Dreams from My Father

He’s hungry, tired, clinging to his sister’s hand, searching for the mother he’s lost. The hunger is too much for him, the exhaustion too great; until finally the slender line that holds him to his mother snaps, sending her image to float down, down into the emptiness. The boy starts to cry; he shakes off his sister’s hand. He wants to go home, he shouts, back to his father’s house. He will find a new mother. He will lose himself in games and learn the power of his mind.
    But he won’t forget the desperation of that day. Twelve years later, at his narrow desk, he will glance up from a stack of forms toward the restless sky and feel that same panic return. He, too, will have to invent himself. His boss is out of the office; he sets the forms aside and from an old file cabinet pulls out a list of addresses. He yanks the typewriter toward him and begins to type, letter after letter after letter, typing the envelopes, sealing the letters like messages in bottles that will drop through a post office slot into a vast ocean and perhaps allow him to escape the island of his father’s shame.
    How lucky he must have felt when his ship came sailing in! He must have known, when that letter came from Hawaii, that he had been chosen after all; that he possessed the grace of his name, the
baraka,
the blessings of God. With the degree, the ascot, the American wife, the car, the words, the figures, the wallet, the proper proportion of tonic to gin, the polish, the panache, the entire thing seamless and natural, without the cobbled-together, haphazard quality of an earlier time—what could stand in his way?
    He had almost succeeded, in a way his own father could never have hoped for. And then, after seeming to travel so far, to discover that he had not escaped after all! To discover that he remained trapped on his father’s island, with its fissures of anger and doubt and defeat, the emotions still visible beneath the surface, hot and molten and alive, like a wicked, yawning mouth, and his mother gone, gone, away….
    I dropped to the ground and swept my hand across the smooth yellow tile. Oh, Father, I cried. There was no shame in your confusion. Just as there had been no shame in your father’s before you. No shame in the fear, or in the fear of his father before him. There was only shame in the silence fear had produced. It was the silence that betrayed us. If it weren’t for that silence, your grandfather might have told your father that he could never escape himself, or re-create himself alone. Your father might have taught those same lessons to you. And you, the son, might have taught your father that this new world that was beckoning all of you involved more than just railroads and indoor toilets and irrigation ditches and gramophones, lifeless instruments that could be absorbed into the old ways. You might have told him that these instruments carried with them a dangerous power, that they demanded a different way of seeing the world. That this power could be absorbed only alongside a faith born out of hardship, a faith that wasn’t new, that wasn’t black or white or Christian or Muslim but that pulsed in the heart of the first African village and the first Kansas homestead—a faith in other people.
    The silence killed your faith. And for lack of faith you clung to both too much and too little of your past. Too much of its rigidness, its suspicions, its male cruelties. Too little of the laughter in Granny’s voice, the pleasures of company while herding the goats, the murmur of the market, the stories around the fire. The loyalty that could make up for a lack of airplanes or rifles. Words of encouragement. An embrace. A strong, true love. For all your gifts—the quick mind, the powers of concentration, the charm—you could never forge yourself into a whole man by leaving those things behind….
    For a long time I sat between the two graves and wept. When my tears were finally spent, I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America—the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d witnessed in Chicago—all of it was connected with this small plot of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain I felt was my