Dreams from My Father (Adapted for Young Adults) Read online

  Now here I was, with no place to stay the night. It was well past midnight by the time I crawled through a nearby fence that led to an alleyway. I found a dry spot, propped my luggage beneath me, and fell asleep.

  * * *

  —

  IN THE MORNING, I woke up to find a white hen pecking at the garbage near my feet. Across the street, a homeless man was washing himself at an open hydrant and didn’t object when I joined him. There was still no one home at the apartment, but Sadik answered his phone when I called him and told me to catch a cab to his place on the Upper East Side.

  He was a short, well-built Pakistani who had come to New York from London two years earlier and now made a living waiting on tables—yet another member of New York’s huge undocumented-immigrant workforce.

  “So tell me, what brings you to our fair city, Barry?” he asked when we sat down together.

  I told him it was “Barack” now, and tried to explain the summer I’d just had, that I’d been brooding over the state of the world and the state of my soul. “I want to make amends,” I said. “Make myself of some use.”

  “Well, amigo…you can talk all you want about saving the world, but this city tends to eat away at such noble sentiments. Look out there.” He gestured to the crowd along First Avenue. “Everybody is looking out for number one. Survival of the fittest. Tooth and claw. That, my friend, is New York. But…who knows? Maybe you’ll be the exception. In which case I will doff my hat to you.”

  In the coming months he watched me as I traveled, like a large lab rat, through the byways of Manhattan. He tried not to grin when I gave up a seat in the subway to a middle-aged woman but a burly young man jumped into it instead. He took me to fancy department stores and watched my eyes pop at the price tags on winter coats. He put me up when I eventually left the apartment on 109th because there wasn’t any heat. And he accompanied me to Housing Court when the people who sublet me my next apartment ran off with my deposit.

  “Tooth and claw, Barack. Stop worrying about the rest of these bums and figure out how you’re going to make some money out of this fancy degree you’ll be getting.”

  When Sadik lost his own lease, we moved in together. After a few months, he began to realize that the city had indeed had an effect on me. But not the one he’d expected. I gave up smoking pot. I ran three miles a day after my classes and fasted on Sundays. For the first time in years, I applied myself to my studies and kept a journal of daily reflections and very bad poetry. Whenever Sadik tried to talk me into going to a bar, I’d make some lame excuse.

  “You’re becoming a bore,” he said.

  He was right. In a way, I was proving what he’d said about the city’s power to corrupt people. It was 1981. Wall Street was booming and men and women barely out of their twenties were getting ridiculously rich. There seemed no limits on what people desired—a more expensive restaurant, a finer suit of clothes, a more exclusive nightspot, a more beautiful woman, a more potent high. The beauty, the filth, the noise, the excess, all of it dazzled my senses. I wasn’t certain I could resist those temptations, so I went to the other extreme.

  But there was something else that made me keep this world at arm’s length. I could sense that it was becoming more fractured. I had seen worse poverty in Indonesia and as much violence in L.A.; I had grown accustomed, everywhere, to suspicion between the races. But whether because of New York’s density or because of its scale, here, you could see more clearly the rifts between races and classes, and the ferocity of the wars between the various tribes. In the stalls of Columbia’s bathrooms, no matter how many times the administration tried to paint them over, the walls remained etched with graffiti like “nigger” and “kike.”

  It was as if all middle ground had collapsed. And nowhere was that collapse more apparent than in the Black community I had so lovingly dreamed of belonging to. One day I met a Black friend at his Midtown law firm and looked out from his high-rise office window, imagining a good life for myself—work I enjoyed, a family, a home. Until I noticed that he was the only Black lawyer in the firm. All the other Black people in the office were messengers or clerks.

  I visited Harlem. I played on basketball courts I’d read about, I sat in the back pews of Abyssinian Baptist Church and was lifted by the gospel choir’s sweet, sorrowful song. I caught a fleeting glimpse of the world I sought. But I couldn’t find a place there to live. The elegant brownstones of Sugar Hill were occupied—and too expensive anyway. The few decent rental buildings in the neighborhood had ten-year waiting lists. What remained were rows and rows of uninhabitable tenements, in front of which young men selling drugs counted out their rolls of large bills, and winos slouched and stumbled and wept softly.

  At first, I took all this as a personal affront, as if someone were mocking my ambitions to bring my worlds together. But people who had lived in New York for a while told me there was nothing original about my experience. The city was out of control, they said. But so long as I earned a bit of money, I’d be free to live like most middle-class Black residents of Manhattan. Never mind Harlem. I could choose a more polished style of clothing, better restaurants, and a more upwardly mobile group of friends.

  I sensed, though, that those choices could end up being permanent. I’d probably send my kids to private school and take cabs at night to avoid the dangerous subways. I’d probably decide I needed a building with a doorman. And pretty soon I’d be on the other side of the line, unable to cross back over.

  Unwilling to make that choice, I spent a year walking from one end of Manhattan to the other. I studied the range of human possibility. I looked at other people’s lives and wondered if I could see in them a reflection of my own future.

