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

  “What’s the matter?” Ray shouted over the music when I went to let him know we were leaving. “Things just starting to heat up.”

  “They’re not into it, I guess.”

  Our eyes met, and for a long stretch we just stood there, the noise and laughter pulsing around us, Ray’s gaze as unblinking as a snake’s. Finally he put out his hand, and I grabbed hold of it, our eyes still fixed on each other. “Later, then,” he said, his hand slipping free from mine, and I watched him walk away through the crowd.

  Outside the air had turned cool. The street was absolutely empty, quiet except for the fading tremor of Ray’s stereo. In the car, Jeff put an arm on my shoulder, looking apologetic and relieved. “You know, man,” he said, “that really taught me something. I mean, I can see how it must be tough for you and Ray sometimes, at school parties…being the only Black guys and all.”

  I snorted. “Yeah. Right.”

  Jeff meant well, but a part of me wanted to punch him right there. We rode in silence while I replayed in my mind the fight I’d had with Ray the day before. By the time I had dropped my friends off, I had begun to see a new map of the world, frightening in its simplicity. We were always playing on the white man’s court, Ray had told me, by the white man’s rules. If the principal, or the coach, or a teacher, or Kurt, wanted to spit in your face, he could, because he had power and you didn’t. If he decided not to, if he treated you like a man or came to your defense, it was because he knew that the words you spoke, the clothes you wore, the books you read, your ambitions and desires, were still, in a way, dictated by him. Whatever he decided to do, it was his decision to make, not yours. The power had nothing to do with his motives or even his conscious feelings about Black people, so the distinction between “good whites” and “bad whites” didn’t really mean all that much.

  In this agitated frame of mind, I began to question everything that I thought was the free expression of my Black self. Had I chosen my own taste in music, my slang, my sense of humor, my basketball moves? Or was I hiding behind those things along with other Black people? This was scary logic. If you thought that way, then what were your options in life? You could withdraw into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until “being Black” meant simply knowing that you were powerless and accepting defeat. It was a kind of prison you built for yourself. Or you could lash out at your “captors” and become what was called “a militant,” someone who spoke out or acted in anger—which could get you thrown into a different kind of prison.

  * * *

  —

  I NEEDED TO find out whether other Black people had shared this nightmare vision. So over the next few months I went to the library and gathered up books by James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and W.E.B. Du Bois. At night I would close the door to my room, telling my grandparents I had homework to do, and there I would sit and read and struggle to figure out how someone with my peculiar beginnings fit into the world. But there was no escape to be had. In every page of every book, in Wright’s Bigger Thomas and Ellison’s Invisible Man, I kept finding the same anguish, the same doubt. No matter how learned or loving or ironic these writers were, there was still a kind of self-hatred. Their art couldn’t help them in the end. All of them finally withdrew, exhausted and bitter—Du Bois to Africa, Baldwin to Europe, Hughes deep into Harlem.

  Only Malcolm X’s autobiography seemed to offer something different. Before he was murdered, he was always trying out new roles, creating himself over and over. His words had a blunt poetry. Above all, he insisted on respect and would work as hard as he could to get it. Yet he had another, angrier side, with talk of “blue-eyed devils” and apocalypse. I didn’t pay much attention to that side of him; I knew he had abandoned that talk toward the end of his life. But one line in the book haunted me. He spoke of a wish to rid himself of whatever white blood ran through him. I knew he was serious. I also knew that his way could not be my way. My road to self-respect would never allow me to cut myself off from my mother and grandparents, my white roots.

  Toward the end of his life, Malcolm seemed to hold out hope that some white people might live beside him in a distant future, in a far-off land. In the meantime, I looked to see where the people would come from who were willing to work toward this future and populate this new world.

  * * *

  —

  ONE MORNING AROUND that time, I awoke to the sound of an argument in the kitchen—my grandmother’s soft voice followed by my grandfather’s deep growl. I opened my door to see Toot entering their bedroom to get dressed for work. I asked her what was wrong.

  “Nothing. Your grandfather just doesn’t want to drive me to work this morning, that’s all.”

  When I entered the kitchen, Gramps was muttering under his breath. He poured himself a cup of coffee as I told him that I would be willing to give Toot a ride to work if he was tired. It was a bold offer, for I wasn’t a morning person. He scowled at my suggestion.

  “That’s not the point. She just wants me to feel bad.”

  “I’m sure that’s not it, Gramps.”

  “Of course it is.” He sipped from his coffee. “She’s been catching the bus ever since she started at the bank. She said it was more convenient. And now, just because she gets pestered a little, she wants to change everything.”

  Toot’s tiny figure hovered in the hall, peering at us from behind her bifocals.

  “That’s not true, Stanley.”

  I took her into the other room and asked her what had happened.

  “A man asked me for money yesterday. While I was waiting for the bus.”

  “That’s all?”

  Her lips pursed with irritation. “He was very aggressive, Barry. Very aggressive. I gave him a dollar and he kept asking. If the bus hadn’t come, I think he might have hit me over the head.”

