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

  He had no money, though, and no university had yet accepted him. Onyango had softened toward his son when he saw that he was becoming more responsible, but even he could not raise enough money. So Barack wrote to universities in America. He wrote and he wrote. Finally, a university in Hawaii wrote back and told him they would give him a scholarship. No one knew where this place was, but Barack didn’t care. He dropped off his pregnant wife and son with me, and in less than a month he was gone.

  What happened in America, I cannot say. I know that after less than two years we received a letter saying that he had met this American girl, Ann, your mother, and that he would like to marry her.

  Now, Barry, I know you have heard that your grandfather disapproved of this marriage. This is true, but it is not for the reasons you say. Onyango did not believe your father was behaving responsibly. He wrote to Barack, saying, “How can you marry this white woman when you have responsibilities at home? Will this woman return with you and live as a Luo woman? Will she accept that you already have a wife and children? I have not heard of white people understanding such things. Their women are jealous and used to being pampered. But if I am wrong in this matter, let the girl’s father come to my hut and discuss the situation properly. For these are the affairs of elders, not children.” He also wrote to your grandfather Stanley and said many of these same things.

  As you know, your father went ahead with the marriage. He told Onyango what had happened only after you were born. We are all happy that this marriage took place, because without it we would not have you here with us now. But your grandfather was very angry and threatened to have Barack’s visa revoked. And because he had lived with white people, perhaps Onyango did understand the white people’s customs better than Barack did. For when Barack returned to Kenya, we discovered that you and your mother had stayed behind, just as Onyango had warned.

  Soon after Barack came, a white woman arrived in Kisumu looking for him. At first we thought this must be your mother, Ann. Barack had to explain that this was a different woman, Ruth. He said that he had met her at Harvard and that she had followed him to Kenya without his knowledge.

  Once Barack married Ruth, she could not accept the idea of his having Kezia as a second wife. So Kezia was left behind and Auma and Roy went to live in Nairobi with Barack and Ruth. When your father brought Auma and Roy back to visit us, Ruth would refuse to accompany him and would not let Barack bring their children, David and Mark.

  The others have told you what happened to your father in Nairobi. We saw him rarely, and he would usually stay only a short time. Whenever he came, he would bring us expensive gifts and money and impress all the people with his big car and fine clothes. But your grandfather continued to speak harshly to him, as if he were a boy. Onyango was now very old. He walked with a cane and was almost blind. He could not even bathe without my help, which I think caused him shame. But age did not soften his temper.

  Later, when Barack fell from power, he would try to hide his problems from your grandfather. Only to me would he confide his unhappiness and disappointments. I would tell him he was too stubborn in his dealings with the government. He would talk to me about principles, and I would tell him that his principles weighed heavily on his children. He would say I didn’t understand, just as his father had said to me. So I stopped giving advice and just listened.

  That is what Barack needed most, I think—someone to listen to him. Even after things had improved and he had built this house for us, he remained heavy-hearted. With his children, he behaved just as Onyango had behaved toward him. He saw that he was pushing them away, but there was nothing he could do. He still liked to boast and laugh and drink with the men. But his laughter was empty.

  I remember the last time he visited Onyango before the old man died. The two of them sat in their chairs, facing each other and eating their food, but no words passed between them. A few months later, when Onyango finally went to join his ancestors, Barack came home to make all the arrangements. He said very little, and it is only when he sorted through a few of the old man’s belongings that I saw him weep.

  Granny stood up and brushed the grass off her skirt. “It’s going to rain,” she said, and we all gathered up the mats and cups and carried them into the house.

  Inside, I asked Granny if she had anything left of the Old Man’s or our grandfather’s. She pulled out an old leather trunk and gave me a rust-colored book the size of a passport, along with a few papers of different colors, stapled together and chewed along one side.

  “I’m afraid this is all I could find,” she said to Auma. “The rats got to the papers before I had a chance to put them away.”

  The binding on the red book had crumbled, but the cover was still legible: Domestic Servant’s Pocket Register, it read, and in smaller letters, Issued under the Authority of the Registration of Domestic Servant’s Ordinance, 1928, Colony and Protectorate of Kenya. On the inside cover, we found a two-shilling stamp above Onyango’s left and right thumbprints. The swirls of his thumbs were still clear, but the box where the photograph had been was empty.

  The book gave a definition of the word servant: cook, house servant, waiter, butler, nurse, valet, bar boy, footmen, or chauffeur, or washerman. It said that any servant found working without a passbook, or damaging a passbook, would have to pay a fine of up to one hundred shillings, be imprisoned for up to six months, or both.

  Most important, there were the personal details of this Registered Servant, my grandfather:

  Name: Hussein II Onyango.

  Native Registration Ordinance No.: Rwl A NBI 0976717.

  Race or Tribe: Ja’Luo.

  Usual Place of Residence When Not Employed: Kisumu.

  Sex: M.

  Age: 35.

  Height and Build: 6'0" Medium.

