O Mr Obama

Oh, Mr Obama, don’t make my son a leper

Well you did it. You are the first black president of the USA. Except, you’re only half black and we shouldn’t notice at all, really, if it really doesn’t matter.

For goodness’ sake, it doesn’t matter to me at all.

My grandmother lived in Handsworth, Birmingham UK. She went to a little Evangelical Church. I became fascinated by it and went along too. I met there one of my very best friends of all time, later to become my chief bridesmaid. She was born in Jamaica and spent the winter in Spain when she did her year abroad for her Dual Hons BA French and Spanish because she couldn’t stand the heat. But that wasn’t the only reason I forgot she was black. She was, after all, simply Elaine.

Trevor MacDonald is my hero. He understands why we English-speakers must learn other languages. And he supports the Hunger Project as I do. The grandfather of the hero in my novel The Prophecy, to be published next year, looks just like him.

My Aunt Dolly, who also lived in Handsworth and found the smells of Asian cooking and the habits of Asian weddings difficult to tolerate at first, learnt to love them, just as they loved her.

My husband and I, in our first few months of marriage, lived in the poorer quarters of Handsworth. We were respected by and respected the Ugandan Asians. The Afros were fun. The other white people were sometimes a problem.

For all those reasons I understand why the supporters of Martin Luther King rejoice.

I’m pleased, too. You seem sincere. You seem tolerant. You seem energetic. You are young. Your family seems nice. You seem all of these things more than you seem black or white.

But then again, just think.

The Land of the Free?

You won’t let my son visit your country.

He has a disease, a disease which doesn’t show up until it’s too late. For goodness’s sake, it may even have been an American who infected him – indirectly. He’s a good person – a lovely person, and a talented artist and now extremely careful in his dealings with people and his own health.

O Mr Obama!

Because I believe in the reaching out between cultures, made possible through seeking to speak the other’s language, because I am Christian in the widest sense, because I write for and work with young people, and because at the tender age of nine I saw how intolerance created ghettos, I have brought up my own children to think and to tolerate and to be open.

And yet you reject my son?

Who are you to do that?

Does that land mass belong to you?

I actually have every faith that you don’t think that way.

Don’t let me down.

O Mr Obama, I too have a dream. I dream that one day soon my lovely son will work through your immigration controls, unchallenged.