Miriam Makeba--My Hero

Miriam Makeba died after performing at a concert in Southern Italy in support of an Italian writer Roberto Saviano whose life was threatened because he wrote truthfully about organized crime. Miriam Makeba was my hero.

In 1988 during my pregnancy, I attended a concert in Carnegie Hall where Miriam Makeba performed with Hugh Masekela. Both were still in exile from South Africa although times were changing in ways we never imagined. I was enormously pregnant and danced all night to the joyful spirited sounds of these two incredibly brave artists. Never, never did they allow anyone to quiet their music.

Miriam had just released her amazing album Sangoma, healing songs that her mother had taught her. And it was those songs that accompanied my delivery of my daughter just two months later. When we got home from the hospital, I put Sangoma on the living room stereo, and Lena began to cry. I suspect she feared she had to go through that horrible trauma once again. For weeks the only music she would tolerate was Pablo Casals playing the cello. But then she warmed up once again to Miriam's voice, and it was a favorite of ours for years together.

A year and a day after Lena was born, Nelson Mandela walked out of Robben Island Prison. I held Lena up to the television, weeping, because I never believed I would see the day that this man of integrity would walk free, unbroken and without bitterness, after 27 years of imprisonment. Of course, Nelson Mandela became the first truly elected president of South Africa.

And now, nearly twenty years later, another first that we never imagined has happened: the election by landslide of Barack Hussein Obama.

An email is floating around from Laurence Tribe, the Constitutional Law professor at Harvard Law School whose own career is certainly remarkable. Professor Tribe marveled at being in Grant Park on Tuesday night and remembered his first meeting with Barack. "In 1989, I had met Barack Obama and hired him as my research assistant while he was still just a first-year Harvard law student. His stunning combination of analytical brilliance and personal charisma, openness and maturity, vision and pragmatism, was unmistakable from my very first encounter with the future president."

One hero dies to remind us always that none of us walks alone. We walk with the spirits of those who came before us, for those who will come after us.