by Barack Obama
He threw back his head to laugh, a magical, inward sound that made his whole body shake, as if he couldn’t get over the wonders this new life had to offer. It was infectious, his laughter—although I wasn’t laughing as we made our way to dinner. His Toyota was too small for his bulk—he looked like a kid in a carnival bumper car—and it didn’t seem as if he’d yet mastered a stick shift or the rules of the road, including the speed limit. Twice we almost collided with oncoming cars; once, at a turn, we careened over a high curb.
“You always drive this way?” I shouted over the music blasting out of his tape deck.
Roy smiled, shifting into fifth. “I’m not so good, eh? Mary, my wife, she’s always complaining, too. Especially since the accident…”
“What accident?”
“Ah, it was nothing. You see I’m still here. Alive and breathing!” And again he laughed and shook his head, as if the car worked independently of him, as if our safe arrival would be yet one more example of God’s ample blessings.
The restaurant was Mexican, beside a marina, and we chose a table with a view out over the water. I ordered a beer, Roy a margarita, and for a while we made small talk about my work and his accounting job at a large mortgage finance company. He ate with gusto, drank a second margarita; he laughed and joked about his adventures in America. But as the meal wore on, the effort he was making began to show. Eventually, I came around to asking him why his wife hadn’t joined us. His smile evaporated.
“Ah, I think we’re getting divorced,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
“She says she’s tired of me staying out late. She says I drink too much. She says I’m becoming just like the Old Man.”
“What do you think?”
“What do I think?” He lowered his head, then looked at me somberly, the flame of the tea candles dancing like tiny bonfires across the lenses of his glasses. “The truth is,” he said, leaning his weight forward, “I don’t think I really like myself. And I blame the Old Man for this.”
For the next hour, he recounted all the hard times that Auma had spoken of—of being yanked away from his mother and everything familiar; the Old Man’s sudden descent into poverty; the arguments and breakdown and eventual flight. He told me about his life after leaving our father’s house; how, bouncing from relative to relative, he had gained admission to the University of Nairobi, then secured a job with a local accounting firm after graduation; how he had taught himself the discipline of work, always arriving at his job early and completing his tasks no matter how late he was out the night before. Listening to him, I felt the same admiration that I’d felt when listening to Auma talk about her life, the resilience they had both displayed, the same stubborn strength that had lifted them out of bad circumstances. Except in Auma I had also sensed a willingness to put the past behind her, a capacity to somehow forgive, if not necessarily forget. Roy’s memories of the Old Man seemed more immediate, more taunting; for him the past remained an open sore.
“Nothing was ever good enough for him,” he told me as the busboy took our plates away. “He was smart, and he couldn’t ever let you forget. If you came home with the second best grades in the class, he would ask why you weren’t first. ‘You are an Obama,’ he would say. ‘You should be the best.’ He would really believe this. And then I would see him drunk, with no money, living like a beggar. I would ask myself, How can someone so smart fall so badly? It made no sense to me. No sense.
“Even after I was living on my own, even after his death, I would try to figure out this puzzle. It was as if I couldn’t escape him. I remember we had to take his body to Alego for the funeral, and as the eldest son, I was responsible for making the arrangements. The government wanted a Christian burial. The family wanted a Muslim burial. People came to Home Square from everywhere, and we had to mourn him according to Luo tradition, burning a log for three days, listening to people cry and moan. Half these people, I didn’t even know who they were. They wanted food. They wanted beer. Some people whispered that the Old Man had been poisoned, that I must take revenge. Some people stole things from the house. Then our relatives began to fight about the Old Man’s inheritance. The Old Man’s last girlfriend, the mother of our baby brother, George—she wanted everything. Some people, like our Aunt Sarah, sided with her. Others lined up with my mum’s side of the family. I’m telling you, it was crazy! Everything seemed to be going wrong.
