Dreams from My Father (16 page)

After I spoke to my mother, I phoned my father’s brother in Boston and we had a brief, awkward conversation. I didn’t go to the funeral, so I wrote my father’s family in Nairobi a letter expressing my condolences. I asked them to write back, and wondered how they were faring. But I felt no pain, only the vague sense of an opportunity lost, and I saw no reason to pretend otherwise. My plans to travel to Kenya were placed on indefinite hold.

Another year would pass before I would meet him one night, in a cold cell, in a chamber of my dreams. I dreamed I was traveling by bus with friends whose names I’ve forgotten, men and women with different journeys to make. We rolled across deep fields of grass and hills that bucked against an orange sky.

An old white man, heavyset, sat beside me, and I read in a book that he held in his hands that our treatment of the old tested our souls. He told me he was a union man, off to meet his daughter.

We stopped at an old hotel, a grand hotel with chandeliers. There was a piano in the lobby and a lounge filled with cushions of soft satin, and I took one of the cushions and placed it on the piano bench, and the old white man sat down, retarded now, or senile, and when I looked again he was a small black girl, her feet barely reaching the pedals. She smiled and started to play, and then a waitress came in, a young Hispanic woman, and the waitress frowned at us, but under the frown was a laugh, and she raised a finger to her lips as if we were sharing a secret.

I dozed for the rest of the trip, and woke up to find everyone gone. The bus came to a halt, and I got off and sat down on the curb. Inside a building made of rough stone, a lawyer spoke to a judge. The judge suggested that perhaps my father had spent enough time in his jail, that perhaps it was time to release him. But the lawyer objected vigorously, citing precedent and various statutes, the need to maintain order. The judge shrugged and got up from the bench.

I stood before the cell, opened the padlock, and set it carefully on a window ledge. My father was before me, with only a cloth wrapped around his waist; he was very thin, with his large head and slender frame, his hairless arms and chest. He looked pale, his black eyes luminous against an ashen face, but he smiled and gestured for the tall, mute guard to please stand aside.

“Look at you,” he said. “So tall—and so thin. Gray hairs, even!” And I saw that it was true, and I walked up to him and we embraced. I began to weep, and felt ashamed, but could not stop myself.

“Barack. I always wanted to tell you how much I love you,” he said. He seemed small in my arms now, the size of a boy.

He sat at the corner of his cot and set his head on his clasped hands and stared away from me, into the wall. An implacable sadness spread across his face. I tried to joke with him; I told him that if I was thin it was only because I took after him. But he couldn’t be budged, and when I whispered to him that we might leave together, he shook his head and told me it would be best if I left.

I awoke still weeping, my first real tears for him—and for me, his jailor, his judge, his son. I turned on the light and dug out his old letters. I remembered his only visit—the basketball he had given me and how he had taught me to dance. And I realized, perhaps for the first time, how even in his absence his strong image had given me some bulwark on which to grow up, an image to live up to, or disappoint.

I stepped to the window and looked outside, listening to the first sounds of morning—the growl of the garbage trucks, footsteps in the apartment next door. I needed to search for him, I thought to myself, and talk with him again.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I
N 1983
, I
DECIDED
to become a community organizer

There wasn’t much detail to the idea; I didn’t know anyone making a living that way. When classmates in college asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn’t answer them directly. Instead, I’d pronounce on the need for change. Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds. Change in the Congress, compliant and corrupt. Change in the mood of the country, manic and self-absorbed. Change won’t come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots.

That’s what I’ll do, I’ll organize black folks. At the grass roots. For change.

And my friends, black and white, would heartily commend me for my ideals before heading toward the post office to mail in their graduate school applications.

I couldn’t really blame them for being skeptical. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I can construct a certain logic to my decision, show how becoming an organizer was a part of that larger narrative, starting with my father and his father before him, my mother and her parents, my memories of Indonesia with its beggars and farmers and the loss of Lolo to power, on through Ray and Frank, Marcus and Regina; my move to New York; my father’s death. I can see that my choices were never truly mine alone—and that that is how it should be, that to assert otherwise is to chase after a sorry sort of freedom.

But such recognition came only later. At the time, about to graduate from college, I was operating mainly on impulse, like a salmon swimming blindly upstream toward the site of his own conception. In classes and seminars, I would dress up these impulses in the slogans and theories that I’d discovered in books, thinking—falsely—that the slogans meant something, that they somehow made what I felt more amenable to proof. But at night, lying in bed, I would let the slogans drift away, to be replaced with a series of images, romantic images, of a past I had never known.

