Dreams from My Father

company promoted me to the position of financial writer. I had my own office, my own secretary, money in the bank. Sometimes, coming out of an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond traders, I would catch my reflection in the elevator doors—see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand—and for a split second I would imagine myself as a captain of industry, barking out orders, closing the deal, before I remembered who it was that I had told myself I wanted to be and felt pangs of guilt for my lack of resolve.
    Then one day, as I sat down at my computer to write an article on interest-rate swaps, something unexpected happened. Auma called.
    I had never met this half sister; we had written only intermittently. I knew that she had left Kenya to study in Germany, and in our letters we had mentioned the possibility of my going there for a visit, or perhaps her coming to the States. But the plans had always been left vague—neither of us had any money, we would say; maybe next year. Our correspondence maintained a cordial distance.
    Now, suddenly, I heard her voice for the first time. It was soft and dark, tinged with a colonial accent. For a few moments I couldn’t understand the words, only the sound, a sound that seemed to have always been there, misplaced but not forgotten. She was coming to the States, she said, on a trip with several friends. Could she come to see me in New York?
    “Of course,” I said. “You can stay with me; I can’t wait.” And she laughed, and I laughed, and then the line grew quiet with static and the sound of our breath. “Well,” she said, “I can’t stay on the phone too long, it’s so expensive. Here’s the flight information”; and we hung up quickly after that, as if our contact was a treat to be doled out in small measures.
    I spent the next few weeks rushing around in preparation: new sheets for the sofa bed, extra plates and towels, a scrubbing for the tub. But two days before she was scheduled to arrive, Auma called again, the voice thicker now, barely a whisper.
    “I can’t come after all,” she said. “One of our brothers, David…he’s been killed. In a motorcycle accident. I don’t know any more than that.” She began to cry. “Oh, Barack. Why do these things happen to us?”
    I tried to comfort her as best I could. I asked her if I could do anything for her. I told her there would be other times for us to see each other. Eventually her voice quieted; she had to go book a flight home, she said.
    “Okay, then, Barack. See you. ’Bye.”
    After she hung up, I left my office, telling my secretary I’d be gone for the day. For hours I wandered the streets of Manhattan, the sound of Auma’s voice playing over and over in my mind. A continent away, a woman cries. On a dark and dusty road, a boy skids out of control, tumbling against hard earth, wheels spinning to silence. Who were these people, I asked myself, these strangers who carried my blood? What might save this woman from her sorrow? What wild, unspoken dreams had this boy possessed?
    Who was I, who shed no tears at the loss of his own?
             
    I still wonder sometimes how that first contact with Auma altered my life. Not so much the contact itself (that meant everything, would mean everything) or the news that she gave me of David’s death (that, too, is an absolute; I would never know him, and that says enough), but rather the timing of her call, the particular sequence of events, the raised expectations and then the dashed hopes, coming at a time when the idea of becoming an organizer was still just that, an idea in my head, a vague tug at my heart.
    Maybe it made no difference. Maybe by this time I was already committed to organizing and Auma’s voice simply served to remind me that I still had wounds to heal, and could not heal myself. Or maybe, if David hadn’t died when he did, and Auma had come to New York as originally planned, and I had learned from her then what I would only learn later, about Kenya, and about our father…well, maybe it would have relieved certain pressures that had built up inside me, showing me a different idea of community, allowing my ambitions to travel a narrower, more personal course, so that in the end I might have taken my friend Ike’s advice and given myself over to stocks and bonds and the pull of respectability.
    I don’t know. What’s certain is that a few months after Auma’s call I turned in my resignation at the