Dreams from My Father

by Barack Obama

  Now, after the meeting in Altgeld, Will had a new idea. “These mixed-up Negroes inside St. Catherine’s ain’t never gonna do nothing,” he said. “If we wanna get something done, we gonna have to take it to the streets!” He pointed out that many of the people who lived in the immediate vicinity of St. Catherine’s were jobless and struggling; those were the people we should be targeting, he said. And because they might not feel comfortable attending a meeting hosted by a foreign church, we should conduct a series of street corner meetings around West Pullman, allowing them to gather on neutral turf.

  I was skeptical at first, but unwilling as I was to discourage any initiative, I helped Will and Mary prepare a flyer, for distribution along the block closest to the church. A week later, the three of us stood out on the corner in the late autumn wind. The street remained empty at first, the shades drawn down the rows of brick bungalows. Then, slowly, people began to emerge, one or two at a time, women in hair nets, men in flannel shirts or windbreakers, shuffling through the brittle gold leaves, edging toward the growing circle. When the gathering numbered twenty or so, Will explained that St. Catherine’s was part of a larger organizing effort and that “we want you to talk to your neighbors about all the things y’all complain about when you’re sitting at the kitchen table.”

  “Well, all I can say is, it’s about time,” one woman said.

  For almost an hour, people talked about potholes and sewers, stop signs and abandoned lots. As the afternoon fell to dusk, Will announced that we’d be moving the meetings to St. Catherine’s basement starting the following month. Walking back to the church, I heard the crowd still behind us, a murmur in the fading light. Will turned to me and smiled.

  “Told you.”

  We repeated these street corner meetings on three, four, five blocks—Will at the center with his priest’s collar and Chicago Cubs jacket, Mary with her sign-in sheets circling the edges of the crowd. By the time we moved the meetings indoors, we had a group of close to thirty people, prepared to work for little more than a cup of coffee.

  It was before such a meeting that I found Mary alone in the church hall, making a pot of coffee. The evening’s agenda was neatly printed on a sheet of butcher’s paper taped to the wall; the chairs were all set up. Mary waved at me while searching a cupboard for sugar and creamer, and told me Will was running a little late.

  “Need any help?” I asked her.

  “Can you reach this?”

  I pulled down the sugar from the top shelf. “Anything else?”

  “No. I think we’re all set.”

  I took a seat and watched Mary finish arranging the cups. She was a hard person to know, Mary was; she didn’t like to talk much, about herself or her past. I knew that she was the only white person from the city who worked with us, one of maybe five white people left in West Pullman. I knew that she had two daughters, one ten and one twelve; the younger one had a disability that made walking difficult and required regular therapy.

  And I knew that the father was absent, although Mary never mentioned him. Only in bits and pieces, over the course of many months, would I learn that she had grown up in a small Indiana town, part of a big, working-class Irish family. Somehow she had met a black man there; they had dated secretly, were married; her family refused to speak to her again, and the newlyweds moved to West Pullman, where they bought a small house. Then the man left, and Mary found herself beached in a world she knew little of, without anything but the house and two manila-hued daughters, unable to return to the world she had known.

  Sometimes I would stop by Mary’s house just to say hello, drawn perhaps by the loneliness I sensed there, and the easy parallels between my own mother and Mary; and between myself and Mary’s daughters, such sweet and pretty girls whose lives were so much more difficult than mine had ever been, with grandparents who shunned them, black classmates who teased them, all the poison in the air. Not that the family had no support; after Mary’s husband left, the neighbors had shown her and her children solicitude, helping them fix a leaky roof, inviting them to barbecues and birthday parties, commending Mary on all her good works. Still, there were limits to how far the neighbors could accept the family, unspoken boundaries to the friendships that Mary could make with the women—specially the married ones—that she met. Her only real friends were her daughters—and now Will, whose own fall, and idiosyncratic faith, gave them something private to share.

