Dreams from My Father

streets—loud congregations of teenage boys, teenage girls feeding potato chips to crying toddlers, the discarded wrappers tumbling down the block—all of it whispered painful truths, told them the progress they’d found was ephemeral, rooted in thin soil; that it might not even last their lifetimes.
    And it was this dual sense, of individual advancement and collective decline, that I thought accounted for some of the attitudes agitating Will when we’d spoken the night of the rally. I heard it in the excessive pride some of the men took in the well-stocked bars they’d built in their basements, with the lava lamps and the mirrored walls. In the protective plastic that the women kept over their spotless carpets and sofas. In all of it, one saw a determined effort to shore up the belief that things had in fact changed, if only some people would start acting right. “I try to avoid driving through Roseland when I can,” a woman from neighboring Washington Heights explained to me one evening. “People down there are just rougher. You can see it in the way they keep up their homes. You didn’t see things like that when the white folks still lived there.”
    Distinctions between neighborhoods, then blocks, then finally neighbors within a block; attempts to cordon off, control the decay. One thing I noticed, though. The woman so concerned with the cruder habits of her neighbors had a picture of Harold in her kitchen, right next to the sampler of the Twenty-third Psalm. So did the young man who lived in the crumbling apartment a few blocks away and was trying to make ends meet by mixing records at dance parties. As it had for the men in Smitty’s barbershop, the election had given both these people a new idea of themselves. Or maybe it was an old idea, born of a simpler time. Harold was something they still held in common: Like my idea of organizing, he held out an offer of collective redemption.
             
    I tossed my third-week report onto Marty’s desk and took a seat as he read it through.
    “Not bad,” he said when he was finished.
    “Not bad?”
    “Yeah, not bad. You’re starting to listen. But it’s still too abstract…like you’re taking a survey or something. If you want to organize people, you need to steer away from the peripheral stuff and go towards people’s centers. The stuff that makes them tick. Otherwise, you’ll never form the relationships you need to get them involved.”
    The man was starting to get on my nerves. I asked him if he ever worried about becoming too calculating, if the idea of probing people’s psyches and gaining their trust just to build an organization ever felt manipulative. He sighed.
    “I’m not a poet, Barack. I’m an organizer.”
    What did that mean? I left the office in a foul mood. Later, I had to admit that Marty was right. I still had no idea how I might translate what I was hearing into action. In fact, it wasn’t until I came to the end of my interviews that an opportunity seemed to present itself.
    It was during a meeting with Ruby Styles, a stocky woman who worked as an office manager on the north side of the city. We had been talking about her teenage son, Kyle, a bright but diffident boy who was starting to have trouble at school, when she mentioned a rise in local gang activity. One of Kyle’s friends had been shot just last week, she said, right in front of his house. The boy was all right, but now Ruby was worried about her own son’s safety.
    My ears perked up; this sounded like self-interest. Over the next few days, I had Ruby introduce me to other parents who shared her fears and felt frustrated over the lackluster police response. When I suggested that we invite the district commander to a neighborhood meeting so the community could air its concerns, everyone agreed; and as we talked about publicity one of the women mentioned that there was a Baptist church on the block where the boy had been shot, and that the pastor there, a Reverend Reynolds, might be willing to make an announcement to his congregation.
    It took me a week of phone calls, but when I finally reached Reverend Reynolds, his response seemed promising. He was the president of the local ministerial alliance, he said—“churches coming together to preach the social gospel.” He said that the group would be holding its regular meeting the very next day and that he would be happy to put me on the agenda.
    I hung up the phone full of excitement, and arrived at