as I passed. "I need guidance," he said, smiling. "Can a black man call a white woman sista?"

As I waited for the last train, you could hear the shouts on the subway platform from the street above. A man walked up and down hollering until he was hoarse. "McCain and Palin are outta business! McCain and Palin are outta business! Who's maverick now? he screamed. After all that patience, it seemed OK, just this once, to crow.

In quotes

"What an awesome night for you, your family and your supporters. You are about to go on one of the great journeys of life. Congratulations, and go enjoy yourself."
George Bush's message to Barack Obama

P Diddy

"It feels like hope won. It feels like it's not just victory for Barack Obama. It feels like America did the right thing. It feels like there's a shift in consciousness. It feels like anything is now possible."
Oprah Winfrey

"It's a great day, it's a beautiful morning, a new dawn, a new beginning - not just in America but the world over."
Spike Lee

John Kerry

"The rest of the world is so pleased and happy for you, America. I'm (almost) dancing with relief"
Stephen Fry

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