Barack Obama Dreams from My Father

for change.

In talking to self-professed nationalists like Rafiq, though, I came to see how the blanket indictment of

everything white served a central function in their message of uplift; how, psychologically, at least, one

depended on the other. For when the nationalist spoke of a reawakening of values as the only solution to

black poverty, he was expressing an implicit, if not explicit, criticism to black listeners: that we did not have

to live as we did. And while there were those who could take such an unadorned message and use it to hew

out a new life for themselves-those with the stolid dispositions that Booker T. Washington had once

demanded from his followers-in the ears of many blacks such talk smacked of the explanations that whites

had always offered for black poverty: that we continued to suffer from, if not genetic inferiority, then cultural

weakness. It was a message that ignored causality or fault, a message outside history, without a script or

plot that might insist on progression. For a people already stripped of their history, a people often ill

equipped to retrieve that history in any form other than what fluttered across the television screen, the

testimony of what we saw every day seemed only to confirm our worst suspicions about ourselves.

Nationalism provided that history, an unambiguous morality tale that was easily communicated and

easily grasped. A steady attack on the white race, the constant recitation of black people’s brutal experience

in this country, served as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal and communal responsibility

from tipping into an ocean of despair. Yes, the nationalist would say, whites are responsible for your sorry

state, not any inherent flaws in you. In fact, whites are so heartless and devious that we can no longer

expect anything from them. The self-loathing you feel, what keeps you drinking or thieving, is planted by

them. Rid them from your mind and find your true power liberated. Rise up, ye mighty race!

This process of displacement, this means of engaging in self-criticism while removing ourselves from

the object of criticism, helped explain the much-admired success of the Nation of Islam in turning around the

lives of drug addicts and criminals. But if it was especially well suited to those at the bottom rungs of

American life, it also spoke to all the continuing doubts of the lawyer who had run hard for the gold ring yet

still experienced the awkward silence when walking into the clubhouse; those young college students who

warily measured the distance between them and life on Chicago’s mean streets, with the danger that

distance implied; all the black people who, it turned out, shared with me a voice that whispered inside them-

“You don’t really belong here.”

In a sense, then, Rafiq was right when he insisted that, deep down, all blacks were potential

nationalists. The anger was there, bottled up and often turned inward. And as I thought about Ruby and her

blue eyes, the teenagers calling each other “nigger” and worse, I wondered whether, for now at least, Rafiq

wasn’t also right in preferring that that anger be redirected; whether a black politics that suppressed rage

toward whites generally, or one that failed to elevate race loyalty above all else, was a politics inadequate to

the task.

It was a painful thought to consider, as painful now as it had been years ago. It contradicted the

morality my mother had taught me, a morality of subtle distinctions-between individuals of goodwill and

those who wished me ill, between active malice and ignorance or indifference. I had a personal stake in that

moral framework; I’d discovered that I couldn’t escape it if I tried. And yet perhaps it was a framework that

blacks in this country could no longer afford; perhaps it weakened black resolve, encouraged confusion

within the ranks. Desperate times called for desperate measures, and for many blacks, times were

chronically desperate. If nationalism could create a strong and effective insularity, deliver on its promise of

self-respect, then the hurt it might cause well-meaning whites, or the inner turmoil it caused people like me,

would be of little consequence.

most of my quarrels with Rafiq. Once, after a particularly thorny meeting with MET, I asked him whether he

could turn out his followers if a public showdown with the city became necessary.

“I don’t got time to run around passing out flyers trying to explain everything to the public,” he said.

“Most of the folks out here don’t care one way or another. The ones that do are gonna be double-crossing

Negroes trying to mess things up. Important thing is to get our plan tight and get the city signed on. That’s

how stuff gets done-not with a big crowd and noise and all that. Once we got a done deal, then y’all

announce it any way you like.”

I disagreed with Rafiq’s approach; for all his professed love of black people, he seemed to distrust

them an awful lot. But I also knew his approach was dictated by a lack of capacity: Neither his organization

nor his mosque, I had discovered, could claim a membership of more than fifty persons. His influence arose

not from any strong organizational support but from his willingness to show up at every meeting that

remotely affected Roseland and shout his opponents into submission.

