Dreams from My Father

(“Black folks are just lazy, Barack—don’t wanna do nothing”). Often the word
nigger
replaced
black
in such remarks, a word I’d once liked to think was spoken in jest, with a knowing irony, the inside joke that marked our resilience as a people. Until the first time I heard a young mother use it on her child to tell him he wasn’t worth shit, or watched teenage boys use it to draw blood in a quick round of verbal sparring. The transformation of the word’s original meaning was never complete; like the other defenses we erected against possible hurt, this one, too, involved striking out at ourselves first.
    If the language, the humor, the stories of ordinary people were the stuff out of which families, communities, economies would have to be built, then I couldn’t separate that strength from the hurt and distortions that lingered inside us. And it was the implications of that fact, I realized, that had most disturbed me when I looked into Ruby’s eyes. The stories that I had been hearing from the leadership, all the records of courage and sacrifice and overcoming of great odds, hadn’t simply arisen from struggles with pestilence or drought, or even mere poverty. They had arisen out of a very particular experience with hate. That hate hadn’t gone away; it formed a counternarrative buried deep within each person and at the center of which stood white people—some cruel, some ignorant, sometimes a single face, sometimes just a faceless image of a system claiming power over our lives. I had to ask myself whether the bonds of community could be restored without collectively exorcising that ghostly figure that haunted black dreams. Could Ruby love herself without hating blue eyes?
             
    Rafiq al-Shabazz had settled such questions to his own satisfaction. I had begun to see him more regularly, for the morning after DCP met with the Mayor’s Office of Employment and Training he had called me up and launched into a rapid-fire monologue about the job center we had asked for from the city.
    “We gotta talk, Barack,” he said. “What y’all are trying to do with job training needs to fit into the overall comprehensive development plan I’ve been working on. Can’t think about this thing in isolation…got to look at the big picture. You don’t understand the forces at work out here. Is big, man. All kinds of folks ready to stab you in the back.”
    “Who is this?”
    “Rafiq. What’s the matter, too early for you?”
    It was. I put him on hold and got a cup of coffee, then asked him to start all over again, more slowly this time. I eventually gathered that Rafiq had an interest in having the new MET intake center we’d proposed to the city locate in a certain building near his office on Michigan Avenue. I didn’t ask the particular nature of that interest: I doubted that I could get a straight answer out of him, and anyway, I figured that we might be able to use an ally in what was proving to be a series of sticky negotiations with Ms. Alvarez. If the storefront he had in mind met the necessary specifications, I said, then I was willing to propose it as one possible alternative.
    So Rafiq and I formed an uneasy alliance, one that didn’t go over too well with the DCP leaders. I understood their concerns: Whenever we sat down with Rafiq to discuss our joint strategy, he would interrupt the discussion with long lectures about secret machinations afoot, and all the black people willing to sell their people down the river. It was an effective negotiating ploy, for with his voice progressively rising, the veins in his neck straining, Angela and Will and the others would suddenly drop into a curious silence, watching Rafiq as if he were an epileptic in the midst of seizure. More than once, I’d have to jump in and start shouting back at him, not so much in anger as simply to slow him down, until finally a small smile would curl under his mustache and we could get back to work.
    When the two of us were alone, though, Rafiq and I could sometimes have normal conversations. Over time I arrived at a grudging admiration for his tenacity and bravado, and, within his own terms, a certain sincerity. He confirmed that he had been a gang leader growing up in Altgeld; he had found religion, he said, under the stewardship of a local Muslim leader unaffiliated with Minister Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam. “If it hadn’t been for Islam, man, I’d probably be dead,” he told me one day.