Dreams from My Father (Adapted for Young Adults) Page 13

  At the same time, I’d learned not to put too much stock in those who said “self-esteem” was the cure for all our ills, whether they were talking about substance abuse or teen pregnancy or Black-on-Black crime. “Self-esteem” was a vague, easy phrase for the hurts we’d been keeping to ourselves. But what exactly did it mean? Did you dislike yourself because of your color or because you couldn’t read and couldn’t get a job? Was the sense of emptiness you felt because of your kinky hair or the fact that your apartment had no heat or decent furniture? Everything was muddled together.

  Perhaps with more self-esteem fewer Black people would be poor, I thought. But wouldn’t it be better to concentrate on things besides skin tone and eye color, things we might all agree on, things we could control? Give that Black man some skills and a job. Teach that Black child reading and arithmetic in a safe, well-funded school. With the basics taken care of, each of us could search for our own sense of self-worth.

  That’s what I’d been thinking—until Ruby and her contact lenses shook me up. Maybe I was so focused on improving the practical realities of Black people’s lives that I had not given enough weight to the hurt and distortions that lingered inside us all. Every day I saw and heard evidence of that kind of self-hatred. A Black leader casually explained that he never dealt with Black contractors: “A Black man’ll just mess it up, and I’ll end up paying white folks to do it all over again.” Another said she couldn’t mobilize people in her church because “Black folks are just lazy—don’t wanna do nothing.”

  Often the word nigger replaced Black in such remarks. It was a word I’d always thought Black people used ironically, to prove we were so resilient that we could make fun of the way others put us down. That was until the first time I heard a young mother use it on her child to tell him he wouldn’t amount to anything. That was until I heard teenage boys use it to wound one another. Even when Black people used it, the word’s original meaning never completely went away. One of our defenses against being hurt is to strike out at ourselves first.

  Those sacred stories I had been hearing of courage and sacrifice and overcoming great odds had a dark side: Most of them were the result of people’s struggle against hate. And buried deep within those people, even the ones who had triumphed, was an image of the white people who had kept them down. Sometimes there was a single white face. But sometimes there was just the faceless image of a system claiming power over our lives.

  Could the bonds of our community be restored without rejecting the ghostly figure that haunted Black dreams? Could Ruby ever love herself without hating blue eyes?

  * * *

  —

  RAFIQ AL-SHABAZZ HAD settled such questions in his mind and had built his career in Chicago on encouraging distrust of white people. He was a slight, wiry man with a goatee and a skullcap, a former gang member who had formed an organization he said was dedicated to Black empowerment and economic development. According to Rafiq, his coalition, based in Roseland, a largely Black, economically struggling neighborhood, had been critical to helping Mayor Washington get elected. From what my community leaders told me, however, Rafiq spent most of his time intimidating local businesses and elected officials into giving him small contracts to supply “community outreach” and other vaguely defined ventures. In fact, it was only after we had already negotiated with the City of Chicago to open a new job training center that Rafiq called me up and launched into a rapid-fire monologue.

  “We gotta talk, Barack,” he said. “What y’all are trying to do with job training needs to fit into the overall comprehensive development plan I’ve been working on. Can’t think about this thing in isolation…got to look at the big picture. You don’t understand the forces at work out here. Is big, man. All kinds of folks ready to stab you in the back.”

  Despite my doubts, I didn’t want to shut people like Rafiq out, and we formed an uneasy alliance. It didn’t go over too well with my colleagues. During group discussions, he would interrupt to rant about conspiracies and about Black people selling their own out, and everyone else would fall silent, not quite knowing what to say.

  When the two of us were alone, though, Rafiq and I could sometimes have normal conversations, and I came to admire his determination and boldness. He confirmed that he had been a gang leader growing up in Altgeld Gardens. Then he had found religion, he said, with the help of a local Muslim leader.

  “If it hadn’t been for Islam, I’d probably be dead,” he told me. “Just had a negative attitude, you understand. Growing up in Altgeld, I’d soak up all the poison the white man feeds us. See, the folks you’re working with got the same problem, even though they don’t realize it yet. They spend half they lives worrying about what white folks think. They know what this country has done to their momma, their daddy, their sister. So the truth is they hate white folks, but they can’t admit it to themselves. Keep it all bottled up, fighting themselves. Waste a lot of energy that way.”

  That was the truth as Rafiq saw it. His loyalty was to family, mosque, and the Black race. Everyone else he mistrusted. For him, it was Black self-respect that had elected Mayor Washington, just as Black self-respect had turned around the lives of drug addicts with the guidance of his Muslim brothers. Progress was within our grasp so long as we didn’t betray ourselves.

  But how do you define betrayal? That’s what I’d been wrestling with since I’d first picked up Malcolm X’s autobiography. I was convinced that the positive message of Black solidarity, self-reliance, and discipline didn’t need to depend on hatred of white people. We could tell this country where it was wrong without ceasing to believe in its capacity for change.

