by Barack Obama
How to explain the emotions of that day? I can summon each moment in my mind almost frame by frame. I remember Auma and myself joining Granny at the afternoon market, the same clearing where the matatu had first dropped us off, only now full of women who sat on straw mats, their smooth brown legs sticking straight out in front of them from under wide skirts; the sound of their laughter as they watched me help Granny pick stems off collard greens that she’d brought from Kisumu, and the nutty-sweet taste of a sugarcane stalk that one of the women put into my hand. I remember the rustle of corn leaves, the concentration on my uncles’ faces, the smell of our sweat as we mended a hole in the fence bounding the western line of the property. I remember how, in the afternoon, a young boy named Godfrey appeared in the compound, a boy who Auma explained was staying with Granny because his family lived in a village where there was no school; I remember Godfrey’s frantic steps as he chased a big black rooster through the banana and papaya trees, the knot in his young brow as the bird kept flapping out of his reach, the look in his eyes when finally Granny grabbed the rooster from behind with one hand and unceremoniously drew her knife across the bird’s neck—a look that I remembered as my own.
It wasn’t simply joy that I felt in each of these moments. Rather, it was a sense that everything I was doing, every touch and breath and word, carried the full weight of my life; that a circle was beginning to close, so that I might finally recognize myself as I was, here, now, in one place. Only once that afternoon would I feel that mood broken, when, on our way back from the market, Auma ran ahead to get her camera, leaving Granny and me alone in the middle of the road. After a long pause, Granny looked at me and smiled. “Halo!” she said. “Musawa!” I said. Our mutual vocabulary exhausted, we stared ruefully down at the dirt until Auma finally returned. And Granny then turned to Auma and said, in a tone I could understand, that it pained her not to be able to speak to the son of her son.
“Tell her I’d like to learn Luo, but it’s hard to find time in the States,” I said. “Tell her how busy I am.”
“She understands that,” Auma said. “But she also says that a man can never be too busy to know his own people.”
I looked at Granny, and she nodded at me, and I knew then that at some point the joy I was feeling would pass and that that, too, was part of the circle: the fact that my life was neither tidy nor static, and that even after this trip hard choices would always remain.
Night fell quickly, the wind making swift tracks through the darkness. Bernard, Roy, and I went to the water tank and bathed ourselves in the open air, our soapy bodies glowing from the light of an almost full moon. When we returned to the house, the food was waiting for us, and we ate purposefully, without words. After dinner, Roy left, muttering that he had some people he wanted to visit. Yusuf went to his hut and brought back an old transistor radio that he said had once belonged to our grandfather. Fiddling with the knob, he caught a scratchy BBC newscast, fading in and out of range, the voices like hallucinatory fragments from another world. A moment later we heard a strange, low-pitched moan off in the distance.
“The night runners must be out tonight,” Auma said.
“What are night runners?”
“They’re like warlocks,” Auma said. “Spirit men. When we were children, these people here”—she pointed at Granny and Zeituni—would tell us stories about them to make us behave. They told us that in daylight the night runners are like ordinary men. You might pass them in the market, or even have them to your house for a meal, and never know their true natures. But at night they take on the shape of leopards and speak to all the animals. The most powerful night runners can leave their bodies and fly to faraway places. Or hex you with only a glance. If you ask our neighbors, they will tell you that there are still many night runners around here.”
“Auma! You act as if it is not true!”
In the flickering light of the kerosene lamp, I couldn’t tell if Zeituni was joking. “Let me tell you, Barry,” she said, “When I was young the night runners caused people many problems. They would steal our goats. Sometimes they took even our cattle. Only your grandfather was not afraid of them. I remember one time he heard his goats bleating in their pen, and when he went to check on them, he saw what looked like a huge leopard standing on its hind legs, like a man. It had a baby goat in its jaws, and when it saw your grandfather, it cried out in Luo before running into the forest. Your grandfather chased it deep into the hills, but just as he was about to strike it with his panga, the night runner flew up into the trees. Luckily, it dropped the goat when it jumped, and the goat suffered only a broken leg. Your grandfather brought the goat back to the compound and showed me how to make a splint. I cared for that goat myself until it was back to health.”
