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

  It wasn’t until 1967—the year I celebrated my sixth birthday, three years after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., received the Nobel Peace Prize—that the Supreme Court of the United States would tell the state of Virginia that its ban on interracial marriages violated the U.S. Constitution.

  So it is pretty surprising that my grandparents accepted my parents’ marriage. I still wonder what about their upbringing made them different from so many other people in those days.

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  MY GRANDPARENTS WERE raised in Kansas, the center of the country, during the Depression of the 1930s. The people of the state were decent and hardworking. They still had what was called “the pioneer spirit.” But side by side with their decency and courage were less worthy qualities. They were suspicious of people who were different, and could be cruel toward them. Many people who didn’t play by the rules wound up leaving.

  Gramps and Toot grew up less than twenty miles from each other, and they liked to tell stories about small-town life: Fourth of July parades and the movies (or “picture shows”) on the side of a barn; fireflies in a jar and the taste of vine-ripe tomatoes, sweet as apples; dust storms and hailstorms and classrooms filled with farm boys who got sewn into their woolen underwear (it had no buttons) at the beginning of winter and stank like pigs as the months wore on. The Depression was full of terrible hardships. Banks lost money and closed down. Poor families lost their farms. But the way my grandparents spoke about that time made it sound like an adventure. Everyone shared the same difficulties, and the experience brought them together.

  Gramps and Toot also made sure I knew that there was something called “respectability”—there were respectable people and not-so-respectable people—and although you didn’t have to be rich to be respectable, you sure had to work harder at it if you weren’t.

  Toot’s family was respectable. Her grandparents were of Scottish and English stock. Her father held a steady job with a big oil company all through the Depression, and her mother taught school until the children were born. The family kept their house spotless and ordered classic books through the mail. They read the Bible. They chose to be Methodists, which meant they valued calmness and reason. They didn’t get as passionate and worked-up as the Baptists, who had big, noisy revival meetings in tents.

  Gramps’s family was another story. His grandparents had raised him, and they were decent, God-fearing Baptists. But there had been troubles at home. When Gramps was eight, his mother killed herself and he was the one who found her body. People gossiped that his father had been unfaithful and said that was why she’d killed herself.

  Whatever the reason, Gramps turned out a bit wild. By the age of fifteen he’d been thrown out of high school for punching the principal in the nose. For the next three years he did odd jobs and jumped freight trains heading for places like Chicago and California. He finally settled in Wichita, Kansas, where Toot’s family had moved.

  Toot’s parents had heard stories about the young man courting their daughter and strongly disapproved of him. The first time Toot brought Gramps over to her house to meet the family, her father took one look at my grandfather’s black, slicked-back hair and wise-guy grin and decided he was no good.

  My grandmother didn’t care. She was fresh out of high school, where she had been a home economics major—which meant learning mostly about cooking, nutrition, and sewing. She was tired of respectability. And my grandfather must have cut a dashing figure. I sometimes imagine them in those years before the war, him in baggy pants and an undershirt, hat cocked back on his head, her a smart-talking girl with too much red lipstick and hair dyed blond and legs nice enough to model stockings for the local department store. He’s telling her about the big cities and how he wants to escape from the empty, dust-ridden plains. He says he doesn’t want to stay in a place where you know practically on the day that you’re born just where you’ll die and who it is that’ll bury you. He won’t end up like that, my grandfather insists; he has dreams, he has plans. She starts to feel as restless for adventure as he does.

  They eloped just in time for the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, and my grandfather joined the army. They never told me much about the war years. I know my mother was born at the army base where Gramps was stationed; that my grandmother, like many women in the 1940s, went to work on a bomber-plane assembly line; and that my grandfather served in France as part of General George S. Patton’s army, though he never saw real combat.

  When Gramps returned from the war, the family headed to California. He enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley under the GI bill, which made it possible for military veterans like him to study for very little money. But he was too ambitious and restless to stay in school. The family moved back to Kansas, then to a series of small Texas towns, then finally to Seattle, where they bought a house and Gramps worked as a furniture salesman. They were pleased that my mother had turned out to be an excellent student. Even so, when she was offered early admission into the University of Chicago, my grandfather forbade her to go. He said she was still too young to be living on her own.

  And that’s where the story might have stopped: a home, a family, a respectable life. Except that my grandfather was always searching for that new start, always running away from the familiar. One day, the manager of the furniture company where he worked happened to mention that a new store was about to open in Honolulu, Hawaii, which at the time was close to becoming the fiftieth state. Gramps rushed home that same day and talked my grandmother into selling their house and packing up yet again, to embark on the final leg of their journey, west, toward the setting sun….

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  LIKE MANY AMERICAN men of his generation, my grandfather believed in individual liberty. He believed you should have the freedom to do anything you wanted to do and that no one could tell you otherwise. For that time, he was open-minded, and thought of himself as a “free thinker.” He wrote poetry on occasion, listened to jazz music, and had close Jewish friends he’d met in the furniture business, even though Christians and Jews didn’t always mix then. He enrolled the family in the local Unitarian Universalist church because he liked the idea that Unitarians sometimes borrowed ideas from other religions. “It’s like you get five religions in one,” he would say. My grandmother was more skeptical by nature. She thought things through for herself and brought Gramps down to earth when his plans weren’t realistic.