  To Rafiq, though, blaming ourselves for anything would mean accepting the explanations that some white people had always offered for Black poverty: that we were genetically inferior, that our culture was weak. He would tell people that the self-loathing they felt, what kept them drinking or thieving, was planted by white people. Rid them from your mind and find your true power liberated.

  For all his professed love of Black people, though, Rafiq seemed to distrust them an awful lot. Once, after a particularly thorny meeting with the city, I asked Rafiq whether he could bring out his followers if a public showdown became necessary.

  “I don’t got time to run around passing out flyers trying to explain everything to the public,” Rafiq said. “Most of the folks out here don’t care one way or another. The ones that do are gonna be double-crossing Negroes trying to mess things up.”

  I disagreed with Rafiq’s thinking, but I also knew the real reason for his lack of effectiveness. Neither his organization nor his mosque had more than fifty members. The reason he had influence was that he showed up at so many meetings and shouted his opponents into submission.

  Rafiq’s program of “Black nationalism” could thrive as an emotion—winning the applause of the unemployed teenager listening on the radio or the businessman watching late-night TV—but it floundered when it came to getting anything done.

  What the Black nationalists wouldn’t accept was that white people were not just phantoms to be erased from our dreams. They were part of our everyday lives. Even Black people who were sympathetic to Black nationalists had to make practical choices every day. The Black accountant had to think twice about choosing to do business at a Black-owned bank if it charged him extra for checking and couldn’t afford the risk of giving him a loan. The Black nurse might say, “White folks I work with ain’t so bad, and even if they were, I can’t be quitting my job—who’s gonna pay my rent tomorrow, or feed my children today?”

  Rafiq had no ready answers to such questions; he was less interested in changing the rules of power than the color of those who had it and enjoyed its privileges. His approach was actually the very thing that Malcolm X had sought to root out: one more feeder of fantasy, one more excuse for inaction.

  Fortunately, nobody I spoke with in the neighborhood s
eemed to take Rafiq’s talk very seriously. They saw it as just that—talk. What concerned me more was the gap between our talk and our actions. Didn’t self-esteem finally depend on our ability to translate words into action? It was that belief that led me into organizing, and it was that belief that would lead me to conclude that notions of purity—of race or of culture—could not be the basis for Black self-esteem.

  Our sense of wholeness would have to arise from something more fine than the bloodlines we’d inherited. It would have to come from the messy, contradictory details of our own experience.

  My father, Barack Obama Sr., grew up in Kenya and studied at the University of Hawaii, where he met my mother, Ann.

  My mother, Ann Dunham, was adventurous and suspicious of anyone who thought the world was easily defined. “The world is complicated, Bar,” she told me. “That’s why it’s interesting.”

  Here I am as a child in Hawaii, riding my tricycle.

  My maternal grandfather, Stanley Dunham, with my maternal grandmother, Madelyn Dunham. They were married just before Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941. My grandfather served in the Army during World War II, while my grandmother worked on a bomber plane assembly line.

  This is my father as a child. He's held by my paternal grandmother, Habiba Akumu Obama, my paternal grandfather's second wife. My family members say that my father took after Akumu in his wild and stubborn ways, even though he was raised mostly by my grandfather's third wife, Sarah.

  Me playing with my grandfather on a beach in Hawaii. My grandfather liked to play pranks on tourists at the beach and tell them I was the great-grandson of Hawaii’s first king, Kamehameha.

  My mother married Lolo Soetoro, my stepfather, when I was six. We moved to Indonesia, where he was from, and a few years later my half sister Maya was born.

  Here I am sightseeing in Indonesia, before returning to live with my grandparents and finish school in Hawaii.

  My father was a stranger to me when he came to visit my mother and me for Christmas one year. It was the last time I saw him in person before he died, and the photos from that visit are the only ones I have of us together.

  As a young man in high school, I wore my hair long and thought I was pretty hip.

  Toot, Gramps, and my mother celebrating at my high school graduation. In Hawaii, flower leis are a common gift for graduations and other celebrations.

  I continued to play basketball through my senior year of high school. I loved the moments when the whole team moved as one unit, and some of my closest friendships started on the court.

  After high school I moved to Los Angeles to attend Occidental College—here I am as a young student. At Occidental I met friends who changed my worldview and started getting involved in political causes I believed in.

  After Occidental, I transferred to Columbia University in New York City. Here I am in Central Park.

  After I graduated from Columbia, I moved to Chicago and started working as a community organizer, attending meetings like this to learn about the needs of people in places like the Altgeld Gardens public housing project.

  I first got to know my half sister Auma by writing letters to her. But when she first visited me in Chicago, we quickly fell into a close and easy relationship as siblings, though we grew up continents apart.

  I left Chicago and community organizing to attend Harvard Law School, hoping to learn new ways to help make real change in the world.

