Dreams from My Father

fantasies that had been forbidden to a white middle-class girl from Kansas, the promise of another life: warm, sensual, exotic, different.
    I turned away, embarrassed for her, irritated with the people around me. Sitting there in the dark, I was reminded of a conversation I’d had a few years earlier with a friend of my mother’s, an Englishman who had worked for an international aid organization throughout Africa and Asia. He had told me that of all the different peoples he had met in his travels, the Dik of Sudan were the strangest.
    “Usually, after a month or two, you make contact,” he had said. “Even where you don’t speak the language, there’s a smile or a joke, you know—some semblance of recognition. But at the end of a year with the Dik, they remained utterly alien to me. They laughed at the things that drove me to despair. What I thought was funny seemed to leave them stone cold.”
    I had spared him the information that the Dik were Nilotes, distant cousins of mine. I had tried to imagine this pale Englishman in a parched desert somewhere, his back turned away from a circle of naked tribesmen, his eyes searching an empty sky, bitter in his solitude. And the same thought had occurred to me then that I carried with me now as I left the movie theater with my mother and sister: The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.
    “Kind of corny, huh,” Maya said as my mother went to the bathroom.
    “What?”
    “The movie. It was kind of corny. Just Mom’s style.”
    For the next several days, I tried to avoid situations where my mother and I might be forced to talk. Then, a few days before they were about to leave, I stopped by while Maya was taking a nap. My mother noticed a letter addressed to my father in my hand. I asked her if she had an international postage stamp.
    “You guys arranging a visit?”
    I told her briefly of my plans as she dug out a stamp from the bottom of her purse. Actually she came up with two stamps; they had melted together in the summer heat. She gave me a sheepish grin and put water on to boil so we could steam them apart.
    “Well, I think it’ll be wonderful for you two to finally get to know each other,” she said from the kitchen. “He was probably a bit tough for a ten-year-old to take, but now that you’re older…”
    I shrugged. “Who knows?”
    She stuck her head out of the kitchen. “I hope you don’t feel resentful towards him.”
    “Why would I?”
    “I don’t know.” She returned to the living room and we sat there for a while, listening to the sounds of traffic below. The teapot whistled, and I stamped my envelope. Then, without any prompting, my mother began to retell an old story, in a distant voice, as if she were telling it to herself.
    “It wasn’t your father’s fault that he left, you know. I divorced him. When the two of us got married, your grandparents weren’t happy with the idea. But they said okay—they probably couldn’t have stopped us anyway, and they eventually came around to the idea that it was the right thing to do. Then Barack’s father—your grandfather Hussein—wrote Gramps this long, nasty letter saying that he didn’t approve of the marriage. He didn’t want the Obama blood sullied by a white woman, he said. Well, you can imagine how Gramps reacted to that. And then there was a problem with your father’s first wife…he had told me they were separated, but it was a village wedding, so there was no legal document that could show a divorce….”
    Her chin had begun to tremble, and she bit down on her lip, steadying herself. She said, “Your father wrote back, saying he was going ahead with it. Then you were born, and we agreed that the three of us would return to Kenya after he finished his studies. But your grandfather Hussein was still writing to your father, threatening to have his student visa revoked. By this time Toot had become hysterical—she had read about the Mau-Mau rebellion in Kenya a few years earlier, which the Western press really played up—and she was sure that I would have my head chopped off and you would be taken away.
    “Even then, it might have worked out. When your father graduated from UH, he received two scholarship offers. One was to the New School, here