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS IN this humorless mood that my mother and sister found me when they came to visit during my first summer in New York.

  “He’s so skinny,” Maya said to my mother.

  “He only has two towels!” my mother shouted as she inspected the bathroom. “And three plates!” They both began to giggle.

  They stayed with Sadik and me for a few nights, then moved to a condominium on Park Avenue that a friend of my mother’s had offered them while she was away.

  I had found a summer job clearing a construction site on the Upper West Side, so my mother and sister spent most of their days exploring the city on their own. When we met for dinner, they would give me detailed reports of their adventures: eating strawberries and cream at the Plaza Hotel, taking the ferry to the Statue of Liberty, visiting the Cézanne exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I would eat in silence until they were finished and then launch into a long speech about the problems of the city and the politics of the people who had nothing. When the two of them withdrew to the kitchen, I would overhear Maya complaining to my mother.

  “Barry’s okay, isn’t he? I hope he doesn’t lose his cool and become one of those freaks you see on the streets.”

  One evening, my mother saw a newspaper ad for a movie called Black Orpheus and insisted we go see it that night.

  “That was the first foreign film I ever saw!” she said. “I was only sixteen. I’d just been accepted to the University of Chicago—Gramps hadn’t told me yet that he wouldn’t let me go—and I was there for the summer, working as an au pair. It was the first time that I’d ever been really on my own. Gosh, I felt like such an adult. And when I saw this film, I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.”

  Black Orpheus was a Brazilian film made in the 1950s, a breakthrough in its day. The cast was almost totally Black, yet it had won an international following. The story was simple: It was the Greek myth of ill-fated lovers Orpheus and Eurydice, only it was set in the favelas of Rio during the boisterous annual Carnival. In Technicolor splendor, the black- and brown-skinned Brazilians sang and danced and strummed guitars like carefree birds in colorful plumage.r />
  About halfway through the movie, I decided that I’d seen enough. The movie depicted Black people as childlike—almost the reverse image of Joseph Conrad’s dark savages—and I turned to my mother to see if she might be ready to go. But her face, lit by the blue glow of the screen, was wistful, melancholy. At that moment, I felt as if I were being given a window into her youthful heart. I realized that those images of childlike Black people were what my mother had carried with her to Hawaii all those years before. They were the simple but forbidden fantasies of a white, middle-class Kansas girl. Here was the promise of another life: warm, sensual, exotic, different.

  I turned away, embarrassed for her, wondering whether emotions between people of different races could ever be pure. Even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other person some element that was missing in ourselves.

  For the next several days, I tried to avoid situations where my mother and I might be forced to talk. Then, a few days before she and Maya were about to leave, I stopped by their apartment. She noticed a letter addressed to my father in my hand.

  “You guys arranging a visit?”

  I told her that I had begun making plans to go to Kenya.

  “Well, I think it’ll be wonderful for you two to finally get to know each other,” she said. “He was probably a bit tough for a ten-year-old to take, but now that you’re older…”

  I shrugged. “Who knows?”

  She stuck her head out of the kitchen. “I hope you don’t resent him.”

  “Why would I?”

  “I don’t know.”

  We sat there for a while, listening to the sounds of traffic below. Then, without any prompting, my mother began to retell an old story, in a distant voice, as if she were telling it to herself.

  “It wasn’t your father’s fault that he left, you know. I divorced him. When we got married, your grandparents weren’t happy. But they said okay—they probably couldn’t have stopped us anyway, and they eventually came around to the idea that it was the right thing to do.

  “Then Barack’s father—your grandfather Hussein—wrote Gramps this long, nasty letter saying that he didn’t approve of the marriage. He didn’t want the Obama blood sullied by a white woman, he said. Well, you can imagine how Gramps reacted to that. And then there was a problem with your father’s first wife…he had told me they were separated, but it was a village wedding, so there was no legal document that could show a divorce….”

  Her chin began to tremble, and she bit down on her lip, steadying herself. She said, “Your father wrote back, saying he was going ahead with it. Then you were born, and we agreed that the three of us would return to Kenya after he finished his studies. But your grandfather Hussein was still writing to your father, threatening to have his student visa revoked. By this time Toot had become hysterical—she had read about the rebellion in Kenya a few years earlier, which Western newspapers really played up—and she was sure I’d have my head chopped off and you’d be taken away.

  “Even then, it might have worked out. Your father received two scholarship offers. One was to the New School, here in New York. The other was to Harvard. The New School agreed to pay for everything—room and board, a job on campus, enough to support all three of us. Harvard just agreed to pay tuition. But Barack was so stubborn, he just had to go to Harvard. ‘How can I refuse the best education?’ he asked. That’s all he could think about, proving that he was the best.”

