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

  Yes, I had spent the last three years preaching action instead of dreams. But now I felt for the first time that the communion inside this church—even if it sometimes disguised the very real conflicts among us—could also help us to move beyond our narrow dreams, to be part of something larger than ourselves.

  “The audacity of hope!” chanted Reverend Wright. “I still remember my grandmother, singing in the house, ‘There’s a bright side somewhere…don’t rest till you find it…. The audacity of hope! Times when we couldn’t pay the bills. Times when it looked like I wasn’t ever going to amount to anything…and yet and still my momma and daddy would break into a song…Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Lord…

  “And it made no sense to me, this singing! Why were they thanking Him for all of their troubles? I’d ask myself. But see, I was only looking at the horizontal dimension of their lives! I didn’t understand that they were talking about the vertical dimension! About their relationship to God above!”

  As the choir lifted back up into song, as the congregation began to applaud those who were walking to the altar to accept Reverend Wright’s call, I felt a light touch on the top of my hand. The older of the two boys beside me was handing me a pocket tissue. Beside him, his mother glanced at me with a faint smile before turning back toward the altar. It was only when I thanked the boy that I felt the tears running down my cheeks.

  “Oh, Jesus,” I heard the older woman beside me whisper softly. “Thank you for carrying us this far.”

  PART THREE

  KENYA

  CHAPTER 14

  Kenyatta International Airport was almost empty when my plane landed in Africa. Officials sipped at their morning tea as they checked over passports. In the baggage area, a creaky conveyor belt spat out luggage. Auma was nowhere in sight, so I took a seat on my carry-on bag. After a few minutes, a security guard approached me.

  “This is your first trip to Kenya, yes?” he asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “I see.” He squatted down beside me. “You are from America. You know my brother’s son, perhaps. Samson Otieno. He is studying engineering in Texas.”

  I told him that I’d never been to Texas and so hadn’t had the opportunity to meet his nephew, which disappointed him. By this time, the last of the other passengers on my flight had left the terminal. I asked the guard if any more bags were coming.

  “I don’t think so,” he said, “but if you will just wait here, I will find someone who can help you.”

  He disappeared around a narrow corridor, and I stood up to stretch my back. I had imagined a more earthshaking homecoming: clouds lifting, old demons fleeing, the spirits of my ancestors rising up in celebration. A pilgrimage, Asante had called it. For folks back in Chicago, as for me, Africa had become an idea more than an actual place, a new promised land, full of ancient traditions and noble struggles and talking drums. But that was Africa from a distance—like the distance I’d had from the Old Man. What would happen when that distance was gone? What if the truth only disappointed, and my father’s death meant nothing, and his leaving me behind meant nothing, and the only tie that bound me to him, or to Africa, was a name and a blood type?

  I felt suddenly tired and abandoned. I was about to search for a telephone when the security guard reappeared with a strikingly beautiful woman, dark brown, slender, close to six feet tall and dressed in a British Airways uniform. She introduced herself as Miss Omoro and explained that my bag had probably been sent on to Johannesburg by mistake.

  As I filled out a missing-baggage form, Miss Omoro asked, “You wouldn’t be related to Dr. Obama, by any chance?”

  “Well, yes—he was my father.”

  Miss Omoro smiled sympathetically. “I’m very sorry about his passing. Your father was a close friend of my family’s. He would often come to our house when I was a child.”

  As we talked about my visit, I found myself trying to prolong the conversation, encouraged by the fact that she’d recognized my name. That had never happened before, I realized; not in Hawaii, not in Indonesia, not in L.A. or New York or Chicago. For the first time in my life, I felt the comfort, the firmness of identity that a name might provide, how it could carry an entire history in other people’s memories, so that they might nod and say knowingly, “Oh, you are so-and-so’s son.” No one here in Kenya would ask how to spell my name, or mispronounce it. My name belonged and so I belonged—even if I did not understand the whole web of connections.

  “Barack!” I turned to see Auma jumping up and down. I rushed over to her and we laughed and hugged, as silly as the first time we’d met. A tall, brown-skinned woman was smiling beside us, and Auma turned and said, “Barack, this is our Auntie Zeituni. Our father’s sister.”

  “Welcome home,” Zeituni said, kissing me on both cheeks.

  While Auma drove, the two of them began to talk at the same time, asking how my trip had been, listing all the things I had to do and people I had to see. Wide plains stretched out on either side of the road, savannah grass mostly, an occasional thorn tree against the horizon, a landscape that seemed at once ancient and alive.

  Gradually the traffic thickened, and crowds began to pour out of the countryside on their way to work, the men still buttoning their flimsy shirts; the women straight-backed, their heads wrapped in bright-colored scarves. Cars meandered across lanes and roundabouts, dodging potholes, bicycles, and pedestrians, while rickety jitneys—called matatus, I was told—stopped without any warning to cram on more passengers.

  It all seemed strangely familiar, as if I had been down that same road before. And then I remembered other mornings in Indonesia, with my mother and Lolo talking in the front seat, the same smell of burning wood and diesel, the same look on people’s faces. It seemed as if they didn’t expect much more than to make it through the day, maybe hoping that their luck would change, or at least hold out.

