Dreams from My Father

swimming lessons, they said; Jewel would dance ballet.
    Sometimes, listening to such innocent dreams, I would find myself fighting off the urge to gather up these girls and their babies in my arms, to hold them all tight and never let go. The girls would sense that impulse, I think, and Linda, with her dark, striking beauty, would smile at Bernadette and ask me why I wasn’t already married.
    “Haven’t found the right woman, I guess,” I would say.
    And Bernadette would slap Linda on the arm, saying, “Stop it! You making Mr. Obama blush.” And they would both start to laugh, and I would realize that in my own way, I must have seemed as innocent to them as they both seemed to me.
    My plan for the parents was simple. We didn’t yet have the power to change state welfare policy, or create local jobs, or bring substantially more money into the schools. But what we could do was begin to improve basic services in Altgeld—get the toilets fixed, the heaters working, the windows repaired. A few victories there, and I imagined the parents forming the nucleus of a genuinely independent tenants’ organization. With that strategy in mind, I passed out a set of complaint forms at the next full parents’ meeting, asking everyone to canvass the block where they lived. They agreed to the plan, but when the meeting was over, one of the parents, a woman named Sadie Evans, approached me holding a small newspaper clipping.
    “I saw this in the paper yesterday, Mr. Obama,” Sadie said. “I don’t know if it means anything, but I wanted to see what you thought.”
    It was a legal notice, in small print, run in the classified section. It said that the CHA was soliciting bids from qualified contractors to remove asbestos from Altgeld’s management office. I asked the parents if any of them had been notified about potential asbestos exposure. They shook their heads.
    “You think it’s in our apartments?” Linda asked.
    “I don’t know. But we can find out. Who wants to call Mr. Anderson over at the management office?”
    I glanced around the room, but no hands went up. “Come on, somebody. I can’t make the call. I don’t live here.”
    Finally Sadie raised her hand. “I’ll do it,” she said.
    Sadie wouldn’t have been my first choice. She was a small, slight woman with a squeaky voice that made her seem painfully shy. She wore knee-length dresses and carried a leather-bound Bible wherever she went. Unlike the other parents, she was married, to a young man who worked as a store clerk by day but was training to be a minister; they didn’t associate with people outside their church.
    All this made her something of a misfit in the group, and I wasn’t sure she’d be tough enough to deal with the CHA. But when I got back to the office that day, my secretary passed on the message that Sadie had already set up the appointment with Mr. Anderson and had called all the other parents to let them know. The following morning, I found Sadie standing out in front of the Altgeld management office, looking like an orphan, alone in the clammy mist.
    “Don’t look like anybody else is showing up, does it, Mr. Obama?” she said, looking at her watch.
    “Call me Barack,” I said. “Listen, do you still want to go through with this? If you’re not comfortable, we can reschedule the meeting until we have some other parents.”
    “I don’t know. Do you think I can get in trouble?”
    “I think you’ve got the right to information that could affect your health. But that doesn’t mean Mr. Anderson is gonna think so. I’ll stand behind you, and so will the other parents, but you need to do what makes sense for you.”
    Sadie pulled her overcoat tightly around herself and looked again at her watch. “We shouldn’t keep Mr. Anderson waiting,” she said, and plunged through the door.
    From the expression on Mr. Anderson’s face when we walked into his office, it was clear that I hadn’t been expected. He offered us a seat and asked us if we wanted some coffee.
    “No thank you,” Sadie said. “I really appreciate you seeing us on such short notice.” With her coat still on, she pulled out the legal notice and set it carefully on Mr. Anderson’s desk. “Some of the parents at the school saw this in the paper, and we were worried…well, we wondered if this asbestos maybe was in our apartments.”
    Mr. Anderson glanced at the notice, then set it aside. “This is nothing to worry about, Mrs. Evans,” he said.