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

  I thought maybe he had been poisoned by radiation, or maybe he was an albino—I had seen one of them on the street and my mother had explained about such things. Except when I read the words that went with the picture, that wasn’t it at all. The man had received a chemical treatment, the article explained, to lighten his complexion, so he could pass for a white man. He had paid for it with his own money. He was full of regret. Things had turned out badly; the results were irreversible.

  It turned out there were thousands of people like him, Black folks back in America who’d undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised them happiness as a white person.

  I felt my face and neck get hot. My stomach knotted; the type began to blur on the page. Did my mother know about this? I had a desperate urge to jump out of my seat, to demand some explanation or reassurance. But something held me back. As in a bad dream, I had no voice to tell my mother what I was feeling. By the time she came to take me home, my face wore a smile and the magazines were back in their proper place.

  But I never got over the shock of that revelation. I still think about Black children who have had similar moments—the young boy who is warned by his parents not to cross the boundary of a particular neighborhood, or the young girl frustrated at not having hair like Barbie, no matter how long she teases and combs. Maybe a father or grandfather tells them a story of being humiliated by an employer or a police officer. When I imagine those small doses of bad news, week after week, I suspect I was lucky to grow up the way that I did. I had a long stretch of childhood free of such self-doubt.

  My mother warned me about bigots, of course. She said they were ignorant, uneducated people who I should avoid. But that one photograph had told me something else: that there was a hidden enemy out there, one that could reach me without my even knowing. When I got home that night from the embassy library, I went into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror looking at myself and wondering if there was something wrong with me.

  My anxiety passed, and I spent my final year in Indonesia much as I had before, confident and often mischievous. But my vision had been permanently altered. On the imported television shows that had started running in the evenings, I began to notice that the Black man on Mission: Impossible spent all his time underground. I noticed that there was nobody like me in the department store Christmas catalogs that Toot and Gramps sent us, and that Santa was a white man.

  I kept these observations to myself, deciding that either my mother didn’t see them or she was trying to protect me. I still trusted her love—but I now faced the possibility that her account of the world, and my father’s place in it, was somehow incomplete.

  CHAPTER 3

  When I had finished all the lessons of my correspondence course, my mother said it was time for me to go back to Hawaii, live with my grandparents, and attend an American school. The new arrangement didn’t sound so bad when she first explained it to me. She said that she and my sister Maya would be joining me in Hawaii very soon—a year, tops. She reminded me what a great time I’d had living with Gramps and Toot the previous summer—the ice cream, the cartoons, the days at the beach. “And you won’t have to wake up at four in the morning,” she said. That would be the best part.

  But when I landed in Honolulu, I felt more uncertain. It took me a while to recognize Gramps and Toot in the blur of smiling, anxious faces. Eventually I spotted a tall, silver-haired man at the back of the crowd, with a short, owlish woman barely visible beside him. I was carrying a wooden mask, a gift from the Indonesian copilot, a friend of my mother’s who had taken me to the plane as she and Lolo waved goodbye. The wood had a nutty, cinnamon smell, and as I inhaled it I felt myself drifting back across oceans and over clouds, back to the place where I had been. Without thinking, I brought the mask up to my face and swayed my head in an odd little dance. My grandparents laughed.

  Just then a customs official tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I was an American. I nodded and handed him my passport. “Go ahead,” he said, telling the Chinese family in line ahead of me to step to one side. I remembered how lively they’d been on the plane, but as I passed them they stood absolutely still, and I saw hands rifling through their passports and luggage.

  Toot gathered me into a hug and tossed candy-and-chewing-gum Hawaiian leis around my neck. Gramps threw an arm over my shoulder and joked that the mask was a definite improvement over my face. They took me to their new car, and Gramps showed me how to operate the air-conditioning. We drove along the highway, past fast-food restaurants and cheap motels and used-car lots. I told them about the trip and everyone back in Jakarta. Gramps told me what they’d planned for my welcome-back dinner. Toot looked at what I was wearing and said, gently, that I’d need new clothes for school.

  Then, suddenly, the conversation stopped. And I realized all at once that I was going to live with strangers.

  The two of them had changed. After my mother and I left for Indonesia, they had sold the big, rambling house near the university and rented a small, two-bedroom apartment in a high-rise building. Gramps had left the furniture business to become a life insurance agent, but since he was unable to convince himself that people needed what he was selling and was hurt by rejection, the work went badly. Every Sunday night, I watched him grow more and more irritable as it came time to chase us out of the living room and try to schedule appointments with potential clients over the phone.

  Sometimes I would tiptoe into the kitchen for a soda and hear the desperation in his voice, the silence that followed when the people he was talking to said, no, Thursday wasn’t good and Tuesday not much better. Gramps would fumble through the files in his lap and sigh heavily after he hung up the phone.

