Dreams from My Father (27 page)

In a sense, then, Will was right: I did feel that there was something to prove—to the people of Altgeld, to Marty, to my father, to myself. That what I did counted for something. That I wasn’t a fool chasing pipe dreams. Later, when I tried to explain some of this to Will, he would laugh and shake his head, preferring to attribute my grumpy attitude that day at the ribbon cutting to a case of youthful jealousy. “See, you like the young rooster, Barack,” he told me, “and Harold’s like the old rooster. Old rooster came in, and the hens gave him all the attention. Made the young rooster realize he’s got a thing or two to learn.”

Will seemed to enjoy the comparison, and I had laughed along with him. But secretly I knew he had misunderstood my ambitions. More than anything, I wanted Harold to succeed; like my real father, the mayor and his achievements seemed to mark out what was possible; his gifts, his power, measured my own hopes. And in listening to him speak to us that day, full of grace and good humor, all I had been able to think about was the constraints on that power. At the margins, Harold could make city services more equitable. Black professionals now got a bigger share of city business. We had a black school superintendent, a black police chief, a black CHA director. Harold’s presence consoled, as Will’s Jesus consoled, as Rafiq’s nationalism consoled. But beneath the radiance of Harold’s victory, in Altgeld and elsewhere, nothing seemed to change.

I wondered whether, away from the spotlight, Harold thought about those constraints. Whether, like Mr. Anderson or Mrs. Reece or any number of other black officials who now administered over inner city life, he felt as trapped as those he served, an inheritor of sad history, part of a closed system with few moving parts, a system that was losing heat every day, dropping into low-level stasis.

I wondered whether he, too, felt a prisoner of fate.

It was Dr. Martha Collier who eventually lifted me out my funk. She was the principal of Carver Elementary, one of the two elementary schools out in Altgeld. The first time I called her for an appointment, she didn’t ask too many questions.

“I can use any help I can get,” she said. “See you at eight-thirty.”

The school, three large brick structures that formed a horseshoe around a broad, pitted dirt lot, was at the southern border of Altgeld. Inside, a security guard showed me to the main office, where a sturdily built, middle-aged black woman in a blue suit was talking to a taut and disheveled younger woman.

“You go home now and get some rest,” Dr. Collier said, throwing her arm over the woman’s shoulder. “I’m gonna make some calls and see if we can’t get this thing sorted out.” She led the woman to the door, then turned to me. “You must be Obama. Come on in. You want some coffee?”

Before I had a chance to reply, she had turned to her secretary. “Get Mr. Obama here a cup of coffee. Did those painters arrive yet?”

The secretary shook her head, and Dr. Collier frowned. “Hold all calls,” she said as I followed her into her office, “except for that good-for-nothing building engineer. I want to tell him just what I think of his sorry ass.”

Her office was sparsely furnished, the walls bare except for a few community service awards and a poster of a young black boy that read “God Don’t Make No Junk.” Dr. Collier pulled up a chair and said, “That girl just leaving my office, she’s the mother of one of our kids. A junkie. Her boyfriend was arrested last night and can’t make bail. So tell me—what can your organization do for someone like her?”

The secretary came in with my coffee. “I was hoping you’d have some suggestions,” I said.

“Short of tearing this whole place down and giving people a chance to start over, I’m not sure.”

She had been a teacher for two decades, a principal for ten years. She was accustomed to skirmishes with superiors—once all-white, now mostly black—over supplies and curriculum and hiring policies. Since coming to Carver, she’d set up a child-parent center that brought teenage parents into the classroom to learn with their children. “Most of the parents here want what’s best for their child,” Dr. Collier explained. “They just don’t know how to provide it. So we counsel them on nutrition, health care, how to handle stress. We teach the ones who need it how to read so they can read to their child at home. Where we can, we help them get their high school equivalency, or hire them as teaching assistants.”

Dr. Collier took a sip of her coffee. “What we can’t do is change the environment these girls and their babies go back to every day. Sooner or later, the child leaves us, and the parents stop coming—”

Her phone buzzed; the painter was here.