They were of the civil rights movement, mostly, the grainy black-and-white footage that appears every February during Black History Month, the same images that my mother had offered me as a child. A pair of college students, hair short, backs straight, placing their orders at a lunch counter teetering on the edge of riot. SNCC workers standing on a porch in some Mississippi backwater trying to convince a family of sharecroppers to register to vote. A county jail bursting with children, their hands clasped together, singing freedom songs.

Such images became a form of prayer for me, bolstering my spirits, channeling my emotions in a way that words never could. They told me (although even this much understanding may have come later, is also a construct, containing its own falsehoods) that I wasn’t alone in my particular struggles, and that communities had never been a given in this country, at least not for blacks. Communities had to be created, fought for, tended like gardens. They expanded or contracted with the dreams of men—and in the civil rights movement those dreams had been large. In the sit-ins, the marches, the jailhouse songs, I saw the African-American community becoming more than just the place where you’d been born or the house where you’d been raised. Through organizing, through shared sacrifice, membership had been earned. And because membership was earned—because this community I imagined was still in the making, built on the promise that the larger American community, black, white, and brown, could somehow redefine itself—I believed that it might, over time, admit the uniqueness of my own life.

That was my idea of organizing. It was a promise of redemption.

And so, in the months leading up to graduation, I wrote to every civil rights organization I could think of, to any black elected official in the country with a progressive agenda, to neighborhood councils and tenant rights groups. When no one wrote back, I wasn’t discouraged. I decided to find more conventional work for a year, to pay off my student loans and maybe even save a little bit. I would need the money later, I told myself. Organizers didn’t make any money; their poverty was proof of their integrity.

Eventually a consulting house to multinational corporations agreed to hire me as a research assistant. Like a spy behind enemy lines, I arrived every day at my mid-Manhattan office and sat at my computer terminal, checking the Reuters machine that blinked bright emerald messages from across the globe. As far as I could tell I was the only black man in the company, a source of shame for me but a source of considerable pride for the company’s secretarial pool. They treated me like a son, those black ladies; they told me how they expected me to run the company one day. Sometimes, over lunch, I would tell them about all my wonderful organizing plans, and they would smile and say, “That’s good, Barack,” but the look in their eyes told me they were secretly disappointed. Only Ike, the gruff black security guard in the lobby, was willing to come right out and tell me I’d be making a mistake.

“Organizing? That’s some kinda politics, ain’t it? Why you wanna do something like that?”

I tried to explain my political views, the importance of mobilizing the poor and giving back to the community. But Ike just shook his head. “Mr. Barack,” he said, “I hope you don’t mind if I give you a little bit of advice. You don’t have to take it, now, but I’m gonna give it to you anyhow. Forget about this organizing business and do something that’s gonna make you some money. Not greedy, you understand. But enough. I’m telling you this ’cause I can see potential in you. Young man like you, got a nice voice—hell, you could be one a them announcers on TV. Or sales … got a nephew about your age making some real money there. That’s what we need, see. Not more folks running around here, all rhymes and jive. You can’t help folks that ain’t gonna make it nohow, and they won’t appreciate you trying. Folks that wanna make it, they gonna find a way to do it on they own. How old are you anyway?”

“Twenty-two.”

“See there. Don’t waste your youth, Mr. Barack. Wake up one morning, an old man like me, and all you gonna be is tired, with nothing to show for it.”

I didn’t pay Ike much attention at the time; I thought he sounded too much like my grandparents. Nevertheless, as the months passed, I felt the idea of becoming an organizer slipping away from me. The company promoted me to the position of financial writer. I had my own office, my own secretary, money in the bank. Sometimes, coming out of an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond traders, I would catch my reflection in the elevator doors—see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand—and for a split second I would imagine myself as a captain of industry, barking out orders, closing the deal, before I remembered who it was that I had told myself I wanted to be and felt pangs of guilt for my lack of resolve.

Then one day, as I sat down at my computer to write an article on interest-rate swaps, something unexpected happened. Auma called.

I had never met this half sister; we had written only intermittently. I knew that she had left Kenya to study in Germany, and in our letters we had mentioned the possibility of my going there for a visit, or perhaps her coming to the States. But the plans had always been left vague—neither of us had any money, we would say; maybe next year. Our correspondence maintained a cordial distance.

Now, suddenly, I heard her voice for the first time. It was soft and dark, tinged with a colonial accent. For a few moments I couldn’t understand the words, only the sound, a sound that seemed to have always been there, misplaced but not forgotten. She was coming to the States, she said, on a trip with several friends. Could she come to see me in New York?

“Of course,” I said. “You can stay with me; I can’t wait.” And she laughed, and I laughed, and then the line grew quiet with static and the sound of our breath. “Well,” she said, “I can’t stay on the phone too long, it’s so expensive. Here’s the flight information”; and we hung up quickly after that, as if our contact was a treat to be doled out in small measures.

