Dreams from My Father

university rented out to its faculty. A huge lawn sloped down from the apartments to meet patches of banana trees and high forest and, farther down, a narrow, murky stream that ran through a wide gully pitted with stones.
    Auma’s apartment, a small but comfortable space with French doors that let sunlight wash through the rooms, was on the first floor. There were stacks of books everywhere, and a collage of photographs hanging on one wall, studio portraits and Polaroid shots, a patchwork of family that Auma had stitched together for herself. Above Auma’s bed, I noticed a large poster of a black woman, her face tilted upward toward an unfolding blossom, the words “I Have a Dream” printed below.
    “So what’s your dream, Auma?” I said, setting down my bags.
    Auma laughed. “That’s my biggest problem, Barack. Too many dreams. A woman with dreams always has problems.”
    My exhaustion from the trip must have showed, because Auma suggested that I take a nap while she went to the university to teach her class. I dropped onto the cot she’d prepared and fell asleep to the buzz of insects outside the window. When I awoke it was dusk and Auma was still gone. From the kitchen, I noticed a troop of black-faced monkeys gathered beneath a banyan tree. The older ones sat warily at the tree’s base watching with knotted brows as pups scampered about through the long, winding roots. Rinsing my face in the sink, I put water on for tea, then opened the door that led into the yard. The monkeys all froze in their tracks; their eyes turned toward me in unison. A few feet away, the air filled with the beat of huge green wings, and I watched the dreamy ascent of a long-necked bird as it sent out a series of deep-throated cries and drifted toward distant canopies.
             
    We decided to stay in that night, cooking stew and catching up on each other’s news. The next morning we walked into town and wandered without any particular destination in mind, just taking in the sights. The city center was smaller than I’d expected, with much of the colonial architecture still intact: row after row of worn, whitewashed stucco from the days when Nairobi was little more than an outpost to service British railway construction. Alongside these buildings, another city emerged, a city of high-rise offices and elegant shops, hotels with lobbies that seemed barely distinguishable from their counterparts in Singapore or Atlanta. It was an intoxicating, elusive mixture, a contrast that seemed to repeat itself wherever we went: in front of the Mercedes-Benz dealership, where a train of Masai women passed by on the way to market, their heads shaven clean, their slender bodies wrapped in red
shukas,
their earlobes elongated and ringed with bright beads; or at the entrance to an open-air mosque, where we watched a group of bank officers carefully remove their wing-tipped shoes and bathe their feet before joining farmers and ditchdiggers in afternoon prayer. It was as if Nairobi’s history refused to settle in orderly layers, as if what was then and what was now fell in constant, noisy collision.
    We wandered into the old marketplace, a cavernous building that smelled of ripe fruit and a nearby butchery. A passage to the rear of the building led into a maze of open-air stalls where merchants hawked fabrics, baskets, brass jewelry, and other curios. I stopped in front of one of them, where a set of small wooden carvings was set out for display. I recognized the figures as my father’s long-ago gift to me: elephants, lions, drummers in tribal headdress. They are only small things, the Old Man had said….
    “Come, mister,” the young man who was minding the stall said to me. “A beautiful necklace for your wife.”
    “This is my sister.”
    “She is a very beautiful sister. Come, this is nice for her.”
    “How much?”
    “Only five hundred shillings. Beautiful.”
    Auma frowned and said something to the man in Swahili. “He’s giving you the
wazungu
price,” she explained. “The white man’s price.”
    The young man smiled. “I’m very sorry, sister,” he said. “For a Kenyan, the price is three hundred only.”
    Inside the stall, an old woman who was stringing glass beads together pointed at me and said something that made Auma smile.
    “What’d she say?”
    “She says that you look like an American to her.”
    “Tell her I’m Luo,” I said, beating my chest.
    The old woman laughed and asked Auma my name. The