Dreams from My Father

by Barack Obama

  It was as if all middle ground had collapsed, utterly. And nowhere, it seemed, was that collapse more apparent than in the black community I had so lovingly imagined and within which I had hoped to find refuge. I might meet a black friend at his Midtown law firm, and before heading to lunch at the MoMA, I would look out across the city toward the East River from his high-rise office, imagining a satisfactory life for myself—a vocation, a family, a home. Until I noticed that the only other blacks in the office were messengers or clerks, the only other blacks in the museum the blue-jacketed security guards who counted the hours before they could catch their train home to Brooklyn or Queens.

  I might wander through Harlem—to play on courts I’d once read about or to hear Jesse Jackson make a speech on 125th; or, on a rare Sunday morning, to sit in the back pews of Abyssinian Baptist Church, lifted by the gospel choir’s sweet, sorrowful song—and catch a fleeting glimpse of that thing which I sought. But I had no guide that might show me how to join this troubled world, and when I looked for an apartment there, I found Sugar Hill’s elegant brownstones occupied and out of reach, the few decent rental buildings with ten-year-long waiting lists, so that all that remained were the rows and rows of uninhabitable tenements, in front of which young men counted out their rolls of large bills, and winos slouched and stumbled and wept softly to themselves.

  I took all this as a personal affront, a mockery of my tender ambitions—although, when I brought up the subject with people who had lived in New York for a while, I was told there was nothing original about my observations. The city was out of control, they said, the polarization a natural phenomenon, like monsoons or continental drift. Political discussions, the kind that at Occidental had once seemed so intense and purposeful, came to take on the flavor of the socialist conferences I sometimes attended at Cooper Union or the African cultural fairs that took place in Harlem and Brooklyn during the summers—a few of the many diversions New York had to offer, like going to a foreign film or ice-skating at Rockefeller Center. With a bit of money, I was free to live like most middle-class blacks in Manhattan, free to choose a motif around which to organize my life, free to patch together a collage of styles, friends, watering holes, political affiliations. I sensed, though, that at some stage—maybe when you had children and decided that you could stay in the city only at the cost of a private school, or when you began takings cabs at night to avoid the subways, or when you decided that you needed a doorman in your apartment building—your choice was irrevocable, the divide was now impassable, and you would find yourself on the side of the line that you’d never intended to be on.

  Unwilling to make that choice, I spent a year walking from one end of Manhattan to the other. Like a tourist, I watched the range of human possibility on display, trying to trace out my future in the lives of the people I saw, looking for some opening through which I could reenter.

  It was in this humorless mood that my mother and sister found me when they came to visit during my first summer in New York.

  “He’s so skinny,” Maya said to my mother.

  “He only has two towels!” my mother shouted as she inspected the bathroom. “And three plates!” They both began to giggle.

  They stayed with Sadik and me for a few nights, then moved to a condominium on Park Avenue that a friend of my mother’s had offered them while she was away. That summer I had found a job clearing a construction site on the Upper West Side, so my mother and sister spent most of their days exploring the city on their own. When we met for dinner, they would give me a detailed report of their adventures: eating strawberries and cream at the Plaza, taking the ferry to the Statue of Liberty, visiting the Cézannes at the Met. I would eat in silence until they were finished and then begin a long discourse on the problems of the city and the politics of the dispossessed. I scolded Maya for spending one evening watching TV instead of reading the novels I’d bought for her. I instructed my mother on the various ways that foreign donors and international development organizations like the one she was working for bred dependence in the Third World. When the two of them withdrew to the kitchen, I would overhear Maya complaining to my mother.

  “Barry’s okay, isn’t he? I mean, I hope he doesn’t lose his cool and become one of those freaks you see on the streets around here.”

  One evening, while thumbing through The Village Voice, my mother’s eyes lit on an advertisement for a movie, Black Orpheus, that was showing downtown. My mother insisted that we go see it that night; she said that it was the first foreign film she had ever seen.

  “I was only sixteen then,” she told us as we entered the elevator. “I’d just been accepted to the University of Chicago—Gramps hadn’t told me yet that he wouldn’t let me go—and I was there for the summer, working as an au pair. It was the first time that I’d ever been really on my own. Gosh, I felt like such an adult. And when I saw this film, I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.”

  We took a cab to the revival theater where the movie was playing. The film, a groundbreaker of sorts due to its mostly black, Brazilian cast, had been made in the fifties. The story line was simple: the myth of the ill-fated lovers Orpheus and Eurydice set in the favelas of Rio during Carnival. In Technicolor splendor, set against scenic green hills, the black and brown Brazilians sang and danced and strummed guitars like carefree birds in colorful plumage. About halfway through the movie, I decided that I’d seen enough, and turned to my mother to see if she might be ready to go. But her face, lit by the blue glow of the screen, was set in a wistful gaze. At that moment, I felt as if I were being given a window into her heart, the unreflective heart of her youth. I suddenly realized that the depiction of childlike blacks I was now seeing on the screen, the reverse image of Conrad’s dark savages, was what my mother had carried with her to Hawaii all those years before, a reflection of the simple fantasies that had been forbidden to a white middle-class girl from Kansas, the promise of another life: warm, sensual, exotic, different.

  I turned away, embarrassed for her, irritated with the people around me. Sitting there in the dark, I was reminded of a conversation I’d had a few years earlier with a friend of my mother’s, an Englishman who had worked for an international aid organization throughout Africa and Asia. He had told me that of all the different peoples he had met in his travels, the Dik of Sudan were the strangest.

