Early last Wednesday morning, waking to the news of Barack Obama’s presidential win, I was struck with a notion — I would call an old, old friend of mine.

Pearl answered the telephone after three rings. She would be sitting in a blue chair, in a tiny living room, the trinkets of a lifetime crowding every crook and cranny, the school photos of her children hanging on the wall, a picture of Jesus above the TV.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Pearl. It’s me. Salley.”

“Who?” Pearl has hard time hearing these days; her voice was skeptical.

“IT’S SALLEY.”

“Oh, how’re you doing?” Pearl’s voice softened.

“I’M FINE. HOW ARE YOU?”

“I’m doing all right. I’m just sitting here on my chair.”

I could hear her television blaring in the background. It sounded like she was watching the news.

“WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE ELECTION? OF BARACK OBAMA?”

“Now you know, I don’t know him, but I’m happy about it,” she said. “I never did know I’d live to see it.”

“DOES IT MAKE YOU HAPPY?”

“I’m just old. I’m fixing to put my flowers on the porch. I brought them in last night. Now I got to put them back out.”

Pearl will spend the morning moving her flowers out to the front stoop of the little brick house where she lives near her three grown children — a nurse, a beautician, and a daughter who lost her legs to diabetes.

Pearl, who has always loved her flowers, will move carefully. She may use her cane; she may not. Her hands — wrinkled and brown — will grasp each clay pot with a vise-like strength.

Pearl was always strong. When I was a child, I would watch her unscrew a jar that my mother could not unscrew. I would watch her take a hoe and chop off the head of a snake in one, fell swoop. I would watch her move about our kitchen, humming if she was happy; silent if she was not.

Pearl grew up in McCormick, South Carolina. She was born in a small cabin in the country. She went to school for a number of years and then she went to work as a housekeeper. She got married and had children. At some point, her husband abandoned her, and she moved to Columbia.

And there she took care of my mother’s children and house, as well as her own. She lived in a rented, wooden house in a bad section of town. She suffered through the poverty and difficulties of that neighborhood, and in my own, the derision of one particularly nasty white kid and the daily walk, past barking dogs, from where the bus dropped her off to my house.

It was not an easy life. Her eyes, bluish now, show the road she has traveled.

I am glad she lived to see these historic times. She deserves them, as do her beloved plants deserve the day’s sun.