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

  In such surroundings, my brown skin caused my grandparents few problems, and they got annoyed when visitors made too much of it. Sometimes when Gramps saw tourists watching me play in the sand, he would come up beside them and whisper that I was the great-grandson of King Kamehameha, Hawaii’s first king. He was playing a prank on them, of course. But I sometimes wondered if he didn’t wish that were the truth. It was so much easier than saying “His mother is white and his father is Black.”

  There were also times he couldn’t resist letting them know how wrong their perceptions were. One day a tourist saw me in the water and was very impressed. “Swimming must just come naturally to these Hawaiian kids,” he said. To which Gramps responded that that would be hard to figure, since “that boy happens to be my grandson, his mother is from Kansas, his father is from the interior of Kenya, and there isn’t an ocean for miles in either place.” For my grandfather, race wasn’t something you really needed to worry about anymore. If some people did, well, before long they’d learn not to.

  Perhaps my grandfather’s journey said as much about the time in which he lived as it did about him. He wanted to be a part of the spirit that, for a fleeting period, gripped the nation. It began with the election of the young, hopeful John F. Kennedy as president of the United States in 1960 and continued through 1965, when Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, which guaranteed the vote to Black people. Many people thought this was the birth of a bright new world without narrow-mindedness and prejudice. Yes, they admitted, there would still be differences. But instead of hating or fearing one another, we’d laugh about those differences and learn from one another’s cultures.

  The stories my mother and grandparents told about my father were part of this dream of a just world in which all racial barriers would dissolve. That dream cast a spell.

  And when that spell was finally broken, when each of them realized it wasn’t so easy to escape the worlds they thought they’d left behind, I was still there, occupying the place where their dreams had once been.

  CHAPTER 2

  One day, when I was six, my mother sat me down to tell me that she was getting married again, and that we would be moving to a faraway place.

  She had been dating a man named Lolo since I was four, so I knew him well. He was (as my father had been) a student at the University of Hawaii, and came from a country in Southeast Asia called Indonesia. Lolo’s name meant “crazy” in Hawaiian, which always made Gramps laugh. But the meaning didn’t suit this Lolo. He had good manners and an easy grace. He was short and brown, handsome, with thick black hair, and he played an excellent tennis game. For the past two years he had endured endless hours of chess with Gramps and long wrestling sessions with me.

  I didn’t object. I did ask her if she loved Lolo—I had been around long enough to know such things were important. My mother’s chin trembled and she looked as though she might cry. She pulled me into a long hug that made me feel very brave, although I wasn’t sure why.

  Lolo left Hawaii quite suddenly after that, to pick out a house and make other preparations for us in Indonesia, and my mother and I spent much of the next year getting ready for the move. We needed passports, visas, plane tickets, hotel reservations, and an endless series of shots. While we packed, my grandfather pulled out an atlas and showed me where I’d be living. Indonesia is a chain of islands—more than seventeen thousand islands, in fact, though only about six thousand are inhabited. Gramps ticked off the names of the more famous ones: Java, Borneo, Sumatra, Bali. When he was my age, they had been called the Spice Islands—enchanted names, shrouded in mystery.

  “It says here they still got tigers over there,” he said. “And orangutangs.” He looked up from the book and his eyes widened. “Says here they even got headhunters!”

  The country’s government had recently been overthrown by a new group of officials, but news reports in the United States said there had been little violence. Toot called the State Department to find out if the country was stable and was told that the situation was “under control.” Still, she insisted that we pack several trunks full of food in case of emergency: Tang, powdered milk, cans of sardines. “You never know what these people will eat,” she said firmly. My mother sighed, but Toot tossed in several boxes of candy to win me over to her side.

  My mother warned me that Indonesia was a very poor country. She said there was a chance we could get dysentery—a bacterial infection that causes severe diarrhea—and that I might have to get used to cold-water baths and days when the lights would go out. But these were only small inconveniences, she insisted. I could tell she was excited by the promise of something new and important. She thought that she and her new husband could help rebuild the country. Also, it would be good finally to get away from her parents, even though she loved them.

  At last, we boarded a jet for our flight around the globe. I wore a long-sleeved white shirt and a gray clip-on tie, and the stewardesses gave me puzzles and extra peanuts and a set of metal pilot’s wings. As we walked off the plane in the country’s capital city, Jakarta, the sun seemed as hot as a furnace. I clutched my mother’s hand. I was determined to protect her from whatever might come.

  Lolo was there to greet us, a few pounds heavier and with a bushy mustache. He hugged my mother, hoisted me up into the air, and told us to follow a small, wiry man who was carrying our luggage straight past the long line at customs and into a waiting car. My mother said something to the man and he laughed and nodded, but it was clear he didn’t understand a word of English. People swirled around us, speaking rapidly in a language I didn’t know, smelling unfamiliar.

