Dreams from My Father

snatch it out of his hands.
    “Man, stop waving that thing around.”
    “See there,” Marcus said. “Makes you embarrassed, don’t it—just being seen with a book like this. I’m telling you, man, this stuff will poison your mind.” He looked at his watch. “Damn, I’m late for class.” He leaned over and pecked Regina on the cheek. “Talk to this brother, will you? I think he can still be saved.”
    Regina smiled and shook her head as we watched Marcus stride out the door. “Marcus is in one of his preaching moods, I see.”
    I tossed the book into my backpack. “Actually, he’s right,” I said. “It is a racist book. The way Conrad sees it, Africa’s the cesspool of the world, black folks are savages, and any contact with them breeds infection.”
    Regina blew on her coffee. “So why are you reading it?”
    “Because it’s assigned.” I paused, not sure if I should go on. “And because—”
    “Because…”
    “And because the book teaches me things,” I said. “About white people, I mean. See, the book’s not really about Africa. Or black people. It’s about the man who wrote it. The European. The American. A particular way of looking at the world. If you can keep your distance, it’s all there, in what’s said and what’s left unsaid. So I read the book to help me understand just what it is that makes white people so afraid. Their demons. The way ideas get twisted around. It helps me understand how people learn to hate.”
    “And that’s important to you.”
    My life depends on it, I thought to myself. But I didn’t tell Regina that. I just smiled and said, “That’s the only way to cure an illness, right? Diagnose it.”
    She smiled back and sipped her coffee. I had seen her around before, usually sitting in the library with a book in hand, a big, dark woman who wore stockings and dresses that looked homemade, along with tinted, oversized glasses and a scarf always covering her head. I knew she was a junior, helped organize black student events, didn’t go out much. She stirred her coffee idly and asked, “What did Marcus call you just now? Some African name, wasn’t it?”
    “Barack.”
    “I thought your name was Barry.”
    “Barack’s my given name. My father’s name. He was Kenyan.”
    “Does it mean something?”
    “It means ‘Blessed.’ In Arabic. My grandfather was a Muslim.”
    Regina repeated the name to herself, testing out the sound. “Barack. It’s beautiful.” She leaned forward across the table. “So why does everybody call you Barry?”
    “Habit, I guess. My father used it when he arrived in the States. I don’t know whether that was his idea or somebody else’s. He probably used Barry because it was easier to pronounce. You know—helped him fit in. Then it got passed on to me. So I could fit in.”
    “Do you mind if I call you Barack?”
    I smiled. “Not as long as you say it right.”
    She tilted her head impatiently, her mouth set in mock offense, her eyes ready to surrender to laughter. We ended up spending the afternoon together, talking and drinking coffee. She told me about her childhood in Chicago, the absent father and struggling mother, the South Side six-flat that never seemed warm enough in winter and got so hot in the summer that people went out by the lake to sleep. She told me about the neighbors on her block, about walking past the taverns and pool halls on the way to church on Sunday. She told me about evenings in the kitchen with uncles and cousins and grandparents, the stew of voices bubbling up in laughter. Her voice evoked a vision of black life in all its possibility, a vision that filled me with longing—a longing for place, and a fixed and definite history. As we were getting up to leave, I told Regina I envied her.
    “For what?”
    “I don’t know. For your memories, I guess.”
    Regina looked at me and started to laugh, a round, full sound from deep in her belly.
    “What’s so funny?”
    “Oh, Barack,” she said, catching her breath, “isn’t life something? And here I was all this time wishing I’d grown up in Hawaii.”
             
    Strange how a single conversation can change you. Or maybe it only seems that way in retrospect. A year passes and you know you feel differently, but you’re not sure what or why or how, so your mind casts back for something that might give that difference shape: a word, a glance, a touch. I know that after what seemed like a long absence, I had felt my voice