Dreams from My Father (Adapted for Young Adults) Page 11

  And my friends, Black and white and brown, would congratulate me for my high ideals and then go off and apply to graduate school in the hope of one day making real money.

  I couldn’t really blame them.

  Looking back, I can see a certain logic in wanting to be a community organizer. I still carried memories of Indonesia with its beggars and farmers, and of my stepfather, Lolo, who tried but was finally powerless to change the system.

  But at the time, I was operating mainly on impulse, like a salmon swimming blindly upstream. In classes, I might dress up that impulse with slogans and theories I’d found in books. But at night, when I lay in bed, those theories would drift away and be replaced by romantic images of a past I had never known.

  They were images of the civil rights movement, mostly, the grainy black-and-white footage that appears every February during Black History Month, the ones my mother showed me as a child. A pair of college students, hair short, backs straight, placing their orders at a lunch counter or standing on a porch in Mississippi, trying to convince a family of sharecroppers to register to vote. A county jail bursting with children, their hands clasped together, singing freedom songs.

  Such images bolstered my spirits in a way that words never could. They told me that I wasn’t alone in my struggles.

  They also told me that I shouldn’t take the existence of the Black community for granted. Communities had to be created, fought for, tended like gardens. They got bigger or smaller based on our dreams. And the dreams of the people who marched and went to jail for civil rights had been large.

  You weren’t automatically a member of a community. You had to earn your membership through shared sacrifice.

  Perhaps, if I worked hard enough, I could speak for the promise of a larger, more inclusive American community, Black, white, and brown—one in which the uniqueness of my own life would be accepted.

  That was my idea of organizing. It was a promise of redemption.

  And so, in the months leading up to my graduation from Columbia, I wrote to every civil rights organization I could think of, to any Black elected official in the country with a progressive agenda, to neighborhood councils and tenant rights groups.

  When no one wrote back, I wasn’t discouraged. I decided to find more conventional work for a year, to pay off my student loans and maybe even save a little bit. Organizers didn’t make any money.

  Eventually a branch of a large corporation hired me as a research assistant. As far as I could tell I was the only Black man in the company, a source of shame for me but one of considerable pride for the secretaries. They treated me like a son, those Black ladies; they told me how they expected me to run the company one day. Sometimes, over lunch, I would tell them about all my wonderful organizing plans, and they would smile and say, “That’s good, Barack,” but the look in their eyes told me they were secretly disappointed.

  Only Ike, the gruff Black security guard in the lobby, was willing to come right out and tell me I’d be making a mistake.

  “Organizing? That’s some kinda politics, ain’t it? Why you wanna do something like that?”

  I tried to explain the importance of mobilizing the poor and giving back to the community. But Ike just shook his head. “Mr. Barack,” he said, “I hope you don’t mind if I give you a little bit of advice. Forget about this organizing business. We don’t need more folks running around here, all rhymes and jive. You can’t help folks that ain’t gonna make it nohow, and they won’t appreciate you trying. Folks that wanna make it, they gonna find a way to do it on they own.

  “Do something that’s gonna make you some money. Not greedy, you understand. But enough. That’s what we need, see. I’m telling you this ’cause I can see potential in you. Young man like you, got a nice voice—hell, you could be one of them announcers on TV. Or sales…got a nephew about your age making some real money there. How old are you?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “See there. Don’t waste your youth, Mr. Barack. Wake up one morning, an old man like me, and all you gonna be is tired, with nothing to show for it.”

  * * *

  —

  I DIDN’T PAY Ike much attention at the time; I thought he sounded too much like my grandparents. But as the months passed I felt the idea of becoming an organizer slipping away from me. The company promoted me. I had my own office, my own secretary, money in the bank. Sometimes I would catch my reflection in the elevator doors—see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand—and for a split second I would imagine myself as a big-shot executive, barking out orders, closing deals, before I remembered who it was that I had told myself I wanted to be. At those moments I felt guilty.

  Then one day, as I sat down at my computer to write an article on interest rates, something unexpected happened. My half sister Auma called.

  We had written to each other occasionally but had never met. I knew that she had left Kenya to study in Germany, and in our letters we had mentioned the possibility of my going there for a visit, or perhaps her coming to the States. But the plans had always been left vague—neither of us had any money, we would say; maybe next year.

  Now, suddenly, I heard her voice for the first time. It was soft and deep, tinged with a British accent from years of Kenya’s colonial rule. She was coming to the States, she said, on a trip with several friends. Could she come to see me in New York?

  “Of course,” I said. “You can stay with me; I can’t wait.” And she laughed, and I laughed, and then the line grew quiet with static and the sound of our breath.

  “Well,” she said, “I can’t stay on the phone too long, it’s so expensive.” And we hung up quickly after that, as if our contact were a treat to be doled out in small measures.

  Two days before she was scheduled to arrive, Auma called again, her voice barely a whisper.

  “I can’t come after all,” she said. “One of our brothers, David…he’s been killed. In a motorcycle accident. I don’t know any more than that.” She began to cry. “Oh, Barack. Why do these things happen to us?”

