My beautiful Orkney Re-blogged from 2020.
Most days I can walk through the Stromness street of the, ‘best place to live’, and tourist brochure fame and meet the same man, who as a boy taunted and ridiculed a seven year old black foster child who was living with a family in the town. Around 1969. I don’t blank that man, I say, ‘hello’. There were very few black people in Orkney when I was young and I knew none. But a ‘black’ doctor saved my 6 month old sister’s life in Aberdeen Royal infirmary. She was rushed there with an incurable illness. So from the age of two I grew up with a knowledge of ‘blackness’ that came from outwith Orkney. I still did not understand what the term ‘black’ meant. Ours was a family that stood out as commies, lefties, non church going and ‘dangerous’ to the settled status quo in Orkney. ‘Deep’ Orcadians viewed us suspiciously. I knew that Paul Robeson was the son of a slave, a Shakespearean actor and singer, and about how the American dream of the ‘land of the free’ was a myth. Paul Robeson
