Dreams from My Father (Adapted for Young Adults) Page 20

  I began to rise out of my chair, but Sarah took my hand in both of hers, her voice softening.

  “Will you give me something? For your grandmother?”

  I reached for my wallet and felt the eyes of both aunts as I counted out the money I had on me—perhaps thirty dollars’ worth of shillings. I pressed them into Sarah’s dry, chapped hands, and she quickly slipped the money down the front of her blouse before clutching my hand again.

  “Stay here, Barry,” Sarah said. “You must meet—”

  “You can come back later, Barry,” Zeituni said. “Let’s go.”

  Outside, Zeituni was visibly upset. She was a proud woman, this aunt; the scene with Sarah had embarrassed her. And then, that thirty dollars—Lord knows, she could have used it herself….

  We walked for ten minutes before I asked Zeituni what she and Sarah had been arguing about.

  “Ah, it’s nothing, Barry. This is what happens to old women who have no husbands.” Zeituni tried to smile, but the tension creased the corners of her mouth.

  “Come on, Auntie. Tell me the truth.”

  Zeituni shook her head. “I don’t know the truth. At least not all of it. Your father and Sarah were actually very similar, even though they did not always get along. She was smart like him. And independent. She used to tell me, when we were children, that she wanted to get an education so that she would not have to depend on any man. That’s why she ended up married to four different husbands. The first one died, but the others she left, because they were lazy or abused her. I admire her for this. Most women in Kenya put up with anything. I did, for a long time. But Sarah also paid a price for her independence.”

  Zeituni wiped the sweat on her forehead with the back of her hand. “Anyway, after Sarah’s first husband died, she decided that your father should support her and her child, since he had received all the education. That’s why she disliked Kezia and her children. She thought Kezia was just a pretty girl who wanted to take everything.”

  Zeituni stopped walking and turned to me. She said, “After your father went off to live with his American wife, Ruth…well, he would go back to Kezia sometimes. You must understand that by tradition she was still his wife—among the Luo, men often had more than one wife. It was during such a visit that Kezia became pregnant with Abo, the brother you haven’t met. The thing was, Kezia also lived with another man briefly during this time. So when she became pregnant again, with Bernard, no one was sure who—” Zeituni stopped, letting the thought finish itself.

  “Does Bernard know about this?”

  “Yes, he knows by now. You understand, such things made no difference to your father. He would say that they were all his children. He drove this other man away, and would give Kezia money for the children whenever he could. But once he died, there was nothing to prove that he’d accepted them.”

  We turned a corner onto a busier road. In front of us, a pregnant goat bleated as it scurried out of the path of an oncoming matatu. An old woman with her head under a faded shawl motioned to us to look at her wares: two tins of dried beans, a neat stack of tomatoes, dried fish hanging from a wire like a chain of silver coins. I gazed into the old woman’s face. Who was this woman? I wondered. My grandmother? A stranger?

  “Now you see what your father suffered,” Zeituni said, interrupting my thoughts. “His heart was too big. He would just give to everybody who asked him. And they all asked. You know, he was one of the first in the whole district to study abroad. The people back home, they didn’t even know anyone else who had ridden in an airplane. So they expected everything from him. ‘Ah, Barack,’ they would say, ‘you are a big shot now. You should give me something.’ And he couldn’t say no, he was so generous. Even me he had to take care of when I became pregnant.

  “He was very disappointed in me. He had wanted me to go to college. But I would not listen to him, and went off with my husband. And despite this thing, when my husband became abusive and I had to leave, no money, no job, who do you think took me in? Yes—it was him. That’s why, no matter what others say, I will always be grateful to him.”

  Zeituni stopped, as if suddenly ill, and spat into the dust.

