Dreams from My Father

by Barack Obama

  “Now you see what your father suffered.”

  “What?” I rubbed my eyes and looked up to find my aunt staring at me.

  “Yes, Barry, your father suffered,” she repeated. “I am telling you, his problem was that his heart was too big. When he lived, he would just give to everybody who asked him. And they all asked. You know, he was one of the first in the whole district to study abroad. The people back home, they didn’t even know anyone else who had ridden in an airplane before. So they expected everything from him. ‘Ah, Barack, you are a big shot now. You should give me something. You should help me.’ Always these pressures from family. And he couldn’t say no, he was so generous. You know, even me he had to take care of when I became pregnant, he was very disappointed in me. He had wanted me to go to college. But I would not listen to him, and went off with my husband. And despite this thing, when my husband became abusive and I had to leave, no money, no job, who do you think took me in? Yes—it was him. That’s why, no matter what others sometimes say, I will always be grateful to him.”

  We were approaching the garage shop; up ahead, we could see Auma talking to her mechanic and hear the engine of the old VW whine. Beside us, a naked boy, maybe three years old, wandered out from behind a row of oil drums, his feet caked with what looked like tar. Again Zeituni stopped, this time as if suddenly ill, and spat into the dust.

  “When your father’s luck changed,” she said, “these same people he had helped, they forgot him. They laughed at him. Even family refused to have him stay in their houses. Yes, Barry! Refused! They would tell Barack it was too dangerous. I knew this hurt him, but he wouldn’t pass blame. Your father never held a grudge. In fact, when he was rehabilitated and doing well again, I would find out that he was giving help to these same people who had betrayed him. Ah, I could not understand this thing. I would tell him, ‘Barack, you should only look after yourself and your children! These others, they have treated you badly. They are just too lazy to work for themselves.’ And you know what he would say to me? He would say, ‘How do you know that man does not need this small thing more than me?’”

  My aunt turned away and, forcing a smile, waved to Auma. And as we began to walk forward, she added, “I tell you this so you will know the pressure your father was under in this place. So you don’t judge him too harshly. And you must learn from his life. If you have something, then everyone will want a piece of it. So you have to draw the line somewhere. If everyone is family, no one is family. Your father, he never understood this, I think.”

  I remember a conversation I had once in Chicago when I was still organizing. It was with a woman who’d grown up in a big family in rural Georgia. Five brothers and three sisters, she had told me, all crowded under a single roof. She told me about her father’s ultimately futile efforts to farm his small plot of land, her mother’s vegetable garden, the two pigs they kept penned out in the yard, and the trips with her siblings to fish the murky waters of a river nearby. Listening to her speak, I began to realize that two of the three sisters she’d mentioned had actually died at birth, but that in this woman’s mind they had remained with her always, spirits with names and ages and characters, two sisters who accompanied her while she walked to school or did chores, who soothed her cries and calmed her fears. For this woman, family had never been a vessel just for the living. The dead, too, had their claims, their voices shaping the course of her dreams.

  So now it was for me. I remember how, a few days after my visit to Sarah’s, Auma and I happened to run into an acquaintance of the Old Man’s outside Barclay’s Bank. I could tell that Auma didn’t remember his name, so I held out my hand and introduced myself. The man smiled and said, “My, my—you have grown so tall. How’s your mother? And your brother Mark—has he graduated from university yet?”

  At first I was confused. Did I know this person? And then Auma explained in a low voice that no, I was a different brother, Barack, who grew up in America, the child of a different mother. David had passed away. And then the awkwardness on all sides—the man nodding his head (“I’m sorry, I didn’t know”) but taking another look at me, as if to make sure what he’d heard was true; Auma trying to appear as if the situation, while sad, was somehow the normal stuff of tragedy; me standing to the side, wondering how to feel after having been mistaken for a ghost.

  Later, back in her apartment, I asked Auma when she had last seen Mark and Ruth. She leaned her head against my shoulder and looked up at the ceiling.

  “David’s funeral,” she said. “Although by then they had stopped speaking to us for a long time.”

  “Why?”

  “I told you that Ruth’s divorce from the Old Man was very bitter. After they separated, she married a Tanzanian and had Mark and David take his name. She sent them to an international school, and they were raised like foreigners. She told them that they should have nothing to do with our side of the family.”

  Auma sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe because he was older, Mark came to share Ruth’s attitudes and had no contact with us after that. But for some reason, once David was a teenager, he began to rebel against Ruth. He told her he was an African, and started calling himself Obama. Sometimes he would sneak off from school to visit the Old Man and the rest of the family, which is how we got to know him. He became everybody’s favorite. He was so sweet, you know, and funny, even if he was sometimes too wild.

  “Ruth tried to enroll him in a boarding school, hoping it would settle him down. But David ended up running away instead. Nobody saw him for months. Then Roy happened to bump into him outside a rugby match. He was dirty, thin, begging money from strangers. He laughed when he saw Roy, and bragged about his life on the streets, hustling bhang with his friends. Roy told him to go home, but he refused, so Roy took David to his own apartment, sending word to Ruth that her son was safe and staying with him. When Ruth heard this, she was relieved but also furious. She begged David to come back, but when he again refused, she tacitly accepted the arrangement with Roy, hoping that eventually David would change his mind.”