  Complexion: Dark.

  Nose: Flat.

  Mouth: Large.

  Hair: Curly.

  Teeth: Six Missing.

  Scars, Tribal Marks, or Other Peculiarities: None.

  Toward the back of the book, we found testimonials from his employers. Capt. C. Harford of Nairobi’s Government House said that Onyango “performed his duties as personal boy with admirable diligence.” Mr. A. G. Dickson found his cooking excellent—“he can read and write English and follows any recipes…apart from other things his pastries are excellent.” On the other hand, Mr. Arthur W. H. Cole of the East Africa Survey Group said that after a week on the job, Onyango was “found to be unsuitable and certainly not worth 60 shillings per month.”

  We moved to the stack of letters. There were more than thirty of them, from our father to the presidents of various universities in the United States.

  Dear President Calhoun, one letter began. I have heard of your college from Mrs. Helen Roberts of Palo Alto, California, who is now in Nairobi here. Mrs. Roberts, knowing how much desirous I am to further my studies in the United States of America, has asked me to apply to your esteemed college for admission. I shall therefore be very much pleased if you will kindly forward me your application form and information regarding the possibility of such scholarships as you may be aware of.

  This was it, I thought. My inheritance.

  I rearranged the letters in a neat stack and set them under the registry book. Then I went out to the backyard and stood before the two graves. Everything around me—the cornfields, the mango tree, the sky—seemed to be closing in, until I was left with only a series of images, Granny’s stories come to life.

  I see my grandfather, Onyango, standing before his father’s hut in his white man’s clothing. I watch his father turn away and hear his brothers laugh, and feel—as he must have felt—the sudden jump in his heart. As he turns and starts back down the red earth road, I know that the path of his life has permanently changed.

  He will have to reinvent himself in this dry, solita
ry place. Through force of will, he will create a life out of the scraps of an unknown world, and the memories of a world that has become obsolete. I see him as an old man sitting alone in a freshly scrubbed hut and know that he still hears his father and brothers laughing at him. He still feels the humiliation of being a servant—of standing silently as a British captain explains for the third and last time the correct way to mix a gin and tonic. The nerves in my grandfather’s neck tighten, the rage builds—he grabs his stick to hit at something, anything. Until finally his grip weakens. He realizes that no matter how strong he is, he cannot outrun the laughter and humiliations. His body goes limp. He waits to die, alone.

  The picture fades, replaced by the image of a nine-year-old boy—my father. He’s hungry, tired, clinging to his sister’s hand, searching for the mother he has lost. Finally, it is too much for him, and the slender cord that holds him to his mother snaps, sending her image to float down, down into the emptiness. The boy starts to cry; he shakes off his sister’s hand. He wants to go home, he shouts, back to his father’s house. He will find a new mother. He will learn the power of his own mind.

  But he won’t forget the desperation of that day. Twelve years later, at his narrow desk in a job with no future, he will feel that same panic return. He, too, will have to reinvent himself. He pulls out a list of addresses, yanks the typewriter toward him, and begins to type, letter after letter after letter, sealing them up like messages in bottles.

  How lucky he must have felt when that letter of acceptance came from Hawaii. He had been chosen after all; he possessed the grace of his name, the baraka, the blessings of God. With a college degree, the right wardrobe, the American wife, the car, the words, the wallet, the proper proportion of tonic to gin, what could stand in his way?

  He had almost succeeded, in a way his own father could never have hoped for. And then, after seeming to travel so far, he discovered that he had not escaped after all! He was still trapped on his father’s island, and his mother was still gone, gone, away….

  I dropped to the ground and swept my hand across the smooth yellow tile.

  Oh, Father, I cried. There was no shame in your confusion. Just as there was no shame in your father’s before you. If only you both had not been silent.

  It was the silence that betrayed us.

  If it weren’t for that silence, your grandfather might have told your father that even if he escaped his village and dressed like a white man and learned the white man’s ways, he could never escape who he was or where he had come from. He could never create a new identity alone, by turning away completely from the world that had shaped him.

  Your father might have taught those same lessons to you.

  And you, the son, might have taught something to your father. You might have shown him that the new world he embraced, the world of railroads and indoor toilets and gramophones, had a dangerous power. Because of that power, your father—my grandfather—lost a faith born out of hardship, a faith that wasn’t new, that wasn’t Black or white or Christian or Muslim, but that pulsed in the heart of the first Kenyan village and the first Kansas homestead—a faith in other people.

  The silence killed your faith. And without it you clung to too much of your past. And too little. Too much of its rigidness, its suspicions, its male cruelties. Too little of the laughter in Granny’s voice, the pleasures of company while herding the goats, the murmur of the market, the stories around the fire.

  For all your gifts—your quick mind, your charm—you could never be whole if you left that precious legacy behind.