  “When your father’s luck changed,” she said, “these same people he had helped, they forgot him. They laughed at him. Even family refused to have him stay in their houses. Yes, Barry! Refused! They would tell Barack it was too dangerous, since he was on bad terms with the president. I knew this hurt him, but your father never held a grudge. In fact, when he was rehabilitated and doing well again, he helped these same people who had betrayed him. He would say, ‘How do you know that man does not need this small thing more than me?’ ”

  As we began to walk, she added, “I tell you this so you will know the pressure your father was under. So you don’t judge him too harshly. You must learn from his life. If you have something, then everyone will want a piece of it. So you have to draw the line somewhere. If everyone is family, no one is family. Your father, he never understood this.”

  * * *

  —

  A FEW DAYS after my visit to Sarah’s, Auma and I ran into an acquaintance of the Old Man’s outside the local bank. I could tell that Auma didn’t remember his name, so I introduced myself. The man said, “My, my—you have grown so tall. How’s your mother? And your brother Mark: Has he graduated from the university?”

  I was confused. Did I know this person? Then Auma explained in a low voice that no, I was a different brother, Barack, who grew up in America, the child of a different mother. David had passed away. And then the awkwardness on all sides—the man nodding (“I’m sorry, I didn’t know”) and me standing to the side, wondering how to feel after having been mistaken for a ghost.

  A few days later, Auma and I came home to find a car waiting for us outside the apartment. The driver handed Auma a note.

  “It’s an invitation from Ruth,” Auma told me. “Her son Mark is back from America for the summer. She wants to have us over for lunch.”

  “Do you want to go?”

  Auma shook her head, a look of disgust on her face. “Ruth knows I’ve been here almost six months now. She doesn’t care about me. The only reason she’s invited us is because she’s curious about you. She wants to compare you to Mark.”

  “I think maybe I should go,” I said quietly.

  “We’ll both go,” Auma said.

  On the way to Ruth’s house, Auma explained the bad feelings between the two families. She said that Ruth’s divorce from the Old Man had been very bitter. After they separated, Ruth married a Tanzanian and had Mark and David take his last name, Auma told me. “She sent them to an international school, and they were raised like foreigners. She told them that they should have nothing to do with our side of the family.”

  She sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe because he was older, Mark came to share Ruth’s attitudes and had no contact with us. But once David was a teenager, he rebelled. He told Ruth he was an African and started calling himself Obama. Sometimes he would sneak off from school to visit the Old Man and the rest of the family, which is how we got to know him. He became everybody’s favorite. He was so sweet and funny, even if he was sometimes too wild.

  “Ruth enrolled him in a boarding school, hoping it would settle him down. But David ended up running away. Nobody saw him for months. Then Roy bumped into him outside a rugby match. He was dirty, thin, begging money from strangers. He laughed when he saw Roy, and bragged about his life on the streets. Roy insisted David go to live with him and sent word to Ruth that her son was safe. She was relieved but also furious.”

  Auma sipped her tea. “That’s when David died in a motorcycle accident. While he was living with Roy. His death broke everybody’s heart—Roy’s especially. Ruth thought we had corrupted David. Stolen her baby away. And I don’t think she’s ever forgiven us for it.”

  Ruth lived in a neighborh
ood of expensive homes set off by wide lawns and well-tended hedges, each one with a post manned by uniformed guards. We came to one of the more modest houses on the block and parked along the curve of a looping driveway. A white woman with a long jaw and graying hair came out of the house to meet us. Behind her was a Black man of my height and complexion with a bushy Afro and horn-rimmed glasses.

  “Come in, come in,” Ruth said. The four of us shook hands stiffly and entered a large living room.

  “Well, here we are,” Ruth said, leading us to the couch and pouring lemonade. “I must say it was quite a surprise to find out you were here, Barry. I told Mark that we just had to see how this other son of Obama’s turned out. Your name is Obama, isn’t it? But your mother remarried. I wonder why she had you keep your name?”

  I smiled as if I hadn’t understood the question. “So, Mark,” I said, turning to my brother, “I hear you’re at Berkeley.”

  “Stanford,” he corrected me. His voice was deep, his accent perfectly American. “I’m in my last year of the physics program there.”

  “It must be tough,” Auma offered.

  Mark shrugged. “Not really.”

  “Don’t be so modest, dear,” Ruth said. “The things Mark studies are so complicated only a handful of people really understand it all.”