  Auma sipped on her tea. “That’s when David died. While he was living with Roy. His death broke everybody’s heart—Roy’s especially. The two of them were really close, you see. But Ruth never understood that. She thought we had corrupted David. Stolen her baby away. And I don’t think she’s ever forgiven us for it.”

  I decided to stop talking about David after that; I could tell that Auma found the memories too painful. But only a few days later, Auma and I came home to find a car waiting for us outside the apartment. The driver, a brown-skinned man with a prominent Adam’s apple, handed Auma a note.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “It’s an invitation from Ruth,” she said. “Mark’s back from America for the summer. She wants to have us over for lunch.”

  “Do you want to go?”

  Auma shook her head, a look of disgust on her face. “Ruth knows I’ve been here almost six months now. She doesn’t care about me. The only reason she’s invited us is because she’s curious about you. She wants to compare you to Mark.”

  “I think maybe I should go,” I said quietly.

  Auma looked at the note again, then handed it back to the driver and said something to him in Swahili. “We’ll both go,” she said, and walked into the apartment.

  Ruth lived in Westlands, an enclave of expensive homes set off by wide lawns and well-tended hedges, each one with a sentry post manned by brown-uniformed guards. It was raining as we drove toward her house, sending a soft, gentle spray through the big, leafy trees. The coolness reminded me of the streets around Punahou, Manoa, Tantalus, the streets where some of my wealthier classmates had lived back in Hawaii. Staring out Auma’s car window, I thought back to the envy I’d felt toward those classmates whenever they invited me over to play in their big backyards or swim in their swimming pools. And along with that envy, a different impression—the sense of quiet desperation those big, pretty houses seemed to contain. The sound of someone’s
sister crying softly behind the door. The sight of a mother sneaking a tumbler of gin in midafternoon. The expression on a father’s face as he sat alone in his den, his features clenched as he flicked between college football games on TV. An impression of loneliness that perhaps wasn’t true, perhaps was just a projection of my own heart, but that, either way, had made me want to run, just as, an ocean away, David had run, back into the marketplace and noisy streets, back into disorder and the laughter disorder produced, back into the sort of pain a boy could understand.

  We came to one of the more modest houses on the block and parked along the curve of a looping driveway. A white woman with a long jaw and graying hair came out of the house to meet us. Behind her was a black man of my height and complexion with a bushy Afro and horn-rimmed glasses.

  “Come in, come in,” Ruth said. The four of us shook hands stiffly and entered a large living room, where a balding, older black man in a safari jacket was bouncing a young boy on his lap. “This is my husband,” Ruth said, “and this is Mark’s little brother, Joey.”

  “Hey, Joey,” I said, bending down to shake his hand. He was a beautiful boy, with honey-colored skin and two front teeth missing. Ruth tousled the boy’s big curls, then looked at her husband and said, “Weren’t you two on your way to the club?”

  “Yes, yes,” the man said, standing up. “Come on, Joey…it was nice to meet you both.” The boy stood fast, staring up at Auma and me with a bright, curious smile until his father finally picked him up and carried him out the door.

  “Well, here we are,” Ruth said, leading us to the couch and pouring lemonade. “I must say it was quite a surprise to find out you were here, Barry. I told Mark that we just had to see how this other son of Obama’s turned out. Your name is Obama, isn’t it? But your mother remarried. I wonder why she had you keep your name?”

  I smiled as if I hadn’t understood the question. “So, Mark,” I said, turning to my brother, “I hear you’re at Berkeley.”

  “Stanford,” he corrected. His voice was deep, his accent perfectly American. “I’m in my last year of the physics program there.”

  “It must be tough,” Auma offered.

  Mark shrugged. “Not really.”

  “Don’t be so modest, dear,” Ruth said. “The things Mark studies are so complicated only a handful of people really understand it all.” She patted Mark on the hand, then turned to me. “And Barry, I understand you’ll be going to Harvard. Just like Obama. You must have gotten some of his brains. Hopefully not the rest of him, though. You know Obama was quite crazy, don’t you? The drinking made it worse. Did you ever meet him? Obama, I mean?”

  “Only once. When I was ten.”

  “Well, you were lucky then. It probably explains why you’re doing so well.”

  That’s how the next hour passed, with Ruth alternating between stories of my father’s failure and stories of Mark’s accomplishments. Any questions were directed exclusively to me, leaving Auma to fiddle silently with Ruth’s lasagna. I wanted to leave as soon as the meal was over, but Ruth suggested that Mark show us the family album while she brought out the dessert.

  “I’m sure they’re not interested, Mother,” Mark said.

  “Of course they’re interested,” Ruth said. Then, her voice oddly distant: “There are pictures of Obama. From when he was young….”

