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

  “Don’t be thick, all right? I’m not just talking about one time.” He told me about asking out girls who turned him down and then hooked up with guys he thought had a lot less to offer.

  “So, fine,” he went on, ranting now. “I figure there’re more fish in the sea. I go ask Pamela out. She tells me she ain’t going to the dance. I say cool. Get to the dance, guess who’s standing there, got her arms around Rick Cook. ‘Hi, Ray,’ she says, like she don’t know what’s going down. I mean, Rick Cook! That guy got nothing on me, right? Nothing.”

  He stuffed a handful of fries into his mouth. “It ain’t just me, by the way. I don’t see you doing any better.”

  Because I’m shy, I thought. But I would never admit that to Ray.

  “Now, Black sisters would be all over us,” he claimed.

  “Well…”

  “Well what? Listen, why don’t you get more playing time on the basketball team, huh? At least two guys ahead of you ain’t nothing, and you know it, and they know it. I seen you tear ’em up on the playground, no contest. Why wasn’t I starting on the football squad this season, no matter how many passes the other guy dropped? Tell me we wouldn’t be treated different if we were white. Or Japanese. Or Hawaiian. Or Eskimo!”

  I understood what he was saying, but I didn’t see it the same way.

  “Yeah, it’s harder to get dates because there aren’t any Black girls around here,” I admitted. “But that don’t make the girls that are here all racist. Maybe they just want somebody that looks like their daddy, or their brother, or whatever, and we ain’t it. I’m saying yeah, I might not get the breaks on the team that some guys get, but they play like white boys do, and that’s the style the coach likes to play, and they’re winning the way they play. I don’t play that way.

  “As for your greasy-mouthed self,” I added, reaching for the last of his fries, “I’m saying the coaches may not like you ’cause you’re a smart-mouthed Black man, but it might help if you stopped eating all them fries, making you look six months pregnant.”

  “Man, I don’t know why you’re making excuses for these folks,” Ray said. “Your way of looking at it is way too complicated for me.”

  Maybe it was because I was raised among white people that I couldn’t share Ray’s easy answers. For three years I had lived with my mother and Maya in a small apartment a block away from Punahou. My mother had separated from Lolo and returned to Hawaii not long after I did to pursue a master’s degree in anthropology, supporting the three of us with her student grant money. Sometimes, when I brought friends home after school, my mother would overhear them comment about the lack of food in the fridge or the less-than-perfect housekeeping, and she would pull me aside and let me know that she was a single mother going to school again and raising two kids, so baking cookies wasn’t exactly one of her top priorities. She said she appreciated the fine education I was receiving at Punahou, but she wasn’t going to put up with snotty attitudes from me or anyone else, was that understood?

  It was understood.

  Despite my desire for independence, the two of us remained close, and I did my best to help her out when I could, shopping for groceries, doing the laundry, looking after the knowing child that my sister had become.

  But when my mother was ready to return to Indonesia to do research to earn her degree in anthropology, I told her there was no way I’d go back with her. I wasn’t sure that Indonesia was the right place for me anymore, and I didn’t want to be new all over again. I could live once more with my grandparents. They would leave me alone, I knew, so long as I kept my trouble out of sight. That was fine with me. Away from my mother, away from my grandparents, I could keep looking for the truth about what it meant to be Black in America.

  My father’s letters provided few clues. They arrived now and then, on a single blue page with gummed-down flaps that covered any writing at the margins. He would report that everyone was fine, praise my progress in school, and insist that my mother, Maya, and I were all welcome to come to Kenya and take our rightful place beside him whenever we wanted. From time to time he included advice, usually in the form of sayings I didn’t quite understand (“Like water finding its level, you will arrive at a career that suits you”). I would respond promptly on a wide-ruled page, and his letters would end up in the closet, next to my mother’s pictures of him.

  Gramps had a number of Black male friends, mostly poker and bridge partners, and when I was younger I would let him drag me along to some of their games. They were old, neatly dressed men with hoarse voices and clothes that smelled of cigars. Whenever they saw me they’d give me a slap on the back and ask how my mother was doing, but once it was time to play they wouldn’t say another word except to complain to their partner about a bid.

  There was one who was different from the rest. He was a poet named Frank who lived in a dilapidated house in a run-down section of Waikiki. He’d lived in Chicago at the same time as the great Black writers Richard Wright and Langston Hughes, and he’d been somewhat well-known once himself. Gramps once showed me some of his work in an anthology of Black poetry. But by the time I met Frank he must have been nearly eighty, with a sagging face and an uncombed gray Afro that made him look like an old, shaggy-maned lion. He would read us his poetry whenever Gramps and I stopped by his house. But as the night wore on, the two of them would ask me to help them write dirty limericks. Eventually, they would complain about what a hard time they had getting along with women.

  “If you let ’em, they’ll drive you into your grave,” Frank would tell me soberly.

  I was intrigued by old Frank, who seemed to have some special, hard-earned knowledge, but the visits to his house always left me feeling uncomfortable. What was going on between him and Gramps, men who were so different in every way?