  She patted Mark on the hand, then turned to me. “And, Barry, I understand you’ll be going to Harvard. Just like Obama. You must have gotten some of his brains. Hopefully not the rest of him, though. You know Obama was quite crazy, don’t you? The drinking made it worse. Did you ever meet him? Obama, I mean?”

  “Only once. When I was ten.”

  “Well, you were lucky, then. It probably explains why you’re doing so well.”

  That’s how the next hour passed, with Ruth alternating between stories of my father’s failures and stories of Mark’s accomplishments. I wanted to leave as soon as the meal was over, but Ruth suggested that Mark show us the family album while she brought out the dessert.

  Together we sat on the couch, slowly thumbing through the pages. Auma and Roy, dark and skinny and tall, all legs and big eyes, holding the two smaller children protectively in their arms. The Old Man and Ruth mugging it up at a beach somewhere. The entire family dressed up for a night on the town. They were happy scenes, and all strangely familiar, as if I were glimpsing some alternative universe. They were reflections, I realized, of my own long-held fantasies, fantasies that I’d kept secret even from myself. If the Old Man had taken my mother and me back with him to Kenya, would we have looked like this? I had often wished that my mother and father, sisters and brothers, were all under one roof. Here was what might have been. The recognition of how wrong it had all turned out made me so sad that after only a few minutes I had to look away.

  On the drive back, I apologized to Auma for having put her through the ordeal. She waved it off.

  “It could have been worse,” she said. “I feel sorry for Mark, though. He seems so alone. You know, it’s not easy being a mixed child in Kenya.”

  I looked out the window, thinking about my mother, Toot, and Gramps, and how grateful I was to them—for who they were, and for the stories they’d told.

  I turned back to Auma and said, “She still hasn’t gotten over him, has she?”

  “Who?”

  “Ruth. She hasn’t gotten over the Old Man.”

  Auma thought for a moment. “No, Barack. I guess she hasn’t. Just like the rest of us.”

  * * *

  —

  THE FOLLOWING WEEK, I called Mark and suggested that we go out to lunch. He seemed hesitant, but he agreed to meet me at an Indian restaurant downtown.

  He was more relaxed than he had been during our first meeting. As the meal wore on, I asked him how it felt being back for the summer.

  “Fine,” he said. “It’s nice to see my mom and dad, of course. As for the rest of Kenya, I don’t feel much of an attachment. Just another poor African country.”

  “You don’t ever think about settling here?”

  “No,” he said. “I mean, there’s not much work for a physicist, is there, in a country where the average person doesn’t have a telephone.”

  I should have stopped then, but something—the certainty in his voice, maybe, or our rough resemblance—made me want to push harder. I asked, “Don’t you ever feel like you might be losing something?”

  Mark put down his knife and fork, and for the first time that afternoon his eyes looked straight into mine.

  “I understand what you’re getting at,” he said flatly. “You think that somehow I’m cut off from my roots.” He dropped the napkin onto his plate. “Well, you’re right. At a certain point, I made a decision not to think about who my real father was. He was a drunk and showed no concern for his wife or children.”

  “It made you mad.”

  “Not mad. Just numb.”

  “And that doesn’t bother you? Being numb, I mean?”

  “Toward him, no. Other things move me. Beethoven’s symphonies. Shakespeare’s sonnets. I know—it’s not what an African is supposed to care about. But who’s to tell me what I should and shouldn’t care about? Understand, I’m not ashamed of being half Kenyan. I just don’t ask myself a lot of questions about what it all means. About who I really am.”

  We stood up to leave, and I insisted on paying the bill. Outside we exchanged addresses and promised to write. I doubted we would, and the dishonesty made my heart ache.

  CHAPTER 16

  Toward the end of my second week in Kenya, Auma and I went on a safari.

  Auma wasn’t thrilled with the idea. When I showed her the brochure, she made a sour face. Like most Kenyans, she saw game parks, with their guarded animals and campgrounds, as part of a colonial past. “How many Kenyans do you think can afford to go on a safari?” she asked. “Why should all that land be set aside for tourists when it could be used for farming?”

