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

  “Anyway, one weekend she invited me to her family’s country house. The parents were there, and they were very gracious. It was autumn, beautiful, with woods all around us, and we paddled a canoe across this round, icy lake with small gold leaves along the shore. The family knew every inch of the land. They knew how the hills had formed, how the glacial drifts had created the lake, the names of the earliest white settlers—their ancestors—and before that, the names of the American Indians who’d once hunted the land. The library was filled with old books and pictures of her grandfather with famous people—presidents, diplomats, industrialists. Standing in that room, I realized that our two worlds were as distant from each other as Kenya is from Germany. And I knew that if we stayed together I’d eventually live in her world. After all, I’d been living in other people’s worlds most of my life. Between the two of us, I was the one who knew how to live as an outsider.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I pushed her away and then we broke up.” I shrugged. “Of course, even if she’d been more like me it still might not have worked out. There are several Black ladies who’ve broken my heart just as good.”

  “Do you ever hear from her?”

  “I got a postcard at Christmas. She’s happy now; she’s met someone. And I have my work.”

  “Is that enough?”

  “Sometimes.”

  * * *

  —

  I TOOK THE next day off so we could spend time together. But we didn’t speak much about our father. It was only that night, after dinner and a long walk along the lake’s crumbling break wall, that we both sensed we couldn’t go any further until we opened up the subject.

  I made some tea and Auma began to tell me about the Old Man, at least what she could remember. “I can’t say I really knew him,” she began. “Maybe nobody did…not really. His life was so scattered. People only knew scraps and pieces, even his own children.

  “I was scared of him. He was away when I was born. In Hawaii with your mum, and then at Harvard. When he came back to Kenya, our oldest brother, Roy, and I were small children. We had lived with our mum in the country, in Alego. He came back with an American woman named Ruth, and he took us from our mother to live with them in Nairobi. Ruth was the first white person I’d ever been near, and suddenly she was supposed to be my new mother.”

  “Why didn’t you stay with your own mother?”

  Auma shook her head. “I don’t know exactly. In Kenya, men get to keep children in a divorce—if they want them. I asked my mum, but it’s difficult for her to talk about. She thought we would be better off living with the Old Man because he was rich.

  “In those first years, the Old Man was doing really well. He was working for an American oil company. It was only a few years after Kenyan independence, and he was well connected with the top government people. He had gone to school with them. The vice president, ministers, they would come to the house. He had a big house and a big car, and everybody was impressed because he was so young and had so much education from abroad. And he had an American wife, which was still rare—although later, when he was still married to Ruth, he would go out sometimes with my real mum. As if he had to show people that he could also have this beautiful African woman whenever he chose.

  “Ruth was nice enough to us then. She treated us almost like her own children. Her parents were rich, I think, and they would send us beautiful presents from the States. I’d get really excited whenever a package came from them. But then things began to change. When Ruth gave birth to Mark and David, her attention shifted to them. The Old Man left the American company to work in the government. He may have had political ambitions. But by 1966 or 1967, the divisions in Kenya had become more serious. The vice president complained that the government was becoming corrupt. There was terrible fighting between the tribes. People were being killed.

  “Most of the Old Man’s friends just kept quiet and learned to live with it. But the Old Man began to speak up. He would tell people that the fighting was going to ruin the country. His friends tried to warn him about saying such things in public, but he didn’t care. He always thought he knew what was best, you see. Word got around that the Old Man was a troublemaker. The president called him in and told him that, because he could not keep his mouth shut, he would not work again ‘until he had no shoes on his feet.’

  “I don’t know how much of these details are true. But I know that with the president as an enemy, things became very bad for the Old Man. He was banished from the government, and even foreign companies were told not to hire him. Finally, he had to accept a small job with the Water Department. Even this was possible only because one of his friends pitied him. The Old Man began to drink heavily, and many of the people he knew stopped coming to visit because now it was dangerous to be seen with him. They told him that maybe if he apologized, he would be all right. But he continued to say whatever was on his mind.

  “I understood most of this only when I was older. At the time, I just saw that life at home became very difficult. The Old Man never spoke to Roy or myself except to scold us. He would come home very late, drunk, and I could hear him shouting at Ruth, telling her to cook him food. Ruth became very bitter at how the Old Man had changed. Sometimes, when he wasn’t home, she would tell Roy and me that he was crazy. I didn’t blame her—I probably agreed. But I noticed that, even more than before, she treated us differently from her own two sons. Roy and I felt like we had no one.

  “She left when I was twelve or thirteen, after the Old Man had had a serious car accident. He had been drinking, I think, and the driver of the other car, a white farmer, was killed. For a long time the Old Man was in the hospital, almost a year, and Roy and I lived basically on our own. When the Old Man finally got out of the hospital, that’s when he went to visit you and your mum in Hawaii. He told us that the two of you would be coming back with him and we would have a proper family. But you weren’t with him when he returned, and Roy and I were left to deal with him by ourselves.

