Dreams from My Father

not before one of the boys had sent the stone in his hand sailing over the fence. Toot’s eyes followed the stone’s trajectory as it came to rest at the foot of a tree. And there she saw the cause for all the excitement: my mother and a black girl of about the same age lying side by side on their stomachs in the grass, their skirts gathered up above their knees, their toes dug into the ground, their heads propped up on their hands in front of one of my mother’s books. From a distance the two girls seemed perfectly serene beneath the leafy shade. It was only when Toot opened the gate that she realized the black girl was shaking and my mother’s eyes shone with tears. The girls remained motionless, paralyzed in their fear, until Toot finally leaned down and put her hands on both their heads.
    “If you two are going to play,” she said, “then for goodness sake, go on inside. Come on. Both of you.” She picked up my mother and reached for the other girl’s hand, but before she could say anything more, the girl was in a full sprint, her long legs like a whippet’s as she vanished down the street.
    Gramps was beside himself when he heard what had happened. He interrogated my mother, wrote down names. The next day he took the morning off from work to visit the school principal. He personally called the parents of some of the offending children to give them a piece of his mind. And from every adult that he spoke to, he received the same response:
    “You best talk to your daughter, Mr. Dunham. White girls don’t play with coloreds in this town.”
             
    It’s hard to know how much weight to give to these episodes, what permanent allegiances were made or broken, or whether they stand out only in the light of subsequent events. Whenever he spoke to me about it, Gramps would insist that the family left Texas in part because of their discomfort with such racism. Toot would be more circumspect; once, when we were alone, she told me that they had moved from Texas only because Gramps wasn’t doing particularly well on his job, and because a friend in Seattle had promised him something better. According to her, the word
racism
wasn’t even in their vocabulary back then. “Your grandfather and I just figured we should treat people decently, Bar. That’s all.”
    She’s wise that way, my grandmother, suspicious of overwrought sentiments or overblown claims, content with common sense. Which is why I tend to trust her account of events; it corresponds to what I know about my grandfather, his tendency to rewrite his history to conform with the image he wished for himself.
    And yet I don’t entirely dismiss Gramps’s recollection of events as a convenient bit of puffery, another act of white revisionism. I can’t, precisely because I know how strongly Gramps believed in his fictions, how badly he wanted them to be true, even if he didn’t always know how to make them so. After Texas I suspect that black people became a part of these fictions of his, the narrative that worked its way through his dreams. The condition of the black race, their pain, their wounds, would in his mind become merged with his own: the absent father and the hint of scandal, a mother who had gone away, the cruelty of other children, the realization that he was no fair-haired boy—that he looked like a “wop.” Racism was part of that past, his instincts told him, part of convention and respectability and status, the smirks and whispers and gossip that had kept him on the outside looking in.
    Those instincts count for something, I think; for many white people of my grandparents’ generation and background, the instincts ran in an opposite direction, the direction of the mob. And although Gramps’s relationship with my mother was already strained by the time they reached Hawaii—she would never quite forgive his instability and often-violent temper and would grow ashamed of his crude, ham-fisted manners—it was this desire of his to obliterate the past, this confidence in the possibility of remaking the world from whole cloth, that proved to be his most lasting patrimony. Whether Gramps realized it or not, the sight of his daughter with a black man offered at some deep unexplored level a window into his own heart.
    Not that such self-knowledge, even if accessible, would have made my mother’s engagement any easier for him to swallow. In fact, how and when the marriage occurred remains a bit murky, a bill of particulars