  I told her she was letting other people’s attitudes prevent her from seeing her own country. Eventually she gave in, but only because she took pity on me.

  “If some animal ate you out there,” she said, “I’d never forgive myself.”

  And so, at seven o’clock on a Tuesday morning, we watched a sturdily built Kikuyu driver named Francis load our bags onto the roof of a white minivan. With us were a skinny cook named Rafael, a dark-haired Italian named Mauro, and a British couple in their early forties, the Wilkersons.

  We drove out of Nairobi and were soon in the countryside, passing green hills and red dirt paths and small shambas, or farms, surrounded by plots of wilting corn. Nobody spoke, and the silence was awkward; it made me think about how I’d come to Kenya believing I could somehow force my many worlds into a single, harmonious whole. Instead, the divisions seemed only to have multiplied. I saw them everywhere.

  Among the country’s forty Black ethnic groups, for example. You didn’t notice the fine lines so much among Auma’s friends, who were younger and college-educated. But most Kenyans had ancient loyalties. Even Jane or Zeituni said things that surprised me. “The Luo are intelligent but lazy,” they’d say, or “The Kikuyu are money-grubbing but industrious.”

  Hearing these stereotypes, I tried to explain to my aunts the error of their ways. “It’s thinking like that that holds us back,” I said. “We’re all part of one tribe. The Black tribe. The human tribe. Look how that thinking has led to wars in other African countries like Nigeria or Liberia.”

  And Zeituni would say, “You sound just like your father, Barry. He also had such ideas about people.”

  What she meant was that he, too, was naive; he, too, liked to argue with history. And look what had happened to him….

  The van came to a stop. We were in front of a small shamba, and our driver, Francis, asked us to stay put. A few minutes later, he emerged from the house with a young African girl, m
aybe twelve or thirteen, who was dressed in jeans and a neatly pressed blouse and carried a small duffel.

  “Is this your daughter?” Auma asked, scooting over to make room for the girl.

  “No,” Francis said. “My sister’s. She likes to see the animals and is always nagging me to take her along. Nobody minds, I hope.”

  Everyone shook their heads and smiled at the girl.

  “What is your name?” the British woman, Mrs. Wilkerson, asked.

  “Elizabeth,” the girl whispered.

  “Well, Elizabeth, you can share my tent if you like,” Auma said. “My brother, I think he snores.”

  I made a face. “Don’t listen to her,” I said, and held out a package of biscuits. Elizabeth took one and nibbled neatly around its edges. Auma reached for the bag and turned to Mauro.

  “Want some?” she asked.

  The Italian smiled and took one, before Auma passed them around to the others.

  We followed the road into cooler hills, where women walked barefoot carrying firewood and water and small boys switched at donkeys from their rickety carts. Gradually the shambas became less frequent, replaced by tangled bush and forest, until the trees on our left dropped away and all we could see was the wide-open sky.

  “The Great Rift Valley,” Francis announced.

  We piled out of the van and stood at the edge of a long, steep slope looking out toward the western horizon. Hundreds of feet below, stone and savannah grass stretched out in a flat and endless plain—our destination.

  To the right, a solitary mountain rose like an island in a silent sea; beyond that, a row of worn and shadowed ridges. Only two signs of a human presence were visible—a slender road and a space-satellite station, its massive white dish cupped upward toward the sky.

  A few miles north, we turned off the highway. It was slow going: the potholes yawned across the road, and every so often trucks would approach from the opposite direction, forcing us onto the side of the road. Eventually, we arrived at the road we’d seen from above and began to make our way across the valley floor. The landscape was dry, mostly bush grass and scruffy thorn trees, gravel and patches of hard dark stone. We passed a solitary wildebeest feeding at the base of a tree, zebras, and a giraffe, barely visible in the distance. For almost an hour we saw no other person, until a single Masai herdsman appeared in the distance, as lean and straight as the staff that he carried, leading a herd of cattle across an empty flat.