  She sighed, running her hands through her hair. “We were so young, you know. I was younger than you are now. He was only a few years older than that. Later, when he came to visit us in Hawaii, he wanted us to come live with him. But I was still married to Lolo, and his third wife had just left him, and I just didn’t think…”

  She stopped and laughed. “Did I ever tell you he was late for our first date? He asked me to meet him in front of the university library. When I got there he hadn’t arrived, but I figured I’d give him a few minutes. It was a nice day, so I lay down on one of the benches, and before I knew it I had fallen asleep. Well, an hour later—an hour!—he shows up with a couple of his friends. I woke up and the three of them were standing over me, and I heard your father saying, serious as can be, ‘You see, gentlemen. I told you that she was a fine girl, and that she would wait for me.’ ”

  My mother laughed once more, and once again I saw her as the child she had been. Except this time I saw something else: In her smiling, slightly puzzled face, I saw what all children must see at some point if they are going to grow up: their parents’ lives revealed to them as separate and apart from their own. I saw their lives before their marriage and my birth. I saw their lives unfurling back to grandparents and great-grandparents, an infinite number of chance meetings, misunderstandings, projected hopes, limited circumstances.

  My mother was the girl with Black Orpheus, the movie full of beautiful Black people, in her head, flattered by my father’s attention, confused and alone, trying to tear herself away from her parents’ grip. The innocence she carried that day, waiting for my father, was rooted in misconceptions and her own needs. But perhaps that’s how any love begins, with impulses and cloudy images of someone else that help us break out of our solitude. And if we’re lucky, those clouds will be transformed into something solid, something that will last.

  In the movie theater, I’d decided that emotions between the races would never be pure, but my mother’s words shook me out of that certainty. What I heard from my mother that day, speaking about my father, was something most Americans don’t believe can exist between Black and white: the love of someone who knows your life in the round, through and through, a love that will survive disappointment. It was a love so generous that she tried to help me—the child who never knew him—see him with her eyes.

  * * *

  —

  A FEW MONTHS later, the call came.

  “Barry? Barry, is this you?”

  The line was thick with static.

  “Yes…Who’s this?”

  “Yes, Barry…this is your Aunt Jane. In Nairobi. Can you hear me?”

  “I’m sorry—who did you say you were?”

  “Aunt Jane. Listen, Barry, your father is dead. He is killed in a car accident. Hello? Can you hear me? I say, your father is dead. Barry, please call your uncle in Boston and tell him. I can’t talk now, okay, Barry. I will try to call you again….”

  That was all.

  When I phoned and told my mother that my father had died, I heard her cry out over the distance. Yet I felt no pain, and saw no reason to pretend otherwise. I didn’t go to the funeral. I wrote to my father’s family in Nairobi to express my condolences and asked them to write back. I wondered how they were doing. But my plans to travel to Kenya were placed on indefinite hold.

  * * *

  —

  ANOTHER YEAR WOULD pass before I would meet my father, in my dreams.

  I was traveling by bus with friends whose names I’ve forgotten. We rolled across deep fields of grass and hills that bucked against an orange sky.

  An old white man, heavyset, sat beside me with a book that said the way we treat the elderly in our society is a test of our very souls. He told me he was on a trip to meet his daughter. I dozed and woke up to find everyone gone.

  I got off the bus and found myself inside a building made of rough stone. A lawyer spoke to a judge. The judge said my father had spent enough time in jail, that it was time to release him. But the lawyer objected vigorously. He said laws are laws and we must maintain order.

  Then I was standing before his cell. I opened the padlock and set it carefully on a window ledge. My father was before me, with only a cloth wrapped around his waist. He was very thin, with his large head and slender frame, his hairless arms and chest. He looked pale, his black eyes luminous against his ashen face.

  “Look at you,” he said. “So tall—and so thi
n. Gray hairs, even!” And I saw that it was true, and I walked up to him and we embraced. I began to weep, and felt ashamed, but could not stop myself.

  “Barack. I always wanted to tell you how much I love you,” he said. He seemed small in my arms now, the size of a boy.

  He sat at the corner of his cot and set his head on his clasped hands and stared away from me, into the wall. Sadness spread across his face. I tried to joke with him; I told him that if I was thin it was only because I took after him. But when I whispered that we could leave together, he shook his head and told me it would be best if I left.

  I awoke still weeping, my first real tears for him—and for me, his jailor, his judge, his son. I turned on the light and dug out his old letters. I remembered his only visit—the basketball he had given me and how he had taught me to dance. And I realized how even in his absence his strong image had given me something to live up to.

  I stepped to the window and looked outside, listening to the first sounds of morning—the growl of the garbage trucks, footsteps in the apartment next door.

  I knew I needed to search for him, to talk with him again.

  PART TWO

  CHICAGO

  CHAPTER 7

  In 1983, I decided to become a community organizer.

  There wasn’t much detail to the idea; I didn’t know anyone making a living that way. When my classmates in college asked just what a community organizer did, I couldn’t answer them directly. Instead, I’d talk about the need for change: change in a White House that was indifferent to too many people’s needs, in a Congress too obedient and corrupt, in a country too moody and self-absorbed to see what was going on. Change won’t come from the top, I would say. Change will come from getting people to act at a grassroots level inside their own communities.