Dreams from My Father (9 page)

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, although 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 served me so well in Djakarta were 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, and I had no idea how to throw a football in a spiral or balance on a skateboard.

A ten-year-old’s nightmare. Still, in my discomfort that first month, I was no worse off than the other children who were relegated to the category of 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 and didn’t seem to have many friends. From the first day, we avoided each other but watched from a distance, as if direct contact would only remind us more keenly of our isolation.

Finally, during recess one hot, cloudless day, we found ourselves occupying 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 some assistance, 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, and the accusation. 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 found wanting; and whenever I snuck a glance at Coretta’s desk, I would see her with her head bent over her work, appearing as if nothing had happened, pulled into herself and asking no favors.

My act of betrayal bought me some room from the other children, and like Coretta, I was mostly left alone. I made a few friends, learned to speak less often in class, and managed to toss a wobbly football around. But from that day forward, a part of me felt trampled on, crushed, and I took refuge in the life that my grandparents led. 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 be at home to 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 programs to watch, sharing the latest snack food he’d discovered at the supermarket. At ten o’clock, I went to my room ( Johnny Carson came on at that time, and there was no negotiating around that), and I would fall asleep to the sounds of Top 40 music on the radio.

Nested in the soft, forgiving bosom of America’s consumer culture, I felt safe; it was as if I had dropped into a long hibernation. I wonder sometimes how long I might have stayed there 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.”

She carefully folded the paper and slipped it into a drawer in the kitchen. Both she and Gramps fell silent, the way I imagine people react when the doctor tells them they have a serious, but curable, illness. For a moment the air was sucked out of the room, and we stood suspended, alone with our thoughts.

“Well,” Toot said finally, “I suppose we better start looking for a place where he can stay.”

Gramps took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

“Should be one hell of a Christmas.”

Over lunch, I explained to a group of boys that my father was a prince.

“My grandfather, see, he’s a chief. It’s sort of like the king of the tribe, you know … like the Indians. So that makes my father a prince. He’ll take over when my grandfather dies.”

“What about after that?” one of my friends asked as we emptied our trays into the trash bin. “I mean, will you go back and be a prince?”

“Well … if I want to, I could. It’s sort of complicated, see, ’cause the tribe is full of warriors. Like Obama … that means ‘Burning Spear.’ The men in our tribe all want to be chief, so my father has to settle these feuds before I can come.”

As the words tumbled out of my mouth, and I felt the boys readjust to me, more curious and familiar as we bumped into each other in the line back to class, a part of me really began to believe the story. But another part of me knew that what I was telling them was a lie, something I’d constructed from the scraps of information I’d picked up from my mother. After a week of my father in the flesh, I had decided that I preferred his more distant image, an image I could alter on a whim—or ignore when convenient. If my father hadn’t exactly disappointed me, he remained something unknown, something volatile and vaguely threatening.

My mother had sensed my apprehension in the days building up to his arrival—I suppose it mirrored her own—and so, in between her efforts to prepare the apartment we’d sublet for him, she would try to assure me that the reunion would go smoothly. She had maintained a correspondence with him throughout the time we had been in Indonesia, she explained, and he knew all about me. Like her, my father had remarried, and I now had five brothers and one sister living in Kenya. He had been in a bad car accident, and this trip was part of his recuperation after a long stay in the hospital.

“You two will become great friends,” she decided.

Along with news of my father, she began to stuff me with information about Kenya and its history—it was from a book about Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of Kenya, that I’d pilfered the name Burning Spear. But nothing my mother told me could relieve my doubts, and I retained little of the information she offered. Only once did she really spark my interest, when she told me that my father’s tribe, the Luo, were a Nilotic people who had migrated to Kenya from their original home along the banks of the world’s greatest river. This seemed promising; Gramps still kept a painting he had once done, a replica of lean, bronze Egyptians on a golden chariot drawn by alabaster steeds. I had visions of ancient Egypt, the great kingdoms I had read about, pyramids and pharaohs, Nefertiti and Cleopatra.

One Saturday I went to the public library near our apartment and, with the help of a raspy-voiced old librarian who appreciated my seriousness, I found a book on East Africa. Only there was no mention of pyramids. In fact, the Luos merited only a short paragraph.
Nilote,
it turned out, described a number of nomadic tribes that had originated in the Sudan along the White Nile, far south of the Egyptian empires. The Luo raised cattle and lived in mud huts and ate corn meal and yams and something called millet. Their traditional costume was a leather thong across the crotch. I left the book open-faced on a table and walked out without thanking the librarian.