  But in the end, when their daughter declared that she wanted to marry and have a family with a Black man from Kenya, they both remained loyal, supportive, and loving.

  And when I was little it seemed that they liked me to know how different they were. Gramps would remind me that Kansas had fought on the Union side of the Civil War, and that some of his relatives had been against slavery. He’d tell me about my great-great-grandfather Christopher Columbus Clark, who had been a decorated Union soldier. And Toot occasionally showed off her beaked nose and jet-black eyes and said she had Cherokee blood in her.

  But as I grew older, I found out that wasn’t the whole story. Kansas passed a law against slavery, but only after four years of violent battles between pro-slavery forces and anti-slavery “Free-Staters.” I learned that another relative on Gramps’s side was rumored to have been a second cousin of Jefferson Davis, president of the pro-slavery Confederacy. And I learned that Toot’s mother was deeply ashamed that one of her ancestors had been a Native American and had tried to keep it secret.

  The truth is that, like most white Americans at the time, my grandparents had never really given Black people much thought. The same unspoken codes that governed life among white people kept personal contact between the races to a minimum; when Black people appear at all in the Kansas of my grandparents’ memories, the images are fleeting—Black men who come around the oil fields once in a while, searching for work as hired hands; Black women taking in the wh
ite folks’ laundry or helping clean white people’s homes. Black people are there but not there, like Sam the piano player or Beulah the maid or Amos and Andy on the radio—shadowy, silent presences that elicit neither passion nor fear.

  As I began to ask questions about race, I heard stories about its role in their past.

  Right after my mother and her parents moved to Texas in the 1950s, Gramps received some friendly advice from his fellow furniture salesmen about serving Black and Mexican customers: “If the coloreds want to look at the merchandise, they need to come after hours and arrange for their own delivery.” Later, at the bank where she worked, Toot met the janitor, a tall and dignified Black World War II vet she remembers only as Mr. Reed. While the two of them chatted in the hallway one day, a secretary stormed up and hissed that Toot should never, ever “call no nigger ‘Mister.’ ” Not long afterward, Toot found Mr. Reed in a corner of the building weeping quietly. When she asked him what was wrong, he straightened his back, dried his eyes, and responded with a question of his own.

  “What have we ever done to be treated so mean?”

  My grandmother didn’t have an answer that day, but the question lingered in her mind. Sometimes she and Gramps would discuss it once my mother had gone to bed. According to Toot, the word racism wasn’t in their vocabulary back then. “Your grandfather and I just figured we should treat people decently, Bar,” she told me. “That’s all.” They decided that Toot would keep calling Mr. Reed “Mister.” But the janitor now kept a careful distance when he passed her in the hall. He was afraid for both their sakes. Gramps, meanwhile, was so uncomfortable with racist talk that he began to turn down invitations from his coworkers to go out for a beer, telling them he had to get home. He and Toot began to feel like strangers in their own town.

  This unpleasantness in the air hit my mother the hardest. She was eleven or twelve, an only child just growing out of a bad case of asthma. The illness, along with all the moves from town to town, had made her something of a loner—cheerful but prone to bury her head in a book or wander off on walks by herself. My mother made few friends at her new school. She was teased for her name, Stanley Ann (one of Gramps’s silly ideas—he had wanted a son). Stanley Steamer, they called her. Stan the Man. When Toot got home from work, she would usually find my mother alone in the front yard, swinging her legs off the porch or lying in the grass, pulled into some lonely world of her own.

  Except for that one hot, windless day when Toot came home to find a crowd of children gathered outside the picket fence that surrounded their house. As Toot drew closer, she could make out the sound of mocking laughter, and could see rage and disgust on the children’s faces. The children were chanting, in a high-pitched, alternating rhythm:

  “Nigger lover!”

  “Dirty Yankee!”

  “Nigger lover!”

  The children scattered when they saw Toot, but not before one of the boys had sent the stone in his hand sailing over the fence. The stone landed at the foot of a tree, and there she saw the cause for all the excitement: my mother and a Black girl of about the same age lying side by side on their stomachs in the grass, their skirts gathered up above their knees, their toes dug into the ground, their heads propped up on their hands in front of one of my mother’s books. From a distance the two girls seemed perfectly serene beneath the leafy shade. It was only when Toot opened the gate that she realized the Black girl was shaking and my mother’s eyes shone with tears. The girls remained motionless, paralyzed in their fear, until Toot finally leaned down and put her hands on both their heads.

  “If you two are going to play,” she said, “then for goodness’ sake, go on inside. Come on. Both of you.” She picked up my mother and reached for the other girl’s hand, but before she could say anything more, the girl was in a full sprint, her long legs like a whippet’s as she vanished down the street.