We became quiet again; lamplight grew low and people began drifting off to bed. Granny brought out blankets and a twin-sized cot for Bernard and me, and we arranged ourselves on the narrow bed before blowing out the lamp. My body ached from exhaustion; inside Granny’s bedroom, I could hear the murmur of her and Auma talking. I wondered where Roy had gone to, and thought about the yellow tiles on the Old Man’s grave.
“Barry,” Bernard whispered. “Are you awake?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you believe what Zeituni told you? About night runners?”
“I don’t know.”
“Myself, I think there is no such thing as a night runner. They are probably just thieves who use these stories to make people afraid.”
“You may be right.”
There was a long pause.
“Barry?”
“What?”
“What made you finally come home?”
“I’m not sure, Bernard. Something told me it was time.”
Bernard rolled over onto his side without answering. A moment later, I heard his soft snores beside me, and I opened my eyes to the darkness, waiting for Roy to return.
In the morning, Sayid and Yusuf suggested that Auma and I take a tour of the lands. As we followed them across the backyard and down a dirt path, through fields of corn and millet, Yusuf turned to me and said, “It must seem very primitive to you, compared to farms in America.”
I told him that I didn’t know much about farming but that, as far as I could tell, the land seemed quite fertile.
“Yes, yes,” Yusuf said, nodding. “The land is good. The problem is that people here are uneducated. They don’t understand much about development. Proper agricultural techniques and so forth. I try to explain to them about capital improvements and irrigation, but they refuse to listen. The Luo are very stubborn in this way.”
I noticed Sayid frowning at his brother, but he said nothing. After a few minutes we came to a small, brown stream. Sayid shouted out a warning, and two young women emerged on the opposite bank, wrapped in their kangas, their hair still gleaming from their morning baths. They smiled shyly and stepped behind an island of rushes, and Sayid pointed to the hedges running alongside the water.
“This is where the land ends,” he said. “Before, when my father lived, the fields were much bigger. But as my mother said, much of the land has now been given away.”
Yusuf decided to go back at this point, but Sayid led Auma and me along the stream for a while, then across more fields, past the occasional compound. In front of some huts, we saw women sorting through millet spread across square strips of cloth, and we stopped to talk to one of them, a middle-aged woman in a faded red dress and red, laceless sneakers. She set aside her work to shake our hands and told us that she remembered our father—they had herded goats together as children, she said. When Auma asked how life had been treating her, she shook her head slowly.
“Things have changed,” she said in a flat voice. “The young men leave for the city. Only the old men, women, and children remain. All the wealth has left us.” As she spoke, an old man with a rickety bicycle came up beside us, then a spindly man whose breath smelled of liquor. They immediately picked up the woman’s refrain about th
e hardness of life in Alego, and the children who had left them behind. They asked if we might give them something to tide them over, and Auma dropped a few shillings into each of their hands before we excused ourselves and started back toward the house.
“What’s happened here, Sayid?” Auma said after we were out of earshot. “There never used to be such begging.”
Sayid leaned down and cleared away a few fallen branches from between the rows of corn. “You are right,” he said. “I believe they have learned this thing from those in the city. People come back from Nairobi or Kisumu and tell them, ‘You are poor.’ So now we have this idea of poverty. We didn’t have this idea before. You look at my mother. She will never ask for anything. She has always something that she is doing. None of it brings her much money, but it is something, you see. It gives her pride. Anyone could do the same, but many people here, they prefer to give up.”
“What about Yusuf?” Auma asked. “Couldn’t he do more?”
Sayid shook his head. “My brother, he talks like a book, but I’m afraid he does not like to lead by example.”