  We went to drop off Zeituni at Kenya Breweries, where she worked as a computer programmer. She leaned over again to kiss me on the cheek, then wagged her finger at Auma. “You take good care of Barry, now,” she said. “Make sure he doesn’t get lost again.”

  Once we were back on the highway, I asked Auma what Zeituni had meant about my getting lost. Auma shrugged.

  “It’s a common expression here,” she said. “Usually, it means the person hasn’t seen you in a while. ‘You’ve been lost,’ they’ll say. Or ‘Don’t get lost.’

  “Sometimes it has a more serious meaning. Let’s say a son or husband moves to the city, or to the West, like our Uncle Omar, in Boston. They promise to return after completing school. They say they’ll send for the family once they get settled. At first they write once a week. Then it’s just once a month. Then they stop writing completely. No one sees them again. They’ve been lost, you see. Even if people know where they are.”

  * * *

  —

  AUMA’S APARTMENT WAS a small but comfortable space with French doors that let sunlight wash through the rooms. There were stacks of books everywhere, and a collage of family photographs hanging on the wall. Above her bed, there was a large poster of a Black woman, her face tilted upward toward an unfolding blossom, the words “I Have a Dream” printed below.

  “So what’s your dream, Auma?” I asked.

  Auma laughed. “That’s my biggest problem, Barack. Too many dreams. A woman with dreams always has problems.”

  My exhaustion from the trip must have showed, because Auma suggested that I take a nap while she went to the university to teach her class. I dropped onto the cot she’d prepared and fell asleep to the buzz of insects outside the window.

  The next morning we walked into town and wandered without any destination in mind. The city center was smaller than I’d expected, with row after row of worn, whitewashed stucco from the days when Nairobi was little more than a place for the British to stay while bui
lding railroads. Alongside these buildings, a modern city had emerged, a city of high-rise offices and elegant shops, hotels with lobbies no different from those in Singapore or Atlanta.

  It was an odd mix of cultures old and new. In front of a fancy car dealership, a train of Masai women passed by on the way to market, their heads shaven clean, their earlobes ringed with bright beads. At the entrance to an open-air mosque, we watched a group of bank officers carefully remove their wing-tipped shoes and bathe their feet before joining farmers and ditchdiggers in afternoon prayer.

  We wandered into the old marketplace, a cavernous building that smelled of ripe fruit and a butcher shop. A passage to the rear of the building led into a maze of open-air stalls where merchants hawked fabrics, baskets, brass jewelry, and other curios. I stopped in front of one with a set of small wooden carvings. I recognized the figures as my father’s long-ago gift to me: elephants, lions, drummers in traditional headdress. “They are only small things,” the Old Man had said….

  “Come, mister,” the young man minding the stall said. “A beautiful necklace for your wife.”

  “This is my sister.”

  “She is a very beautiful sister. Come, this is nice for her.”

  “How much?”

  “Only five hundred shillings. Beautiful.”

  Auma frowned and said something to the man in Swahili. “He’s giving you the wazungu price,” she explained. “The white man’s price.”

  The young man smiled. “I’m very sorry, sister,” he said. “For a Kenyan, the price is three hundred only.”

  Inside the stall, an old woman who was stringing glass beads pointed at me and said something that made Auma smile.

  “What’d she say?”

  “She says that you look like an American to her.”

  “Tell her I’m Luo,” I said, beating my chest.

  Across from us, a woman wove colored straw into baskets and a man cut cowhide into long strips to be used for purse straps. I watched those nimble hands stitch and cut and weave, and began to imagine an unchanging rhythm of days, lived on firm soil where you could wake up each morning and know that today would be the same as yesterday, where you saw how the things that you used had been made and could recite the lives of those who had made them. And all of this happened while a steady procession of Black faces passed before your eyes, the round faces of babies and the chipped, worn faces of the old; beautiful faces that made me understand the transformation that Asante and other Black Americans said they’d undergone after their first visit to Africa.

  Here in Africa, you could experience the freedom that comes from not feeling watched, the freedom of believing that your hair grows as it’s supposed to grow and that your rump sways the way a rump is supposed to sway. Here the world was Black, and so you were just you; you could discover all those things that were unique to your life without being accused of betrayal or living a lie.

  We turned onto Kimathi Street, named after one of the leaders of the Mau-Mau rebellion: eight years, from 1952 to 1960, when ethnic groups rose up and fought the colonialist British rulers. They lost in the end, and Kimathi was captured and executed. But they inspired Africans in other countries to mount similar rebellions. And their efforts led, in a roundabout way, to Kenya’s independence in 1963.

  The first prime minister and president of Kenya was Jomo Kenyatta, who would later make it impossible for my father to work. When he came into office, he immediately assured white people who were busy packing their bags that they shouldn’t worry about the government taking their businesses or land. Kenya became a model of stability to Europeans and Americans, unlike its neighbors Uganda and Tanzania. Former freedom fighters put away their guns and returned to their villages or ran for government offices.

  And Kimathi became just a name on a street sign for tourists to walk past.

