Dreams from My Father (Adapted for Young Adults) Page 17
CHAPTER 13
That September, I applied to law school. It was a decision that tore me up, that I went over and over a hundred times. I felt proud of what I’d helped accomplish in Chicago, yet there was so much more to do. But I was convinced that what I would learn in law school—about the ways in which businesses and banks were put together, about how government actually worked—would help me bring about real change. I would learn about power in all its fine details, and I would bring that knowledge back to places like this, where it was desperately needed.
Since I wouldn’t hear back from those schools until January, the only person I told was Johnnie.
“I knew it!” he shouted, and slapped me on the back.
“Knew what?”
“That it was just a matter of time, Barack. Before you were outta here.”
“Why’d you think that?”
Johnnie shook his head and laughed. “Because you got options, that’s why. You can leave. When somebody’s got a choice between Harvard and Roseland, it’s only so long somebody’s gonna keep on choosing Roseland. I just hope you remember your friends when you’re up in that fancy office downtown.”
For some reason, his laughter made me defensive. I had gone over my decision in my mind a hundred times. I insisted to him that I would be coming back to the neighborhood, that I didn’t plan on being dazzled by the wealth and power that I would certainly come into contact with. Johnnie put his up hands in mock surrender.
“Man, we’re just proud to see you succeed.”
Why did Johnnie doubt my intentions? Was I so defensive because I doubted them, too?
I imagined my father telling himself, twenty-eight years earlier, the same story. He would go to America, the land of dreams, and bring back knowledge that he couldn’t hope to gain in his homeland. But his plans, his dreams, soon turned to dust….
Would the same thing happen to me?
Perhaps I would find my answers where he spent the last part of his life, in Kenya. Auma was back in Nairobi, teaching at a university for a year. Between leaving my job in Chicago and starting law school would be the ideal time for an extended visit.
Perhaps it was finally the time….
* * *
—
THERE WERE TWO reasons that I told Johnnie I planned to leave. The first was that he was my friend. The second was that I hoped he’d be willing to stay on and take my place as lead organizer. By the time I left, our new youth program would be up and running and the money for next year’s budget would have been raised. I also hoped to bring a few more churches into our fold. If there was anything left to do, it was to reach out again to Chicago’s pastors and finally figure out where they would fit into our organization’s future.
I started with Reverend Philips.
His church was an old building in one of the South Side’s older neighborhoods. The sanctuary was dark, with several pews that had cracked and splintered; the reddish carpet gave off a musty, damp odor. And Reverend Philips himself—he was old. With the window shades drawn, only his snow-white hair was clearly visible. His voice came at me like something out of a dream.
We talked about the church. Not his church so much as the church, the Black church, as an institution and as an idea.
He began by telling me about the religion of enslaved Africans who, newly landed on hostile shores, once sat in circles around fires, mixing stories of their new world with the ancient rhythms of their old. Their songs told of their dreams of survival, and freedom, and hope. Reverend Philips recalled the Southern church of his youth, a small, whitewashed wooden place built with sweat and pennies saved from sharecropping. On bright, hot Sunday mornings, he said, all the quiet terror and hurt of the previous week would melt away as people clapped and cried and shouted to the Lord in gratitude. They prayed for those same stubborn ideas their fathers and grandfathers had: survival, and freedom, and hope.
Reverend Philips spoke of his time in Chicago and the emergence of the Nation of Islam and the Black nationalists. He understood their anger. He shared it. He didn’t expect he would ever entirely escape it. But through prayer, he said, he had learned to control it. And he had tried not to pass it down to his children.
He remembered thousands of churches in Chicago, from tiny storefronts to large stone edifices. Most of the large ones had been a blend of two kinds: those where people sat stiff as cadets and sang from their hymnals, and those where preachers known as charismatics shook their bodies and spoke in tongues—unintelligible words they believed came from God.
Chicago’s neighborhoods were segregated by race, and Reverend Philips thought that segregation, as bad as it was, did have one blessing. Black people with more money and more education, doctors and lawyers, worshiped right next to maids and laborers. So rich and poor, learned and unlearned, could share ideas and information and values.
He wasn’t sure, he said, how much longer that mixing would go on. Most of his wealthier members had moved away to tidier neighborhoods in the suburbs. They still drove back every Sunday, out of loyalty or habit. But they no longer volunteered to tutor children or visit the homes of the poor and elderly. They were scared of the neighborhood at night. He expected that once he passed on, many of those members would start new churches, as tidy as their new streets, and their link to the past would finally be broken. Their children would no longer retain the memory of that first circle of enslaved people around the fire.
Reverend Philips’s voice began to trail off; he was getting tired. As I was leaving, he asked, “By the way, what church do you belong to?”
“I…I attend different services,” I stammered.