“After the funeral was over, I didn’t want to be with anyone. The only person I trusted was David, our younger brother. That guy, let me tell you, he was okay. He looked like you a little bit, only younger…fifteen, sixteen. His mother, Ruth, had tried to raise him like an American. But David, he rebelled. He loved everybody, you see. He ran away from home and came to live with me. I told him he should go home, but he refused. He didn’t want to be an American, he said. He was an African. He was an Obama.
“When David died, that was it for me. I was sure our whole family was cursed. I started drinking, fighting—I didn’t care. I figured if the Old Man could die, if David could die, that I would have to die, too. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had stayed in Kenya. As it was, there was Nancy, this American girl I had been seeing. She’d returned to the States, so one day I just called her and said I wanted to come. When she said yes, I bought a ticket and caught the next plane out. I didn’t pack, or tell my office, or say goodbye to anyone, or anything.
“I thought I could start over, you see. But now I know you can never start over. Not really. You think you have control, but you are like a fly in somebody else’s web. Sometimes I think that’s why I like accounting. All day, you are only dealing with numbers. You add them, multiply them, and if you are careful, you will always have a solution. There’s a sequence there. An order. With numbers, you can have control….”
Roy took another sip from his drink, and suddenly his speech slowed, as if he’d dropped deep into another place, as if our father had taken possession of him. “I am the oldest, you see. In Luo tradition, I am now head of the household. I am responsible for you, and for Auma, and for all the younger boys. It’s my responsibility to set things right. To pay the boys’ school fees. To see that Auma is properly married. To build a proper house and bring the family together.”
I reached across the table and touched his hand. “You don’t have to do it alone, brother,” I said. “We can share the load.”
But it was as if he hadn’t heard me. He just stared out the window, and then, as if snapping out of a trance, he waved the waitress over.
“You want another drink?”
“Why don’t we just get the check?”
Roy looked at me and smiled. “I can tell you worry too much, Barack. That’s my problem, as well. I think we need to learn to go with the flow. Isn’t that what you say in America? Just go with the flow.…” Roy laughed again, loud enough for the people at the next table to turn around. Only the magic was gone out of it now; it sounded hollow, as if it were traveling across a vast, empty distance.
I caught a flight out the next day—Roy needed to spend some time with his wife, and I didn’t have the money for another night at the hotel. We had breakfast together, and in the morning light he seemed in better spirits. At the airport gate, we shook hands and hugged, and he promised to come visit me once things had settled down. The entire flight back to Chicago, though, and through the rest of the weekend, I couldn’t rid myself of the sense that Roy was in danger somehow, that old demons were driving him toward an abyss, and that if only I was a better brother, my intervention would prevent his fall.
Roy was still on my mind when Johnnie walked into my office late Monday afternoon.
“You’re back early,” Johnnie said. “How was your trip?”
“It was good. Good to see my brother.” I nodded, tapping on the edge of my desk. “So what happened while I was gone?”
Johnnie dropped into a chair. “Well,” he said, “we met with the state senator. He committed to introducing
a bill to get funding for a pilot program. Maybe not the whole half million, but enough.”
“That’s terrific. How about the high school principals?”
“Just got back from a meeting with Dr. King, the principal at Asante’s school. The rest of ’em haven’t returned my calls.”
“That’s all right. What did Dr. King have to say?”
“Oh, he was all smiles,” Johnnie said. “Said he really liked the proposal. He got real excited when he heard we might get funding. Said he’d encourage the other principals to work with us and that we’d have his full support. ‘Nothing’s more important than saving our youth,’ he said.”
“Sounds good.”
“Right. Sounds good. So then, I’m about to walk out of his office when suddenly he gives me this.” Johnnie reached into his briefcase, pulled out a piece of paper, and handed it to me. I read over a few lines before handing it back.
“A résumé?”
“Not just any résumé, Barack. His wife’s résumé. Seems she’s kinda bored around the house, see, and Dr. King thinks she’d make an ‘excellent’ director for our program. No pressure, you understand. Just once the money is allocated, some consideration, you know what I mean.”