  Eventually, though, he’d convince a few people to meet with him, his pain would pass, and Gramps would wander into my room to tell me stories of his youth or the new joke he had read in Reader’s Digest. If his phone calls had gone especially well, he might discuss with me some scheme he still harbored—the book of poems he had started to write, the sketch he intended to turn into a painting, the floor plans for his ideal house. The bolder his plans, the less likely they seemed, but I recognized some of his old enthusiasm, and I tried to think up encouraging questions to keep up his good mood. Then, somewhere in the middle of his presentation, we would both notice Toot standing in the hall outside my room.

  “What do you want, Madelyn?”

  “Are you finished with your calls, dear?”

  “Yes, Madelyn. I’m finished with my calls. It’s ten o’clock at night!”

  “There’s no need to holler, Stanley. I just wanted to know if I could go into the kitchen.”

  “I’m not hollering!”

  Toot would retreat into their bedroom, and Gramps would leave my room with a look of dejection and rage.

  What was all that about? Scenes like that became familiar to me, and I soon realized the tension had something to do with the rarely mentioned fact that Toot was earning more money than Gramps. In those days wives almost never made more than their husbands, but Toot was a trailblazer. She had become the first woman vice president of a local bank, and although Gramps liked to say that he always encouraged her in her career, he couldn’t help but be ashamed that he paid fewer and fewer of the family’s bills.

  Toot hadn’t expected to be so successful. She had no college education, and she had only become a secretary after I was born, to help my mother financially. But she had a quick mind, good judgment, and the capacity for hard work. Slowly she had risen, playing by the rules—until, as a woman, she couldn’t rise any higher. It didn’t matter how competent she was. For twenty years she watched her male colleagues move up past her, becoming wealthy men.

  More than once, my mother would tell Toot that the bank shouldn’t get away with such obvious sexism—promoting men over women who were more qualified. But Toot would just pooh-pooh my mother’s remar
ks, saying that everybody could find a reason to complain about something. Toot didn’t complain. Every morning, she woke up at five a.m., powdered her face, and put on a tailored suit and high-heeled pumps. Then she would board the six-thirty bus to arrive at her downtown office before anyone else. She took pride in her work. She liked to read an article about money in the newspaper and be able to tell us the inside story, the real story.

  When I got older, though, she would confide in me that she had never stopped dreaming of a different kind of life: a house with a white picket fence, days spent baking or playing bridge or volunteering at the local library. I was surprised, because she rarely mentioned hopes or regrets. And I don’t know if she would really have preferred that other life, the life of a woman who didn’t have to work. But when I was older I came to understand that at the time she built her career, a wife working outside the home was nothing to brag about, for her or for Gramps. She did it for me.

  “So long as you kids do well, Bar,” she would say more than once, “that’s all that really matters.”

  They hardly had people over to dinner anymore. We didn’t go to the beach or on hikes together. At night, Gramps watched television while Toot sat in her room reading murder mysteries. They should have been enjoying the middle years of their lives, a time when people can begin to feel satisfied with their accomplishments and still have plenty of time left to look forward to. But they were just hanging on, going through the motions. At some point while I was in Indonesia, they had given up the dreams that had brought them to Hawaii. They saw no more destinations to hope for.

  * * *

  —

  THERE WAS ONE thing that filled my grandparents with pride: I had gotten into the prestigious Punahou Academy. Founded by missionaries in 1841, Punahou was now the school of choice for the children of Hawaii’s rich and powerful. It hadn’t been easy to get in; there was a long waiting list. But the school agreed to consider me after they were contacted by Gramps’s boss, who had gone there years before. So my first experience with “affirmative action” had little to do with race and a lot to do with who my family knew.

  When I applied, Gramps and I took a tour of the campus, and we were amazed by the acres of lush green fields and shady trees, the old masonry schoolhouses and modern structures of glass and steel. There were tennis courts, swimming pools, and photography studios. At one point, Gramps grabbed me by the arm. “This isn’t a school,” he whispered. “This is heaven. You might just get me to go back to school with you.”

  With my acceptance came a thick packet of information. “Welcome to the Punahou family,” the letter announced. A locker had been assigned to me; I was enrolled in a meal plan; and there was a list of things to buy—a uniform for physical education, scissors, a ruler, number two pencils, a calculator (optional). Gramps spent the evening reading the entire school catalog, everything that would be expected from me over the next seven years. With each new item, Gramps grew more and more excited; several times he got up, with his thumb saving his place, and headed toward the room where Toot was reading, his voice full of amazement: “Madelyn, get a load of this!”

  So Gramps was thrilled to take me to my first day of school. He insisted that we arrive early, and Castle Hall, the building for the fifth and sixth graders, was not yet open. We sat beside a slender Chinese boy who had a large dental retainer strapped around his neck.

  “Hi there,” Gramps said to the boy. “This here’s Barry. I’m Barry’s grandfather. You can call me Gramps.” He shook hands with the boy, whose name was Frederick. “Barry’s new.”

  “Me too,” Frederick said, and the two of them launched into a lively conversation. I sat, embarrassed, until the doors finally opened and we went up the stairs to our classroom. At the door, Gramps slapped both of us on the back.

  “Don’t do anything I would do,” he said with a grin.

  “Your grandfather’s funny,” Frederick said as we watched Gramps introduce himself to Miss Hefty, our homeroom teacher.

