By Joye Brown:

Michael Higgins didn’t go the polls alone on Election Day.

Like many others in this historic presidential election, Higgins traveled to a neighborhood elementary school last Tuesday with wife, Bernadette, son, Jabari, 3, and daughter, Ayanna, 8, to cast his vote.

Joye Brown, columnist for Newsday

Higgins carried three photographs behind the curtain and into the voting booth, too.

Two were of his beloved grandmother, Elease Lee Key, a former Hempstead resident, who died five years ago, and her grandmother, Rosa Lee, of South Carolina.

The third was of an African, Cilucangy, who was kidnapped by America’s last slave ship, The Wanderer, which was built on Long Island almost 40 years after federal law banned the importation of slaves from Africa.

The boy, along with others who survived the brutal Middle Passage, was put ashore at Jekyll Island, Ga., 150 years ago this month.

The African was enslaved and renamed Ward Lee.

He is Michael Higgins’ great-great-grandfather.

“I took the pictures and lined them up.” Higgins said. “I carried them with me as I cast a vote for a son of Africa, who will be this country’s first African-American president.”

On Nov. 25, as President-elect Barack Obama continues his preparations to assume office, some of Cilucangy’s descendants will travel to Jekyll Island to help dedicate a memorial for The Wanderer’s survivors.

“It’s so astonishing that I can’t get my head around it,” said Higgins’ brother, Darrell.

“Here we are, 150 years after Lee comes ashore in cuffs and Obama is going to the White House,” he said.

“It says so much about where the nation is and was,” he said. “Everybody, of all colors, worked together to make it happen. It’s profound.”

Yesterday, four generations of Lee’s descendants gathered for an impromptu reunion in Hempstead to talk about their family’s past and the nation’s future.

The group included Lee’s great-times-six grandson, Alex Valenti, a 13-year-old artist and manga comic book fan. His middle name is Cilucangy.

“At first people think it’s weird,” he said. “But I tell them the family story and they think it’s cool.”

Valenti, who like many of Lee’s descendants is of mixed race, laughed as talk turned to Obama’s first news conference and how the first family-elect would go about selecting the first canine.

“He called himself a mutt and I thought it was pretty funny when he did it,” Valenti said. “It was kind of right … He’s cool and I think it’s cool to have a cool president.”

“It’s a new day,” agreed Sharon Sansaverino, who is 36.

“I think young black men are going to start pulling up their pants,” she said. “There’s no excuse, no blaming anyone anymore; it’s possible to do anything and education is the key, no matter what color you are.”

Michele Woodard, 53, a state Supreme Court judge, sat in Mineola on Election Day, hearing petitions from people who had been turned away at the polls.

“Some of them hadn’t voted in 10, 12 years, that’s more than one presidential election,” said Woodard, the first African-American woman elected to her post in Nassau. “This election excited them.”

Her daughter, Erica, 20, a student studying in Argentina, was excited, too. She took a bus to the U.S. Embassy to get a ballot — she didn’t want to take a chance that her absentee one wouldn’t arrive — and paid $50 to have it shipped in. Raheem Isom, 39, said the Internet played a key role in binding voters of all ages and colors for Obama.

“There is no race on the Internet,” he said. “People come together because they have a common interest or a common cause. They become more tolerant because they’ve already got something in common.”

Not all of Lee’s descendants supported Obama at the beginning of the campaign. Many backed Hillary Clinton. And they’ll be watching to see whether Obama makes crucial staff choices that, Isom said, “will determine whether he will be the great president he wants to be.”

” Al Sharpton ran for president and I knew I wouldn’t vote for him,” said Darrell Higgins. “I was looking for someone who could do the job and, in Obama, there was someone who I thought could do the job.”

As the family talked and laughed, and talked some more, Ocea Barnes, 87, Lee’s only surviving granddaughter, watched and listened carefully.

And later, in the quiet of almost everyone gone, the family’s elder settled onto her sofa.

“I thought Martin Luther King had the character and the education to be the first black president,” she said.

“I’m not saying he would have made it, but I watched him and he had what it takes,” she said.

She said she watched Obama for almost two years. (“The kids would always complain about how I was always watching news programs on television, but I was hooked,” she said.)

And Barnes said she came to be impressed by Obama’s intelligence, commitment to family and the way he carried himself.

“I was inspired by how he composed himself after the loss of his grandmother; he didn’t fall apart,” she said.

“It proved to me that he could carry weight,” said the granddaughter of an African boy, Cilucangy, who was bound up and forced to these shores 150 years ago.

“It proved to me,” she said, almost in a whisper, “that he could carry the country.”

This article was originally published on the  Newsday website  at 10:20 PM EST, November 8, 2008.
Copyright © 2008, Newsday Inc.