Dreams from My Father

image of the Old Man or my image of Africa. Until I settled on the fact that this man from Senegal had bought me coffee and offered me water, and that was real, and maybe that was all any of us had a right to expect: the chance encounter, a shared story, the act of small kindness….
    The airplane shook with some turbulence; the flight crew came to serve us dinner. I woke up the young Brit, who ate with impressive precision, describing, between bites, what it had been like to grow up in Manchester. Eventually I dozed off into a fitful sleep. When I awoke, the stewardess was passing out customs forms in preparation for landing. Outside it was still dark, but, pressing my face against the glass, I began to see scattered lights, soft and hazy like fireflies, gradually swarming into the shape of a city below. A few minutes later, a slope of rounded hills appeared, black against a long strand of light on the eastern horizon. As we touched down on an African dawn I saw high thin clouds streak the sky, their underbellies glowing with a reddish hue.
             
    Kenyatta International Airport was almost empty. Officials sipped at their morning tea as they checked over passports; in the baggage area, a creaky conveyor belt slowly disgorged luggage. Auma was nowhere in sight, so I took a seat on my carry-on bag and lit a cigarette. After a few minutes, a security guard with a wooden club started to walk toward me. I looked around for an ashtray, thinking I must be in a no-smoking area, but instead of scolding me, the guard smiled and asked if I had another cigarette to spare.
    “This is your first trip to Kenya, yes?” he asked as I gave him a light.
    “That’s right.”
    “I see.” He squatted down beside me. “You are from America. You know my brother’s son, perhaps. Samson Otieno. He is studying engineering in Texas.”
    I told him that I’d never been to Texas and so hadn’t had the opportunity to meet his nephew. This seemed to disappoint him, and he took several puffs from his cigarette in quick succession. By this time, the last of the other passengers on my flight had left the terminal. I asked the guard if any more bags were coming. He shook his head doubtfully.
    “I don’t think so,” he said, “but if you will just wait here, I will find someone who can help you.”
    He disappeared around a narrow corridor, and I stood up to stretch my back. The rush of anticipation had drained away, and I smiled with the memory of the homecoming I had once imagined for myself, clouds lifting, old demons fleeing, the earth trembling as ancestors rose up in celebration. Instead I felt tired and abandoned. I was about to search for a telephone when the security guard reappeared with a strikingly beautiful woman, dark, slender, close to six feet tall, dressed in a British Airways uniform. She introduced herself as Miss Omoro and explained that my bag had probably been sent on to Johannesburg by mistake.
    “I’m awfully sorry about the inconvenience,” she said. “If you will just fill out this form, we can call Johannesburg and have it delivered to you as soon as the next flight comes in.”
    I completed the form and Miss Omoro gave it the once-over before looking back at me. “You wouldn’t be related to Dr. Obama, by any chance?” she asked.
    “Well, yes—he was my father.”
    Miss Omoro smiled sympathetically. “I’m very sorry about his passing. Your father was a close friend of my family’s. He would often come to our house when I was a child.”
    We began to talk about my visit, and she told me of her studies in London, as well as her interest in traveling to the States. I found myself trying to prolong the conversation, encouraged less by Miss Omoro’s beauty—she had mentioned a fiancé—than by the fact that she’d recognized my name. That had never happened before, I realized; not in Hawaii, not in Indonesia, not in L.A. or New York or Chicago. For the first time in my life, I felt the comfort, the firmness of identity that a name might provide, how it could carry an entire history in other people’s memories, so that they might nod and say knowingly, “Oh, you are so and so’s son.” No one here in Kenya would ask how to spell my name, or mangle it with an unfamiliar tongue. My name belonged and so I belonged, drawn into a web of relationships, alliances, and grudges that I did not yet understand.
    “Barack!” I turned to see Auma jumping up and down behind another guard, who