  “Yeah. He is.”

  We sat at a table with four other children, and Miss Hefty, an energetic middle-aged woman with short gray hair, took attendance. When she read my full name—Barack Hussein Obama—I heard snickering. Frederick leaned over to me.

  “I thought your name was Barry.”

  “Would you prefer if we called you Barry?” Miss Hefty asked. “Barack is such a beautiful name. Your grandfather tells me your father is Kenyan. I used to live in Kenya, you know. Teaching children just your age. It’s such a magnificent country. Do you know what tribe your father is from?”

  Her question brought on more giggles, and I remained speechless for a moment. When I finally said “Luo,” a sandy-haired boy behind me repeated the word in a loud hoot, like the sound of a monkey. The children could no longer contain themselves, and it took a stern reprimand from Miss Hefty before the class would settle down and we could mercifully move on to the next person on the list.

  I spent the rest of the day in a daze. A redheaded girl asked to touch my hair and seemed hurt when I refused. A ruddy-faced boy asked me if my father ate people. When I got home, Gramps was in the middle of preparing dinner.

  “So how was it? Isn’t it terrific that Miss Hefty used to live in Kenya? Makes the first day a little easier, I’ll bet.”

  I went into my room and closed the door.

  The novelty of having me in the class quickly wore off for the other kids, but my sense that I didn’t belong continued to grow. The clothes that Gramps and I had chosen for me were too old-fashioned; the Indonesian sandals that had been just fine in Jakarta seemed dowdy. Most of my classmates had been together since kindergarten; they lived in the same neighborhoods, in split-level homes with swimming pools; their fathers coached the same Little League teams; their mothers sponsored the bake sales. Nobody played soccer or badminton or chess like the kids in Jakarta, and I had no idea how to throw a football in a spiral or balance on a skateboard like they did.

  A ten-year-old’s nightmare. Still, I was no worse off than the other children who were thought of as “misfits”—the girls who were too tall or too shy, the boy who was mildly hyperactive, the kids whose asthma excused them from PE.

  There was one other child in my class, though, who reminded me of a different sort of pain. Her name was Coretta, and before my arrival she had been the only Black person in our grade. She was plump and dark-skinned and didn’t seem to have many friends. From the first day, we avoided each other but watched from a distance, as if having contact would somehow make us feel even more different and alone.

  Finally, during recess one hot, cloudless day, we found ourselves in the same corner of the playground. I don’t remember what we said to each other, but I remember that suddenly she was chasing me around the jungle gyms and swings. She was laughing brightly, and I teased her and dodged this way and that, until she finally caught me and we fell to the ground breathless. When I looked up, I saw a group of children, faceless before the glare of the sun, pointing down at us.

  “Coretta has a boyfriend! Coretta has a boyfriend!”

  The chants grew louder as a few more kids circled us.

  “She’s not my g-girlfriend,” I stammered. I looked to Coretta for help, but she just stood there looking down at the ground.

  “Coretta’s got a boyfriend! Why don’t you kiss her, mister boyfriend?”

  “I’m not her boyfriend!” I shouted. I ran up to Coretta and gave her a slight shove; she staggered back and looked up at me, but still said nothing. “Leave me alone!” I shouted again. And suddenly Coretta was running, faster and faster, until she disappeared from sight. Appreciative laughs rose around me. Then the bell rang, and the teachers appeared to round us back into class.

  For the rest of the afternoon, I was haunted by the look on Coretta’s face just before she had started to run: her disappointment that I had abandoned her. I wanted
to explain to her somehow that it had been nothing personal; I’d just never had a girlfriend before and saw no particular need to have one now. But I didn’t even know if that was true. I knew only that it was too late for explanations, that somehow I’d been tested and had failed. Whenever I snuck a glance at Coretta’s desk, I saw her with her head bent over her work, pulled into herself and asking no favors.

  After that, I was mostly left alone, like Coretta. I learned to speak less often in class so I wouldn’t draw attention to myself. I made a few friends and managed to toss a wobbly football around. But from that day forward, a part of me felt crushed. After school let out, I would walk the five blocks to our apartment. If I had any change in my pockets, I might stop off at a newsstand run by a blind man, who would let me know what new comics had come in. Gramps would let me into the apartment, and as he lay down for his afternoon nap, I would watch cartoons and sitcom reruns. At four-thirty, I would wake Gramps and we would drive downtown to pick up Toot. My homework would be done in time for dinner, which we ate in front of the television. There I would stay for the rest of the evening, negotiating with Gramps over which shows to watch, sharing the latest snack food he’d discovered at the supermarket. At ten o’clock, I went to my room and fell asleep to the sounds of Top 40 music on the radio.

  Snack food, TV, radio: Surrounded by all that, I somehow felt safe, as if I had dropped into a long hibernation. I wonder how long I might have stayed in that “sleep” had it not been for the telegram Toot found in the mailbox one day.

  “Your father’s coming to see you,” she said. “Next month. Two weeks after your mother gets here. They’ll both stay through New Year’s.”