Dreams from My Father

this way?”
    The woman smiled and shook her head, and I said it probably had to do with the tides. The answer seemed to satisfy the boy, and he went back to his mother. As I watched the two of them disappear into dusk, I realized I had never noticed which way the river ran.
    A week later, I loaded up my car and drove to Chicago.

CHAPTER EIGHT

    I HAD BEEN TO CHICAGO once before. It was during the summer after my father’s visit to Hawaii, before my eleventh birthday, when Toot had decided it was time I saw the mainland of the United States. Perhaps the two things were connected, her decision and my father’s visit—his presence (once again) disturbing the world she and Gramps had made for themselves, triggering in her a desire to reclaim antecedents, her own memories, and pass them on to her grandchildren.
    We traveled for over a month, Toot and my mother and Maya and I—Gramps had lost his taste for traveling by this time and chose to stay behind. We flew to Seattle, then went down the coast to California and Disneyland, east to the Grand Canyon, across the Great Plains to Kansas City, then up to the Great Lakes before heading back west through Yellowstone Park. We took Greyhound buses, mostly, and stayed at Howard Johnson’s, and watched the Watergate hearings every night before going to bed.
    We were in Chicago for three days, in a motel in the South Loop. It must have been sometime in July, but for some reason I remember the days as cold and gray. The motel had an indoor swimming pool, which impressed me; there were no indoor pools in Hawaii. Standing beneath the el tracks, I closed my eyes as a train passed and shouted as loud as I could. At the Field Museum, I saw two shrunken heads that were kept on display. They were wrinkled but well preserved, each the size of my palm, their eyes and mouths sewn shut, just as I would have expected. They appeared to be of European extraction: The man had a small goatee, like a conquistador; the female had flowing red hair. I stared at them for a long time (until my mother pulled me away), feeling—with the morbid glee of a young boy—as if I had stumbled upon some sort of cosmic joke. Not so much the fact that the heads had been shrunk—that I could understand; it was the same idea as eating tiger meat with Lolo, a form of magic, a taking of control. Rather, the fact that these little European faces were here in a glass case, where strangers, perhaps even descendants, might observe the details of their gruesome fate. That no one seemed to think that odd. It was a different sort of magic, these harsh museum lights, the neat labels, the seeming indifference of the visitors who passed; another effort at control.
    Fourteen years later, the city appeared much prettier. It was another July, and the sun sparkled through the deep green trees. The boats were out of their moorings, their distant sails like the wings of doves across Lake Michigan. Marty had told me that he would be busy those first few days, and so I was left on my own. I had bought a map, and I followed Martin Luther King Drive from its northernmost to its southernmost point, then went back up Cottage Grove, down byways and alleys, past the apartment buildings and vacant lots, convenience stores and bungalow homes. And as I drove, I remembered. I remembered the whistle of the Illinois Central, bearing the weight of the thousands who had come up from the South so many years before; the black men and women and children, dirty from the soot of the railcars, clutching their makeshift luggage, all making their way to Canaan Land. I imagined Frank in a baggy suit and wide lapels, standing in front of the old Regal Theatre, waiting to see Duke or Ella emerge from a gig. The mailman I saw was Richard Wright, delivering mail before his first book sold; the little girl with the glasses and pigtails was Regina, skipping rope. I made a chain between my life and the faces I saw, borrowing other people’s memories. In this way I tried to take possession of the city, make it my own. Yet another sort of magic.
    On the third day I passed Smitty’s Barbershop, a fifteen-by-thirty-foot storefront on the edge of Hyde Park with four barber’s chairs and a card table for LaTisha, the part-time manicurist. The door was propped open when I walked in, the barbershop smells of hair cream and antiseptic mingling with the sound of men’s laughter and the hum of slow fans. Smitty turned out to be an older black man, gray-haired,