Dreams from My Father

confusion, because my image of him remained so contradictory—sometimes one thing, sometimes another, but never the two things at once—I would find myself, at random moments in the day, feeling as if I was living out a preordained script, as if I were following him into error, a captive to his tragedy.
    Then there were my problems with Marty. We had officially separated our respective efforts that spring; since then he’d been spending most of his time with the suburban churches, where it turned out that parishioners, black and white, were less concerned about jobs than they were about the same pattern of white flight and dropping property values that had swept through the South Side a decade before.
    These were difficult issues, rife with the racialism and delicacy that Marty found so distasteful. So he had decided to move on. He had hired another organizer to do most of the day-to-day work in the suburbs and was now busy starting a new organization in Gary, a city where the economy had long ago collapsed—where things were so bad, Marty said, that no one would care about the color of an organizer. One day, he asked me to come with him.
    “This is a bad training situation for you,” he explained. “The South Side’s too big. Too many distractions. It’s not your fault. I should have known better.”
    “I can’t just leave, Marty. I just got here.”
    He looked at me with infinite patience. “Listen, Barack, your loyalty is admirable. But right now you need to worry about your own development. Stay here and you’re bound to fail. You’ll give up organizing before you gave it a real shot.”
    He had it all worked out in his head: how much time it would take to hire and train a replacement for me, the need to leave a respectable budget in place. As I listened to him lay out his plans, it occurred to me that he’d made no particular attachments to people or place during his three years in the area, that whatever human warmth or connection he might require came from elsewhere: from his gracious wife, from his handsome young son. In his work, it was only the idea that drove him, the idea that a closed plant symbolized but that was larger than the plant, larger than Angela or Will or the lonely priests who had agreed to work with him. That idea might take spark anywhere; for Marty, it was simply a matter of finding the right combination of circumstances, the right mix of compounds.
    “Marty.”
    “What?”
    “I’m not going anywhere.”
    We had eventually come to an agreement: He would provide me the consultation I still desperately needed; the fee he received would help subsidize his work elsewhere. In our weekly meetings, though, he would remind me of the choice I’d made, that there was no risk in my modest accomplishments, that the men in fancy suits downtown were still calling all the shots. “Life is short, Barack,” he would say. “If you’re not trying to really change things out here, you might as well forget it.”
    Ah, yes.
Real
change. It had seemed like such an attainable goal back in college, an extension of my personal will and my mother’s faith, like boosting my grade point average or giving up liquor: a matter of taking and assigning responsibility. Only now, after a year of organizing, nothing seemed simple. Who was responsible for a place like Altgeld? I found myself asking. There were no cigar-chomping crackers like Bull Connor out there, no club-wielding Pinkerton thugs. Just a small band of older black men and women, a group characterized less by malice or calculation than by fear and small greeds. People like Mr. Anderson, the Altgeld project manager, a balding, older man one year short of retirement. Or Mrs. Reece, a plump woman with a pincushion face who was president of the official tenant council and spent most of her time protecting the small prerogatives that came with her office: a stipend and a seat at the yearly banquet; the ability to see that her daughter got a choice apartment, her nephew a job in the CHA bureaucracy. Or Reverend Johnson, Mrs. Reece’s pastor and head of the only large church in Altgeld, who, the first and only time that we met, had stopped me the minute I mentioned the word
organizing
.
    “CHA ain’t the problem,” the good reverend had said. “Problem is these young girls out here, engaging in all manner of fornication.”
    Some tenants in Altgeld would tell me that Mr. Anderson didn’t repair the apartments of anybody who opposed Mrs.