“But you’re not a member anywhere?”
“Still searching, I guess.”
“Well, I can understand that. It might help your mission if you had a church home, though. It doesn’t matter where, really.”
Back outside, I glanced up at the small, second-story window of the church, imagining the old pastor inside, drafting his sermon for the week. Where did my faith come from? I didn’t have an answer. I had learned to have faith in myself. But is faith in oneself enough?
* * *
—
WITH JOHNNIE NOW handling our day-to-day activities, I met with more Black ministers, hoping to convince them to join the Developing Communities Project.
It was a slow process. Most Black pastors were fiercely independent. When I reached them on the phone, they would often be suspicious. Why would this Barack Obama, with his Muslim-sounding name, want a few minutes of their time?
Once I met them face to face, though, I would usually come away impressed. Most turned out to be thoughtful, hardworking men, with a confidence and certainty of purpose that made them by far the best organizers in the neighborhood. They were generous with their time and surprisingly willing to tell me about their own troubled pasts. One minister said he’d once had a gambling addiction. Another told me about his years as a successful executive who drank in secret. They all mentioned periods of religious doubt. That was the source of their new confidence, they insisted. They had fallen and found redemption. It was what gave them the authority to preach.
Many of the younger ministers told me about a man they saw as a mentor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Jr., and toward the end of October I finally got a chance to pay him a visit. I had expected that his church, Trinity, would be imposing, but it turned out to be a modest structure surrounded with evergreens and sculpted shrubs and a small sign spiked into the grass—Free South Africa. The South African system of apartheid—similar to the segregation in the American South before the civil rights movement—was still going strong at the time, and African American churches were leading the movement to pressure American companies doing business with South Africa to finally bring that hated way of life to an end.
Inside, the church was cool and murmured with activity. A group
of small children waited to be picked up from day care. A crew of teenage girls passed by, dressed in brightly colored costumes for what looked like an African dance class. Four elderly women emerged from the sanctuary, and one of them shouted “God is good!” causing the others to respond giddily “All the time!”
Reverend Wright was in his late forties, with silver hair and a silver mustache and goatee. He was dressed in a gray three-piece suit. He told me he had grown up in Philadelphia, the son of a Baptist minister. At first, he didn’t want to follow in his father’s footsteps. After college, he served in the Marines. In the 1960s, he explored Islam and Black nationalism. But the call of his faith was a steady tug on his heart. Eventually he spent six years in a university, studying for a Ph.D. in the history of religion. He then brought everything he’d learned to Trinity United Church of Christ. His wide-ranging background, it was clear, helped him bring together the many different strands of Black experience.
Reconciling those experiences had been a challenge, but his efforts had paid off: the church had grown from two hundred to four thousand members during his two decades there. He was especially pleased that he’d managed to get more men involved.
“Nothing’s harder than reaching young brothers like yourself,” Reverend Wright said. “They tell themselves church is a woman’s thing—that it’s a sign of weakness for a man to admit that he’s got spiritual needs.”
On my way out, I picked up a copy of Trinity’s brochure. Reverend Wright had written a list of guiding principles, and one of them warned of the dangers of chasing a certain kind of middle-class life. He warned that Black people blessed with the talent or good fortune to achieve success had to be careful not to think they were better than the rest and lose touch with their own people.
Although most of the church’s members were teachers and secretaries and government workers, there was also a large number of Black professionals: engineers, doctors, accountants, and corporate managers. Many of them had worshipped in other churches or stopped going to church altogether. With successful careers in largely white institutions, they’d stopped caring about their religious heritage. But at some point, they would later tell me, they began to feel they’d reached a spiritual dead end. They felt as if they’d been cut off from themselves. In Trinity, they found something they never could get from a paycheck: an assurance, as their hair began to gray, that they belonged to a larger community, something that would outlast their own lives. The fate of the professional became bound to that of the teenage mother or the former gang member. It was a powerful program, this cultural community. It was more flexible than Black nationalism, more sustaining than my own brand of organizing.
Still, I couldn’t help wondering whether it would be enough to keep more people from leaving the city or young men out of jail. Would the Christian fellowship between a Black school administrator, say, and a Black school parent change the way the schools were run? Would it reform public housing? And if men like Reverend Wright failed to take a stand, if churches like Trinity refused to engage with real power and risk genuine conflict, then what chance would there be of holding the larger community intact?
Sometimes I would pose such questions to the people I met through Reverend Wright. Maybe, they said, if you joined the church you could help us start a community program. You have some good ideas, they would tell me. Why don’t you come by on Sunday? But I’d always shrug off the invitation. I believed in the sincerity of their faith, but I was still not sure of my own.
* * *
—
THE DAY BEFORE Thanksgiving, Harold Washington died.