  With nothing left to do for the meeting, Mary sat down and watched me scribble some last-minute notes to myself.

  “Do you mind if I ask you something, Barack?”

  “No, go ahead.”

  “Why are you here? Doing this work, I mean.”

  “For the glamour.”

  “No, I’m serious. You said yourself you don’t need this job. And you’re not very religious, are you?”

  “Well…”

  “So why do you do it? That’s why Will and I do this, you know. Because it’s part of our faith. But with you, I don’t—”

  At that moment, the door opened and Mr. Green walked in. He was an older man in a hunting jacket and a cap whose earflaps hung stiffly against his chin.

  “How you doing, Mr. Green.”

  “Fine, just fine. Getting chilly, though….”

  Mrs. Turner and Mr. Albert quickly followed, then the rest of the group, all bundled up against the hint of an early winter. They unbuttoned their coats, prepared coffee for themselves, and engaged in the small, unhurried talk that helped warm up the room. Finally Will walked in wearing cut-off jeans and a red T-shirt with “Deacon Will” across the front, and after asking Mrs. Jeffrey to lead us in prayer, he started the meeting. While everyone talked, I took notes to myself, speaking up only when things started to wander. In fact, I thought the meeting had already dragged on too long—a few people had slipped out after an hour—when Will added a new item to the agenda.

  “Before we adjourn,” he announced, “I want us to try something out. This here’s a church-based organization, and that means we devote a part of each meeting to reflection on ourselves, our relationships to each other, and our relationship to God. So I want everybody to take out just a minute to think about what brought them here tonight, some thoughts or feelings that you haven’t talked about, and then I want you to share ’em with the group.”

  Will let the silence build for several minutes. “Anybody want to share their thoughts?” he repeated.

  People looked down at the table uncomfortably.

  “Okay,” Will said. “I’ll share something that’s been on my mind for a while. Nothing big—just memories. You know, my folks weren’t rich or nothing. We lived out in Altgeld. But when I think back on my own childhood, I remember some really good times. I remember going to Blackburn Forest with my folks to pick wild berries. I remember making skating carts with my cut buddies out of empty fruit crates and old roller skate wheels and racing around the parking lot. I remember going on field trips at school, and on the holidays meeting all the families in the park, everybody out and nobody scared, and then in the summers sleeping out in the yard together if it got too hot inside. A lot of good memories…seemed like I was smiling all the time, laughing—”

  Will broke off suddenly and bowed his head. I thought he was preparing to sneeze, but when he raised his head back up, I saw tears rolling down his cheeks. He continued in a cracking voice, “And you know, I don’t see kids smiling around here no more. You look at ’em listen to ’em…they seem worried all the time, mad about something. They got nothing they trust. Not their parents. Not God. Not themselves. And that’s not right. That just ain’t the way things supposed to be…kids not smiling.”

  He stopped again and pulled a handkerchief from his hip pocket to blow his nose. Then, as if the sight of this big man weeping had watered the dry surface of their hearts, the others in the room began speaking about their own memories in solemn, urgent tones. They talked about life in small Southern towns: the corner stores where men had gathered to
learn the news of the day or lend a hand to women with their groceries, the way adults looked after each other’s children (“Couldn’t get away with nothing, ’cause your momma had eyes and ears up and down the whole block”), the sense of public decorum that such familiarity had helped sustain. In their voices was no little bit of nostalgia, elements of selective memory; but the whole of what they recalled rang vivid and true, the sound of shared loss. A feeling of witness, of frustration and hope, moved about the room from mouth to mouth, and when the last person had spoken, it hovered in the air, static and palpable. Then we all joined hands, Mr. Green’s thick, callused hand in my left, Mrs. Turner’s, slight and papery to the touch, in my right, and together we asked for the courage to turn things around.