  I returned to the kitchen. Gramps was rinsing his cup, his back turned to me. “Listen,” I said, “why don’t you just let me give her a ride. She seems pretty upset.”

  “By a panhandler?”

  “Yeah, I know—but it’s probably a little scary for her, seeing some big man block her way. It’s really no big deal.”

  He turned around and I saw now that he was shaking. “It is a big deal. It’s a big deal to me. She’s been bothered by men before. You know why she’s so scared this time? I’ll tell you why. Before you came in, she told me the fella was Black.” He whispered the word. “That’s the real reason why she’s bothered. And I just don’t think that’s right.”

  The words were like a fist in my stomach.

  Trying to calm myself down, I told him in my steadiest voice that such an attitude bothered me, too. But I said that Toot’s fears would pass and that we should give her a ride in the meantime. Gramps slumped into a chair in the living room and said he was sorry he had told me. Before my eyes, he grew small and old and very sad. I put my hand on his shoulder and told him that it was all right, I understood.

  We remained like that for several minutes, in painful silence. Finally he insisted that he drive Toot after all, and struggled up from his seat to get dressed. After they left, I sat on the edge of my bed and thought about my grandparents. They had sacrificed again and again for me. They had poured all their lingering hopes into my success. Never had they given me reason to doubt their love; I doubted they ever would. And yet I knew that men who might easily have been my brothers could still inspire their rawest fears.

  * * *

  —

  THAT NIGHT, I drove into Waikiki, past the bright-lit hotels and down toward the Ala-Wai Canal. It took me a while to recognize the house, with its wobbly porch and low-pitched roof. Inside, the light was on, and I could see the old poet Frank sitting in his overstuffed chair, a book of verse in his lap, his reading glasses slipping down his nose. I sat in the car, watching him for a time, then finally got out and tapped on the door.
The old man barely looked up as he rose to undo the latch. It had been three years since I’d seen him. He looked the same, his mustache a little whiter, his cut-off jeans with a few more holes and tied at the waist with a length of rope. He invited me inside.

  “How’s your grandpa?”

  “He’s all right.”

  “So what are you doing here?”

  I wasn’t sure. I told Frank some of what had happened.

  “Funny cat, your grandfather,” he said. “You know he and I grew up maybe fifty miles apart?”

  I shook my head.

  “We sure did. Both of us lived near Wichita. We didn’t know each other, of course. I was long gone by the time he was old enough to remember anything. I might have seen some of his people, though. Might’ve passed ’em on the street. If I did, I would’ve had to step off the sidewalk to give ’em room. Your grandpa ever tell you about things like that?”

  I shook my head again.

  “Naw,” Frank said, “I don’t suppose he would have. Stan doesn’t like to talk about that part of Kansas much. Makes him uncomfortable. He told me once about a Black girl they hired to look after your mother. A preacher’s daughter, I think it was. Told me how she became a regular part of the family. That’s how he remembers it, you understand—this girl coming in to look after somebody else’s children, her mother coming to do somebody else’s laundry. A regular part of the family.”

  Frank wasn’t watching me; his eyes were closed now, his head leaning against the back of his chair, his big wrinkled face like a carving of stone. “You can’t blame Stan for what he is,” Frank said quietly. “He’s basically a good man. But he doesn’t know me. Any more than he knew that girl that looked after your mother. He can’t know me, not the way I know him. Maybe some of these Hawaiians can, or the Indians on the reservation. They’ve seen their fathers humiliated, their mothers violated. But your grandfather will never know what that feels like. That’s why he can come over here and drink my whiskey and fall asleep in that chair you’re sitting in right now. Sleep like a baby. See, that’s something I can never do in his house. Never. Doesn’t matter how tired I get, I still have to watch myself, for my own survival.”

  Frank opened his eyes. “What I’m trying to tell you is, your grandma’s right to be scared. She’s at least as right as Stanley is. She understands that Black people have a reason to hate. That’s just how it is. For your sake, I wish it were otherwise. But it’s not. So you might as well get used to it.”

  Frank closed his eyes again. His breathing slowed until he seemed to be asleep. I thought about waking him, then decided against it and walked back to the car. The earth shook under my feet, ready to crack open at any moment. I tried to steady myself.

  I knew for the first time that I was utterly alone.

  CHAPTER 5

  By the time I got to eleventh grade, I had stopped writing to my father and he’d stopped writing back. My friend Ray had gone off to junior college somewhere and I had set the books aside. I had grown tired of trying to untangle a mess that wasn’t of my own making.

  I had learned not to care.

  Marijuana helped, and booze. But when I drank or got high, it wasn’t about proving what a down brother I was. I got high for just the opposite effect. It was something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind. I had discovered that it didn’t make any difference whether you smoked weed in the white classmate’s sparkling new van, in the dorm room of some brother you’d met down at the gym, or on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids who had dropped out of school. Nobody asked you whether your father was rich or poor. Everybody was welcome into the club of disaffection. And if the high didn’t solve whatever it was that was getting you down, it could at least help you laugh and see through all the hypocrisy and cheap moralizing.