It occurred without warning. Only a few months earlier, he had been reelected as mayor of Chicago, easily beating his white opponents. He had run a cautious campaign this time, without the passion he’d had the first time around. The business community had sent him their checks, resigned to his powerful presence. Some Black people had argued that he’d given up on them to win over white and Latino voters. Harold didn’t pay such critics much attention. He saw no reason to take big risks, no reason to hurry. He said he’d be mayor for the next twenty years.
And then death: sudden, simple, final, almost ridiculous in its ordinariness, the heart attack of an overweight man.
It rained that weekend, cold and steady. In the neighborhood, the streets were silent. Indoors and outside, people cried. The Black radio stations replayed Harold’s speeches. At City Hall, the lines stretched for blocks as mourners visited the body, lying in state. Everywhere Black people appeared dazed, stricken, uncertain of direction, frightened of the future.
In spite of their shock, those loyal to Washington began to regroup, trying to decide on a strategy for maintaining control, trying to select Harold’s rightful heir. But it was too late. There was no political organization in place, no clearly defined principles to follow. Black Chicago politics had centered on one radiant individual. Now that he was gone, no one could agree on what he had stood for.
The day city council was to select a new mayor to serve until the special election, people, mostly Black, gathered outside the city council’s chambers in the late afternoon, hoping for a fair and transparent process when it came to choosing Washington’s successor. They chanted and stomped and swore never to leave. But in the end, the Black politicians cut deals with the white politicians and outlasted those crowds. Old-guard and conservative politicians met in secret just after four in the morning in the parking lot of a closed restaurant to nominate a soft-spoken Black alderman who would go on to let Washington’s programs die with him.
I felt as if Harold Washington had died a second time that night.
* * *
—
IN FEBRUARY, I received an acceptance from Harvard Law School. The letter came with a thick packet of information. It reminded me of the packet I’d received from Punahou fourteen years earlier. I remembered how Gramps had stayed up the whole night reading from the school’s catalog, how he’d told me I would make contacts that would last a lifetime, that I would move in charmed circles and have all the opportunities he’d never had. And I had smiled back at him, pretending to understand but actually wishing I was still in Indonesia running barefoot along a paddy field, with my feet sinking in the cool, wet mud.
I felt something like that now.
I had scheduled a luncheon that week at our office for the twenty or so ministers whose churches had agreed to join the organization. Most of the ministers we’d invited showed up, along with most of our key leadership. Together we discussed strategies for the coming year.
When we were finally finished, I announced that I would be leaving in May and that Johnnie would be taking over as director.
As it turned out, no one was surprised. They all came up to me afterward and offered their congratulations. Reverend Philips assured me I had made a wise choice. Angela and Mona said they always knew I’d amount to something. But one of our leaders, a single mom named Mary who had worked with us from the start, seemed upset. “What is it with you men? Why is it you’re always in a hurry? Why is it that what you have isn’t ever good enough?”
I started to say something, then gave her a hug. Mary had two daughters at home who would never know their father. Now someone else was leaving them behind.
* * *
—
THAT SUNDAY, I woke up at six a.m. I shaved, brushed the lint from my only suit, and arrived at Trinity Church by seven-thirty. Most of the pews were already filled, so I stuffed myself between a plump older woman who failed to scoot over and a family of four. The mother told the two young boys beside her to stop kicking each other.
“Where’s God?” the toddler asked his brother.
“Shut up,” the older boy replied.
“Both of you settle down right now,” the mother said.
As the congregation joined in song, the deacons, then Reverend Wright, appeared beneath the large
cross that hung from the rafters. The title of Reverend Wright’s sermon that morning was “The Audacity of Hope.” While the boys next to me doodled on their church bulletin, Reverend Wright spoke of the history of injustice, in the Bible and in more recent times. He described a painting titled Hope.
“It depicts a harpist,” he said, “a woman who appears to be sitting atop a great mountain. Then you take a closer look and see that the woman is bruised and bloodied, dressed in tattered rags, the harp reduced to a single frayed string. Your eye is then drawn down to the valley below, where people are starving and dying from war.”
“Daily,” he cried, “we all face rejection and despair! And yet consider that painting, Hope. That harpist is looking upwards, a few faint notes floating upwards toward the heavens. She dares to hope…. She has the audacity…to make music…and praise God…on the one string…she has left!”
People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out.
And I began to hear all the voices from the past three years. The courage and fear of women like Ruby. The race pride and anger of men like Rafiq. The desire to let go, the desire to escape, the desire to give oneself up to a God that could somehow put a floor on despair.
And in that single note—hope!—I heard something else. I imagined inside the thousands of churches across the city, the stories of ordinary Black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den. Those stories—of survival, and freedom, and hope—became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this Black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world.