  I had the same question whenever Gramps took me downtown to one of his favorite bars (“Don’t tell your grandmother,” he would say with a wink), where he would be the only white man in the place. Some of the men would wave at us, and the bartender, a big, light-skinned woman, would bring a Scotch for Gramps and a Coke for me. If nobody else was playing pool, Gramps would teach me the game. But usually I would sit at the bar, my legs dangling from the high stool, blowing bubbles into my drink and looking at the pictures of half-naked women on the wall. If he was around, a man named Rodney with a wide-brimmed hat would stop by to say hello.

  “How’s school coming, captain?”

  “All right.”

  “You getting them A’s, ain’t you?”

  “Some.”

  “That’s good. Sally, buy my man here another Coke,” Rodney would say, peeling a twenty off a thick stack of bills.

  I can still remember the excitement I felt during those evening trips: the dark room, the click of the cue ball, the jukebox flashing its red and green lights, the weary laughter of the men. Yet even then, as young as I was, I had already begun to sense that most of the people in the bar weren’t there out of choice. They needed to drink to forget their troubles. What my grandfather was looking for were people who could help him forget his own troubles, people he believed would not judge him the way other white people might. Maybe the bar really did help him forget. But I knew he was wrong about not being judged. He didn’t belong there. By the time I had reached junior high school I had learned to say no to Gramps’s invitations. Whatever it was that I needed would have to come from some other source.

  TV, movies, the radio: those were the places to start. Pop culture was color-coded, and from it a boy could learn a walk, a talk, a step, a style. I couldn’t croon like Marvin Gaye, but I could learn to dance all the Soul Train steps. I couldn’t pack a gun like the Black detective Shaft, but I could sure enough curse like the comedian Richard Pryor.

  And I could play basketball, with a passion that surpassed my limited talent. My father’s Christmas gift of a basketball had come at a time when
the University of Hawaii team had slipped into the national rankings on the strength of an all-Black starting five the school had recruited from the mainland. That same spring, Gramps had taken me to one of their games, and I had watched the players in warm-ups. They were still boys, but to me at the time they looked like poised and confident warriors, chuckling to each other about some inside joke, glancing over the heads of fawning fans to wink at the girls on the sidelines, casually flipping layups or tossing high-arcing jumpers until the whistle blew and the centers jumped and the players joined in furious battle.

  I decided to become part of that world, and began going down to a playground near my grandparents’ apartment after school. From her bedroom window, ten stories up, Toot would watch me on the court until well after dark. I threw the ball with two hands at first, then developed an awkward jump shot and a crossover dribble. Hour after hour I’d be absorbed in the same solitary moves.

  By the time I reached high school, I was playing on Punahou’s teams, and could take my game to the university courts, where a handful of Black men would teach me an attitude that didn’t just have to do with the sport. They let me know that respect came from what you did and not who your daddy was. That you could mouth off to rattle an opponent, but that you should shut up if you couldn’t back it up. That you didn’t let anyone sneak up behind you to see emotions—like hurt or fear—you didn’t want them to see.

  And they taught me something else, too, without even talking about it: a way of being together when the game was tight. Everyone, the best and worst players, would get swept up in the moment and go into a kind of group trance. In the middle of that you might make a move or a pass that surprised even you, so that even the guy guarding you had to smile in admiration.

  When I look back on it now, deciding to play basketball seems like a pretty obvious choice for a Black kid—almost a cliché. But unlike the boys around me—the surfers, the football players, the would-be rock-and-roll guitarists—I didn’t see that many options for myself. At that time, there just weren’t a lot of ways for Black kids to connect with other people so that our race didn’t remind us of our lack of status. But on the basketball court, being Black wasn’t a disadvantage. We could put on a kind of costume and play a role and forget our uncertainty in every other part of life. It was on the court that I made my closest white friends. And it was there that I met Ray and the other Black kids close to my age who had begun to trickle into the islands, teenagers who were just as confused and angry as I was.

  “That’s just how white folks will do you,” one of those Black friends might say when we were alone. Everybody would chuckle and shake their heads, and my mind would run down a list of slights. There was the boy in seventh grade who called me a coon; I could still see his tears of surprise—“Why’dya do that?”—when I gave him a bloody nose. There was the tennis pro who told me during a tournament that I shouldn’t touch the schedule pinned up on the bulletin board because my color might rub off, and his thin-lipped, red-faced smile when I threatened to report him. (“Can’t you take a joke?” he said.) There was the older woman in my grandparents’ apartment building who became upset when I got on the elevator behind her and ran out to tell the manager that I was following her, and refused to apologize when she was told that I lived in the building. There was our assistant basketball coach, a young, wiry man from New York with a nice jumper, who, after a pick-up game with some talkative Black men, muttered within earshot of me and three of my teammates that we shouldn’t have lost to a bunch of “niggers.” When I told him—with a fury that surprised even me—to shut up, he calmly explained to me that “there are Black people, and there are niggers. Those guys were niggers.”

  It wasn’t merely the cruelty that upset me; Black people could be mean, too. It was a particular brand of arrogance, a lack of awareness. It was as if white people didn’t know they were being cruel in the first place. Or maybe they thought we deserved their scorn.