  I tried to comfort her as best I could. I asked her if I could do anything for her. I told her there would be other times for us to see each other. Eventually her voice quieted; she had to go book a flight home to Kenya, she said.

  “Okay, then, Barack. See you. Bye.”

  After she hung up, I left my office, telling my secretary I’d be gone for the day. For hours I wandered the streets of Manhattan, the sound of Auma’s voice playing over and over in my mind. A continent away, a woman cries. On a dark, dusty road, a boy skids out of control, tumbling against hard earth, wheels spinning to silence. Who were these people, I asked myself, these strangers who carried my blood?

  * * *

  —

  I STILL WONDER how that first contact with Auma and the news of David’s death changed my life. I don’t know. But Auma’s voice reminded me that I had wounds that I could not heal myself. A few months later, I resigned from the company and threw myself back into the search for an organizing job.

  An offer came from a well-known civil rights outfit with a board of directors that had ten white executives and one Black minister. They wanted someone Black and educated and self-assured enough to feel comfortable in corporate boardrooms—just where I didn’t want to be. I declined their offer.

  I passed out flyers for an assemblyman’s race in Brooklyn. The candidate lost and I never got paid.

  I had all but given up when I received a call from a guy named Marty Kaufman. He explained that he’d started an organizing project in Chicago and was looking to hire a trainee. When he met me in New York, his appearance didn’t inspire much confidence. He was a white man of medium height wearing a rumpled suit over a pudgy frame. His face was heavy with a two-day-old beard; behind a pair of thick, wire-rimmed glasses, his eyes were set in a perpetual squint.

  He aske
d why someone from Hawaii wanted to be an organizer. “You must be angry about something,” he said, and added that this was actually a good thing. Anger, he said, was a requirement for the job. “Well-adjusted people find more relaxing work.”

  Marty was trying to pull urban Black people and suburban white people together around a plan to save manufacturing jobs in metropolitan Chicago. He needed somebody to work with him, he said. Somebody Black.

  “Most of our work is with churches,” he said. “With the unions in such bad shape, they’re the only game in town. Churches are where the people are, and that’s where the values are. Pastors won’t work with you, though, just out of the goodness of their hearts. They’ll give a sermon on Sunday. But they won’t really move unless you can show them how it’ll help them pay their heating bill.”

  Marty asked me what I knew about Chicago.

  I thought for a moment. “Hog butcher to the world,” I said finally, dredging up a line from poet Carl Sandburg’s 1914 ode to the city, which was known for its slaughterhouses.

  Marty shook his head. “The butcheries closed a while ago.”

  “The Cubs never win,” I offered.

  “True.”

  “America’s most segregated city,” I said. “A Black man, Harold Washington, was just elected mayor, and white people don’t like it.”

  “So you’ve been following Harold’s career,” Marty said. “I’m surprised you haven’t gone to work for him.”

  “I tried,” I admitted. “His office didn’t write back.”

  Marty smiled and took off his glasses, cleaning them with the end of his tie. “Well, that’s the thing to do, isn’t it, if you’re young and Black and interested in social issues? Find a political campaign to work for. A powerful patron—somebody who can help you with your own career. And Harold’s powerful, no doubt about it. Lots of charisma. He has the support of the entire Black community, plus about half the Hispanics and a handful of white liberals. But you’re right about one thing. The atmosphere in the city is polarized—people have taken sides and won’t budge. A big media circus. Not much is getting done.”

  “And whose fault is that?”

  Marty put his glasses back on and met my stare. “It’s not a question of fault,” he said. “It’s a question of whether any politician, even somebody with Harold’s talent, can do much to break the cycle.”

  Marty offered to start me off at ten thousand dollars the first year, with a two-thousand-dollar travel allowance to buy a car; the salary would go up if things worked out.

  On the way home, I stopped to sit on a nearby park bench and think about my options. A young Black boy shouted, “Excuse me, mister. You know why sometimes the river runs that way and sometimes it goes this way?”

  I said it probably had to do with the tides, and that seemed to satisfy him.

  As I watched him disappear, I realized I had never noticed which way the river ran.

  A week later, I loaded up my car and drove to Chicago.

  CHAPTER 8

  I arrived in July, and the sun sparkled through the deep green trees. The boats were out of their moorings, their distant sails like the wings of doves across Lake Michigan. Marty had told me that he would be busy those first few days, and so I was left on my own. I bought a map and took a tour of the city.

  As I drove, I remembered the history I’d learned: the whistle of the Illinois Central Railroad, bearing the weight of the thousands of formerly enslaved people and their descendants who had come up from the South for better opportunities during the Great Migration; and the Black men and women and children, dirty from the soot of the railcars, clutching their battered luggage, making their way to the Promised Land. I passed a mail carrier and imagined he was the great novelist Richard Wright, delivering mail before his first book sold. I imagined Gramps’s friend Frank in a baggy suit in front of the old Regal Theater, waiting to see jazz great Duke Ellington. The little girl with the glasses and pigtails could have been Regina, skipping rope.

