Dreams from My Father

position behind him, smiling widely for the photographers they’d hired. The ribbon was cut, and that was it. As the limousine sped away to the next event, the crowd dispersed almost instantly, leaving just a few of us standing in the litter-blown road.
    I walked over to Angela, who was busy talking to Shirley and Mona. “When I heard him say ‘Ms. Rider,’” she was saying, “I swear I just about died.”
    Shirley shook her head. “Girl, don’t I know it.”
    “We got the pictures to prove it,” Mona said, holding up her Instamatic camera.
    I tried to break in. “Did we get a date for the rally?”
    “So then he tells me that I look too young to have a fourteen-year-old daughter. Can you imagine?”
    “Did he agree to come to our rally?” I repeated.
    The three of them looked at me impatiently. “What rally?”
    I threw up my hands and started stomping down the street. As I reached my car, I heard Will coming up from behind.
    “Where you off to in such a hurry?” he said.
    “I don’t know. Somewhere.” I tried to light a cigarette, but the wind kept blowing out the match. I cursed, tossing the matches to the ground, and turned to Will. “You wanna know something, Will?”
    “What.”
    “We’re trifling. That’s what we are. Trifling. Here we are, with a chance to show the mayor that we’re real players in the city, a group he needs to take seriously. So what do we do? We act like a bunch of starstruck children, that’s what. Standing around, cheesing and grinning, worrying about whether we got a picture taken with him—”
    “You mean you didn’t get yourself a picture?” Will smiled cheerfully and held up a Polaroid shot, then put a hand on my shoulder. “You mind if I tell you something, Barack? You need to lighten up a little bit. What you call trifling was the most fun Angela and them have had all year. Ten years from now, they’ll still be bragging about it. It made ’em feel important. And you made it happen. So what if they forgot to invite Harold to a rally? We can always call him back.”
    I climbed into my car and rolled down the window. “Forget it, Will. I’m just frustrated.”
    “Yeah, I can see that. But you should be asking yourself
why
you so frustrated.”
    “Why do you think?”
    Will shrugged. “I think you’re just trying to do a good job. But I also think you ain’t never satisfied. You want everything to happen fast. Like you got something to prove out here.”
    “I’m not trying to prove anything, Will.” I started the car and began to pull away, but not fast enough to avoid hearing Will’s parting words.
    “You don’t have to prove nothing to us, Barack. We love you, man. Jesus loves you!”
             
    Almost a year had passed since my arrival in Chicago, and our labor had finally begun to bear fruit. Will’s and Mary’s street corner group had grown to fifty strong; they organized neighborhood cleanups, sponsored career days for area youth, won agreements from the alderman to improve sanitation services. Farther north, Mrs. Crenshaw and Mrs. Stevens had pressed the Park District into overhauling run-down parks and playlots; work there had already begun. Streets had been repaired, sewers rooted, crime-watch programs instituted. And now the new job intake center, where once only an empty storefront had been.
    As the organization’s stock had grown, so had my own. I began receiving invitations to sit on panels and conduct workshops; local politicians knew my name, even if they still couldn’t pronounce it. As far as our leadership was concerned, I could do little wrong. “You should have seen him when he first got here,” I’d overhear Shirley tell a new leader one day. “He was just a boy. I swear, you look at him now, you’d think he was a different person.” She spoke like a proud parent: I’d become a sort of surrogate prodigal son.
    The appreciation of those you worked with, concrete improvements in the neighborhood, things you could hang a price tag on. It should have been enough. And yet what Will had said was true. I wasn’t satisfied.
    Maybe it was connected to Auma’s visit and the news she had brought of the Old Man. Where once I’d felt the need to live up to his expectations, I now felt as if I had to make up for all his mistakes. Only the nature of those mistakes still wasn’t clear in my mind; I still couldn’t read the signposts that might warn me away from the wrong turns he’d taken. Because of that