Dreams from My Father

slender and stooped. His chair was open and so I took a seat, soon joining in the familiar barbershop banter of sports and women and yesterday’s headlines, conversation at once intimate and anonymous, among men who’ve agreed to leave their troubles outside.
    Somebody had just finished telling a story about his neighbor—the man had been caught in bed with his wife’s cousin and chased at the point of a kitchen knife, buck naked, out into the street—when the talk turned to politics.
    “Vrdolyak and the rest of them crackers don’t know when to quit,” the man with the newspaper said, shaking his head in disgust. “When Old Man Daley was mayor, didn’t nobody say nothing about him putting all them Irish up in City Hall. But the minute Harold tries to hire some black people, just to even things out, they call it reverse racism—”
    “Man, that’s how it always is. Whenever a black man gets into power, they gonna try and change the rules on him.”
    “Worse part is, newspapers acting like it was black folks that started this whole mess.”
    “What you expect from the white man’s paper?”
    “You right. Harold knows what he’s doing, though. Just biding his time till the next election.”
    That’s how black people talked about Chicago’s mayor, with a familiarity and affection normally reserved for a relative. His picture was everywhere: on the walls of shoe repair shops and beauty parlors; still glued to lampposts from the last campaign; even in the windows of the Korean dry cleaners and Arab grocery stores, displayed prominently, like some protective totem. From the barbershop wall, that portrait looked down on me now: the handsome, grizzled face, the bushy eyebrows and mustache, the twinkle in the eyes. Smitty noticed me looking at the picture and asked if I’d been in Chicago during the election. I told him I hadn’t. He nodded his head.
    “Had to be here before Harold to understand what he means to this city,” Smitty said. “Before Harold, seemed like we’d always be second-class citizens.”
    “Plantation politics,” the man with the newspaper said.
    “That’s just what it was, too,” Smitty said. “A plantation. Black people in the worst jobs. The worst housing. Police brutality rampant. But when the so-called black committeemen came around election time, we’d all line up and vote the straight Democratic ticket. Sell our soul for a Christmas turkey. White folks spitting in our faces, and we’d reward ’em with the vote.”
    Clumps of hair fell into my lap as I listened to the men recall Harold’s rise. He had run for mayor once before, shortly after the elder Daley died, but the candidacy had faltered—a source of shame, the men told me, the lack of unity within the black community, the doubts that had to be overcome. But Harold had tried again, and this time the people were ready. They had stuck with him when the press played up the income taxes he’d failed to pay (“Like the white cats don’t cheat on every damn thing every minute of their lives”). They had rallied behind him when white Democratic committeemen, Vrdolyak and others, announced their support for the Republican candidate, saying that the city would go to hell if it had a black mayor. They had turned out in record numbers on election night, ministers and gang-bangers, young and old.
    And their faith had been rewarded. Smitty said, “The night Harold won, let me tell you, people just ran the streets. It was like the day Joe Louis knocked out Schmeling. Same feeling. People weren’t just proud of Harold. They were proud of themselves. I stayed inside, but my wife and I, we couldn’t get to bed until three, we were so excited. When I woke up the next morning, it seemed like the most beautiful day of my life….”
    Smitty’s voice had fallen to a whisper, and everyone in the room began to smile. From a distance, reading the newspapers back in New York, I had shared in their pride, the same sort of pride that made me root for any pro football team that fielded a black quarterback. But something was different about what I was now hearing; there was a fervor in Smitty’s voice that seemed to go beyond politics. “Had to be here to understand,” he had said. He’d meant here in Chicago; but he could also have meant here in my shoes, an older black man who still burns from a lifetime of insults, of foiled ambitions, of ambitions abandoned before they’ve been tried. I asked myself if I could truly