  We followed Mark to the bookcase, and he pulled down a large photo album. Together we sat on the couch, slowly thumbing through laminate pages. Auma and Roy, dark and skinny and tall, all legs and big eyes, holding the two smaller children protectively in their arms. The Old Man and Ruth mugging it up at a beach somewhere. The entire family dressed up for a night out on the town. They were happy scenes, all of them, and all strangely familiar, as if I were glimpsing some alternative universe that had played itself out behind my back. They were reflections, I realized, of my own long-held fantasies, fantasies that I’d kept secret even from myself. The fantasy of the Old Man’s having taken my mother and me back with him to Kenya. The wish that my mother and father, sisters and brothers, were all under one roof. Here it was, I thought, what might have been. And the recognition of how wrong it had all turned out, the harsh evidence of life as it had really been lived, made me so sad that after only a few minutes I had to look away.

  On the drive back, I apologized to Auma for having put her through the ordeal. She waved it off.

  “It could have been worse,” she said. “I feel sorry for Mark, though. He seems so alone. You know, it’s not easy being a mixed child in Kenya.”

  I looked out the window, thinking about my mother, Toot, and Gramps, and how grateful I was to them—for who they were, and for the stories they’d told. I turned back to Auma, and said, “She still hasn’t gotten over him, has she?”

  “Who?”

  “Ruth. She hasn’t gotten over the Old Man.”

  Auma thought for a moment. “No, Barack. I guess she hasn’t. Just like the rest of us.”

  The following week, I called Mark and suggested that we go out to lunch. He seemed a bit hesitant, but eventually agreed to meet me at an Indian restaurant downtown. He was more relaxed than he had been during our first meeting, making a few self-deprecatory jokes, offering his observations about California and academic infighting. As the meal wore on, I asked him how it felt being back for the summer.

  “Fine,” he said. “It’s nice to see my mom and dad, of course. And Joey—he’s really a great kid.” Mark cut off a bite of his samosa and put it into his mouth. “As for the rest of Kenya, I don’t feel much of an attachment. Just another poor African country.”

  “You don’t ever think about settling here?”

  Mark took a sip from his Coke. “No,” he said. “I mean, there’s not much work for a physicist, is there, in a country where the average person doesn’t have a telephone.”

  I should have stopped then, but something—the certainty in this brother’s voice, maybe, or our rough resemblance, like looking into a foggy mirror—made me want to push harder. I asked, “Don’t you ever feel like you might be losing something?”

  Mark put down his knife and fork, and for the first time that afternoon his eyes looked straight into mine.

  “I understand what you’re getting at,” he said flatly. “You think that somehow I’m cut off from my roots, that sort of thing.” He wiped his mouth and dropped the napkin onto his plate. “Well, you’re right. At a certain point, I made a decision not to think about who my real father was. He was dead to me even when he was still alive. I knew that he was a drunk and showed no concern for his wife or children. That was enough.”

  “It made you mad.”

  “Not mad. Just numb.”

  “And that doesn’t bother you? Being numb, I mean?”

  “Towards him, no. Other things move me. Beethoven’s symphonies. Shakespeare’s sonnets. I know—it’s not what an African is supposed to care about. But who’s to tell me what I should and shouldn’t care about? Understand, I’m not ashamed of being half Kenyan. I just don’t ask myself a lot of questions about what it all means. About who I really am.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe I should. I can acknowledge the possibility that if I looked more carefully at myself, I would…”

  For the briefest moment I sensed Mark hesitate, like a rock climber losing his footing. Then, almost immediately, he regained his composure and waved for the check.

  “Who knows?” he said. “What’s certain is that I don’t need the stress. Life’s hard enough without all that excess baggage.”

  We stood up to leave, and I insisted on paying the bill. Outside we exchanged addresses and promised to write, with a dishonesty that made my heart ache. When I got home, I told Auma how the meeting had gone. She looked away for a moment, then broke out with a short, bitter laugh.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I was just thinking about how life is so strange. You know, as soon as the Old Man died, the lawyers contacted all those who might have a claim to the inherita
nce. Unlike my mum, Ruth has all the documents needed to prove who Mark’s father was. So of all of the Old Man’s kids, Mark’s claim is the only one that’s uncontested.”

  Again Auma laughed, and I looked up at the picture hanging on her wall, the same picture pasted inside Ruth’s album, of three brothers and a sister, smiling sweetly for the camera.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  TOWARD THE END OF my second week in Kenya, Auma and I went on a safari.

  Auma wasn’t thrilled with the idea. When I first showed her the brochure, she grimaced and shook her head. Like most Kenyans, she could draw a straight line between the game parks and colonialism. “How many Kenyans do you think can afford to go on a safari?” she asked me. “Why should all that land be set aside for tourists when it could be used for farming? These wazungu care more about one dead elephant than they do for a hundred black children.”

  For several days we parried. I told her she was letting other people’s attitudes prevent her from seeing her own country. She said she didn’t want to waste the money. Eventually she relented, not because of my persuasive powers but because she took pity on me.