I spent the next few weeks rushing around in preparation: new sheets for the sofa bed, extra plates and towels, a scrubbing for the tub. But two days before she was scheduled to arrive, Auma called again, the voice thicker now, barely a whisper.

“I can’t come after all,” she said. “One of our brothers, David … he’s been killed. In a motorcycle accident. I don’t know any more than that.” She began to cry. “Oh, Barack. Why do these things happen to us?”

I tried to comfort her as best I could. I asked her if I could do anything for her. I told her there would be other times for us to see each other. Eventually her voice quieted; she had to go book a flight home, she said.

“Okay, then, Barack. See you. ’Bye.”

After she hung up, I left my office, telling my secretary I’d be gone for the day. For hours I wandered the streets of Manhattan, the sound of Auma’s voice playing over and over in my mind. A continent away, a woman cries. On a dark and dusty road, a boy skids out of control, tumbling against hard earth, wheels spinning to silence. Who were these people, I asked myself, these strangers who carried my blood? What might save this woman from her sorrow? What wild, unspoken dreams had this boy possessed?

Who was I, who shed no tears at the loss of his own?

I still wonder sometimes how that first contact with Auma altered my life. Not so much the contact itself (that meant everything, would mean everything) or the news that she gave me of David’s death (that, too, is an absolute; I would never know him, and that says enough), but rather the timing of her call, the particular sequence of events, the raised expectations and then the dashed hopes, coming at a time when the idea of becoming an organizer was still just that, an idea in my head, a vague tug at my heart.

Maybe it made no difference. Maybe by this time I was already committed to organizing and Auma’s voice simply served to remind me that I still had wounds to heal, and could not heal myself. Or maybe, if David hadn’t died when he did, and Auma had come to New York as originally planned, and I had learned from her then what I would only learn later, about Kenya, and about our father … well, maybe it would have relieved certain pressures that had built up inside me, showing me a different idea of community, allowing my ambitions to travel a narrower, more personal course, so that in the end I might have taken my friend Ike’s advice and given myself over to stocks and bonds and the pull of respectability.

I don’t know. What’s certain is that a few months after Auma’s call I turned in my resignation at the consulting firm and began looking in earnest for an organizing job. Once again, most of my letters went unanswered, but after a month or so I was called in for an interview by the director of a prominent civil rights organization in the city. He was a tall, handsome black man, dressed in a crisp white shirt, a paisley tie, and red suspenders. His office was furnished with Italian chairs and African sculpture, a bar service built into the exposed brick. Through a tall window, sunlight streamed down on a bust of Dr. King.

“I like it,” the director said after looking over my résumé. “Particularly the corporate experience. That’s the real business of a civil rights organization these days. Protest and pickets won’t cut it anymore. To get the job done, we’ve got to forge links between business, government, and the inner city.” He clasped his broad hands together, then showed me a glossy annual report opened to a page that listed the organization’s board of directors. There was one black minister and ten white corporate executives. “You see?” the director said. “Public-private partnerships. The key to the future. And that’s where young people like yourself come in. Educated. Self-assured. Comfortable in boardrooms. Why, just last week I was discussing the problem with the secretary of HUD at a White House dinner. Terrific guy, Jack. He’d be interested in meeting a young man like you. Of course I’m a registered Democrat, but we have to learn to work with whoever’s in power ….”

On the spot he offered me the job, which involved organizing conferences on drugs, unemployment, housing. Facilitating dialogue, he called it. I declined his generous offer, deciding I needed a job closer to the streets. I spent three months working for a Ralph Nader offshoot up in Harlem, trying to convince the minority students at City College about the importance of recycling. Then a week passing out flyers for an assemblyman’s race in Brooklyn—the candidate lost and I never did get paid.

In six months I was broke, unemployed, eating soup from a can. In search of some inspiration, I went to hear Kwame Touré, formerly Stokely Carmichael of SNCC and Black Power fame, speak at Columbia. At the entrance to the auditorium, two women, one black, one Asian, were selling Marxist literature and arguing with each other about Trotsky’s place in history. Inside, Touré was proposing a program to establish economic ties between Africa and Harlem that would circumvent white capitalist imperialism. At the end of his remarks, a thin young woman with glasses asked if such a program was practical given the state of African economies and the immediate needs facing black Americans. Touré cut her off in midsentence. “It’s only the brainwashing that you’ve received that makes it impractical, sister,” he said. His eyes glowed inward as he spoke, the eyes of a madman or a saint. The woman remained standing for several minutes while she was upbraided for her bourgeois attitudes. People began to file out. Outside the auditorium, the two Marxists were now shouting at the top of their lungs.