“He gave you his wife’s résumé—”
“Not just his wife’s résumé.” Johnnie reached into his briefcase and pulled out another piece of paper, waving it in the air. “Got his daughter’s, too! Tells me she’d make an ‘excellent’ counselor—”
“Naw—”
“I’m telling you, Barack, he had the whole thing figured out. And you know what? The whole time we’re talking, he’s not batting an eye. Acting like what he’s doing is the most natural thing in the world. It was unbelievable.” Johnnie shook his head, then suddenly shouted out like a preacher. “Yessuh! Doctah Lonnie King! Now there’s a brother with some nerve! An enterprising brother! Program hasn’t even started yet, he’s already thinking ahead.”
I started to laugh.
“He don’t just want one job! He gotta have two! Go in to talk about some kids, he gonna hand you his whole goddamn family’s résumé….”
I shouted out, catching the spirit. “Doctah Lonnie King!”
“Yessuh! Doctah Lonnie King!” Johnnie started to giggle, which made me laugh even harder, until soon we were doubled over in loud guffaws, catching our breath only long enough to repeat that name again—“Doctah Lonnie King!”—as if it now contained the most obvious truth, the most basic element in an elemental world. We laughed until our faces were hot and our sides hurt, until tears came to our eyes, until we felt emptied out and couldn’t laugh anymore, and decided to take the rest of the afternoon off and go find ourselves a beer.
That night, well past midnight, a car pulls up in front of my apartment building carrying a troop of teenage boys and a set of stereo speakers so loud that the floor of my apartment begins to shake. I’ve learned to ignore such disturbances—where else do they have to go? I say to myself. But on this particular evening I have someone staying over; I know that my neighbors next door have just brought home their newborn child; and so I pull on some shorts and head downstairs for a chat with our nighttime visitors. As I approach the car, the voices stop, the heads within all turn my way.
“Listen, people are trying to sleep around here. Why don’t y’all take it someplace else.”
The four boys inside say nothing, don’t even move. The wind wipes away my drowsiness, and I feel suddenly exposed, standing in a pair of shorts on the sidewalk in the middle of the night. I can’t see the faces inside the car; it’s too dark to know how old they are, whether they’re sober or drunk, good boys or bad. One of them could be Kyle. One of them could be Roy. One of them could be Johnnie.
One of them could be me. Standing there, I try to remember the days when I would have been sitting in a car like that, full of inarticulate resentments and desperate to prove my place in the world. The feelings of righteous anger as I shout at Gramps for some forgotten reason. The blood rush of a high school brawl. The swagger that carries me into a classroom drunk or high, knowing that my teachers will smell beer or reefer on my breath, just daring them to say something. I start picturing myself through the eyes of these boys, a figure of random authority, and know the calculations they might now be making, that if one of them can’t take me out, the four of them certainly can.
That knotted, howling assertion of self—as I try to pierce the darkness and read the shadowed faces inside the car, I’m thinking that while these boys may be weaker or stronger than I was at their age, the only difference that matters is this: The world in which I spent those difficult times was far more forgiving. These boys have no margin for error; if they carry guns, those guns will offer them no protection from that truth. And it is that truth, a truth that they surely sense but can’t admit and, in fact, must refuse if they are to wake up tomorrow, that has forced them, or others like them, eventually to shut off access to any empathy they may once have felt. Their unruly maleness will not be contained, as mine finally was, by a sense of sadness at an older man’s injured pride. Their anger won’t be checked by the intimation of danger that would come upon me whenever I split another boy’s lip or raced down a highway with gin clouding my head. As I stand there, I find myself thinking that somewhere down the line both guilt and empathy speak to our own buried sense that an order of some sort is required, not the social order that exists, necessarily, but something more fundamental and more demanding; a sense, further, that one has a stake in this order, a wish that, no matter how fluid this order sometimes appears, it will not drain out of the universe. I suspect that these boys will have to search long and hard for that order—indeed, any order that includes them as more than objects of fear or derision. And that suspicion terrifies me, for I now have a place in the world, a job, a schedule to follow. As much as I might tell myself otherwise, we are breaking apart, these boys and me, into different tribes, speaking a different tongue, living by a different code.
