Dreams from My Father (Adapted for Young Adults) Page 12

  Marty hurried into the auditorium, but when I tried to follow, my way was blocked by three Black women. One of them, a pretty woman with orange-tinted hair, leaned over to me and whispered, “You’re Barack, aren’t you?”

  “Don’t he look clean-cut, Mona?” she said to one of her companions.

  “Sure does!”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” said the first woman. “I’ve got nothing against Marty. But the fact is, there’s only so far you can—”

  At that point, Marty waved at us from the stage. “You guys can talk to Barack all you want later. Right now I need all of you up here with me.”

  The woman with the orange hair was Angela. The other two were Mona and Shirley. We would end up spending a lot of time together.

  The auditorium was almost filled, two thousand people in all, about a third of them Black residents bused in from the city. A choir sang two gospel songs, and there was a procession of speakers, ending with the governor, who offered his solemn pledge of support for the new job bank.

  To my mind the whole thing came off a bit flat and staged, like a bad TV wrestling match. Still, the crowd seemed to be enjoying itself. And seeing all these Black and white faces together in one place, I felt cheered. I was sure I recognized in myself the same vision driving Marty. He believed that if you could just clear away the politicians and media and bureaucrats and give everybody a seat at the table, then ordinary people could find common ground. These were the first stirrings of something I would need in the months and years ahead: faith.

  * * *

  —

  THE DAY AFTER the rally, Marty decided it was time for me to do some real work, and he handed me a long list of people to interview.

  “Find out their self-interest,” he said. “That’s why people get involved in organizing—because they think they’ll get something out of it.”

  At first I was worried that people might not be willing to talk with me, but once we met in person I found they didn’t mind a chance to air their opinions about a do-nothing alderman or a neighbor who refused to mow his lawn. I heard certain things again and again. Most of the people in the area had been raised in cramped Black neighborhoods. They had few options. For most of its history, Chicago had been a city with many “restrictive covenants”: private legal agreements among white homeowners not to sell or rent their properties to Black people. The people I talked to had some fond memories of the neighborhoods they’d built, which were like self-contained worlds, but they also remembered how there had never been enough heat or light or space to breathe—that, and the sight of their parents grinding out life in physical labor.

  A few had followed their parents into the steel mills or onto the assembly line. But more had found jobs as mail carriers, bus drivers, teachers, and social workers—in the public sector, where laws against racial discrimination were more strongly enforced. Such jobs had benefits and provided enough security for them to think about buying homes. And with the passage of fair housing laws, which helped keep landlords and homeowners from refusing to rent or sell to Black people, they moved, one at a time, into white neighborhoods. Not because they were necessarily interested in mingling with white people, they told me, but because the houses were affordable, with small yards for their children; the schools were better and the stores cheaper. Maybe they also bought them just because they could.

  Often, as I listened to these stories, I was reminded of the ones that Gramps and Toot and my mother had told—stories of hardship and migration, the drive for something better. But there was an inescapable difference. In these new stories, white families fled when Black families arrived, For Sale signs cropping up like dandelions under a summer sun. Stones flew through the windows of Black families’ homes, and anxious parents could be heard calling their children indoors from innocent games. Entire blocks turned over in less than six months; entire neighborhoods in less than five years.

  In these stories, wherever Black and white met, the result was sure to be anger and grief.

  The area had never fully recovered from this racial upheaval. The stores and banks had left along with their white customers, and city services had declined. Still, when the Black families who’d now lived in their homes for ten or fifteen years looked back on the way things had turned out, they did so with some satisfaction. On the strength of two incomes, they had paid off house and car loans, maybe paid for college educations for their sons or daughters. They had kept their homes up and kept their children off the streets; they had formed block clubs to make sure that others did too.

  It was when they spoke of the future that their voices sounded worried. The better their children did, the more likely they were to move away. In their place came younger, less stable families who couldn’t always afford to keep up with their mortgage payments. Car thefts were up; churches had fewer members; the leafy parks were empty. Now there were loud groups of teenage parents feeding potato chips to crying toddlers, the discarded wrappers blowing down the block. People put bars on their doors to keep out burglars; they wondered if they could afford to sell their houses for less than they’d paid and retire to a warmer climate, perhaps move back to the South.

  The parents with younger kids had even more difficult decisions. Ruby Styles was one of them. Her son, Kyle, was a bright but shy boy who was starting to have trouble at school. One of his friends had been shot right in front of his house. The boy was all right, but Ruby was worried about her own son’s safety. Gang activity was on the rise.

  Ruby introduced me to other parents who shared her fears and felt frustrated that the police were slow to respond. When I suggested that we invite the district police commander to a neighborhood meeting so they could share their concerns with him, everyone thought it was a good idea. Some pastors agreed to help us get the word around.