  My first trip to Kenya was in 1987. Here I am with my step-grandmother “Mama Sarah” (below) and with Mama Sarah, Auma, and Auma's mother, Kezia Obama (left), outside the family homestead in Alego.

  Before we were married, Michelle joined me for a trip to the family homestead in Alego.

  My siblings Roy, Maya, and Auma came to my wedding to Michelle in 1992. Michelle’s brother, Craig, and his then-wife, Janis, joined for a family photo.

  CHAPTER 10

  I ran to the airport arrivals hall as fast as I could. Panting for breath, I spun around several times, my eyes scanning the crowds of Indians, Germans, Poles, Thais, and Czechs gathering their luggage.

  I knew I should have left earlier! Maybe she had gotten worried and tried to call. What if she had walked right past me and I hadn’t even known it?

  I looked down at the photograph in my hand, the one she had sent me two months earlier, smudged now from too much handling.

  Then I looked up, and the picture came to life: a Kenyan woman emerging from behind the customs gate, moving with easy, graceful steps, her bright, searching eyes fixed on my own.

  “Barack?”

  “Auma?”

  “Oh my…”

  I lifted my sister off the ground as we embraced, and we laughed and laughed as we looked at each other. I picked up her bag and we began to walk to the parking garage, and she slipped her arm through mine. And I knew at that moment, somehow, that I loved her naturally, easily and fiercely. Even now I can’t explain it; I only know that the love was true, and still is, and I’m grateful for it.

  “So, brother,” Auma said as we drove into Chicago, “tell me everything.”

  “About what?”

  “Your life, of course.”

  I told her about Chicago and New York, my work as an organizer, my mother and grandparents and Maya—she had heard so much about them from our father, she said, she felt as if she already knew them. She described Germany, where she was trying to finish a master’s degree in linguistics.

  “I have no right to complain, I suppose,” she said. “I have a scholarship, an apartment. I don’t know what I would be doing if I was still in Kenya. But the Germans…They think of themselves as very liberal when it comes to Africans, but if you scratch the surface you see they still have the attitudes of their childhood. In German fairy tales, Black people are always the goblins. Sometimes I try to imagine what it must have been like for the Old Man, leaving home for the first time. Whether he felt that same loneliness…”

  The Old Man. That’s what Auma called our father. It sounded right, at once familiar and distant, an elemental force that isn’t fully understood. In my apartment, Auma held up the picture of him that sat on my bookshelf.

  “He looks so innocent, doesn’t he? So young.” She held the picture next to my face. “You have the same mouth.”

  I told her she should lie down and get some rest while I went to my office.

  She shook her head. “I’m not tired. Let me go with you.”

  “You’ll feel better if you take a nap.”

  She said, “Agh, Barack! I see you’re bossy like the Old Man. And you only met him once? It must be in the blood.”

  I laughed, but she didn’t; instead, her eyes wandered over my face as if it were a puzzle to solve.

  I gave her a tour of the South Side that afternoon, the same drive I had taken in my first days in Chicago, only with some of my own memories now. When we stopped by my office, Angela, Mona, and Shirley happened to be there. They asked Auma all about Kenya and how she braided her hair and how come she talked so pretty, like the queen of England, and the four of them enjoyed themselves thoroughly talking about me and all my strange habits.

  “They seem very fond of you,” Auma said afterward. “They remind me of our aunties back home.” She rolled down the window and stuck her face into the wind, watching Michigan Avenue pass by: the gutted remains of a once-famous theater, a garage full of rusted cars. “Are you doing this for them, Barack?” she asked, turning back to me. “This organizing business?”

  I shrugged. “For them. For me.”

  That same expression of puzzlement, and fear, returned to Auma’s face. “I don’t like politics much,” she said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “I don’t know. People alw
ays end up disappointed.”

  There was a letter waiting for her in my mailbox when we got home; it was from the German law student she’d been dating. It was at least seven pages long, and as I prepared dinner, she sat at the kitchen table and laughed and sighed and clicked her tongue.

  She told me his name was Otto and he was different from many of the Germans she met. “He’s so sweet! And sometimes I treat him so badly! I don’t know, Barack. Sometimes I think it’s just impossible for me to trust anybody completely. I think of what the Old Man made of his life, and the idea of marriage gives me, how do you say…the shivers. Also, with Otto and his career, we would have to live in Germany. I imagine what it would be like, living my life as a foreigner, and I don’t think I could take it.”

  She folded her letter and put it back in the envelope. “What about you, Barack?” she asked. “Do you have these problems, or is it just your sister who’s so confused?”

  “I think I know what you’re feeling.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Well…there was a woman in New York that I loved. She was white. She had dark hair, and specks of green in her eyes. Her voice sounded like a wind chime. We saw each other for almost a year. You know how you can fall into your own private world? Just two people, hidden and warm. Your own language. Your own customs. That’s how it was.