  I studied these tourists as Auma and I sat down for lunch in an outdoor café. They were everywhere—Germans, Japanese, British, Americans—taking pictures, fending off street peddlers, many of them dressed in safari suits like actors on a movie set.

  A white American family sat down a few tables away from us. Two of the Kenyan waiters immediately sprang into action, both of them smiling from one ear to the other. Since Auma and I hadn’t yet been served, I began to wave at the two waiters who remained by the kitchen, thinking they must have somehow failed to see us. For some time they managed to avoid my glance, but eventually an older man with sleepy eyes brought over two menus. His manner was resentful, though, and after several more minutes he showed no sign of ever coming back. At this point, the Americans had already received their food and we still had no place settings. Auma stood up.

  “Let’s go.”

  She started heading for the exit, then suddenly turned and walked back to the waiter, who was watching us with an impassive stare.

  “You should be ashamed of yourself,” Auma said to him, her voice shaking. “You should be ashamed.”

  The waiter replied brusquely in Swahili.

  “I don’t care how many mouths you have to feed, you cannot treat your own people like dogs.”

  Auma snapped open her purse and took out a crumpled hundred-shilling note. “You see!” she shouted. “I can pay for my own damn food.”

  She threw the note to the ground, then marched out onto the street.

  For several minutes we wandered without apparent direction, until I finally suggested we sit down on a bench beside the central post office.

  “You okay?” I asked her.

  She nodded. “That was stupid, throwing away money like that.”

  We watched the traffic pass. “You know,” she said eventually, “I can’t go to a club in any of these hotels if I’m with another African woman. The security people will turn us away, thinking we are prostitutes. The same in any of these big office buildings. If you don’t work there, and you are African, they will stop you. But if you’re with a German friend, they’re all smiles. ‘Good evening, miss,’ they’ll say. ‘How are you tonight?’ ”

  I told Auma she was being too hard on the Kenyans, that it was the same in many countries where foreign businessmen and tourists had more money than the people who grew up there. But my words did nothing to soothe her bitterness. She was right, I suspected, in one way. Not all the tourists in Nairobi had come for safaris. Some were there to relive an era when white people from foreign lands could come and be served by Black people without fear or guilt.

  Did the waiter who ignored us know that Black rule had come to Kenya? Did it mean anything to him? Maybe once. But then he looked around and saw his unlucky countrymen drifting into hustles and odd jobs, some of them going under. He realized he needed to support himself, and if that meant treating others better than his own people, so be it.

  Then again, maybe he was torn between two worlds, remembering the hush of a village night or the sound of his mother grinding corn under a stone pallet. And so he was uncertain in each world, always off balance, playing whichever game it took to keep from losing what he had.

  * * *

  —

  THAT EVENING, WE drove east to Kariako, a sprawling apartment complex surrounded by dirt lots. The moon had dropped behind thick clouds, and a light drizzle had begun to fall. At the top of three flights, Auma pushed against a door that was slightly ajar.

  “Barry! You’ve finally come!”

  A short, stocky woman with a cheerful brown face gave me a tight squeeze around the waist. Behind her were fifteen or so people smiling and waving like a crowd at a parade. The short woman looked up at me and frowned.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  “I…”

  “I’m your Aunt Jane. It is me that called you when your father died.”

  She smiled and took me by the hand. “Come. You must meet everybody here. Zeituni you have already met. This…,�
� she said, leading me to a handsome older woman in a green patterned dress, “this is my sister, Kezia. She is mother to Auma and to Roy Obama.”

  Kezia took my hand and said my name together with a few words of Swahili.

  “She says her other son has finally come home,” Jane said.

  “My son,” Kezia repeated in English, nodding and pulling me into a hug. “My son has come home.”

  We continued around the room, shaking hands with aunts, cousins, nephews, and nieces. Everyone greeted me with cheerful curiosity but very little awkwardness, as if meeting a relative for the first time was an everyday occurrence. I had a bag of chocolates for the children, and they gathered around me with polite stares as the adults tried to explain who I was.

  A young man, sixteen or seventeen, stood against the wall with a watchful expression.

  “That’s one of your brothers,” Auma said to me. “Bernard.”

  We shook hands, studying each other’s faces. I found myself at a loss for words but managed to ask him how he had been.

  “Fine, I guess,” he answered softly, which brought a round of laughter from everyone.

  Jane pushed me toward a small table set with bowls of goat curry, fried fish, collard greens, and rice. As we ate, people asked about everyone back in Hawaii, and I tried to describe my life in Chicago and my work as an organizer. They nodded politely but seemed a bit puzzled, so I mentioned that I’d be studying law at Harvard in the fall.

  “Ah, this is good, Barry,” Jane said as she sucked on a bone from the curry. “Your father studied at this school, Harvard. You will make us all proud, just like him. You see, Bernard, you must study hard like your brother.”

  “Bernard thinks he’s going to be a football star,” Zeituni said.

  I turned to Bernard. “Is that right, Bernard?”

  “No,” he said, uncomfortable that he’d attracted attention. “I used to play, that’s all.”