Tolerant, humorous, intelligent: Obama is different

Barack Obama's memoir ''Dreams from My Father'' is an extraordinary, moving work of literature, writes Vincent Browne

FRANK WAS an elderly black poet. The young man's grandfather used to visit him. The grandfather and Frank drank together, talked and then, usually, the grandfather would fall asleep. The young man went there occasionally just to talk and one evening did so just before he was to leave home for college. Frank spoke of the "price of admission" for college. The young man asked what he meant.

"Leaving your race at the door . . . Leaving your people behind . . . You are not going to college to get educated. You're going there to get trained. They'll train you to want what you don't need. They'll train you to manipulate words so they don't mean anything anymore. They'll train you to forget what it is you already know. They'll train you so good, you'll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that s**t. They'll give you a corner of the office and invite you to fancy dinners and they'll tell you you're a credit to your race. Until you want to actually start running things, and then they'll yank on your chain and let you know that you may be a well-trained, well-paid nigger, but you're a nigger just the same."

The well-trained, well-paid nigger may have been elected president of the United States by the time you read this. The story is taken from Dreams from My Fatherby Barack Obama, first published in 1995, long before he thought of a political career. It is an extraordinary work of autobiography and of literature. Beautifully written, stunningly honest, moving, even painful. It reveals a man, not just of such a varied and turbulent background, but of insight, humour, self-deprecation, intelligence, tolerance, awareness.

This fellow, Obama, is different.

He tells of the racism he encountered.

"The first boy, in seventh grade, who called me a coon; his tears of surprise - 'why'dya do that?' - when I gave him a bloody nose . . . The older woman in my grandparents' apartment building who became agitated when I got into the elevator behind her and ran out to tell the manager that I was following her . . . Our assistant basketball coach, a young wiry man from New York with a nice jumper, who, after a pick-up game with some talkative black men, had muttered within earshot of me and three of my team-mates that we shouldn't have lost to a bunch of niggers and who when I told him - with a fury that surprised even me - to shut up, had calmly explained the apparently obvious fact that 'there are black people and there are niggers. Those guys were niggers' . . . 'There are white folks and then there are ignorant motherf*****s like you', I had finally told the coach before walking off the court that day."

After one of his friends had been arrested for drug possession, his mother berated him about those he hung around with, his declining grades, his general lassitude. He hadn't yet told her he planned not to go to college in Los Angeles, instead to hang around Hawaii, working part time. She said: "Bar, you can't just sit around like some good-time Charlie, waiting for luck to see you through." He writes: "I suddenly felt like puncturing that certainty of hers, letting her know that her experiment with me had failed."

He tells of hearing his grandparents arguing one morning. His grandfather, Gramps, was refusing to drive his grandmother, Toot, to work. She had been threatened by a man on the street the previous evening. This didn't seem to explain her alarm and then Gramps said it was a black man. "The words were like a fist in my stomach and I wobbled to regain my composure . . . I knew that men who might easily have been my brothers could still inspire their rawest fears."

He went to talk to Frank about the incident. Frank said: "Your grandma's right to be scared. She's at least as right as [Gramps] is. She understand that black people have a reason to hate. That's just how it is. For your sake I wish it were otherwise. But it's not. So you might as well get used to it."

Frank fell asleep and Barack left. "The earth shook under my feet, ready to crack open at any moment. I stopped, trying to steady myself and knew for the first time that I was utterly alone." Throughout his youth he tried "to reconcile the world as I'd found it with the terms of my birth".

That speech he made in Philadelphia last March when the Jeremiah Wright controversy broke showed how he had achieved that reconciliation.

The troubled meeting with his Kenyan father; the year in Indonesia with his mother and her lovely, disturbed Indonesian second husband; the solace his mother, Gramps and Toot brought to his childhood: all are narrated vividly in a book that must be the most extraordinary self-revelation of anyone who has attained such political prominence.

This guy is of a different order to anybody who has attained the White House and because of that he brings to it hopes not just of the Americans, and particularly black Americans, who voted for him, but of hundreds of millions around the world, who, understandably, see in this remarkable man a hope of serenity, justice and fairness in the world. An expectation surely to be disappointed, even by this extraordinary man, a man who no doubt now, even in the moment of this transformative achievement of reaching the US presidency (this is written in the expectation - yearning - that he makes it), is grief-stricken by the death of that loving grandmother, who was so fearful of black men.