Dreams from My Father

I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling constraints. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.
    But this strategy alone couldn’t provide the distance I wanted, from Joyce or my past. After all, there were thousands of so-called campus radicals, most of them white and tenured and happily tolerated. No, it remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names.
    I thought back to that time when I was still living in the dorms, the three of us in Reggie’s room—Reggie, Marcus, and myself—the patter of rain against the windowpane. We were drinking a few beers and Marcus was telling us about his run-in with the L.A.P.D. “They had no reason to stop me,” he was saying. “No reason ’cept I was walking in a white neighborhood. Made me spread-eagle against the car. One of ’em pulled out his piece. I didn’t let ’em scare me, though. That’s what gets these storm troopers off, seeing fear in a black man….”
    I watched Marcus as he spoke, lean and dark and straight-backed, his long legs braced apart, comfortable in a white T-shirt and blue denim overalls. Marcus was the most conscious of brothers. He could tell you about his grandfather the Garveyite; about his mother in St. Louis who had raised her kids alone while working as a nurse; about his older sister who had been a founding member of the local Panther party; about his friends in the joint. His lineage was pure, his loyalties clear, and for that reason he always made me feel a little off-balance, like a younger brother who, no matter what he does, will always be one step behind. And that’s just how I was feeling at that moment, listening to Marcus pronounce on his authentic black experience, when Tim walked into the room.
    “Hey, guys,” Tim had said, waving cheerfully. He turned to me. “Listen, Barry—do you have that assignment for Econ?”
    Tim was not a conscious brother. Tim wore argyle sweaters and pressed jeans and talked like Beaver Cleaver. He planned to major in business. His white girlfriend was probably waiting for him up in his room, listening to country music. He was happy as a clam, and I wanted nothing more than for him to go away. I got up, walked with him down the hall to my room, gave him the assignment he needed. As soon as I got back to Reggie’s room, I somehow felt obliged to explain.
    “Tim’s a trip, ain’t he,” I said, shaking my head. “Should change his name from Tim to Tom.”
    Reggie laughed, but Marcus didn’t. Marcus said, “Why you say that, man?”
    The question caught me by surprise. “I don’t know. The dude’s just goofy, that’s all.”
    Marcus took a sip of his beer and looked me straight in the eye. “Tim seems all right to me,” he said. “He’s going about his business. Don’t bother nobody. Seems to me we should be worrying about whether our own stuff’s together instead of passing judgment on how other folks are supposed to act.”
    A year later, and I still burned with the memory, the anger and resentment I’d felt at that moment, Marcus calling me out in front of Reggie like that. But he’d been right to do it, hadn’t he? He had caught me in a lie. Two lies, really—the lie I had told about Tim and the lie I was telling about myself. In fact, that whole first year seemed like one long lie, me spending all my energy running around in circles, trying to cover my tracks.
    Except with Regina. That’s probably what had drawn me to Regina, the way she made me feel like I didn’t have to lie. Even that first time we met, the day she walked into the coffee shop and found Marcus giving me grief about my choice of reading material. Marcus had waved her over to our table, rising slightly to pull out a chair.
    “Sister Regina,” Marcus said. “You know Barack, don’t you? I’m trying to tell Brother Barack here about this racist tract he’s reading.” He held up a copy of
Heart of Darkness,
evidence for the court. I reached over to