Maybe If I Was More Barry Than Barack May 2008

In 1860 three weeks before the presidential election an eleven year old girl wrote this letter to the Republican candidate from Illinois.

Honorable Abraham Lincoln

Oct. 15, 1860

Dear Sir

My father has just home from the fair and brought home your picture and Mr. Hamlin's. I am a little girl only eleven years old, but want you should be President of the United States very much so I hope you wont think me very bold to write to such a great man as you are. Have you any little girls about as large as I am if so give them my love and tell her to write to me if you cannot answer this letter. I have got 4 brother's and part of them will vote for you any way and if you let your whiskers grow I will try and get the rest of them to vote for you you would look a great deal better for your face is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husband's to vote for you and then you would be President. My father is a going to vote for you and if I was a man I would vote for you to but I will try and get every one to vote for you that I can I think that rail fence around your picture makes it look very pretty I have got a little baby sister she is nine weeks old and is just as cunning as can be. When you direct your letter direct to Grace Bedell Westfield Chatauque County New York

I must not write any more answer this letter right off Good bye

Grace Bedell

Abraham Lincoln granted the young girl's wishes and grew a chin curtain beard also known a Donegal.

He won the election and Became the first American president with a beard.

Barack Obama must get thousands of similar letters every year, but judging from how divided the country is on Race, many political pundits must been wondering why our first black president has taken measures to whitify himself a la Michael Jackson.

That would catch the KKK by surprise, because this election might be about jobs, but the real issue as always is equality and no growing a beard will free us.

Once you go black, you never come back.

ps even racists have to have a sense of humor.

Q. What would you get if you crossed Albert Einstein with Barack Obama? A. E = MC Hammer

Tar In The Blood

My father’s side of the family traveled to the New World on the the Mayflower.

My antecedents were Howlands.

A young indentured servant, John Howland, had been washed overboard mid-Atlantic and somehow had grabbed a trailing lanyard to haul himself to the safety of the Mayflower.

Centuries later my Irish Nana had sailed on a ship a deck above steerage in the Year of the Crow. She was 14.

In 1966 my parents had enrolled my name in the lists of The Sons of Colonial Wars and Mayflower Descendants. I attended a single gathering of both association. The walls glorified the wars against the First People. As an anti-status quo hippie never went back.

Family legend had that we were also akin to Hannibal Hamlin, Abraham Lincoln’s first vice president.

My grandmother’s last name was Hamlin. I recalled her saying that she was related to the great man and I have mentioned this to a few of my friends over the years.

Back in the 1990s my father compiled a family genealogy. The Vice President was mentioedn in the family tree, so I researched Hannibal Hamlin on the Internet.

Wikipedia accused my supposed ancestor of having been a mulatto, citing his dark complexion.

“Hamlin is what we call a Mulatto…they design to place over the South a man who has Negro blood in his veins.”

His Vice-Presidency added another incendiary flame to the secessionists and his political opponents in Maine further scandalized by untruths as to his heritage.

“That black Penobscot Indian.”

Of course no one was really white back then. Artists painted presidents as white when in truth they were men of color, because white women died in droves during childbirth. Faced with extinction white males impregnated black women to save the race, plus sex with white women was an obligation instead of a pleasure, however the darkest of the dark were thrown out of the big house same as Abraham banished his concubine Hagar and his son Ishmael into the desert.

As for me, I walked like the Mothers of Invention sang on FREAK OUT, “I’m not black,but there’s a lot of times I don’t feel white.”

It’s in my blood.

And everyone else’s too.