The 'Obama Before Obama'

After John Thomasson came Fitzgerald Barnes. Barnes, 44, was a local high school basketball coach until he got "pissed off" over a county bond issue and entered politics. Elected to the seven-member Board of Supervisors in 1997, he became the board's first African American chairman in 2002 and served three years. He was sitting in a coffee shop the other day, thinking about two magazine covers: One was an old Time that featured Martin Luther King Jr.'s portrait. The other was a recent issue of Newsweek featuring Obama.

"I'm living in an era where I think I'll be able to speak about Barack in the same tones that my mother and father spoke about King," Barnes said. "It just kind of dawned on me."

It also dawned on him how much weight Obama must be carrying. "People's hopes are so high, they are putting so much in him. I hope they don't expect too much -- like he's our savior or something."

Barnes carries some weight of his own. Growing up in North Carolina, "my dad always said, 'Don't use your race as a crutch,' " but always represent your race well and remember that perceptions matter.

The father named his son Fitzgerald after JFK, believing that a name like that would look impressive on paper. The father didn't want his son automatically discounted because someone figured out he was black based on his name. Barnes has adapted that instinct in his public life. "I have never felt my race in this community has ever held me back," he said.

He usually wears bow ties, he said, because they convey intellect and gravitas. He enjoys watching how people perceive him, based on his bow ties.

He is thinking that the presidential election will also be about perceptions, the changed perceptions of a nation. "It ain't going to be about race," said Barnes. "Sure, you're going to have some people clinging to the old issues -- blacks and whites. But in the fall, it's going to come down to who can help me live better."

The old perceptions died in some but live on in others. Let Janice Abercrombie, 69, tell a story. She is a white genealogist who grew up here and attended segregated schools. After marriage in 1958 she moved to Fairfax, but came back in 1974 with a 16-year-old daughter who found the county intolerable. "I knew how to live in both worlds," said Abercrombie. "She only knew how to live in Fairfax County."

One day, in a five-and-dime store here, a clerk tried to skip over an elderly black woman who was in line ahead of her daughter, "and my daughter let her have it," Abercrombie recalled. She remembers being deeply disappointed at how little her county had evolved. "I had people try to convince me that the black brain was inferior to the white brain," she said. "I stopped associating with those people."

There are fewer of "those people" now in a county that Barack Obama carried in the Virginia Democratic primary, though Democrats haven't been competitive here in the fall since 1996, when incumbent President Bill Clinton lost to Republican nominee Bob Dole by seven votes.

"Louisa's probably more open-minded than people would expect, if you think, small, agricultural town," said Jade Lourenco, one of two chef-owners of the trendy Mediterranean restaurant Obrigado, which opened just two years ago right across the street from the courthouse and Langston's marker. The nation's first black local elected official was born in 1829 on a farm about five miles from her restaurant. Lourenco was surprised to learn this.

Langston's father was Ralph Quarles, a slaveowner; his mother, Lucy Langston, was an ex-slave and bondswoman. Both parents died when he was 4, and an Ohio friend of Quarles's ended up caring for him. He was the fifth black man to graduate from Oberlin College, was elected to several local offices in Ohio, was active in the black freedom movement with Frederick Douglass, served as educational inspector for the Freedmen's Bureau and was the U.S. minister to Haiti. In 1888, he ran for Congress in Virginia's 4th Congressional District as an independent. Denied a victory, he contested the election results and finally won his seat, but it was so late in the term that he served but three months. He was unseated in the next election.