  The meeting was a disaster. Only thirteen people showed up, scattered across rows of empty chairs. The district commander canceled on us and sent a “community relations” officer instead. Every few minutes an older couple would walk in looking for the Bingo game. I spent most of the evening directing them upstairs, while Ruby sat glumly onstage, listening to the police officer lecture about the need for parental discipline.

  After that, I worried that Ruby might back away from organizing, but instead she threw herself headlong into our project, working hard to build a network of neighbors and school parents. She was what every organizer dreams of—someone with untapped talent, smart, steady, excited by the idea of a public life, eager to learn.

  It was, surprisingly, some of the Baptist churches that resisted my efforts most. At a meeting with local pastors, I was introduced to a man named Reverend Smalls. He was tall and pecan-colored, with straightened hair that was swept back in a pompadour. He said, “Listen, Obama, the last thing we need is to join up with a bunch of white money and Catholic churches and Jewish organizers to solve our problems. White folks come in here thinking they know what’s best for us, hiring a bunch of high-talking college-educated brothers like yourself who don’t know any better. All they want to do is take over.”

  He told me that with Harold Washington in office, things would change. Black people had a direct line to City Hall now, and they could organize their own protests. Then he patted me on the shoulder and said he knew I meant well. “You’re just on the wrong side of the battle right now,” he said.

  Marty laughed when I described my interaction with Reverend Smalls. “I told you the city’s polarized,” he said. “You should be glad you learned your lesson early.”

  Which lesson was that? I wondered. The one that says that America’s historic civil-rights gathering in the 1960s in front of the Lincoln Memorial is only a distant memory—that in the end, we each pray to our own masters?

  Marty and Reverend Smalls did share one thing. They knew that the more certain you were that your point of view was right, the more forceful you could be
and the more power you could win. The problem was that one person’s certainty always threatened another’s, so none of those certain people could work with one another.

  Meanwhile, all I had was doubt—and a job I wasn’t sure I was up to doing.

  CHAPTER 9

  The place that symbolized everything I was fighting to change was the Altgeld Gardens public housing project.

  It sat at Chicago’s southernmost edge: two thousand apartments arranged in a series of two-story brick buildings with army-green doors and grimy mock shutters. Everybody called it the Gardens for short, but most of the children who lived there grew up without ever having seen an actual garden. It sat between the largest landfill in the Midwest and a sewage treatment plant that gave off a heavy, putrid odor that seeped through windows no matter how tightly they were shut. Now that jobs from once-thriving factories were gone, it seemed only natural to use the land as a dump.

  A dump—and a place to house poor Black folks.

  Good people, reformers, had once dreamed of building decent housing for the poor. But politicians fought to keep those places as far away as possible from white neighborhoods. People who had jobs didn’t want to live there. Those who did were often miserable. Gradually, things began to fall apart.

  Altgeld wasn’t as bad as some of Chicago’s high-rise projects, with their ink-black stairwells and urine-stained lobbies and random shootings. If you went inside the apartments at Altgeld, you would often find them well-kept, with small touches—a patterned cloth thrown over torn upholstery, a calendar with tropical beach scenes on the wall—that expressed the lingering idea of home.

  But the place seemed in a perpetual state of disrepair. Ceilings crumbled, pipes burst, toilets backed up. The Chicago Housing Authority was supposed to maintain it, but city officials had stopped even pretending that repairs would happen anytime soon.

  Pulling up at a church for one of my first meetings as an organizer at Altgeld, I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the car seat, feeling like the first mate on a sinking ship.

  I was there to meet some of the neighborhood’s key leaders—including Angela, Shirley, and Mona—and talk about getting things back on track. They were spirited, good-humored women, those three. Without husbands to help, they’d somehow managed to raise sons and daughters, juggle an assortment of part-time jobs, and organize Girl Scout troops, fashion shows, and summer camps for the parade of children that wandered through their church every day.

  But that fall day morale was low, and they were angry, especially about the new job bank that we had announced with such excitement the night of the rally. The government had picked a state university out in the suburbs to run the program, but its computers constantly malfunctioned. People were sent to interview for jobs that didn’t exist. Two months after it was supposed to have started, no one had found work. Marty was furious, and at least once a week he would drive out to the university and try to pry answers from university officials. But the women from Altgeld weren’t interested in Marty’s frustrations. They complained that he wouldn’t listen to their suggestions. All they knew was that $500,000 meant to fund the job bank’s operation had gone to the white suburbs—and that their neighborhood had gotten nothing.

  Marty said they were sore because he’d refused to hire them to run the program. “If you’re going to do this work, Barack, you’ve got to stop worrying about whether people like you. They won’t.”

  That day, I found the women waiting for me with long faces.

  “We’re quitting,” Angela announced. “We’re just tired. We’ve been at this for two years and we’ve got nothing to show for it.”

  I started to say that we just needed more time, but Shirley cut me off. “We don’t have more time,” she said. “We can’t keep on making promises to our people and then have nothing happen.”