The engine starts, and the car screeches away. I turn back toward my apartment knowing that I’ve been both stupid and lucky, knowing that I am afraid after all.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
IT WAS AN OLD BUILDING, in one of the South Side’s older neighborhoods, still sound but badly in need of tuck-pointing and perhaps a new roof. The sanctuary was dark, with several pews that had cracked and splintered; the reddish carpet gave off a musty, damp odor; and at various points the floorboards beneath bucked and dipped like welts in a meadow. Reverend Philips’s office had this same chipped, worn quality, lit only by an antique desk lamp that cast the room in a dull, amber glow. And Reverend Philips himself—he was old. With the window shades drawn, surrounded by stacks of dusty old books, he seemed now to be receding into the wall, as still as a portrait, only his snow-white hair clearly visible, his voice sonorous and disembodied, like the voice of a dream.
We had been talking for close to an hour, mostly about the church. Not his church so much as the church, the historically black church, the church as an institution, the church as an idea. He was an erudite man and began our conversation with a history of slave religion, telling me about the Africans who, newly landed on hostile shores, had sat circled around a fire mixing newfound myths with ancient rhythms, their songs becoming a vessel for those most radical of ideas—survival, and freedom, and hope. The reverend went on to recall the Southern church of his own youth, a small, whitewashed wooden place, he said, built with sweat and pennies saved from share-cropping, where on bright, hot Sunday mornings all the quiet terror and open wounds of the week drained away in tears and shouts of gratitude; the clapping, waving, fanning hands reddening the embers of those same stubborn ideas—survival, and freedom, and hope. He discussed Martin Luther King’s visit to Chicago and the jealousy he had witnessed among some of King’s fellow ministers, their fear of being usurped; and the emergence of the Muslims, whose anger Reverend Philips understood: It was his own anger, he said, an anger that he didn’t
expect he would ever entirely escape but that through prayer he had learned to control—and that he had tried not to pass down to his children.
Now he was explaining the history of churches in Chicago. There were thousands of them, and it seemed as if he knew them all: the tiny storefronts and the large stone edifices; the high-yella congregations that sat stiff as cadets as they sang from their stern hymnals, and the charismatics who shook as their bodies expelled God’s unintelligible tongue. Most of the larger churches in Chicago had been a blend of these two forms, Reverend Philips explained, an example of segregation’s hidden blessings, the way it forced the lawyer and the doctor to live and worship right next to the maid and the laborer. Like a great pumping heart, the church had circulated goods, information, values, and ideas back and forth and back again, between rich and poor, learned and unlearned, sinner and saved.
He wasn’t sure, he said, how much longer his church would continue to serve that function. Most of his better-off members had moved away to tidier neighborhoods, suburban life. They still drove back every Sunday, out of loyalty or habit. But the nature of their involvement had changed. They hesitated to volunteer for anything—a tutoring program, a home visitation—that might keep them in the city after dark. They wanted more security around the church, a fenced-in parking lot to protect their cars. Reverend Philips expected that once he passed on, many of those members would stop coming back. They would start new churches, tidy like their new streets. He feared that the link to the past would be finally broken, that the children would no longer retain the memory of that first circle, around a fire….
His voice began to trail off; I felt he was getting tired. I asked him for introductions to other pastors who might be interested in organizing, and he mentioned a few names—there was a dynamic young pastor, he said, a Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Jr., pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ, who might be worth talking to; his message seemed to appeal to young people like me. Reverend Philips gave me his number, and as I got up to leave, I said, “If we could bring just fifty churches together, we might be able to reverse some of the trends you’ve been talking about.”