Dreams from My Father

our two worlds, my friend’s and mine, were as distant from each other as Kenya is from Germany. And I knew that if we stayed together I’d eventually live in hers. After all, I’d been doing it most of my life. Between the two of us, I was the one who knew how to live as an outsider.”
    “So what happened.”
    I shrugged. “I pushed her away. We started to fight. We started thinking about the future, and it pressed in on our warm little world. One night I took her to see a new play by a black playwright. It was a very angry play, but very funny. Typical black American humor. The audience was mostly black, and everybody was laughing and clapping and hollering like they were in church. After the play was over, my friend started talking about why black people were so angry all the time. I said it was a matter of remembering—nobody asks why Jews remember the Holocaust, I think I said—and she said that’s different, and I said it wasn’t, and she said that anger was just a dead end. We had a big fight, right in front of the theater. When we got back to the car she started crying. She couldn’t be black, she said. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. She could only be herself, and wasn’t that enough.”
    “That’s a sad story, Barack.”
    “I suppose. Maybe even if she’d been black it still wouldn’t have worked out. I mean, there are several black ladies out there who’ve broken my heart just as good.” I smiled and scraped the cut-up peppers into the pot, and then turned back to Auma. “The thing is,” I said, no longer smiling, “whenever I think back to what my friend said to me, that night outside the theater, it somehow makes me ashamed.”
    “Do you ever hear from her?”
    “I got a postcard at Christmas. She’s happy now; she’s met someone. And I have my work.”
    “Is that enough?”
    “Sometimes.”
             
    I took the next day off, and we spent the day together, visiting the Art Institute (I wanted to go see the shrunken heads at the Field Museum, but Auma refused), digging old photos out of my closet, visiting the supermarket, where Auma decided that Americans were friendly and overweight. She was stubborn sometimes, sometimes impish, sometimes burdened with the weight of the world, and always asserting a self-reliance that I recognized as a learned response—my own response to uncertainty.
    We didn’t speak much about our father, though; it was as if our conversation stopped whenever we threatened to skirt his memory. It was only that night, after dinner and a long walk along the lake’s crumbling break wall, that we both sensed we couldn’t go any further until we opened up the subject. I made us some tea and Auma began to tell me about the Old Man, at least what she could remember.
    “I can’t say I really knew him, Barack,” she began. “Maybe nobody did…not really. His life was so scattered. People only knew scraps and pieces, even his own children.
    “I was scared of him. You know, he was already away when I was born. In Hawaii with your mum, and then at Harvard. When he came back to Kenya, our oldest brother, Roy, and I were small children. We had lived with our mum in the country, in Alego, up until then. I was too young to remember much about him coming. I was four, but Roy was six, so maybe he can tell you more about what happened. I just remember that he came back with an American woman named Ruth, and that he took us from our mother to go live with them in Nairobi. I remember that this woman, Ruth, was the first white person I’d ever been near, and that suddenly she was supposed to be my new mother.”
    “Why didn’t you stay with your own mother?”
    Auma shook her head. “I don’t know exactly. In Kenya, men get to keep children in a divorce—if they want them, that is. I asked my mum about this, but it’s difficult for her to talk about. She only says that the Old Man’s new wife refused to live with another wife, and that she—my mum—thought us children would be better off living with the Old Man because he was rich.
    “In those first years, the Old Man was doing really well, you see. He was working for an American oil company—Shell, I think. It was only a few years after independence, and the Old Man was well connected with all the top government people. He had gone to school with many of them. The vice-president, ministers, they would all come to the house sometimes and drink with him and talk about politics. He had