  For a long time I sat between the two graves and wept. When I had no more tears left to cry, I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I saw that my life in America—the Black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d witnessed in Chicago—all of it was connected to this small plot of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain I felt was my father’s pain. My questions were my brothers’ questions. Their struggle was my struggle.

  A light rain began to fall, and I felt a hand on my arm. I turned to find Bernard beside me, trying to fit the two of us under a bent-up old umbrella.

  “They wanted me to see if you were okay,” he said.

  I smiled. “Yeah. I’m okay. Let’s take a walk.”

  We stood up and started toward the entrance to the compound. The young boy, Godfrey, was leaning against the mud wall of the cooking hut. He looked at us and smiled shyly.

  “Come on,” Bernard said, waving to the boy. “You can walk with us.” And so the three of us made our way over the widening dirt road, picking at leaves that grew along the way, watching the rain blow down across the valleys.

  EPILOGUE

  I remained in Kenya for two more weeks. We all went back to Nairobi and there were more dinners, more arguments, more stories. Granny stayed in Auma’s apartment, and each night I fell asleep to their whispering voices. One day we gathered at a photography studio for a family portrait, and all the women wore flowing African gowns of bright greens and yellows and blues, and the men were all tall and clean-shaven and neatly pressed, and the photographer told us what a handsome picture we made.

  Roy flew back to Washington, D.C., soon after that, and Granny returned to Home Squared. The days suddenly became very quiet, and a certain sadness settled over Auma and me, as if we were coming out of a dream.

  On the last weekend of my stay, Auma and I took the train to the coast and stayed at an old beachfront hotel in Mombasa that had once been a favorite of the Old Man’s. We didn’t do much, just read and swam and walked along the beach, watching pale crabs scurry like ghosts into their sandy holes. We visited Mombasa’s Old Town and climbed the worn stairs of a fort built by the Portuguese, now an empty casing of stone, its massive walls peeling like papier-mâché, its empty cannons pointing out to a tranquil sea.

  On the way back to Nairobi, Auma and I decided to splurge, buying tickets on a bus line that actually assigned seats. But my knees ended up being pinched by a passenger who wanted his money’s worth from the reclining seats, and a sudden rainstorm sent water streaming through leaks in the roof, which we tried—unsuccessfully—to plug with tissue.

  Eventually, the rain stopped, and we found ourselves looking out at a barren landscape of gravel and shrub and the occasional baobab tree. I remembered reading somewhere that the baobab could go for years without flowering, surviving on barely any rainfall; and seeing the trees there in the hazy afternoon light, I understood why people believed they had a special power—that they housed ancestral spirits and demons, that humankind first appeared under such a tree.

  “They look as if each one could tell a story,” Auma said, and it was true. Each tree seemed to possess its own character—not generous, not cruel, but simply enduring, with secrets whose depths I would never plumb. They looked as if they might uproot themselves and simply walk away, if it weren’t for the knowledge that on this earth one place is not so different from another—the knowledge that one moment carries within it all that’s gone on before.

  * * *

  —

  AS I WRITE, it has been six years since that first trip to Kenya, and much in the world has changed.

  For me, it has been a relatively quiet period, a time of doing the things we tell ourselves we finally must do to grow up. I went to Harvard Law School, spending most of three years in libraries. The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules to a reality that sometimes won’t cooperate. Often the law helps those who are already powerful manage that power—and seeks to explain to everyone else why it is fair that they should remain powerless.

  But that’s not all the law is. The law is also a means for a nation to examine its conscience and ask the very same questions that have come to shape my life, the same questions tha
t I sometimes, late at night, find myself asking the Old Man—about the definition of community and the ways we are all responsible to one another. The answers I find in law books don’t always satisfy me. And yet I believe that so long as the questions are still being asked, there is hope that what binds us together will prove stronger than what drives us apart.

  I think I’ve learned to be more patient these past few years, with others as well as myself. If so, I give most of the credit to my wife, Michelle. She’s a daughter of Chicago’s South Side, raised in one of those bungalow-style houses that I spent so many hours visiting during my first year in Chicago. She doesn’t always know what to think of me; she worries that, like Gramps and the Old Man, I am something of a dreamer. Sometimes, with her practicality and Midwestern attitudes, she reminds me a lot of Toot. In fact, the first time I took her back to Hawaii, Toot described my bride-to-be as “a very sensible girl”—which Michelle understood to be my grandmother’s highest form of praise.

  After our engagement, I took Michelle to Africa to meet the other half of my family. She was an immediate success there as well, partly because she soon had a much bigger Luo vocabulary than I did. We had a fine time in Alego, helping Auma on a film project, listening to more of Granny’s stories, meeting relatives I’d missed the first time around. Away from the countryside, though, life in Kenya seemed to have gotten harder. The economy had gotten worse, the government seemed more corrupt, and street crime was on the rise. The case of the Old Man’s inheritance was still up in the air, and Sarah and Kezia were still not speaking to each other. Neither Bernard, nor Abo, nor Sayid had found steady work, although they remained hopeful.