  White folks. The term itself was uncomfortable in my mouth, like a foreign phrase. Sometimes I would be talking to Ray about white folks this or white folks that, and I would suddenly remember my mother’s smile, and the words would seem awkward and false. Or I would be helping Gramps dry the dishes after dinner and Toot would come in to say she was going to sleep, and those same words—white folks—would flash in my head like a bright neon sign, and I would suddenly grow quiet, as if I had secrets to keep.

  Later, when I was alone, I would try to untangle these difficult thoughts. It was obvious that certain white people could be exempted from the general category of our distrust: Ray was always telling me how cool my grandparents were. The term white was simply a shorthand for him, I decided, a tag for what my mother would call a bigot. And although I recognized the risks in his terminology—how easy it was to fall into the same sloppy thinking my basketball coach had displayed when he said “there are Black people, and there are niggers”—Ray assured me that we would never talk about white people in front of white people without knowing exactly what we were doing, or there might be a price to pay.

  But was that right? Was there still a price to pay for us? I would remind Ray that we weren’t living in the South during segregation, where for so long, laws made sure that Black people and white people stayed separate. We weren’t forced to live in some heatless housing project in Harlem or the Bronx. We were in Hawaii. We said what we pleased, ate where we pleased; we sat at the front of the bus. None of our white friends, guys like Jeff or Scott from the basketball team, treated us any differently than they treated each other. They loved us, and we loved them back. It seemed like half of them imitated Black NBA players like Doctor J, as if they wanted to be Black themselves.

  Well, that’s true, Ray would admit.

  Maybe we could afford to give our angry pose a rest, I said. Save it for when we really needed it.

  And Ray would shake his head. A pose, huh? Speak for your own self.

  And I would know that Ray had flashed his trump card, one that, to his credit, he rarely played. I was different, after all, potentially suspect; I had no idea who my own self was. Unwilling to risk exposure, I would quickly drop the subject.

  Perhaps if we had been living in New York or L.A., I would have been quicker to pick up the rules of the high-stakes game we were playing. As it was, I learned to slip back and forth between my Black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere. Still, the feeling that something wasn’t quite right stayed with me, a warning that sounded whenever a white girl mentioned in the middle of conversation how much she liked Stevie Wonder, or when a woman in the supermarket asked me if I played basketball, or when the school principal told me I was cool. I did like Stevie Wonder, I did love basketball, and I tried my best to be cool at all times. So why did such comments always set me on edge? There was a trick there somewhere, although I couldn’t quite figure out what the trick was, who was doing the tricking, and who was being tricked.

  And I learned to slip back and forth between my Black and white worlds, convinced that even though each had its own language and customs, I could make them into one whole.

  One day in early spring Ray and I met up after class and began walking in the direction of the stone bench that circled a big banyan tree on Punahou’s campus. It was called the Senior Bench, but it served mainly as a gathering place for the high school’s popular crowd, the jocks and cheerleaders and partygoing set, with their jesters, attendants, and ladies-in-waiting jostling for position up and down the circular steps. One of the seniors, a stout defensive tackle named Kurt, was there, and he shouted loudly as soon as he saw us.

  “Hey, Ray! Mah main man! Wha’s happenin’!”

  Ray went up and slapped Kurt’s outstretched palm. But when Kurt repeated the gesture to me, I waved him off.

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nbsp; “What’s his problem?” I overheard Kurt say to Ray as I walked away. A few minutes later, Ray caught up with me and asked me what was wrong.

  “Man, those folks are just making fun of us,” I said.

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “All that ‘Yo baby, give me five.’ ”

  “So who’s mister sensitive all of a sudden?” asked Ray. “Kurt don’t mean nothing by it.”

  “If that’s what you think, then hey—”

  Ray’s face suddenly lit up with anger, and we had a huge argument. For Ray, giving white people five and “talking your game” with them was how he got along—and who was I to interfere with that? He said it was different for me, that I had mastered the art of sucking up to the white teachers. (“Yes, Miss Snooty Teacher,” he said, mocking me. “I just find this novel so engaging. And can I have just one more day for that paper?”) Finally, he said, “It’s their world, all right? They own it, and we in it.” Then he stomped off.

  By the following day, things had cooled down, and Ray suggested that I invite our friends Jeff and Scott to a party Ray was throwing at his house that weekend. I hesitated for a moment—we had never brought white friends along to a Black party—but Ray insisted, and I couldn’t find a good reason to object. Neither could Jeff or Scott; they both agreed to come so long as I was willing to drive. And so that Saturday night, after one of our games, the three of us piled into Gramps’s old Ford Granada and rattled our way out to Schofield Barracks, maybe thirty miles out of town.

  When we arrived the party was well on its way, and we steered ourselves toward the refreshments. The presence of Jeff and Scott seemed to make no waves. Ray introduced them around the room, they made some small talk, and they took a couple of the girls out on the dance floor. But I could see right away that the scene had taken my white friends by surprise. They kept smiling a lot. They huddled together in a corner. They nodded self-consciously to the beat of the music and said “Excuse me” every few minutes. After maybe an hour, they asked me if I’d be willing to take them home.