Dreams from My Father

called our father. It sounded right to me, somehow, at once familiar and distant, an elemental force that isn’t fully understood. In my apartment, Auma held up the picture of him that sat on my bookshelf, a studio portrait that my mother had saved.
    “He looks so innocent, doesn’t he? So young.” She held the picture next to my face. “You have the same mouth.”
    I told her she should lie down and get some rest while I went to my office for a few hours of work.
    She shook her head. “I’m not tired. Let me go with you.”
    “You’ll feel better if you take a nap.”
    She said, “Agh, Barack! I see you’re bossy like the Old Man as well. And you only met him once? It must be in the blood.”
    I laughed, but she didn’t; instead, her eyes wandered over my face as if it were a puzzle to solve, another piece to a problem that, beneath the exuberant chatter, nagged at her heart.
    I gave her a tour of the South Side that afternoon, the same drive I had taken in my first days in Chicago, only with some of my own memories now. When we stopped by my office, Angela, Mona, and Shirley happened to be there. They asked Auma all about Kenya and how she braided her hair and how come she talked so pretty, like the queen of England, and the four of them enjoyed themselves thoroughly talking about me and all my strange habits.
    “They seem very fond of you,” Auma said afterward. “They remind me of our aunties back home.” She rolled down the window and stuck her face into the wind, watching Michigan Avenue pass by: the gutted remains of the old Roseland Theatre, a garage full of rusted cars. “Are you doing this for them, Barack?” she asked, turning back to me. “This organizing business, I mean?”
    I shrugged. “For them. For me.”
    That same expression of puzzlement, and fear, returned to Auma’s face. “I don’t like politics much,” she said.
    “Why’s that?”
    “I don’t know. People always end up disappointed.”
    There was a letter waiting for her in my mailbox when we got home; it was from a German law student she said she’d been seeing. The letter was voluminous, at least seven pages long, and as I prepared dinner, she sat at the kitchen table and laughed and sighed and clicked her tongue, her face suddenly soft and wistful.
    “I thought you didn’t like Germans,” I said.
    She rubbed her eyes and laughed. “Yah—Otto is different. He’s so sweet! And sometimes I treat him so badly! I don’t know, Barack. Sometimes I think it’s just impossible for me to trust anybody completely. I think of what the Old Man made of his life, and the idea of marriage gives me, how do you say…the shivers. Also, with Otto and his career, we would have to live in Germany, you see. I start imagining what it would be like for me, living my entire life as a foreigner, and I don’t think I could take it.”
    She folded her letter and put it back in the envelope. “What about you, Barack?” she asked. “Do you have these problems, or is it just your sister who’s so confused?”
    “I think I know what you’re feeling.”
    “Tell me.”
    I went to the refrigerator and pulled out two green peppers, setting them on the cutting board. “Well…there was a woman in New York that I loved. She was white. She had dark hair, and specks of green in her eyes. Her voice sounded like a wind chime. We saw each other for almost a year. On the weekends, mostly. Sometimes in her apartment, sometimes in mine. You know how you can fall into your own private world? Just two people, hidden and warm. Your own language. Your own customs. That’s how it was.
    “Anyway, one weekend she invited me to her family’s country house. The parents were there, and they were very nice, very gracious. It was autumn, beautiful, with woods all around us, and we paddled a canoe across this round, icy lake full of small gold leaves that collected along the shore. The family knew every inch of the land. They knew how the hills had formed, how the glacial drifts had created the lake, the names of the earliest white settlers—their ancestors—and before that, the names of the Indians who’d once hunted the land. The house was very old, her grandfather’s house. He had inherited it from his grandfather. The library was filled with old books and pictures of the grandfather with famous people he had known—presidents, diplomats, industrialists. There was this tremendous gravity to the room. Standing in that room, I realized that