The big day finally arrived, and Miss Hefty let me out early from class, wishing me luck. I left the school building feeling like a condemned man. My legs were heavy, and with each approaching step toward my grandparents’ apartment, the thump in my chest grew louder. When I entered the elevator, I stood without pressing the button. The door closed, then reopened, and an older Filipino man who lived on the fourth floor got on.

“Your grandfather says your father is coming to visit you today,” the man said cheerfully. “You must be very happy.”

When—after standing in front of the door and looking out across the Honolulu skyline at a distant ship, and then squinting at the sky to watch sparrows spiral through the air—I could think of no possible means of escape, I rang the doorbell. Toot opened the door.

“There he is! Come on, Bar … come meet your father.”

And there, in the unlit hallway, I saw him, a tall, dark figure who walked with a slight limp. He crouched down and put his arms around me, and I let my arms hang at my sides. Behind him stood my mother, her chin trembling as usual.

“Well, Barry,” my father said. “It is a good thing to see you after so long. Very good.”

He led me by the hand into the living room, and we all sat down.

“So, Barry, your grandmama has told me that you are doing very well in school.”

I shrugged.

“He’s feeling a little shy, I think,” Toot offered. She smiled and rubbed my head.

“Well,” my father said, “you have no reason to be shy about doing well. Have I told you that your brothers and sister have also excelled in their schooling? It’s in the blood, I think,” he said with a laugh.

I watched him carefully as the adults began to talk. He was much thinner than I had expected, the bones of his knees cutting the legs of his trousers in sharp angles; I couldn’t imagine him lifting anyone off the ground. Beside him, a cane with a blunt ivory head leaned against the wall. He wore a blue blazer, and a white shirt, and a scarlet ascot. His horn-rimmed glasses reflected the light of the lamp so that I couldn’t see his eyes very well, but when he took the glasses off to rub the bridge of his nose, I saw that they were slightly yellow, the eyes of someone who’s had malaria more than once. There was a fragility about his frame, I thought, a caution when he lit a cigarette or reached for his beer. After an hour or so, my mother suggested that he looked tired and should take a nap, and he agreed. He gathered up his travel bag, then stopped in mid-stride and began to fish around in it, until he finally pulled out three wooden figurines—a lion, an elephant, and an ebony man in tribal dress beating a drum—and handed them to me.

“Say thank you, Bar,” my mother said.

“Thank you,” I muttered.

My father and I both looked down at the carvings, lifeless in my hands. He touched my shoulder.

“They are only small things,” he said softly. Then he nodded to Gramps, and together they gathered up his luggage and went downstairs to the other apartment.

A month. That’s how long we would have together, the five of us in my grandparents’ living room most evenings, during the day on drives around the island or on short walks past the private landmarks of a family: the lot where my father’s apartment had once stood; the remodeled hospital where I had been born; my grandparents’ first house in Hawaii, before the one on University Avenue, a house I had never known. There was so much to tell in that single month, so much explaining to do; and yet when I reach back into my memory for the words of my father, the small interactions or conversations we might have had, they seem irretrievably lost. Perhaps they’re imprinted too deeply, his voice the seed of all sorts of tangled arguments that I carry on with myself, as impenetrable now as the pattern of my genes, so that all I can perceive is the worn-out shell. My wife offers a simpler explanation—that boys and their fathers don’t always have much to say to each other unless and until they trust—and this may come closer to the mark, for I often felt mute before him, and he never pushed me to speak. I’m left with mostly images that appear and die off in my mind like distant sounds: his head thrown back in laughter at one of Gramps’s jokes as my mother and I hang Christmas ornaments; his grip on my shoulder as he introduces me to one of his old friends from college; the narrowing of his eyes, the stroking of his sparse goatee, as he reads his important books.

Images, and his effect on other people. For whenever he spoke—his one leg draped over the other, his large hands outstretched to direct or deflect attention, his voice deep and sure, cajoling and laughing—I would see a sudden change take place in the family. Gramps became more vigorous and thoughtful, my mother more bashful; even Toot, smoked out of the foxhole of her bedroom, would start sparring with him about politics or finance, stabbing the air with her blue-veined hands to make a point. It was as if his presence had summoned the spirit of earlier times and allowed each of them to reprise his or her old role; as if Dr. King had never been shot, and the Kennedys continued to beckon the nation, and war and riot and famine were nothing more than temporary setbacks, and there was nothing to fear but fear itself.