What held true for Rafiq was true throughout the city; without the concentrating effect of Harold’s

campaign, nationalism dissipated into an attitude rather than any concrete program, a collection of

grievances and not an organized force, images and sounds that crowded the airwaves and conversation but

without any corporeal existence. Among the handful of groups to hoist the nationalist banner, only the

Nation of Islam had any significant following: Minister Farrakhan’s sharply cadenced sermons generally

drew a packed house, and still more listened to his radio broadcasts. But the Nation’s active membership in

Chicago was considerably smaller-several thousand, perhaps, roughly the size of one of Chicago’s biggest

black congregations-a base that was rarely, if ever, mobilized around political races or in support of broad-

based programs. In fact, the physical presence of the Nation in the neighborhoods was nominal, restricted

mainly to the clean-cut men in suits and bow ties who stood at the intersections of major thoroughfares

selling the Nation’s newspaper, The Final Call.

I would occasionally pick up the paper from these unfailingly polite men, in part out of sympathy to their

heavy suits in the summer, their thin coats in winter; or sometimes because my attention was caught by the

sensational, tabloid-style headlines (CAUCASIAN WOMAN ADMITS: WHITES ARE THE DEVIL). Inside the

front cover, one found reprints of the minister’s speeches, as well as stories that could have been picked

straight off the AP news wire were it not for certain editorial embellishments (“Jewish Senator Metzenbaum

announced today…”). The paper also carried a health section, complete with Minister Farrakhan’s pork-free

recipes; advertisements for Minister Farrakhan’s speeches on videocassette (VISA or MasterCard

accepted); and promotions for a line of toiletries-toothpaste and the like-that the Nation had launched under

the brand name POWER, part of a strategy to encourage blacks to keep their money within their own

community.

After a time, the ads for POWER products grew less prominent in The Final Call; it seems that many

who enjoyed Minister Farrakhan’s speeches continued to brush their teeth with Crest. That the POWER

campaign sputtered said something about the difficulty that faced any black business-the barriers to entry,

the lack of finance, the leg up that your competitors possessed after having kept you out of the game for

over three hundred years.

But I suspected that it also reflected the inevitable tension that arose when Minister Farrakhan’s

message was reduced to the mundane realities of buying toothpaste. I tried to imagine POWER’s product

manager looking over his sales projections. He might briefly wonder whether it made sense to distribute the

brand in national supermarket chains where blacks preferred to shop. If he rejected that idea, he might

consider whether any black-owned supermarket trying to compete against the national chains could afford

to give shelf space to a product guaranteed to alienate potential white customers. Would black consumers

buy toothpaste through the mail? And what of the likelihood that the cheapest supplier of whatever it was

that went into making toothpaste was a white man?

Questions of competition, decisions forced by a market economy and majoritarian rule; issues of

power. It was this unyielding reality-that whites were not simply phantoms to be expunged from our dreams

but were an active and varied fact of our everyday lives-that finally explained how nationalism could thrive

as an emotion and flounder as a program. So long as nationalism remained a cathartic curse on the white

race, it could win the applause of the jobless teenager listening on the radio or the businessman watching

late-night TV. But the descent from such unifying fervor to the practical choices blacks confronted every day

was steep. Compromises were everywhere. The black accountant asked: How am I going to open an

account at the black-owned bank if it charges me extra for checking and won’t even give me a business

loan because it says it can’t afford the risk? The black nurse said: White folks I work with ain’t so bad, and

even if they were, I can’t be quitting my job-who’s gonna pay my rent tomorrow, or feed my children today?

Rafiq had no ready answers to such questions; he was less interested in changing the rules of power

than in the color of those who had it and who therefore enjoyed its spoils. There was never much room at

the top of the pyramid, though; in a contest framed in such terms, the wait for black deliverance would be

long indeed. During that wait, funny things happened. What in the hands of Malcolm had once seemed a

call to arms, a declaration that we would no longer tolerate the intolerable, came to be the very thing

Malcolm had sought to root out: one more feeder of fantasy, one more mask for hypocrisy, one more

excuse for inaction. Black politicians less gifted than Harold discovered what white politicians had known for

a very long time: that race-baiting could make up for a host of limitations. Younger leaders, eager to make a

name for themselves, upped the ante, peddling conspiracy theories all over town-the Koreans were funding

the Klan, Jewish doctors were injecting black babies with the AIDS virus. It was a shortcut to fame, if not

always fortune; like sex or violence on TV, black rage always found a ready market.

Nobody I spoke with in the neighborhood seemed to take such talk very seriously. As it was, many had

already given up the hope that politics could actually improve their lives, much less make demands on

them; to them, a ballot, if cast at all, was simply a ticket to a good show. Blacks had no real power to act on

the occasional slips into anti-Semitism or Asian-bashing, people would tell me; and anyway, black folks

needed a chance to let off a little steam every once in a while-man, what do you think those folks say about

us behind our backs?

