Dreams from My Father

footage that appears every February during Black History Month, the same images that my mother had offered me as a child. A pair of college students, hair short, backs straight, placing their orders at a lunch counter teetering on the edge of riot. SNCC workers standing on a porch in some Mississippi backwater trying to convince a family of sharecroppers to register to vote. A county jail bursting with children, their hands clasped together, singing freedom songs.
    Such images became a form of prayer for me, bolstering my spirits, channeling my emotions in a way that words never could. They told me (although even this much understanding may have come later, is also a construct, containing its own falsehoods) that I wasn’t alone in my particular struggles, and that communities had never been a given in this country, at least not for blacks. Communities had to be created, fought for, tended like gardens. They expanded or contracted with the dreams of men—and in the civil rights movement those dreams had been large. In the sit-ins, the marches, the jailhouse songs, I saw the African-American community becoming more than just the place where you’d been born or the house where you’d been raised. Through organizing, through shared sacrifice, membership had been earned. And because membership was earned—because this community I imagined was still in the making, built on the promise that the larger American community, black, white, and brown, could somehow redefine itself—I believed that it might, over time, admit the uniqueness of my own life.
    That was my idea of organizing. It was a promise of redemption.
    And so, in the months leading up to graduation, I wrote to every civil rights organization I could think of, to any black elected official in the country with a progressive agenda, to neighborhood councils and tenant rights groups. When no one wrote back, I wasn’t discouraged. I decided to find more conventional work for a year, to pay off my student loans and maybe even save a little bit. I would need the money later, I told myself. Organizers didn’t make any money; their poverty was proof of their integrity.
    Eventually a consulting house to multinational corporations agreed to hire me as a research assistant. Like a spy behind enemy lines, I arrived every day at my mid-Manhattan office and sat at my computer terminal, checking the Reuters machine that blinked bright emerald messages from across the globe. As far as I could tell I was the only black man in the company, a source of shame for me but a source of considerable pride for the company’s secretarial pool. They treated me like a son, those black ladies; they told me how they expected me to run the company one day. Sometimes, over lunch, I would tell them about all my wonderful organizing plans, and they would smile and say, “That’s good, Barack,” but the look in their eyes told me they were secretly disappointed. Only Ike, the gruff black security guard in the lobby, was willing to come right out and tell me I’d be making a mistake.
    “Organizing? That’s some kinda politics, ain’t it? Why you wanna do something like that?”
    I tried to explain my political views, the importance of mobilizing the poor and giving back to the community. But Ike just shook his head. “Mr. Barack,” he said, “I hope you don’t mind if I give you a little bit of advice. You don’t have to take it, now, but I’m gonna give it to you anyhow. Forget about this organizing business and do something that’s gonna make you some money. Not greedy, you understand. But enough. I’m telling you this ’cause I can see potential in you. Young man like you, got a nice voice—hell, you could be one a them announcers on TV. Or sales…got a nephew about your age making some real money there. That’s what we need, see. Not more folks running around here, all rhymes and jive. You can’t help folks that ain’t gonna make it nohow, and they won’t appreciate you trying. Folks that wanna make it, they gonna find a way to do it on they own. How old are you anyway?”
    “Twenty-two.”
    “See there. Don’t waste your youth, Mr. Barack. Wake up one morning, an old man like me, and all you gonna be is tired, with nothing to show for it.”
             
    I didn’t pay Ike much attention at the time; I thought he sounded too much like my grandparents. Nevertheless, as the months passed, I felt the idea of becoming an organizer slipping away from me. The