  One day I happened to pass Smitty’s Barbershop, a fifteen-by-thirty-foot storefront on the edge of Hyde Park. The door was propped open when I walked in, the barbershop smells of hair cream and antiseptic mingling with the sound of men’s laughter and the hum of slow fans. Smitty turned out to be an older Black man, gray-haired, slender and stooped. His chair was open and so I took a seat, soon joining in the familiar barbershop banter of sports and women and yesterday’s headlines.

  There was a picture of Chicago’s new mayor, Harold Washington, on the wall, and the men talked about him with as much affection as if he were a relative. Smitty noticed me looking at the photo and asked if I’d been in Chicago during the election.

  “Had to be here before Harold to understand what he means to this city,” Smitty said. “Before Harold, seemed like we’d always be second-class citizens.”

  “Plantation politics,” a man with a newspaper said.

  “That’s just what it was, too,” Smitty said. “A plantation. Black people in the worst jobs. The worst housing. Police brutality out of control.”

  Clumps of hair fell into my lap as I listened to the men recall Harold’s rise. He had run for mayor once before but hadn’t gotten anywhere. The lack of support in the Black community was a source of shame, the men told me. But Harold had tried again, and this time the people were ready. They had turned out in record numbers on election night, ministers and gang members, young and old.

  And their faith had been rewarded. Smitty said, “The night Harold won, people just ran the streets. People weren’t just proud of Harold. They were proud of themselves. I stayed inside, but my wife and I, we couldn’t get to bed until three, we were so excited. When I woke up the next morning, it seemed like the most beautiful day of my life….”

  Smitty’s voice had fallen to a whisper, and everyone in the room began to smile.

  From a distance, reading the newspapers back in New York, I had shared in their pride. But something was different about what I was hearing now; there was an intensity in Smitty’s voice that seemed to go beyond politics.

  “Had to be here to understand,” he had said. He’d meant here in Chicago; but he could also have meant here in his shoes, an older Black man who still burns from a lifetime of insults, of foiled or abandoned ambitions.

  I asked myself if I could truly understand that. I believed that I could. The men thought I could, too. But would they feel the same way if they knew more about me? I tried to imagine what would happen if Gramps walked into the barbershop at that moment, how the talk would stop at the sight of a white man, how the spell would be broken, how they’d begin seeing me differently.

  Smitty handed me the mirror to check his handiwork, then pulled off my smock and brushed off the back of my shirt. “Thanks for the history lesson,” I said, standing up.

  “Hey, that part’s free. Haircut’s ten dollars. What’s your name, anyway?”

  “Barack.”

  He took the money and shook my hand. “Well, Barack, you should come back a little sooner next time. Your hair was looking awful raggedy when you walked in.”

  * * *

  —

  LATE THAT AFTERNOON, Marty picked me up in front of my new apartment and we headed to the southeast side of Chicago, past rows of small houses made of gray clapboard or brick, until we arrived at a massive old factory that stretched out over several blocks.

  “The old Wisconsin Steel plant,” Marty announced.

  We sat there in silence, studying the building. It was empty and rust-stained, an abandoned wreck. On the other side of the chain-link fence, a spotted, mangy cat ran through the weeds.

  “All kinds of people used to work in the plant,” Marty said. “Black. White. Hispanic. All working the same jobs. All living the same kind of lives. But outside the plant, most of them didn’t want anything to do with each other.”

 
; “So what makes you think they can work together now?”

  “They don’t have any choice,” Marty said. “Not if they want their jobs back.”

  As we reentered the highway, Marty began to tell me more about the organization he’d built. With the help of a sympathetic Catholic bishop, he’d met with area pastors and church members, and heard both Black and white congregants talk about their shame of unemployment, their fear of losing a house or being cheated out of a pension—their shared sense of having been betrayed.

  Eventually more than twenty churches had agreed to form a coalition. I would specifically be working with representatives from parishes inside Chicago, an arm of Marty’s organization that was called the Developing Communities Project, or DCP. And while things hadn’t moved quite as fast as Marty had hoped, the group had just won their first real victory: the Illinois legislature had agreed to spend $500,000 helping out-of-work people find jobs. That was where we were going now, Marty explained. To a rally to celebrate the program.

  “It’s going to take a while to rebuild manufacturing out here,” he said. “At least ten years. We’ll have a stronger position when we get the unions involved. In the meantime, we just need to give people some short-term victories. Something to show them how much power they have once they stop fighting each other and start fighting the real enemy.”

  I asked who that was.

  “The investment bankers. The politicians. The fat cat lobbyists.”

  It was twilight by the time we crossed the city line and pulled into the parking lot of a large suburban school, where crowds of people were already making their way into the auditorium: laid-off steelworkers, secretaries, and truck drivers, men and women who smoked a lot and didn’t watch their weight, shopped at Sears or Kmart, drove late-model cars from Detroit and ate at Red Lobster on special occasions.