Just talk. Yet what concerned me wasn’t just the damage loose talk caused efforts at coalition building,

or the emotional pain it caused others. It was the distance between our talk and our action, the effect it was

having on us as individuals and as a people. That gap corrupted both language and thought; it made us

forgetful and encouraged fabrication; it eventually eroded our ability to hold either ourselves or each other

accountable. And while none of this was unique to black politicians or to black nationalists-Ronald Reagan

was doing quite well with his brand of verbal legerdemain, and white America seemed ever willing to spend

vast sums of money on suburban parcels and private security forces to deny the indissoluble link between

black and white-it was blacks who could least afford such make-believe. Black survival in this country had

always been premised on a minimum of delusions; it was such an absence of delusions that continued to

operate in the daily lives of most black people I met. Instead of adopting such unwavering honesty in our

public business, we seemed to be loosening our grip, letting our collective psyche go where it pleased, even

as we sank into further despair.

The continuing struggle to align word and action, our heartfelt desires with a workable plan-didn’t self-

esteem finally depend on just this? It was that belief which had led me into organizing, and it was that belief

which would lead me to conclude, perhaps for the final time, that notions of purity-of race or of culture-could

no more serve as the basis for the typical black American’s self-esteem than it could for mine. Our sense of

wholeness would have to arise from something more fine than the bloodlines we’d inherited. It would have

to find root in Mrs. Crenshaw’s story and Mr. Marshall’s story, in Ruby’s story and Rafiq’s; in all the messy,

contradictory details of our experience.
I went away for two weeks to visit my family. When I returned, I called Ruby and told her I needed her

to come to a meeting that Saturday night.

A long pause. “What about?”

“You’ll see. Be ready by six…we’ll grab a bite to eat first.”

Our destination was a full hour away from Ruby’s apartment, in one of the north-side neighborhoods

where jazz and blues had migrated in search of a paying audience. We found a Vietnamese restaurant, and

over a plate of noodles and shrimp we talked about her boss at work, the problems she was having with her

back. The conversation seemed forced, though, without pause or reflection; as we spoke, we kept skirting

each other’s gaze.

By the time we’d paid the restaurant bill and walked next door, the theater was already full. An usher

showed us to our seats, which turned out to be in front of a group of black teenage girls out on a field trip.

Some of the girls diligently thumbed through their programs, taking their cue from the older woman-a

teacher, I assumed-who sat beside them. Most of the girls, though, were too excited to sit still; they

whispered and giggled about the play’s lengthy title and asked questions of their chaperone, who showed

an admirable patience throughout.

The room was suddenly blanketed in darkness, and the girls fell quiet. Then the lights rose, a dim blue

now, and seven black women appeared on the stage dressed in flowing skirts and scarves, their bodies

frozen in awkward contortions. One of them, a big woman dressed in brown, began to cry out:

without rhythm / no tune

distraught laughter fallin’

over a black girl’s shoulder

it’s funny / it’s hysterical

the melody-less-ness of her dance

don’t tell a soul

she’s dancing on beer cans and shingles…

and cream, round and slender, young and not so young, stretching their limbs across the stage.

sing a black girl’s song

bring her out

to know herself

to know you

but sing her rhythms

carin’ / struggle / hard times

sing her song of life…

time and discarded fantasies and what might have been. They sang of the men who loved them, betrayed

them, raped them, embraced them; they sang of the hurt inside these men, hurt that was understood and

sometimes forgiven. They showed each other their stretch marks and the calluses on their feet; they

revealed their beauty in the lilt of their voice, the flutter of a hand, beauty waning, ascendant, elusive. They

wept over the aborted children, the murdered children, the children they once were. And through all of their

songs, violent, angry, sweet, unflinching, the women danced, each of them, double-dutch and rhumba and

bump and solitary waltz; sweat-breaking, heart-breaking dances. They danced until they all seemed one

spirit. At the end of the play, that spirit began to sing a single, simple verse:
I found god in myself

and I loved her / I loved her fiercely

we walked out to the parking lot. The temperature had dropped; the stars glinted like ice against the black

sky. As we waited for the car to warm up, Ruby leaned over and kissed me on the cheek.

“Thanks.”

Her eyes, deep brown, were shimmering. I grabbed her gloved hand and gave it a quick squeeze

before starting to drive. Nothing more was said; for the entire ride back to the South Side, until I left her at

her door and wished her good-night, we never broke that precious silence.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

could. Panting for breath, I spun around several times, my eyes scanning the crowds of Indians, Germans,

Poles, Thais, and Czechs gathering their luggage.

