Dreams from My Father

though I told him that this gossip was not true. Or maybe he just cared for Ruth more than he liked to admit.
    Whatever the reason, I know that once Barack agreed to marry Ruth, she could not accept the idea of his having Kezia as a second wife. That is how the children went to live with their father and his new wife in Nairobi. When Barack brought Auma and Roy back to visit, Ruth would refuse to accompany him and would not let Barack bring David or Mark. Onyango did not discuss this directly with Barack. But he would say to his friends, in such a way that Barack could hear him, “My son is a big man, but when he comes home his mother must cook for him instead of his wife.”
    The others have told you what happened to your father in Nairobi. We saw him rarely, and he would usually stay only a short time. Whenever he came, he would bring us expensive gifts and money and impress all the people with his big car and fine clothes. But your grandfather continued to speak harshly to him, as if he were a boy. Onyango was now very old. He walked with a cane and was almost blind. He could not even bathe without my help, which I think caused him shame. But age did not soften his temper.
    Later, when Barack fell from power, he would try to hide his problems from the old man. He continued to bring gifts that he could no longer afford, although we noticed that he arrived in a taxi instead of in his own car. Only to me would he confide his unhappiness and disappointments. I would tell him he was too stubborn in his dealings with the government. He would talk to me about principles, and I would tell him that his principles weighed heavily on his children. He would say I didn’t understand, just as his father had said to me. So I stopped giving advice and just listened.
    That is what Barack needed most, I think—someone to listen to him. Even after things had improved again for him, and he had built this house for us, he remained heavy-hearted. With his children, he behaved just as Onyango had behaved towards him. He saw that he was pushing them away, but there was nothing he could do. He still liked to boast and laugh and drink with the men. But his laughter was empty. I remember the last time he visited Onyango before the old man died. The two of them sat in their chairs, facing each other and eating their food, but no words passed between them. A few months later, when Onyango finally went to join his ancestors, Barack came home to make all the arrangements. He said very little, and it is only when he sorted through a few of the old man’s belongings that I saw him begin to weep.
             
    Granny stood up and brushed the grass off her skirt. The yard was hushed, the silence broken only by a bird’s anxious trill. “It’s going to rain,” she said, and we all gathered up the mats and cups and carried them into the house.
    Once inside, I asked Granny if she had anything left of the Old Man’s or our grandfather’s. She went into her bedroom, sorting through the contents of an old leather trunk. A few minutes later, she emerged with a rust-colored book the size of a passport, along with a few papers of different colors, stapled together and chewed at an angle along one side.
    “I’m afraid this is all I could find,” she said to Auma. “The rats got to the papers before I had a chance to put them away.”
    Auma and I sat down and set the book and papers on the low table in front of us. The binding on the red book had crumbled away, but the cover was still legible:
Domestic Servant’s Pocket Register,
it read, and in smaller letters,
Issued under the Authority of the Registration of Domestic Servant’s Ordinance,
1928
, Colony and Protectorate of Kenya.
On the book’s inside cover, we found a two-shilling stamp above Onyango’s left and right thumbprints. The swirls were still clear, like an imprint of coral. The box was empty where the photograph once had been.
    The preamble explained:
The object of this Ordinance is to provide every person employed in a domestic capacity with a record of such employment, and to safeguard his or her interests as well as to protect employers against the employment of persons who have rendered themselves unsuitable for such work.
    The term
servant
was defined:
cook, house servant, waiter, butler, nurse, valet, bar boy, footmen, or chauffeur, or washermen
. The rules governing the carrying of such passbooks: servants found to be working without such books, or in any way