MAYBE today a warm wind blows through the old cotton fields of song and tears, whispering “history”. Maybe. Or it could just be that a man, the son of a white mother and an African father, begins the biggest job in the world.

For we must remember that he is a man, not a god. To be sure, he’s clever, athletic, passionate, obviously ambitious, a fine orator in the grand tradition, and very good looking – “handsome,” as my aunties would have said beneath the colonial-style fans of the old cafe in the department store, where they gossiped on brass-studded leather chairs.

Then one, the wisest, would have pursed her rouged lips, which left stains on the stubs of her hard-sucked cigarettes, before adding: “But handsome is what handsome does.”

And, of course, Barack Obama, like everybody else, will be measured by his achievements.

But so much more is hoped of him than of you or me. Some do expect him to be a god, to change our world. Often they are the people most in need of raising – from the slums and the sweat houses, the shanty-town hospitals, the barren soil, the dust bowls, the faithless cities and the soulless, humming of offices run by computers. Yet, on this day of celebration for oppressed people, we should not quibble. A black man – a man of colour, as some would say – is president of the USA.

A few years after drinking coffee with those aunties, I was sitting on damp pavements with young idealists in Birkenhead and other towns.

Guitars strummed and we all sang, We Shall Overcome or The Chimes of Freedom Flashing – middle-class, suburban, and as white as the day was long.

Yet, we sang for our “black brothers” in the plantations, the long-fingered guitar-pickers, playing the blues in the creaking, sweet-scented verandas of Dixieland and the brave children wanting to drink water from the same fountains as the white boys and girls, while their mothers stepped on the segregated buses with saintly patience, watched by gum-chewing men with clubs and bright badges.

Older friends with tolerant, smiling faces would ask us what we wanted to overcome and we would answer, “injustice, man”, in our hippie voices. So, perhaps, on this fine day, there is a thin thread stretching from Birkenhead to Barack Hussein Obama in the White House.

Then, we never thought there would be a black president. We were the early ones, stepping gingerly on the route to race rights. In the company of black people, we were patronising because we over-did the friendliness.