  “That was a terrible time. We had no place to live and bounced from relative to relative. The Old Man had so little money, he would have to borrow from relatives just for food. This made him more ashamed, I think, and his temper got worse. He would never admit to us that anything was wrong. I think that’s what hurt the most—the way he still put on airs about how we were the children of Dr. Obama. We would have empty cupboards, and he would donate money to charities just to keep up appearances!

  “Finally Roy left, and I was left alone with the Old Man. Sometimes I would stay up half the night, waiting for him to come home, worrying that something terrible had happened. He would stagger in drunk and come into my room and wake me because he wanted company or something to eat. He would talk about how unhappy he was and how he had been betrayed. I would be so sleepy, I wouldn’t understand anything he was saying.

  “The only thing that saved me was Kenya High School. It was a very strict girls’ boarding school, and when it was in session I would stay there instead of with the Old Man. The school gave me some sense of order, you see. Something to hold on to.

  “One year, the Old Man couldn’t even pay my school fees, and I was sent home. I was so ashamed, I cried all night. But I was lucky. One of the headmistresses gave me a scholarship that let me stay on. It’s sad to say, but as much as I cared for the Old Man, I was glad not to have to live with him anymore.

  “In my last two years in high school, the Old Man’s situation improved. The president died, and our father got a job with the Ministry of Finance and started to have money again, and influence. But he never got over his bitterness at seeing the people he grew up with—the ones who showed more political sense—rise ahead of him. And it was too late to pick up the pieces of his family. For a long time he lived alone in a hotel room, even when he could afford again to buy a house. I almost never saw him, and when I did, he didn’t know how to behav
e with me. We were like strangers, but he still wanted to pretend that he was a model father and could tell me how to behave.

  “It was only after I got my scholarship to study in Germany that I began to let go of some of the anger I felt toward him. With distance, I could see what he had gone through, how even he had never really understood himself.

  “Only at the end, after making such a mess of his life, do I think he was beginning to change. The last time I saw him, he was on a business trip, representing Kenya at a conference in Europe. I wasn’t sure how things would go, because we hadn’t spoken for so long. But when he arrived in Germany he seemed really relaxed, almost peaceful. We had a really good time. You know, even when he was being completely unreasonable he could be so charming! He took me to London, and we stayed in a fancy hotel, and he introduced me to all his friends at a British club. He was pulling out chairs for me and making a great fuss, telling all his friends how proud he was of me. I felt like a little girl again. Like his princess.”

  For some time, Auma had been staring at our father’s photograph, soft-focused in the dim light. Now she stood up and went to the window, her back to me. She began to shake violently, and I came up behind her and put my arms around her as she wept.

  “Do you see, Barack?” she said between sobs. “I was just starting to know him. It was just getting to the point where…where he might have explained himself. He might have turned the corner, found some inner peace. When he died, I felt so…cheated. As cheated as you must have felt.”

  Auma’s body suddenly straightened and she wiped her eyes with her shirtsleeve. “Ah, look at what you’ve made your sister do,” she said.

  “You know, the Old Man used to talk about you so much! He would show off your picture to everybody and tell us how well you were doing in school. I guess your mum and him used to exchange letters. I think those letters really comforted him. During the really bad times, when everybody seemed to have turned against him, he would bring her letters into my room and start reading them out loud. ‘You see!’ he would say. ‘At least there are people who truly care for me.’ ”

  After a while, she curled up under a blanket and fell into a sound sleep. But I remained awake, looking at the stillness of her face, listening to the rhythm of her breathing, trying to make some sense out of all that she’d said. I felt as if my world had been turned upside down—as if I had woken up to find a blue sun in a yellow sky. All my life, I had carried a single image of my father, one that I had sometimes rebelled against but had never questioned: the brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader. Because he was not there, I’d had no reason to change that image. I’d never seen what most men see at some point in their lives: their father’s body shrinking, their father’s best hopes dashed, their father’s face lined with grief and regret.

  I’d seen weakness in other men—Gramps and his disappointments, Lolo and his compromises. I loved them and respected them for the struggles they went through, recognizing them as my own, but I never wanted to follow in their footsteps. My father was different. His voice had remained untainted, always inspiring. I imagined him with the qualities of heroic Black men like W.E.B. Du Bois or Nelson Mandela. I could almost hear him rebuking me: “You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people’s struggle. Wake up, Black man!”

  Now, as I sat in the glow of a single light bulb, that image had suddenly vanished. Replaced by…what? A bitter drunk? An abusive husband? A defeated, lonely bureaucrat? To think that all my life I had been wrestling with someone who didn’t exist!

  If Auma hadn’t been in the room, I would have probably laughed out loud. The king is overthrown, I thought. The man behind the curtain isn’t a wizard. I can do what I please. Whatever I do, I won’t do much worse than he did. The fantasy of my father had kept me from despair. Now he was dead, truly. He could no longer tell me how to live.

  All he could tell me, perhaps, was what had happened to him. What had happened to all his vigor, his promise? He hadn’t been able to tell me his true feelings when he returned to Hawaii, any more than I had been able to express my ten-year-old desires. Now, I looked into Auma’s sleeping face and saw the price we had paid for that silence.