Auma turned to me. “You know, Yusuf was doing really well for a time. He did well in school, didn’t he, Sayid? He received several good job offers. Then, I don’t know what happened. He just dropped out. Now he just stays here with Granny, doing small chores for her. It’s as if he’s afraid to try to succeed.”
Sayid nodded. “I think perhaps education doesn’t do us much good unless it is mixed with sweat.”
I thought about what Sayid had said as we continued to walk. Perhaps he was right; perhaps the idea of poverty had been imported to this place, a new standard of need and want that was carried like measles, by me, by Auma, by Yusuf’s archaic radio. To say that poverty was just an idea wasn’t to say that it wasn’t real; the people we’d just met couldn’t ignore the fact that some people had indoor toilets or ate meat every day, any more than the children of Altgeld could ignore the fast cars and lavish homes that flashed across their television sets.
But perhaps they could fight off the notion of their own helplessness. Sayid was telling us about his own life now: his disappointment at having never gone to the university, like his older brothers, for lack of funds; his work in the National Youth Corps, assigned to development projects around the country, a three-year stint that was now coming to an end. He had spent his last two holidays knocking on the doors of various businesses in Nairobi, so far without any success. Still, he seemed undaunted by his circumstances, certain that persistence would eventually pay off.
“To get a job these days, even as a clerk, requires that you know somebody,” Sayid said as we approached Granny’s compound. “Or you must grease the palm of some person very heavily. That’s why I would like to start my own business. Something small only. But mine. That was your father’s error, I think. For all his brilliance, he never had something of his own.” He thought for a moment. “Of course, there’s no point wasting time worrying about the mistakes of the past, am I correct? Like this dispute over your father’s inheritance. From the beginning, I have told my sisters to forget this thing. We must get on with our lives. They do not listen to me, though. And in the meantime, the money they fight over goes where? To the lawyers. The lawyers are eating very well off this case, I believe. How does the saying go? When two locusts fight, it is always the crow who feasts.”
“Is that a Luo expression?” I asked. Sayid’s face broke into a bashful smile.
“We have similar expressions in Luo,” he said, “but actually I must admit that I read this particular expression in a book by Chinua Achebe. The Nigerian writer. I like his books very much. He speaks the truth about Africa’s predicament. The Nigerian, the Kenyan—it is the same. We share more than divides us.”
Granny and Roy were sitting outside the house and talking to a man in a heavy suit when we returned. The man turned out to be the principal of the nearby school, and he had stopped to share news from town and enjoy the chicken stew left over from the night before. I noticed that Roy had his bag packed, and asked him where he was going.
“To Kendu Bay,” he said. “The principal here is going that way, so myself, Bernard, and my mum, we’re going to go catch a ride with him and bring Abo back here. You should come, too, and pay your respects to the family there.”
Auma decided to stay back with Granny, but Sayid and I went to gather a change of clothes and piled into the principal’s old jalopy. The drive to Kendu turned out to be several hours long by the main highway; to the west, Lake Victoria appeared intermittently, its still, silver waters tapering off into flat green marsh. By late afternoon we were pulling down Kendu Bay’s main street, a wide, dusty road lined with sand-colored shops. After thanking the principal, we caught a matatu down a maze of side streets, until all signs of town had disappeared and the landscape was once again open pasture and cornfields. At a fork in the road, Kezia signaled for us to get off, and we began walking along a deep, chalk-colored gully at the bottom of which flowed a wide, chocolate-brown river. Along the riverbank, we could see women slapping wet clothes against exposed rock; on a terrace above, a herd of goats chewed on the patches of yellow grass, their black, white, and roan markings like lichen against the earth. We turned down a narrower footpath and came to the entrance of a hedged-in compound. Kezia stopped and pointed to what looked like a random pile of rocks and sticks, saying something to Roy in Luo.
“That’s Obama’s grave,” Roy explained. “Our great-grandfather. All the land around here is called K’Obama—‘Land of the Obama.’ We are Jok’Obama—‘the people of Obama.’ Our great-great-grandfather was raised in Alego, but he moved here when he was still a young man. This is where Obama settled, and where all his children were born.”