“I tell you what, Obama,” Dr. Collier said, rising to her feet. “You come in and talk to our parent group next week. Find out what’s on their mind. I’m not encouraging you, now. But if the parents decide they want to raise some hell with you, I can’t stop them, can I?”

She laughed cheerfully and walked me into the hallway, where a wobbly line of five- and six-year-olds was preparing to enter a classroom. A few of them waved and smiled at us; a pair of boys toward the rear spun around and around, their arms tight against their sides; a tiny little girl struggled to yank a sweater over her head and got tangled up in the sleeves. As the teacher tried to direct them up the stairs, I thought how happy and trusting they all seemed, that despite the rocky arrivals many of them had gone through—delivered prematurely, perhaps, or delivered into addiction, most of them already smudged with the ragged air of poverty—the joy they seemed to find in simple locomotion, the curiosity they displayed toward every new face, seemed the equal of children anywhere. They made me think back to those words of Regina’s, spoken years ago, in a different time and place:
It’s not about you.

“Beautiful, aren’t they?” Dr. Collier said.

“They really are.”

“The change comes later. In about five years, although it seems like it’s coming sooner all the time.”

“What change is that?”

“When their eyes stop laughing. Their throats can still make the sound, but if you look at their eyes, you can see they’ve shut off something inside.”

I began spending several hours a week with those children and their parents. The mothers were all in their late teens or early twenties; most had spent their lives in Altgeld, raised by teenage mothers themselves. They spoke without self-consciousness about pregnancy at fourteen or fifteen, the dropping out of school, the tenuous links to the fathers who slipped in and out of their lives. They told me about working the system, which involved mostly waiting: waiting to see the social worker, waiting at the currency exchange to cash their welfare checks, waiting for the bus that would take them to the nearest supermarket, five miles away, just to buy diapers on sale.

They had mastered the tools of survival in their tightly bound world and made no apologies for it. They weren’t cynical, though; that surprised me. They still had ambitions. There were girls like Linda and Bernadette Lowry, two sisters Dr. Collier had helped get high school equivalencies. Bernadette was now taking classes at the community college; Linda, pregnant again, stayed at home to look after Bernadette’s son, Tyrone, and her own daughter, Jewel—but she said she’d be going to college, too, once her new baby was born. After that they would both find jobs, they said—in food management, maybe, or as secretaries. Then they would move out of Altgeld. In Linda’s apartment one day, they showed me an album they kept full of clippings from
Better Homes and Gardens
. They pointed to the bright white kitchens and hardwood floors, and told me they would have such a home one day. Tyrone would take swimming lessons, they said; Jewel would dance ballet.

Sometimes, listening to such innocent dreams, I would find myself fighting off the urge to gather up these girls and their babies in my arms, to hold them all tight and never let go. The girls would sense that impulse, I think, and Linda, with her dark, striking beauty, would smile at Bernadette and ask me why I wasn’t already married.

“Haven’t found the right woman, I guess,” I would say.

And Bernadette would slap Linda on the arm, saying, “Stop it! You making Mr. Obama blush.” And they would both start to laugh, and I would realize that in my own way, I must have seemed as innocent to them as they both seemed to me.

My plan for the parents was simple. We didn’t yet have the power to change state welfare policy, or create local jobs, or bring substantially more money into the schools. But what we could do was begin to improve basic services in Altgeld—get the toilets fixed, the heaters working, the windows repaired. A few victories there, and I imagined the parents forming the nucleus of a genuinely independent tenants’ organization. With that strategy in mind, I passed out a set of complaint forms at the next full parents’ meeting, asking everyone to canvass the block where they lived. They agreed to the plan, but when the meeting was over, one of the parents, a woman named Sadie Evans, approached me holding a small newspaper clipping.

“I saw this in the paper yesterday, Mr. Obama,” Sadie said. “I don’t know if it means anything, but I wanted to see what you thought.”

It was a legal notice, in small print, run in the classified section. It said that the CHA was soliciting bids from qualified contractors to remove asbestos from Altgeld’s management office. I asked the parents if any of them had been notified about potential asbestos exposure. They shook their heads.

“You think it’s in our apartments?” Linda asked.

“I don’t know. But we can find out. Who wants to call Mr. Anderson over at the management office?”

