ATLANTA — Tonya Jones doesn't want to imagine what it would feel like to have a black president in the White House.
"I want to feel that euphoria, but I can't," said Jones, an African American hairstylist who was hanging out in front of her shop here on a slow afternoon. "Because I don't want to put myself way up here" -- with this she raised her hand over her head -- "only to fall." She let her hand plunge downward like a falling elevator.
"Everybody's on edge, I'm telling you," she said.
Such are the fraught emotions of African Americans, whose up-from-slavery story could culminate Nov. 4 in the election of a black president. Polls show that black voters overwhelmingly support Barack Obama in the presidential race, in many cases for reasons that transcend policy: One popular T-shirt depicts Obama with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. under the banner "A Dream Answered."
But many blacks are also steeling themselves for the heartbreak that will come if a breakthrough does not. Damascus Harris, a school administrator in Chicago, rattled off a litany of past indignities his people have suffered -- from the broken promises that followed slavery to Jim Crow-era voter suppression to racist redlining by banks. They explained, in part, why Harris won't be surprised if Obama loses this election.
"I'm not naive about what our history has been," he said.
That skepticism, born of centuries of experience, is shaping the mood of the black electorate on the eve of this historic election. Even with Obama surging in national polls, the excitement of his black supporters is in many cases tempered by an acute anxiety.
"I've seen lots of moods around rage and progress and all those things," said Andrea Y. Simpson, a political science professor at the University of Richmond who marched with King when she was a girl. "This is the strangest one I've experienced . . . of anticipation, hope, pride -- and fear."
Fear finds its most intense expression in the ongoing concerns for Obama's safety. Rosalind Johnson, a finance company worker from Camden, S.C., stated her deepest worry bluntly, as if it were a fact: "He will be assassinated," she said on a sunny weekday morning recently as she walked out of her local registrar's office.
There are other, less morbid concerns. Some voters fret over the shadowy workings of a system that they believe will prevent Obama from ascending to the highest office in the land. Sometimes this conversation hinges on the voting irregularities of the 2000 election. Sometimes the sentiment is more vague.