“So why did our grandfather go back to Alego?”
Roy turned to Kezia, who shook her head. “You have to ask Granny that question,” Roy said. “My mum thinks maybe he didn’t get along with his brothers. In fact, one of his brothers is still living here. He’s old now, but perhaps we can see him.”
We came to a small wooden house where a tall, handsome woman was sweeping the yard. Behind her, a young shirtless man sat on the porch. The woman shaded her eyes with her forearm and began to wave, and the young man slowly turned our way. Roy went up to shake hands with the woman, whose name was Salina, and the young man stood up to greet us.
“Eh, you people finally came for me,” Abo said, hugging each of us in turn. He reached for his shirt. “I had heard you were coming with Barry so long ago!”
“Yah, you know how it is,” Roy said. “It took us a while to get organized.”
“I’m just glad you came. I’m telling you, I need to get back to Nairobi.”
“You don’t like it here, eh?”
“It’s so boring, man, you would not believe it. No TV. No clubs. These people in the country, I think they are slow. If Billy hadn’t shown up, I would have gone crazy for sure.”
“Billy’s here?”
“Yah, he’s around somewhere….” Abo waved his hand vaguely, then turned to me and smiled. “So, Barry. What have you brought me from America?”
I reached into my bag and pulled out one of the portable cassette players that I had bought for him and Bernard. He turned it over in his hands with a thinly disguised look of disappointment.
“This brand is not a Sony, is it?” he said. Then, looking up, he quickly recovered himself and slapped me on the back. “That’s okay, Barry. Thank you! Thank you.”
I nodded at him, trying not to get angry. He was standing beside Bernard and their resemblance was striking: the same height, the same slender frame, the same smooth, even features. Just shave off Abo’s mustache, I thought to myself, and they could almost Pass as twins. Except for…what? The look in Abo’s eyes. That was it. Not just the telltale redness of some sort of high but something deeper, something that reminded me of young men back in Chicago. An element of guardedness, perhaps, and calculation. The look of someone who reali
zes early in life that he has been wronged.
We followed Salina inside the house, and she brought in a tray of sodas and biscuits. As she set down the tray, a strapping, mustached young man, as good-looking as Salina and as tall as Roy, walked through the door and let out a yell.
“Roy! What are you doing here?”
Roy stood up and they embraced. “You know me. Just looking for a meal. I should ask you the same thing.”
“Me, I am only visiting my mother. If I don’t come so often, she begins to complain.” He kissed Salina on the cheek and took my hand in a crushing handshake. “So I see you’ve brought my American cousin! I’ve heard so much about you, Barry, I cannot believe you are now here.” He turned to Salina. “Have you given Barry food?”
“Soon, Billy. Soon.” Salina took Kezia’s hand and turned to Roy. “You see what mothers must put up with? How is your granny, anyway?”
“Same.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “That is not so bad,” she said.
Together with Kezia, she went out of the room, and Billy fell onto the couch beside Roy.
“So, you still crazy, bwana? Look at you now! Well-fed, like a prize bull! You must be enjoying yourself in the States.”
“It’s okay,” Roy said. “How’s Mombasa? I hear you’re working at the post office.”
Billy shrugged. “The pay is all right. Not too much thinking, you know, but steady.” He turned to me. “Let me tell you, Barry, this brother of yours, he was wild! Truthfully, we were all wild back then. We spent most of our time chasing the bush meat, eh Roy!” He slapped Roy on the thigh and laughed. “So tell me, how are these American women?”
Roy laughed, but he seemed relieved when Salina and Kezia brought in dinner. “You see, Barry,” Billy said, setting down his plate on the low table in front of him, “your father and my father were age-mates. Very close. When Roy and I were growing up, we were also age-mates, so naturally we became very close. Let me tell you, your father, he was a very great man. I was closer to him than to my own father. If I was in trouble, it was my Uncle Barack that I went to first. And Roy, you would also go to my father, I believe.”