Dreams from My Father

limbs across the stage.
             
    somebody / anybody
    sing a black girl’s song
    bring her out
    to know herself
    to know you
    but sing her rhythms
    carin’ / struggle / hard times
    sing her song of life…
             
    For the next hour, the women took turns telling their stories, singing their songs. They sang about lost time and discarded fantasies and what might have been. They sang of the men who loved them, betrayed them, raped them, embraced them; they sang of the hurt inside these men, hurt that was understood and sometimes forgiven. They showed each other their stretch marks and the calluses on their feet; they revealed their beauty in the lilt of their voice, the flutter of a hand, beauty waning, ascendant, elusive. They wept over the aborted children, the murdered children, the children they once were. And through all of their songs, violent, angry, sweet, unflinching, the women danced, each of them, double-dutch and rhumba and bump and solitary waltz; sweat-breaking, heart-breaking dances. They danced until they all seemed one spirit. At the end of the play, that spirit began to sing a single, simple verse:
             
    I found god in myself
    and I loved her / I loved her fiercely
             
    Lights came up; bows were taken; the girls behind us cheered wildly. I helped Ruby with her coat and we walked out to the parking lot. The temperature had dropped; the stars glinted like ice against the black sky. As we waited for the car to warm up, Ruby leaned over and kissed me on the cheek.
    “Thanks.”
    Her eyes, deep brown, were shimmering. I grabbed her gloved hand and gave it a quick squeeze before starting to drive. Nothing more was said; for the entire ride back to the South Side, until I left her at her door and wished her good-night, we never broke that precious silence.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

    I PULLED INTO THE AIRPORT parking lot at a quarter past three and ran to the terminal as fast as I could. Panting for breath, I spun around several times, my eyes scanning the crowds of Indians, Germans, Poles, Thais, and Czechs gathering their luggage.
    Damn! I knew I should have left earlier. Maybe she had gotten worried and tried to call. Had I given her my office number? What if she’d missed her flight? What if she had walked right past me and I hadn’t even known it?
    I looked down at the photograph in my hand, the one she had sent me two months earlier, smudged now from too much handling. Then I looked up, and the picture came to life: an African woman emerging from behind the customs gate, moving with easy, graceful steps, her bright, searching eyes now fixed on my own, her dark, round, sculpted face blossoming like a wood rose as she smiled.
    “Barack?”
    “Auma?”
    “Oh my…”
    I lifted my sister off the ground as we embraced, and we laughed and laughed as we looked at each other. I picked up her bag and we began to walk to the parking garage, and she slipped her arm through mine. And I knew at that moment, somehow, that I loved her, so naturally, so easily and fiercely, that later, after she was gone, I would find myself mistrusting that love, trying to explain it to myself. Even now I can’t explain it; I only know that the love was true, and still is, and I’m grateful for it.
    “So, brother,” Auma said as we drove into the city, “you have to tell me everything.”
    “About what?”
    “Your life, of course.”
    “From the beginning?”
    “Start anywhere.”
    I told her about Chicago and New York, my work as an organizer, my mother and grandparents and Maya—she had heard so much about them from our father, she said, she felt as if she already knew them. She described Heidelberg, where she was trying to finish a master’s degree in linguistics, and the trials and tribulations of living in Germany.
    “I have no right to complain, I suppose,” she said. “I have a scholarship, a flat. I don’t know what I would be doing if I was still in Kenya. Still, I don’t care for Germany so much. You know, the Germans like to think of themselves as very liberal when it comes to Africans, but if you scratch the surface you see they still have the attitudes of their childhood. In German fairy tales, black people are always the goblins. Such things one doesn’t forget so easily. Sometimes I try to imagine what it must have been like for the Old Man, leaving home for the first time. Whether he felt that same loneliness…”
    The Old Man. That’s what Auma