  Gramps was beside himself when he heard what had happened. He talked to my mother and wrote down the names of all those children. The next day he took the morning off from work to visit the school principal. He personally called the parents of some of the offending children to give them a piece of his mind. And from every adult that he spoke to, he received the same response:

  “You best talk to your daughter, Mr. Dunham. White girls don’t play with coloreds in this town.”

  * * *

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  THESE EPISODES WERE not the main reason my grandparents left Texas, but they left their mark. Over the years I have wondered what made my grandfather so angry that day. Maybe because he had grown up without parents in a place where smirks and whispers and gossip had kept him on the outside looking in, he imagined he could understand how the world seemed to people who were Black.

  And so, years later, when my mother came home one day and mentioned a friend she had met at the University of Hawaii, an African student named Barack, their first impulse was to invite him over for dinner.

  What were they thinking? Gramps might have said, “The poor kid’s probably lonely, so far away from home.” Toot was cautious and probably wanted to have a look at him. But what did they think when Barack showed up at their door? If I know Gramps, he would have been struck by my father’s resemblance to one of his favorite singers, Nat King Cole. Toot would have been polite no matter what she was thinking. When the evening was over, they would both have remarked on how intelligent the young man seemed, so dignified, with that British-sounding accent!

  But how did they feel about their daughter marrying a Black man? I don’t know how they reacted to the engagement, or what the ceremony was like. There’s no record of a real wedding, a cake, a ring, a giving away of the bride. Just a small civil ceremony, performed by a justice of the peace.

  My grandparents must have worried, though. In many parts of the South, my father could have been murdered simply for flirting with my mother. Perhaps they held their tongues because they didn’t think the marriage would last long.

  If so, they underestimated my mother’s quiet determination. Pretty soon the baby arrived—eight pounds, two ounces, with ten toes and ten fingers and hungry for food. What in the heck were they supposed to do?

  Then the country began to change, and my grandfather had no intention of being left behind. He would listen to his new son-in-law sound off about politics or the economy, about far-off places like the British Parliament or the Kremlin, and imagine a world far different from the one he knew. He read newspapers more carefully, paying special attention to each article about civil rights and racial integration. He believed the world was moving toward Dr. King’s magnificent dream.

  He began to question how America could be so advanced in its scientific knowledge that it could send men into space and yet so backward in its morals that it kept its Black citizens from having the same opportunities as everyone else. He convinced himself that the world was changing, and that we—our family, not long out of Wichita—were at the forefront of that change. One of my earliest memories is of sitting on my grandfather’s shoulders as the astronauts from one of the Apollo missions arrived at Hickam Air Force Base after a splashdown. I remember the astronauts, in aviator glasses, so far away they were barely visible. But Gramps always swore that one of them waved at me—just at me—and that I waved back. It was part of the story he told himself. With his Black son-in-law and his brown grandson, Gramps had entered the space age.

  Hawaii, the newest state to join the Union, seemed like the perfect port for setting off on this new adventure. No one seemed to remember that the history of Hawaii was full of injustices. Treaties were signed and broken. Men and women called missionaries who had come from foreign lands to convert the Hawaiians to Christianity accidentally brought diseases that Hawaiians had never known, and those diseases killed many. American companies seized the rich soil to grow sugarcane and pineapple. Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino immigrants earned pennies for working sunup to sunset on pl
antations. And after Japan attacked the United States during World War II, many Japanese Americans in Hawaii were confined in camps and treated like prisoners. All this was recent history. And yet, by the time my family arrived in 1959, all these injustices seemed to have vanished from people’s memories. Now, all of a sudden, Hawaii was hailed as the one true “melting pot,” an experiment in racial harmony.

  My grandparents threw themselves into that experiment. They wanted to make friends with everyone. My grandfather even had a copy of Dale Carnegie’s famous book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, which told people how to act to make other people like them—and in some cases to make other people buy things from them. I would hear Gramps talking in a breezy way he must have thought would help him with his customers. He would whip out pictures of the family and offer his life story to strangers; he would pump the hand of the mail carrier or make jokes in bad taste to our waitresses at restaurants.

  Sometimes his manners made me cringe, but a lot of people liked that he was so curious, and he made a wide circle of friends. A Japanese American man who ran a small market near our house would save us the choicest cuts of fish for sashimi and give me rice candy with edible wrappers. Every so often, the Hawaiians who worked at my grandfather’s store making deliveries would invite us over for roast pig and a native dish called poi, which Gramps gobbled down. (My grandmother would wait until she got home and then fix herself some scrambled eggs.)

  Sometimes I would accompany Gramps to Ali’i Park, where he liked to play checkers with the old Filipino men who smoked cheap cigars and chewed betel nuts, which had red juice that looked like blood. And I still remember how, one early morning, hours before the sun rose, a Portuguese customer of Gramps’s took us out to spear fish off Kailua Bay. A gas lantern hung from the cabin on the small fishing boat as I watched the men dive into inky-black waters, the beams of their flashlights glowing beneath the surface until they emerged with a large fish, iridescent and flopping at the end of one pole. Gramps told me its Hawaiian name, humu-humu-nuku-nuku-apuaa, and we repeated it to each other the entire way home.