  The car was borrowed, Lolo told us, but he had bought a brand-new motorcycle. The new house was finished, with only a few touch-ups left to be done. I was already enrolled in a nearby school, and Lolo’s parents and cousins and friends were excited to meet us. As he and my mother talked, I stuck my head out the back window and stared at the brown and green landscape and smelled diesel oil and wood smoke. Men and women stepped like cranes through rice paddies, their faces hidden by their straw hats. A boy, wet and slick as an otter, sat on the back of a water buffalo, whipping its haunch with a stick of bamboo. Then the streets became more congested. Small stores appeared, along with men pulling carts loaded with stone and timber. The buildings began to grow taller, like the ones in Hawaii.

  “There’s the Hotel Indonesia,” said Lolo. “Very modern. There’s the new shopping center.” But only a few of the buildings were higher than the trees that now cooled the road.

  When we passed a row of big houses with high hedges and guards, my mother said something I didn’t understand about the government and a man named Sukarno.

  “Who’s Sukarno?” I shouted from the backseat, but Lolo appeared not to hear me. Instead, he touched my arm and motioned ahead of us. “Look,” he said, pointing upward. There beside the road was a towering giant at least ten stories tall, with the body of a man and the face of an ape. It was a statue.

  “That’s Hanuman, the monkey god,” Lolo said.

  I was amazed by the solitary figure, so dark against the sun. It looked as if it were about to leap into the sky as puny cars swirled around its feet. “He’s a great warrior,” Lolo said. “Strong as a hundred men. When he fights the demons, he’s never defeated.”

  Our house was on the outskirts of town. The road ran over a narrow bridge over a wide brown river; and as we passed, I could see villagers bathing and washing clothes along the steep banks below. The road turned to gravel and then to dirt as it wound past small stores and whitewashed bungalows until it finally petered out into the narrow footpaths of the kampong, or compound. The house itself was modest stucco and red tile, but it was open and airy, with a big mango tree in the small courtyard in front.

  As we passed through the gate, Lolo announced that he had a surprise for me; but before he could explain we heard a deafening howl from high up in the tre
e. My mother and I jumped back and saw a big, hairy creature with a small, flat head and long, menacing arms drop onto a low branch.

  “A monkey!” I shouted.

  “An ape,” my mother corrected me.

  Lolo drew a peanut from his pocket and handed it to the animal’s grasping fingers. “His name is Tata,” he said. “I brought him all the way from New Guinea for you.”

  I started to step forward to get a closer look, but Tata threatened to lunge, his dark-ringed eyes fierce and suspicious. I decided to stay where I was.

  “Don’t worry,” Lolo said, handing Tata another peanut. “He’s on a leash. Come—there’s more.”

  I looked up at my mother, and she gave me a tentative smile. In the backyard, we found what seemed like a small zoo: chickens and ducks running every which way, a big yellow dog with a scary howl, two birds of paradise, a white cockatoo, and two baby crocodiles, half underwater in a fenced-off pond. Lolo stared down at the reptiles.

  “There were three,” he said, “but the biggest one crawled out through a hole in the fence. Slipped into somebody’s rice field and ate one of the man’s ducks. We had to hunt it by torchlight.”

  There wasn’t much light left, but we took a short walk down the mud path into the village. Groups of giggling neighborhood children waved from their compounds, and a few barefoot old men came up to shake our hands. We stopped at the town center, the “common,” where a man Lolo knew was grazing a few goats, and a small boy came up beside me, holding a dragonfly that hovered at the end of a string.

  When we returned to the house, the man who had carried our luggage was standing in the backyard with a rust-colored hen tucked under his arm and a long knife in his right hand. He said something to Lolo, who nodded and called over to my mother and me. My mother told me to wait where I was and looked questioningly at Lolo.

  “Don’t you think he’s a little young?” she asked him.

  Lolo shrugged and looked down at me. “The boy should know where his dinner is coming from. What do you think, Barry?”

  I looked at my mother, then turned back to face the man holding the chicken. Lolo nodded again, and I watched the man set the bird down, pinning it gently under one knee and pulling its neck out across a narrow gutter. For a moment the bird struggled, beating its wings hard against the ground, a few feathers dancing up with the wind. Then it grew completely still. The man pulled the blade across the bird’s neck in a single smooth motion. Blood shot out in a long, crimson ribbon. The man stood up, holding the bird far away from his body, and suddenly tossed it high into the air. It landed with a thud, then struggled to its feet, its legs pumping wildly in a wide, wobbly circle. I watched as the circle grew smaller, until finally the bird collapsed, lifeless on the grass.

  Lolo rubbed his hand across my head and told me and my mother to go wash up before dinner. The three of us ate quietly under a dim yellow bulb—chicken stew and rice, and then a dessert of red, hairy-skinned fruit so sweet at the center that only a stomachache could make me stop eating. Later, lying alone beneath a mosquito net canopy, I listened to the crickets chirp under the moonlight and remembered the chicken’s last twitch of life. I could hardly believe my good fortune.

  * * *

  —

  ONE DAY NOT long after my arrival in Indonesia, I was playing soccer with a friend and in the middle of the game an older boy jumped in and ran off with the ball. I chased after him, but when I got close he picked up a rock and threw it at me. By the time I got home I had an egg-sized lump on the side of my head. When Lolo saw me, he looked up from washing his motorcycle and asked what had happened. I told him the story.

  “It’s not fair,” I said, my voice choking. “He cheated.”

