Dreams from My Father

again….”
    While Auma brushed her teeth, I prepared the convertible sofa for her. Soon she was curled up under a blanket, sound asleep. But I remained awake, propped up in a chair with the desk light on, looking at the stillness of her face, listening to the rhythm of her breathing, trying to make some sense out of all that she’d said. I felt as if my world had been turned on its head; as if I had woken up to find a blue sun in the yellow sky, or heard animals speaking like men. All my life, I had carried a single image of my father, one that I had sometimes rebelled against but had never questioned, one that I had later tried to take as my own. The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader—my father had been all those things. All those things and more, because except for that one brief visit in Hawaii, he had never been present to foil the image, because I hadn’t seen what perhaps most men see at some point in their lives: their father’s body shrinking, their father’s best hopes dashed, their father’s face lined with grief and regret.
    Yes, I’d seen weakness in other men—Gramps and his disappointments, Lolo and his compromise. But these men had become object lessons for me, men I might love but never emulate, white men and brown men whose fates didn’t speak to my own. It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela. And if later I saw that the black men I knew—Frank or Ray or Will or Rafiq—fell short of such lofty standards; if I had learned to respect these men for the struggles they went through, recognizing them as my own—my father’s voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people’s struggle. Wake up, black man!
    Now, as I sat in the glow of a single light bulb, rocking slightly on a hard-backed chair, that image had suddenly vanished. Replaced by…what? A bitter drunk? An abusive husband? A defeated, lonely bureaucrat? To think that all my life I had been wrestling with nothing more than a ghost! For a moment I felt giddy; if Auma hadn’t been in the room, I would have probably laughed out loud. The king is overthrown, I thought. The emerald curtain is pulled aside. The rabble of my head is free to run riot; I can do what I damn well please. For what man, if not my own father, has the power to tell me otherwise? Whatever I do, it seems, I won’t do much worse than he did.
    The night wore on; I tried to regain my balance, sensing that there was little satisfaction to be had from my newfound liberation. What stood in the way of my succumbing to the same defeat that had brought down the Old Man? Who might protect me from doubt or warn me against all the traps that seem laid in a black man’s soul? The fantasy of my father had at least kept me from despair. Now he was dead, truly. He could no longer tell me how to live.
    All he could tell me, perhaps, was what had happened to him. It occurred to me that for all the new information, I still didn’t know the man my father had been. What had happened to all his vigor, his promise? What had shaped his ambitions? I imagined once again the first and only time we’d met, the man I now knew must have been as apprehensive as I was, the man who had returned to Hawaii to sift through his past and perhaps try and reclaim that best part of him, the part that had been misplaced. He hadn’t been able to tell me his true feelings then, any more than I had been able to express my ten-year-old desires. We had been frozen by the sight of the other, unable to escape the suspicion that under examination our true selves would be found wanting. Now, fifteen years later, I looked into Auma’s sleeping face and saw the price we had paid for that silence.
             
    Ten days later, Auma and I sat in the hard plastic seats of an airport terminal, looking out at the planes through the high wall of glass. I asked her what she was thinking about, and she smiled softly.
    “I was thinking about Alego,” she said. “Home Square—our grandfather’s land, where Granny still lives. It’s the most beautiful place, Barack. When I’m in Germany, and it’s cold outside, and I’m feeling lonely, sometimes I close my eyes and imagine I’m there. Sitting in the compound, surrounded by big