  * * *

  —

  TEN DAYS LATER, Auma and I sat in the hard plastic seats of the airport terminal, looking out at the planes. I asked what she was thinking about, and she smiled softly.

  “I was thinking about Alego,” she said. “Home Square—our grandfather’s land, where Granny still lives. It’s the most beautiful place, Barack. When I’m in Germany, and it’s cold outside, and I’m feeling lonely, I close my eyes and imagine I’m there. Sitting in the compound, surrounded by big trees that our grandfather planted. Granny is talking, telling me something funny, and I can hear the cow swishing its tail behind us, and the chickens pecking. And under the mango tree, near the cornfields, is the place where the Old Man is buried….”

  Her flight was starting to board. We remained seated, and Auma closed her eyes, squeezing my hand.

  “We need to go home,” she said. “We need to go home, Barack, and see him there.”

  CHAPTER 11

  One day, Mayor Harold Washington came for a visit.

  He wasn’t visiting me personally. He was coming to cut the ribbon for the new MET (Mayor’s Office of Employment and Training) center. His presence was considered a great victory, and for weeks Rafiq had begged to have the activities start at his building. He was one of many begging for a photo op.

  “You’ve sure become popular, Barack,” said my secretary as the phone rang yet again.

  I looked now at the crowd that had gathered inside Rafiq’s warehouse, mostly politicians and hangers-on, all of them taking peeks out the door every few minutes while plainclothes police officers spoke into their walkie-talkies and surveyed the scene. “Remember,” I told Angela, “try to get the mayor to commit to come to our rally in the fall. Tell him about all the work we’re doing out here, and why—”

  At that moment, a murmur ran through the crowd, then a sudden stillness. A large motorcade pulled up, a limousine door opened, and there was the Man himself. He wore a plain blue suit and a rumpled trench coat; his gray hair looked a little frazzled, and he was shorter than I had expected. Still, he had presence, and the smile of a man at the peak of his powers. The crowd chanted—“Ha-rold! Ha-rold!”—and the mayor made a small pirouette, his hand held up in acknowledgment.

  He began making his way through the throng. Past the senator and the alderman. Past Rafiq and me. Until he finally came to a stop in front of Angela.

  “Ms. Rider.” He took her hand and made a slight bow. “It’s a pleasure. I’ve heard excellent things about your work.”

  Angela looked like she was going to pass out. The mayor offered her his arm, and together they walked toward the door, the crowd pressing behind them.

  “Honey, can you believe this?” Shirley whispered to Mona.

  The ceremony lasted about fifteen minutes. The mayor congratulated us on our civic involvement, while the senator and the alderman jockeyed for position behind him, smiling widely for the photographers they’d hired. The ribbon was cut, and that was it.

  As the limousine sped away, the crowd scattered almost instantly, leaving just a few of us standing in the litter-blown road.

  I walked over to Angela, who was busy laughing and crowing with Shirley and Mona.

  “Did he agree to come to our rally?” I asked Angela.

  The three of them looked at me impatiently. “What rally?”

  I threw up my hands and stomped away. I was furious that she had forgotten. As I reached my car, Deacon Wilbur Milton, copresident of our organization, came up from behind. With his short, reddish beard and round cheeks, he always reminded me of Santa Claus.

  “Where you off to in such a hurry?” he said.

  “I
don’t know,” I said, fuming. “Somewhere. You wanna know something, Will?”

  “What?”

  “We act like a bunch of starstruck children. Here we are, with a chance to show the mayor that we’re real players in the city, and instead we’re worrying about whether we got a picture taken with him—”

  “You mean you didn’t get yourself a picture?” Will smiled and held up a Polaroid shot of himself and the mayor. He put a hand on my shoulder. “You need to lighten up a little bit. What you call trifling was the most fun Angela and them have had all year. It made ’em feel important. And you made it happen. So what if they forgot to invite Harold to a rally? We can always call him back.”

  “I’m just frustrated.”

  “You want everything to happen fast. Like you got something to prove out here. You don’t have to prove nothing to us, Barack. We love you, man. Jesus loves you!”

  * * *

  —

  ALMOST A YEAR had passed since my arrival in Chicago, and not only had Angela, Mona, and Shirley decided not to quit, but our work was finally starting to make a difference. A street-corner group we had pulled together had fifty members who organized neighborhood cleanups, sponsored career days for youth, won agreements to improve sanitation. Run-down parks and playgrounds were overhauled, streets repaired, crime-watch programs started. And now there was a new job center where an empty storefront had been.

  I began receiving invitations to sit on panels and conduct workshops; local politicians knew my name, even if they still couldn’t pronounce it.

  “You should have seen him when he first got here,” I overheard Shirley tell a new leader one day. “He was just a boy. I swear, you look at him now, you’d think he was a different person.” She spoke like a proud parent.

  It should have been enough. And yet I wasn’t satisfied.