  Lolo parted my hair with his fingers to examine the wound. “It’s not bleeding,” he said finally. Then he went back to his motorcycle.

  I thought that was the end of it. But when he came home from work the next day, he had two pairs of boxing gloves. They smelled of new leather. The larger pair was black, the smaller pair red. I put on the red pair and he tied the laces, then stepped back to inspect me. My hands dangled at my sides like bulbs at the ends of thin stalks. He shook his head and raised the gloves to cover my face. We faced off in the backyard.

  “The first thing to remember is how to protect yourself. There. Keep your hands up.” He adjusted my elbows, then crouched into a stance and started to bob. “You want to keep moving, but always stay low—don’t give them a target. How does that feel?”

  I nodded, copying his movements as best I could. After a few minutes, he stopped and held his palm up in front of my nose.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s see your swing.”

  This I could do. I took a step back, wound up, and delivered my best shot into his hand. It barely wobbled.

  “Not bad,” Lolo said. He nodded, his expression unchanged. “Not bad at all. Agh, but look where your hands are now. What did I tell you? Get them up….”

  I raised my arms, throwing soft jabs at Lolo’s palm, glancing up at him every so often and realizing how familiar his face had become after our two years together, as familiar as the earth on which we stood.

  * * *

  —

  IT HAD TAKEN me less than six months to learn Indonesia’s language, its customs, and its legends. I had survived chicken pox, measles, and the sting of my teachers’ bamboo switches. The children of farmers, servants, and low-level government workers had become my best friends, and together we ran the streets morning and night, hustling odd jobs and catching crickets. One of our games was to try to cut the lines of one another’s kites: The loser would watch his soar off with the wind while other children would chase after it, waiting for their prize to land. With Lolo, I learned how to eat small green chili peppers raw with dinner (plenty of rice), and, away from the dinner table, I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy). Like many Indonesians, Lolo followed a brand of the Islamic religion that included elements from other faiths. Like the Hindus, he believed that a man took on the powers of whatever he ate. One day soon, he promised, he would bring home a piece of tiger meat for us to share.

  That’s how things were, one long adventure. My grandparents sent packages of chocolate and peanut butter, and I wrote to them faithfully. But some things about this strange new land I found too difficult to explain.

  I didn’t tell Toot and Gramps about the man who had come to our door one day with a gaping hole where his nose should have been, and the whistling sound he made as he asked my mother for food.

  I didn’t mention the story that one of my friends had told me, about the wind that had brought an evil spirit the night before and killed his baby brother. He wasn’t trying to frighten me. There was terror in his eyes.

  I didn’t write about the look on the faces of farmers when the rains didn’t come, about the stoop in their shoulders as they wandered barefoot through their barren, cracked fields. I didn’t write about how desperate those same farmers were when the rains lasted for over a month and the river overflowed and the streets gushed with water, as high as my waist. I didn’t write about the families who scrambled to rescue their goats and hens as chunks of their huts washed away.

  The world was violent, I was learning, unpredictable and often cruel. My grandparents knew nothing about such a world, I decided, so there was no point in bothering them with questions they couldn’t answer. Sometimes, when my mother came home from her job at the U.S. Embassy, I would tell her the things I had seen or heard, and she would stroke my forehead and try her best to explain what she could. I liked the attention—her voice, the touch of her hand, made me feel secure. But she didn’t know anything more about floods and evil winds than I did. I would go away feeling that my questions had only worried her unnecessarily.

  So I would turn to Lolo for guidance. He didn’t talk much, but h
e was easy to be with. With his family and friends he introduced me as his son, but he never pretended to be my real father. Somehow this didn’t bother me. I liked that he treated me more like a man than a child. And his knowledge of the world seemed inexhaustible. Not just how to change a flat tire or make the opening move in a chess game. He knew ways to help me manage my emotions. He knew how to explain the mysteries that surrounded me.

  Like how to deal with beggars. They seemed to be everywhere—men, women, children, in tattered clothing matted with dirt, some without arms, others without feet, victims of untreated diseases like polio or leprosy, walking on their hands or rolling down the crowded sidewalks in homemade carts. At first, I watched my mother give her money to anyone who stopped at our door or stretched out an arm as we passed on the streets. Later, when it became clear that the tide of pain was endless, she gave to fewer people, doing her best to figure out who needed her help the most. Lolo was touched by her calculations but thought they were silly. Whenever he caught me following her example and giving away the few coins I had, he would take me aside.

  “How much money do you have?” he would ask.

  I’d empty my pocket. “Thirty rupiah.”

  “How many beggars are there on the street?”

  I tried to imagine the number that had come by the house in the last week. “You see?” he said, once it was clear I’d lost count. “Better to save your money and make sure you don’t end up on the street yourself.”

  He was the same way about servants. They were mostly young people who had just arrived in the big city from small villages. Often they worked for families that didn’t have much more money than they did. They would send the small amount they earned to their families back home, or try to save enough to start their own businesses. If they were hard workers, Lolo was willing to help them. But he would fire them without a second thought if they were clumsy or forgetful, or cost him money. And he was baffled when either my mother or I defended them.