  That’s how it seemed to me then, anyway. It wasn’t until my senior year that I saw the difference that color and money made after all, in who survived, how soft or hard the landing when you finally fell. Of course, either way, you needed some luck—just what my classmate Pablo didn’t have. He’d been stopped by a cop and didn’t have his driver’s license, and the cop had nothing better to do than to check the trunk of his car. Then there was Bruce, who took too much LSD and wound up in a mental institution. And Duke, who didn’t walk away from a car wreck.

  I had tried to explain some of this to my mother once, the role of luck in the world, the spin of the wheel. It was at the start of my senior year in high school; she was back in Hawaii, her research in Indonesia completed, and one day she marched into my room, wanting to know the details of Pablo’s arrest. I gave her a reassuring smile and patted her hand and told her not to worry, I wouldn’t do anything stupid.

  Except that she didn’t seem reassured at all. She just sat there, studying my eyes, her face as grim as a hearse.

  “Don’t you think you’re being a little casual about your future?” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know exactly what I mean. One of your friends was just arrested for drug possession. Your grades are slipping. You haven’t even started on your college applications. Whenever I try to talk to you about it you act like I’m just this great big bother.”

  I didn’t need to hear all this. It wasn’t like I was flunking out. I started to tell her how I’d been thinking about maybe not going away for college, how I could stay in Hawaii and take some classes and work part-time. She cut me off before I could finish.

  “You could get into any school in the country,” she said, “if you just put in a little effort. Remember what that’s like? Effort? Come on, Bar, you can’t just sit around like a good-time Charlie waiting for luck to see you through.”

  “A good-time what?”

  “A good-time Charlie. A loafer.”

  I looked at her sitting there, so earnest, so certain of her son’s destiny. I suddenly felt like puncturing that certainty of hers.

  “A good-time Charlie, huh?” I laughed. “Well, why not? Maybe that’s what I want out of life. I mean, look at Gramps. He didn’t even go to college.”

  The comparison caught my mother by surprise. Her face went slack, her eyes wavered. It suddenly dawned on me that this was her greatest fear.

  “Is that what you’re worried about?” I asked. “That I’ll end up like Gramps?”

  She shook her head quickly. “You’re already much better educated than your grandfather,” she said. But the certainty had finally drained from her voice.

  * * *

  —

  I FELT BAD after that conversation. I knew that on some level my mother was right. Drinking and taking drugs could never stop the ticking sound of the clock, the sound that life was passing by and all you had to show was emptiness. What I’d tried to explain to my mother was that her faith in justice and rational behavior was misplaced. I wanted to tell her that all the education and good intentions in the world couldn’t give you the power to change the world’s blind, mindless course.

  Later we could look back on that conversation and laugh, because her worst fears hadn’t come to pass. I had graduated right on time, had been accepted into several respectable schools, and had chosen Occidental College in Los Angeles, mainly because I’d met a California girl I liked while she was vacationing in Hawaii with her family.

  But I was still just going through the motions. I didn’t care that much about college, or anything else. Even Frank thought I had a bad attitude, although he was less than clear about how I should change it.

  What had Frank called college? An advanced degree in compromise. I thought back to the last time I had seen the old poet, a few days before I’d left Hawaii. He had asked me what it was that I expected to get out of college. I told him I didn’t know, and he shook his head.

  “Well,” he said, “that’s the problem, isn’t it? You don’t know. You’re just like th
e rest of these young cats out here. All you know is that college is the next thing you’re supposed to do. And the Black people who are old enough to know better, who fought all those years for your right to go to college—they’re just so happy to see you in there that they won’t tell you the truth. The real price of admission.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Leaving your race at the door,” he said. “Leaving your people behind.” He studied me over the top of his reading glasses. “Understand something, boy. You’re not going to college to get educated. You’re going there to get trained. They’ll train you to want what you don’t need. They’ll train you to manipulate words so they don’t mean anything anymore. They’ll train you to forget what it is that you already know. They’ll train you so good, you’ll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit. They’ll give you a big office and invite you to fancy dinners, and tell you you’re a credit to your race. Until you want to actually start running things, and then they’ll yank on your chain and let you know that you may be a well-trained, well-paid nigger, but you’re a nigger just the same.”

  “So what is it you’re telling me—that I shouldn’t be going to college?”

  Frank’s shoulders slumped, and he fell back in his chair with a sigh. “No. I didn’t say that. You’ve got to go. I’m just telling you to keep your eyes open. Stay awake.”

  Keeping your eyes open wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Not in sunny L.A., where I landed the following fall. Not as you strolled through Occidental’s campus, a few miles from Pasadena, with its tree-lined streets and Spanish-tiled roofs. The students were friendly, the teachers encouraging. It was the fall of 1979, Jimmy Carter was on his way out, and Ronald Reagan was promising a new optimism, “morning in America.” When you left campus, you drove on the freeway to Venice Beach or over to Westwood, passing the poor Black neighborhoods of East L.A. or South Central without even knowing it, just more palm trees peeking out like dandelions over the high concrete walls. L.A. wasn’t all that different from Hawaii—not the part you saw, anyway. It was just bigger, and easier to find a barber who knew how to cut a Black man’s hair.