  “Usually, after a month or two, you make contact,” he had said. “Even where you don’t speak the language, there’s a smile or a joke, you know—some semblance of recognition. But at the end of a year with the Dik, they remained utterly alien to me. They laughed at the things that drove me to despair. What I thought was funny seemed to leave them stone cold.”

  I had spared him the information that the Dik were Nilotes, distant cousins of mine. I had tried to imagine this pale Englishman in a parched desert somewhere, his back turned away from a circle of naked tribesmen, his eyes searching an empty sky, bitter in his solitude. And the same thought had occurred to me then that I carried with me now as I left the movie theater with my mother and sister: The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.

  “Kind of corny, huh,” Maya said as my mother went to the bathroom.

  “What?”

  “The movie. It was kind of corny. Just Mom’s style.”

  For the next several days, I tried to avoid situations where my mother and I might be forced to talk. Then, a few days before they were about to leave, I stopped by while Maya was taking a nap. My mother noticed a letter addressed to my father in my hand. I asked her if she had an international postage stamp.

  “You guys arranging a visit?”

  I told her briefly of my plans as she dug out a stamp from the bottom of her purse. Actually she came up with two stamps; they had melted together in the summ
er heat. She gave me a sheepish grin and put water on to boil so we could steam them apart.

  “Well, I think it’ll be wonderful for you two to finally get to know each other,” she said from the kitchen. “He was probably a bit tough for a ten-year-old to take, but now that you’re older…”

  I shrugged. “Who knows?”

  She stuck her head out of the kitchen. “I hope you don’t feel resentful towards him.”

  “Why would I?”

  “I don’t know.” She returned to the living room and we sat there for a while, listening to the sounds of traffic below. The teapot whistled, and I stamped my envelope. Then, without any prompting, my mother began to retell an old story, in a distant voice, as if she were telling it to herself.

  “It wasn’t your father’s fault that he left, you know. I divorced him. When the two of us got married, your grandparents weren’t happy with the idea. But they said okay—they probably couldn’t have stopped us anyway, and they eventually came around to the idea that it was the right thing to do. Then Barack’s father—your grandfather Hussein—wrote Gramps this long, nasty letter saying that he didn’t approve of the marriage. He didn’t want the Obama blood sullied by a white woman, he said. Well, you can imagine how Gramps reacted to that. And then there was a problem with your father’s first wife…he had told me they were separated, but it was a village wedding, so there was no legal document that could show a divorce….”

  Her chin had begun to tremble, and she bit down on her lip, steadying herself. She said, “Your father wrote back, saying he was going ahead with it. Then you were born, and we agreed that the three of us would return to Kenya after he finished his studies. But your grandfather Hussein was still writing to your father, threatening to have his student visa revoked. By this time Toot had become hysterical—she had read about the Mau-Mau rebellion in Kenya a few years earlier, which the Western press really played up—and she was sure that I would have my head chopped off and you would be taken away.

  “Even then, it might have worked out. When your father graduated from UH, he received two scholarship offers. One was to the New School, here in New York. The other one was to Harvard. The New School agreed to pay for everything—room and board, a job on campus, enough to support all three of us. Harvard just agreed to pay tuition. But Barack was such a stubborn bastard, he had to go to Harvard. How can I refuse the best education? he told me. That’s all he could think about, proving that he was the best….”

  She sighed, running her hands through her hair. “We were so young, you know. I was younger than you are now. He was only a few years older than that. Later, when he came to visit us in Hawaii that time, he wanted us to come live with him. But I was still married to Lolo then, and his third wife had just left him, and I just didn’t think…”

  She stopped and laughed to herself. “Did I ever tell you that he was late for our first date? He asked me to meet him in front of the university library at one. When I got there he hadn’t arrived, but I figured I’d give him a few minutes. It was a nice day, so I laid out on one of the benches, and before I knew it I had fallen asleep. Well, an hour later—an hour!—he shows up with a couple of his friends. I woke up and the three of them were standing over me, and I heard your father saying, serious as can be, ‘You see, gentlemen. I told you that she was a fine girl, and that she would wait for me.’ ”

  My mother laughed once more, and once again I saw her as the child she had been. Except this time I saw something else: In her smiling, slightly puzzled face, I saw what all children must see at some point if they are to grow up—their parents’ lives revealed to them as separate and apart, reaching out beyond the point of their union or the birth of a child, lives unfurling back to grandparents, great-grandparents, an infinite number of chance meetings, misunderstandings, projected hopes, limited circumstances. My mother was that girl with the movie of beautiful black people in her head, flattered by my father’s attention, confused and alone, trying to break out of the grip of her own parents’ lives. The innocence she carried that day, waiting for my father, had been tinged with misconceptions, her own needs. But it was a guileless need, one without self-consciousness, and perhaps that’s how any love begins, impulses and cloudy images that allow us to break across our solitude, and then, if we’re lucky, are finally transformed into something firmer. What I heard from my mother that day, speaking about my father, was something that I suspect most Americans will never hear from the lips of those of another race, and so cannot be expected to believe might exist between black and white: the love of someone who knows your life in the round, a love that will survive disappointment. She saw my father as everyone hopes at least one other person might see him; she had tried to help the child who never knew him see him in the same way. And it was the look on her face that day that I would remember when a few months later I called to tell her that my father had died and heard her cry out over the distance.

  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

  IN 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.