I glanced around the room, but no hands went up. “Come on, somebody. I can’t make the call. I don’t live here.”

Finally Sadie raised her hand. “I’ll do it,” she said.

Sadie wouldn’t have been my first choice. She was a small, slight woman with a squeaky voice that made her seem painfully shy. She wore knee-length dresses and carried a leather-bound Bible wherever she went. Unlike the other parents, she was married, to a young man who worked as a store clerk by day but was training to be a minister; they didn’t associate with people outside their church.

All this made her something of a misfit in the group, and I wasn’t sure she’d be tough enough to deal with the CHA. But when I got back to the office that day, my secretary passed on the message that Sadie had already set up the appointment with Mr. Anderson and had called all the other parents to let them know. The following morning, I found Sadie standing out in front of the Altgeld management office, looking like an orphan, alone in the clammy mist.

“Don’t look like anybody else is showing up, does it, Mr. Obama?” she said, looking at her watch.

“Call me Barack,” I said. “Listen, do you still want to go through with this? If you’re not comfortable, we can reschedule the meeting until we have some other parents.”

“I don’t know. Do you think I can get in trouble?”

“I think you’ve got the right to information that could affect your health. But that doesn’t mean Mr. Anderson is gonna think so. I’ll stand behind you, and so will the other parents, but you need to do what makes sense for you.”

Sadie pulled her overcoat tightly around herself and looked again at her watch. “We shouldn’t keep Mr. Anderson waiting,” she said, and plunged through the door.

From the expression on Mr. Anderson’s face when we walked into his office, it was clear that I hadn’t been expected. He offered us a seat and asked us if we wanted some coffee.

“No thank you,” Sadie said. “I really appreciate you seeing us on such short notice.” With her coat still on, she pulled out the legal notice and set it carefully on Mr. Anderson’s desk. “Some of the parents at the school saw this in the paper, and we were worried … well, we wondered if this asbestos maybe was in our apartments.”

Mr. Anderson glanced at the notice, then set it aside. “This is nothing to worry about, Mrs. Evans,” he said. “We’re just doing renovation on this building, and after the contractors tore up one of the walls, they found asbestos on the pipes. It’s just being removed as a precautionary measure.”

“Well … shouldn’t the same thing, the same precautionary measures, I mean, be taken in our apartments? I mean, isn’t there asbestos there, too?”

The trap was laid, and Mr. Anderson’s eyes met mine. A cover-up would generate as much publicity as the asbestos, I had told myself. Publicity would make my job easier. And yet, as I watched Mr. Anderson shift around in his seat, trying to take measure of the situation, there was a part of me that wanted to warn him off. I had the unsettling feeling that his soul was familiar to me, that of an older man who feels betrayed by life—a look I had seen so often in my grandfather’s eyes. I wanted to somehow let Mr. Anderson know that I understood his dilemma, wanted to tell him that if he would just explain that the problems in Altgeld preceded him and admit that he, too, needed help, then some measure of salvation might alight in the room.

Instead, I said nothing, and Mr. Anderson turned away. “No, Mrs. Evans,” he said to Sadie. “There’s no asbestos in the residential units. We’ve tested them thoroughly.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” Sadie said. “Thank you. Thank you very much.” She rose, shook Mr. Anderson’s hand, and started for the door. I was just about to say something when she turned back toward the project manager.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I forgot to ask you something. The other parents … well, they’d like to see a copy of these tests you took. The results, I mean. You know, just so we can make everybody feel their kids are safe.”

“I … the records are all at the downtown office,” Mr. Anderson stammered. “Filed away, you understand.”

“Do you think you can get us a copy by next week?”

“Yes, well … of course. I’ll see what I can do. Next week.”

When we got outside, I told Sadie she had done well.

“Do you think he’s telling the truth?”

“I don’t know. We’ll find out soon enough.”

A week passed. Sadie called Mr. Anderson’s office: She was told that the results would take another week to produce. Two weeks passed, and Sadie’s calls went unreturned. We tried to reach Mrs. Reece, then the CHA district manager, then sent a letter to the executive director of the CHA with a copy to the mayor’s office. No response.