Dreams from My Father

my place as lead organizer—and maybe, too, because he was my friend and I needed to explain myself. Except Johnnie hadn’t seen the need for explanations. The minute I told him the schools to which I’d applied—Harvard, Yale, Stanford—he had grinned and slapped me on the back.
    “I
knew
it!” he shouted.
    “Knew what?”
    “That it was just a matter of time, Barack. Before you were outta here.”
    “Why’d you think that?”
    Johnnie shook his head and laughed. “Damn, Barack…’cause you got
options,
that’s why. ’Cause you
can
leave. I mean, I know you’re a conscientious brother and all that, but when somebody’s got a choice between Harvard and Roseland, it’s only so long somebody’s gonna keep choosing Roseland.” Again he shook his head. “Harvard! Goddamn. I just hope you remember your friends when you up in that fancy office downtown.”
    For some reason, Johnnie’s laughter had made me defensive. I insisted that I would be coming back to the neighborhood. I told him that I didn’t plan on being dazzled by the wealth and power that Harvard represented, and that he shouldn’t be either. Johnnie put his hands up in mock surrender.
    “Hey, you don’t need to be telling
me
all this. I ain’t the one going nowhere.”
    I grew quiet, embarrassed by my outburst. “Yeah, well…I’m just saying that I’ll be back, that’s all. I don’t want you or the leaders to get the wrong idea.”
    Johnnie smiled gently. “Ain’t nobody gonna get the wrong idea, Barack. Man, we’re just proud to see you succeed.”
    The sun was now slipping behind a cloud; a couple of the old cardplayers pulled on the windbreakers they had hung on the backs of their chairs. I lit a cigarette and tried to decipher that conversation with Johnnie. Had he doubted my intentions? Or was it just me that mistrusted myself? It seemed like I had gone over my decision at least a hundred times. I needed a break, that was for sure. I wanted to go to Kenya: Auma was already back in Nairobi, teaching at the university for a year; it would be an ideal time for an extended visit.
    And I had things to learn in law school, things that would help me bring about real change. I would learn about interest rates, corporate mergers, the legislative process; about the way businesses and banks were put together; how real estate ventures succeeded or failed. I would learn power’s currency in all its intricacy and detail, knowledge that would have compromised me before coming to Chicago but that I could now bring back to where it was needed, back to Roseland, back to Altgeld; bring it back like Promethean fire.
    That’s the story I had been telling myself, the same story I imagined my father telling himself twenty-eight years before, as he had boarded the plane to America, the land of dreams. He, too, had probably believed he was acting out some grand design, that he wasn’t simply fleeing from possible inconsequence. And, in fact, he had returned to Kenya, hadn’t he? But only as a divided man, his plans, his dreams, soon turned to dust….
    Would the same thing happen to me? Maybe Johnnie was right; maybe once you stripped away the rationalizations, it always came down to a simple matter of escape. An escape from poverty or boredom or crime or the shackles of your skin. Maybe, by going to law school, I’d be repeating a pattern that had been set in motion centuries before, the moment white men, themselves spurred on by their own fears of inconsequence, had landed on Africa’s shores, bringing with them their guns and blind hunger, to drag away the conquered in chains. That first encounter had redrawn the map of black life, recentered its universe, created the very idea of escape—an idea that lived on in Frank and those other old black men who had found refuge in Hawaii; in green-eyed Joyce back at Occidental, just wanting to be an individual; in Auma, torn between Germany and Kenya; in Roy, finding out that he couldn’t start over. And here, in the South Side, among members of Reverend Philips’s church, some of whom had probably marched alongside Dr. King, believing then that they marched for a higher purpose, for rights and for principles and for all God’s children, but who at some point had realized that power was unyielding and principles unstable, and that even after laws were passed and lynchings ceased, the closest thing to freedom would still involve escape, emotional if not physical, away from ourselves, away