  I helped Will and Mary put back the chairs, rinse out the coffee pot, lock up, and turn off the lights. Outside, the night was cold and clear. I turned up my collar and quickly evaluated the meeting: Will needed to watch the time; we had to research the issue of city services before the next meeting and interview everyone who had come. At the end of my checklist, I put my arm around Will’s shoulders.

  “That reflection at the end was pretty powerful, Will.”

  He looked at Mary and they both smiled. “We noticed you didn’t share anything with the group,” Mary said.

  “The organizer’s supposed to keep a low profile.”

  “Who says?”

  “It’s in my organizer’s handbook. Come on, Mary, I’ll give you a ride home.”

  Will mounted his bike and waved good-bye, and Mary and I drove the four blocks to her house. I let her out in front of her door and watched her take a few steps before I stretched across the passenger seat and rolled down the window.

  “Hey, Mary.”

  She came back and bent down to look at me.

  “You know what you were asking before. About why I do this. It had something to do with the meeting tonight. I mean…I don’t think our reasons are all that different.”

  She nodded, and walked up the path to her daughters.

  A week later, I was back out in Altgeld, trying to stuff Angela, Mona, and Shirley into my subcompact car. Mona, who was sitting in the back, complained about the lack of room.

  “What kinda car is this anyway?” she asked.

  Shirley moved her seat up. “It’s built for the skinny little girls Barack goes out with.”

  “Who are we meeting with again?”

  I had scheduled three meetings, hoping to find a job strategy that would meet the needs of people in Altgeld. For now at least a new manufacturing boom appeared out of our reach: The big manufacturers had opted for well-scrubbed suburban corridors, and not even Gandhi could have gotten them to relocate near Altgeld anytime soon. On the other hand, there did remain a part of the economy that could be called local, I thought, a second-level consumer economy—of shops, restaurants, theaters, and services—that in other areas of the city continued to function as an incubator of civic life. Places where families might invest their savings and make a go of a business, and where entry-level jobs might be had; places where the economy remained on a human scale, transparent enough for people to understand.

  The closest thing to a shopping district in the area was in Roseland, and so we followed the bus route up Michigan Avenue, with its wig shops and liquor stores, discount clothing stores and pizzerias, until we arrived in front of a two-story former warehouse. We entered the building through a heavy metal door and took a narrow set of stairs down into a basement filled with old furniture. In a small office sat a slight, wiry man with a goatee and a skullcap that accentuated a pair of prominent ears.

  “Can I help you?”

  I explained who we were and that we had spoken on the phone.

  “That’s right, that’s right.” He gestured to two large men standing on either side of his desk and they walked past us with a nod. “Listen, we’re gonna have to make this quick ’cause something’s come up. Rafiq al Shabazz.”

  “I know you,” Shirley said as we shook hands with Rafiq. “You’re Mrs. Thompson’s boy, Wally. How’s your momma doing?”

  Rafiq forced a smile and offered us all a seat. He explained that he was the president of the Roseland Unity Coalition, an organization that engaged in a range of political activities to promote the black cause and claimed considerable credit for helping Mayor Washington get elected. When we asked him how our churches could encourage local economic development, he handed us a leaflet accusing Arab stores of selling bad meat.

  “That’s the real deal, right here,” Rafiq said. “People from outside our community making money off us and showing our brothers and sisters disrespect. Basically what you got here is Koreans and Arabs running the stores, the Jews still owning most of the buildings. Now, in the short term, we’re here to make sure that the interests of black people are looked after, you understand. When we hear one of them Koreans is mistreating a customer, we gonna be on the case. We gonna insist that they respect us and make a contribution back to the community—fund our programs, what have you.

  “That’s the short term. This”—Rafiq pointed to a map of Roseland that hung on the wall, with certain areas marked off in red ink—“is the long term. It’s all about ownership. A comprehensive plan for the area. Black businesses, community centers—the whole nine yards. Some of the properties, we’ve already started negotiating with the white owners to sell them to us at a fair price. So if y’all are interested in jobs, then you can help by spreading the message about this here plan. The problem we got right now is not enough support from the folks in Roseland. Instead of taking a stand, they’d rather follow white folks out into the suburbs. But see, white folks ain’t stupid. They just waiting for us to move out of the city so they can come back, ’cause they know that the value of the property we sitting on right now is worth a mint.”

