Dreams from My Father

before.
             
    It’s been six years since that first trip to Kenya, and much in the world has changed.
    For me, it’s been a relatively quiet period, less a time of discovery than of consolidation, of doing the things that we tell ourselves we finally must do to grow up. I went to Harvard Law School, spending most of three years in poorly lit libraries, poring through cases and statutes. The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power—and that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition.
    But that’s not all the law is. The law is also memory; the law also records a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience.
    We hold these truths to be self-evident.
In those words, I hear the spirit of Douglass and Delany, as well as Jefferson and Lincoln; the struggles of Martin and Malcolm and unheralded marchers to bring these words to life. I hear the voices of Japanese families interned behind barbed wire; young Russian Jews cutting patterns in Lower East Side sweatshops; dust-bowl farmers loading up their trucks with the remains of shattered lives. I hear the voices of the people in Altgeld Gardens, and the voices of those who stand outside this country’s borders, the weary, hungry bands crossing the Rio Grande. I hear all of these voices clamoring for recognition, all of them asking the very same questions that have come to shape my life, the same questions that I sometimes, late at night, find myself asking the Old Man. What is our community, and how might that community be reconciled with our freedom? How far do our obligations reach? How do we transform mere power into justice, mere sentiment into love? The answers I find in law books don’t always satisfy me—for every
Brown
v.
Board of Education
I find a score of cases where conscience is sacrificed to expedience or greed. And yet, in the conversation itself, in the joining of voices, I find myself modestly encouraged, believing that so long as the questions are still being asked, what binds us together might somehow, ultimately, prevail.
    That faith, so different from innocence, can sometimes be hard to sustain. Upon my return to Chicago, I would find the signs of decay accelerated throughout the South Side—the neighborhoods shabbier, the children edgier and less restrained, more middle-class families heading out to the suburbs, the jails bursting with glowering youth, my brothers without prospects. All too rarely do I hear people asking just what it is that we’ve done to make so many children’s hearts so hard, or what collectively we might do to right their moral compass—what values
we
must live by. Instead I see us doing what we’ve always done—pretending that these children are somehow not our own.
    I try to do my small part in reversing this tide. In my legal practice, I work mostly with churches and community groups, men and women who quietly build grocery stores and health clinics in the inner city, and housing for the poor. Every so often I’ll find myself working on a discrimination case, representing clients who show up at my law firm’s office with stories that we like to tell ourselves should no longer exist. Most of these clients are slightly embarrassed by what’s happened to them, as are the white co-workers who agree to testify on their behalf; no one wants to be known as a troublemaker. And yet at some point both plaintiff and witness decide that a principle is at stake, that despite everything that has happened, those words put to paper over two hundred years ago must mean something after all. Black and white, they make their claim on this community we call America. They choose our better history.
             
    I think I’ve learned to be more patient these past few years, with others as well as myself. If so, it’s one of several improvements in my character that I attribute to my wife, Michelle. She’s a daughter of the South Side, raised in one of those bungalow-style houses that I spent so many hours visiting during my first year in Chicago. She doesn’t always know what to make of me; she worries that, like Gramps and the Old Man, I am something of a dreamer. Indeed, in her eminent practicality and midwestern attitudes, she reminds me not a little