Dreams from My Father

apartment, their hoods pulled over their heads like miniature monks. One of the boys reached up and started yanking at a loose piece of plywood nailed across the apartment door, then stumbled and fell, causing the others to laugh. A part of me suddenly felt like joining them, tearing apart the whole dying landscape, piece by piece. Instead, I turned back toward Angela.
    “Let me ask you something,” I said, pointing out the window. “What do you suppose is going to happen to those boys out there?”
    “Barack…”
    “No, I’m just asking you a question. You say you’re tired, the same way most folks out here are tired. So I’m just trying to figure out what’s going to happen to those boys. Who’s going to make sure they get a fair shot? The alderman? The social workers? The gangs?”
    I could hear my voice rising, but I didn’t let up. “You know, I didn’t come here ’cause I needed a job. I came here ’cause Marty said there were some people who were serious about doing something to change their neighborhoods. I don’t care what’s happened in the past. I know that I’m here, and committed to working with you. If there’s a problem, then we’ll fix it. If you don’t think anything’s happened after working with me, then I’ll be the first one to tell you to quit. But if you all are planning to quit now, then I want you to answer my question.”
    I stopped there, trying to read each of their faces. They seemed surprised at my outburst, though none of them was as surprised as me. I knew I was on precarious ground; I wasn’t close enough to any of them to be sure my play wouldn’t backfire. At that particular moment, though, I had no other hand to play. The boys outside moved on down the street. Shirley went to get herself more coffee. After what seemed like ten minutes, Will finally spoke up.
    “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I think we’ve talked about this same old mess long enough. Marty knows we got problems. That’s why he hired Barack. Ain’t that right, Barack?”
    I nodded cautiously.
    “Things still bad out here. Ain’t nothing gone away. So what
I
wanna know,” he said, turning to me, “is what we gonna do from here on out.”
    I told him the truth. “I don’t know, Will. You tell me.”
    Will smiled, and I sensed that the immediate crisis had passed. Angela agreed to give it another few months. I agreed to concentrate more time on Altgeld. We spent the next half hour talking strategy and handing out assignments. On our way out, Mona came up and took me by the arm.
    “You handled that meeting pretty good, Barack. Seems like you know what you’re doing.”
    “I don’t, Mona. I don’t have a clue.”
    She laughed. “Well, I promise I won’t tell nobody.”
    “I appreciate that, Mona. I sure do appreciate that.”
             
    That evening, I called Marty and told him some of what had happened. He wasn’t surprised: several of the suburban churches were already starting to drop out. He gave me a few suggestions for approaching the job issue in Altgeld, then advised me to pick up the pace of my interviews.
    “You’re going to need to find some new leaders, Barack. I mean, Will’s a terrific guy and all that, but do you really want to depend on him to keep the organization afloat?”
    I understood Marty’s point. As much as I liked Will, as much as I appreciated his support, I had to admit that some of his ideas were…well, eccentric. He liked to smoke reefer at the end of a day’s work (“If God didn’t want us to smoke the stuff, he wouldn’t have put it on this here earth”). He would walk out of any meeting that he decided was boring. Whenever I took him along to interview members of his church, he’d start arguing with them about their incorrect reading of Scripture, their choice of lawn fertilizer, or the constitutionality of the income tax (he felt that tax violated the Bill of Rights, and conscientiously refused to pay).
    “Maybe if you listened to other people a little more,” I had told him once, “they’d be more responsive.”
    Will had shaken his head. “I
do
listen. That’s the problem. Everything they say is wrong.”
    Now, after the meeting in Altgeld, Will had a new idea. “These mixed-up Negroes inside St. Catherine’s ain’t never gonna do nothing,” he said. “If we wanna get something done, we gonna have to take it to the streets!” He pointed out that many of the people who lived in the immediate