Damn! I knew I should have left earlier. Maybe she had gotten worried and tried to call. Had I given her

my office number? What if she’d missed her flight? What if she had walked right past me and I hadn’t even

known it?

I looked down at the photograph in my hand, the one she had sent me two months earlier, smudged

now from too much handling. Then I looked up, and the picture came to life: an African woman emerging

from behind the customs gate, moving with easy, graceful steps, her bright, searching eyes now fixed on my

own, her dark, round, sculpted face blossoming like a wood rose as she smiled.

“Barack?”

“Auma?”

I lifted my sister off the ground as we embraced, and we laughed and laughed as we looked at each

other. I picked up her bag and we began to walk to the parking garage, and she slipped her arm through

mine. And I knew at that moment, somehow, that I loved her, so naturally, so easily and fiercely, that later,

after she was gone, I would find myself mistrusting that love, trying to explain it to myself. Even now I can’t

explain it; I only know that the love was true, and still is, and I’m grateful for it.

“So, brother,” Auma said as we drove into the city, “you have to tell me everything.”

“About what?”

“Your life, of course.”

“From the beginning?”

“Start anywhere.”

I told her about Chicago and New York, my work as an organizer, my mother and grandparents and

Maya-she had heard so much about them from our father, she said, she felt as if she already knew them.

She described Heidelberg, where she was trying to finish a master’s degree in linguistics, and the trials and

tribulations of living in Germany.

“I have no right to complain, I suppose,” she said. “I have a scholarship, a flat. I don’t know what I

would be doing if I was still in Kenya. Still, I don’t care for Germany so much. You know, the Germans like to

think of themselves as very liberal when it comes to Africans, but if you scratch the surface you see they still

have the attitudes of their childhood. In German fairy tales, black people are always the goblins. Such things

one doesn’t forget so easily. Sometimes I try to imagine what it must have been like for the Old Man,

leaving home for the first time. Whether he felt that same loneliness…”

The Old Man. That’s what Auma called our father. It sounded right to me, somehow, at once familiar

and distant, an elemental force that isn’t fully understood. In my apartment, Auma held up the picture of him

that sat on my bookshelf, a studio portrait that my mother had saved.

“He looks so innocent, doesn’t he? So young.” She held the picture next to my face. “You have the

same mouth.”

I told her she should lie down and get some rest while I went to my office for a few hours of work.

She shook her head. “I’m not tired. Let me go with you.”

“You’ll feel better if you take a nap.”

She said, “Agh, Barack! I see you’re bossy like the Old Man as well. And you only met him once? It

must be in the blood.”

I laughed, but she didn’t; instead, her eyes wandered over my face as if it were a puzzle to solve,

another piece to a problem that, beneath the exuberant chatter, nagged at her heart.

I gave her a tour of the South Side that afternoon, the same drive I had taken in my first days in

Chicago, only with some of my own memories now. When we stopped by my office, Angela, Mona, and

Shirley happened to be there. They asked Auma all about Kenya and how she braided her hair and how

come she talked so pretty, like the queen of England, and the four of them enjoyed themselves thoroughly

talking about me and all my strange habits.

“They seem very fond of you,” Auma said afterward. “They remind me of our aunties back home.” She

rolled down the window and stuck her face into the wind, watching Michigan Avenue pass by: the gutted

remains of the old Roseland Theatre, a garage full of rusted cars. “Are you doing this for them, Barack?”

she asked, turning back to me. “This organizing business, I mean?”

I shrugged. “For them. For me.”

That same expression of puzzlement, and fear, returned to Auma’s face. “I don’t like politics much,”

she said.

“Why’s that?”

“I don’t know. People always end up disappointed.”

There was a letter waiting for her in my mailbox when we got home; it was from a German law student

she said she’d been seeing. The letter was voluminous, at least seven pages long, and as I prepared

dinner, she sat at the kitchen table and laughed and sighed and clicked her tongue, her face suddenly soft

and wistful.

“I thought you didn’t like Germans,” I said.

She rubbed her eyes and laughed. “Yah-Otto is different. He’s so sweet! And sometimes I treat him so

badly! I don’t know, Barack. Sometimes I think it’s just impossible for me to trust anybody completely. I think

of what the Old Man made of his life, and the idea of marriage gives me, how do you say…the shivers. Also,

with Otto and his career, we would have to live in Germany, you see. I start imagining what it would be like

for me, living my entire life as a foreigner, and I don’t think I could take it.”

She folded her letter and put it back in the envelope. “What about you, Barack?” she asked. “Do you

have these problems, or is it just your sister who’s so confused?”

“I think I know what you’re feeling.”