  One of the burly men reentered Rafiq’s office, and Rafiq stood up. “I gotta get going,” he said abruptly. “But hey, we’ll talk again.” He shook all our hands before his assistant led us to the door.

  “Sounds like you knew him, Shirley,” I said once we were out of the building.

  “Yeah, before he got that fancy name of his, he was plain old Wally Thompson. He can change his name but he can’t hide them ears he’s got. He grew up in Altgeld—in fact, I think him and Will used to be in school together. Wally was a big-time gang-banger before he became a Muslim.”

  “Once a thug, always a thug,” Angela said.

  Our next stop was the local Chamber of Commerce, located on the second floor of what looked like a pawnshop. Inside, we found a plump black man who was busy packing boxes.

  “We’re looking for Mr. Foster,” I said to the man.

  “I’m Foster,” he said, not looking up.

  “We were told that you were the president of the Chamber—”

  “Well, you right about that. I was the president. Just resigned last week.”

  He offered us three chairs and talked as he worked. He explained that he had owned the stationery store down the street for fifteen years now, had been the president of the Chamber for the last five. He had done his best to organize the local merchants, but lack of support had finally left him discouraged.

  “You won’t hear me complaining about the Koreans,” he said, stacking a few boxes by the door. “They’re the only ones that pay their dues into the Chamber. They understand business, what it means to cooperate. They pool their money. Make each other loans. We don’t do that, see. The black merchants around here, we’re all like crabs in a bucket.” He straightened up and wiped his brow with a handkerchief. “I don’t know. Maybe you can’t blame us for being the way we are. All those years without opportunity, you have to figure it took something out of us. And it’s tougher now than it was for the Italian or the Jew thirty years ago. These days, a small store like mine has to compete against the big chains. It’s a losing battle unless you do like these Koreans—work your family sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. As a people,
we’re not willing to do that anymore. I guess we worked so long for nothing, we feel like we shouldn’t have to break our backs just to survive. That’s what we tell our children anyway. I can’t say I’m any different. I tell my sons I don’t want them taking over the business. I want them to go work for some big company where they can be comfortable….”

  Before we left, Angela asked about the possibility of part-time work for the youth in Altgeld. Mr. Foster looked up at her like she was crazy.

  “Every merchant around here turns down thirty applications a day,” he said. “Adults. Senior citizens. Experienced workers willing to take whatever they can get. I’m sorry.”

  As we walked back to the car, we passed a small clothing store full of cheap dresses and brightly colored sweaters, two aging white mannequins now painted black in the window. The store was poorly lit, but toward the back I could make out the figure of a young Korean woman sewing by hand as a child slept beside her. The scene took me back to my childhood, back to the markets of Indonesia: the hawkers, the leather workers, the old women chewing betelnut and swatting flies off their fruit with whisk brooms.

  I’d always taken such markets for granted, part of the natural order of things. Now, though, as I thought about Altgeld and Rose-land, Rafiq and Mr. Foster, I saw those Djakarta markets for what they were: fragile, precious things. The people who sold their goods there might have been poor, poorer even than folks out in Altgeld. They hauled fifty pounds of firewood on their backs every day, they ate little, they died young. And yet for all that poverty, there remained in their lives a discernible order, a tapestry of trading routes and middlemen, bribes to pay and customs to observe, the habits of a generation played out every day beneath the bargaining and the noise and the swirling dust.

  It was the absence of such coherence that made a place like Altgeld so desperate, I thought to myself; it was that loss of order that had made both Rafiq and Mr. Foster, in their own ways, so bitter. For how could we go about stitching a culture back together once it was torn? How long might it take in this land of dollars?