  Outside, a group of young boys were tossing stones at the boarded-up window of a vacant apartment, their hoods pulled over their heads. Part of me felt like joining them, tearing apart the whole dying landscape, piece by piece. Instead, I asked Angela, “What will happen to those boys out there? Who’s going to make sure they get a fair shot? The politicians? The social workers? The gangs?”

  I told them I’d come to Chicago because Marty had said there were people serious about changing their neighborhoods and the least they could do was give me a chance. “If you don’t think anything’s happened after working with me, I’ll be the first to tell you to quit,” I went on, my voice rising. “But if you’re all planning to quit now, then answer my question: What will happen to those boys?”

  There was a long silence. The boys moved on down the street. Shirley got more coffee.

  Angela said, “I guess we could give it a few more months.”

  * * *

  —

  WINTER CAME AND the city turned monochrome—black trees against gray sky above white earth. Night now fell in midafternoon, especially when the snowstorms rolled in.

  The work was tougher in such weather. Mounds of fine white powder blew through the cracks of my car, down my collar, and into the openings in my coat. As I journeyed around the city interviewing people, I never spent enough time in one place to thaw out, and the snow made it hard to find parking. When we held evening meetings, people often didn’t show up; they called at the last minute to say they had the flu or their car wouldn’t start. Those who did come looked damp and resentful.

  Marty suggested that I take more time off, build a life for myself away from the job. His concerns were professional, he explained: Without support outside the work, an organizer could lose perspective and could quickly burn out. There was something to what he said. On weekends, I usually ended up alone in an empty apartment, making do with the company of books.

  But gradually, the bonds between myself and the leaders working in our organization grew stronger, and I found them offering more than simple friendship. After meetings, I might go with one of the men to a local bar to watch the news or listen to oldies thump from a dinged-up corner jukebox. On Sunday, I’d go to church and let the women tease me over my confusion with communion and prayer. At a Christmas party, I danced with Angela, Mona, and Shirley and swapped sports stories with husbands who had been reluctantly dragged to the affair. I counseled sons or daughters on their college applications and played with grandchildren who sat on my knee.

  At times like that I began to understand the true meaning of the work I had chosen. I remember sitting with a woman named Mrs. Stevens, waiting for a meeting to start. I didn’t know her well—only that she was very interested in renovating the local hospital.

  Trying to make small talk, I asked her why she was so concerned with improving health care in the area; her family seemed healthy enough. Then she told me how, in her twenties, she was working as a secretary but had cataracts so bad that her doctor declared her legally blind. She had kept this from her boss for fear of being fired. Day after day, she snuck off to the bathroom to read her boss’s memos with a magnifying glass, memorizing each line before she went back to type them up, staying at the office long after others had left. She kept this up for a year, until she finally saved enough money for an operation.

  That’s what these leaders were teaching me, day by day: a strength of spirit I hadn’t imagined. They told me stories that were like explanations of their core selves. Stories full of terror and wonder, events that still haunted or inspired them. Sacred stories.

  And it was this realization, I think, that finally allowed me to share more of myself with the people I was working with, to break out of the isolation that I had carried with me to Chicago. At first I was afraid that my experiences in Hawaii or Indonesia would sound too strange, that South Siders would be disturbed by how different I was. Instead, they would nod and laugh and offer a story to match mine—a lost father, a teenage brush with crime, a moment of simple grace.

  Not t
o say that all these stories cheered my heart. Sometimes I came face to face with a different, destructive kind of force.

  One day just before Christmas, Ruby stopped by my office. From the minute she walked in, I thought I saw something different about her, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was. Finally, I realized that her eyes, normally a warm, dark brown that matched the color of her skin, had turned an opaque shade of blue, as if someone had glued plastic buttons over her irises.

  “What did you do to your eyes?”

  “Oh, these.” Ruby shook her head and laughed. “They’re just contacts, Barack. You like them?”

  “Your eyes looked just fine the way they were.”

  “It’s just for fun,” she said, looking down, suddenly embarrassed. “Something different, you know.”

  For the rest of the day and into the next, I thought about Ruby’s blue eyes. I had handled the moment badly and made her feel ashamed. After all, she wasn’t someone who spent much time or money on herself—she was entitled to a bit of vanity. I realized that a part of me expected her and the other leaders to be immune to the images that bombard us all and make us insecure—the slender models in the fashion magazines, the square-jawed men in fast cars, the blondes with radiant blue eyes. I was vulnerable to those images, too, but somehow I had believed that Ruby and the others would be able to rise above such doubts about their own appearance.

  When I mentioned the incident to a Black woman friend, she stated the issue more bluntly. “What are you surprised about?” she said impatiently. “That Black people still hate themselves?”

  No, I told her, I wasn’t surprised. Since my discovery of bleaching creams in that magazine I had read in the American embassy in Jakarta, I’d become familiar with color consciousness in the Black community—good hair, bad hair; thick lips or thin; if you’re light, you’re all right, if you’re Black, get back.