“Because of the
accident, the Old Man had now lost his job at the Water Department, and we had
no place to live. For a while, we bounced around from relative to relative, but
eventually they would put us out because they had their own troubles. Then we
found a run-down house in a rough section of town, and we stayed there for
several years. That was a terrible time. The Old Man had so little money, he
would have to borrow from relatives just for food. This made him more ashamed,
I think, and his temper got worse. Despite all our troubles, he would never
admit to Roy or myself that anything was wrong. I think that’s what hurt the
most-the way he still put on airs about how we were the children of Dr. Obama.
We would have empty cupboards, and he would make donations to charities just to
keep up appearances! I would argue with him sometimes, but he would just say
that I was a foolish young girl and didn’t understand.
“It was worse
between him and Roy. They would have terrific fights. Finally Roy just left. He
just stopped coming home and started living with different people. So I was
left alone with the Old Man. Sometimes I would stay up half the night, waiting
to hear him come through the door, worrying that something terrible had
happened. Then he would stagger in drunk and come into my room and wake me
because he wanted company or something to eat. He would talk about how unhappy
he was and how he had been betrayed. I would be so sleepy, I wouldn’t
understand anything he was saying. Secretly, I began to wish that he would just
stay out one night and never come back.
“The only thing that
saved me was Kenya High School. It was a girls’ school that had once been reserved
for the British. Very strict, and still very racist-it was only when I was
there, after most of the white students had left, that they allowed African
teachers to lecture. But despite these things, I became active there. It was a
boarding school, so during the school term I would stay there instead of with
the Old Man.
The school gave me some sense of
order, you see. Something to hold on to.
“One year, the Old
Man couldn’t even pay my school fees, and I was sent home. I was so ashamed, I
cried all night. I didn’t know what I would do. But I was lucky. One of the
headmistresses heard about my situation and gave me a scholarship that let me
stay on. It’s sad to say, but as much as I cared for the Old Man, and worried
about him, I was glad not to have to live with him. I just left him to himself
and never looked back.
“In my last two
years in high school, the Old Man’s situation improved. Kenyatta died, and
somehow the Old Man was able to work again in government. He got a job with the
Ministry of Finance and started to have money again, and influence. But I think
he never got over the bitterness of what had happened to him, seeing his other
age-mates who had been more politically astute rise ahead of him. And it was
too late to pick up the pieces of his family. For a long time he lived alone in
a hotel room, even when he could afford again to buy a house. He would have
different women for short spells-Europeans, Africans-but nothing ever lasted. I
almost never saw him, and when I did, he didn’t know how to behave with me. We
were like strangers, but you know, he still wanted to pretend that he was a
model father and could tell me how to behave. I remember when I got my
scholarship to study in Germany, I was afraid to tell him. I thought he might
say I was too young to go and interfere with my student visa, which had to be
approved by the government. So I just left without saying good-bye.
“It was only in
Germany that I began to let go of some of the anger I felt towards him. With
distance, I could see what he had gone through, how even he had never really
understood himself. Only at the end, after making such a mess of his life, do I
think he was maybe beginning to change. The last time I saw him, he was on a
business trip, representing Kenya at an international conference in Europe. I
was apprehensive, because we hadn’t spoken for so long. But when he arrived in
Germany he seemed really relaxed, almost peaceful. We had a really good time.
You know, even when he was being completely unreasonable he could be so
charming! He took me with him to London, and we stayed in a fancy hotel, and he
introduced me to all his friends at a British club. He was pulling out chairs
for me and making a great fuss, telling all his friends how proud he was of me.
On the flight back from London, I noticed a little glass tumbler his whiskey
was being served in, and I said I was going to filch it, and he said, ‘There’s
no need for such things.’ He called the stewardess and asked her to bring me a
whole set of the glasses, as if he owned the plane. When the stewardess handed
them to me, I felt like a little girl again. Like his princess.
“On the last day of
his visit, he took me to lunch, and we talked about the future. He asked me if
I needed money and insisted that I take something. He told me that once I
returned to Kenya, he would find me a proper husband. It was touching, you
know, what he was trying to do…as if he could make up for all the lost time. By
then, he had just fathered another son, George, with a young woman he was
living with. So I told him, ‘Roy and myself, we’re already adults. We have our
own ways, our own memories, and what has happened between all of us is hard to
undo. But with George, the baby, he is a clean slate. You have a chance to
really do right by him.’ And he just nodded, as if…as if…”
For some time, Auma
had been staring at our father’s photograph, soft-focused in the dim light. Now
she stood up and went to the window, her back turned to me. She was clutching
herself, her hands inching over her hunched shoulders. She began to shake
violently, and I came up behind her and put my arms around her as she wept, the
sorrow washing through her in slow, deep waves. “Do you see, Barack?” she said
between sobs. “I was just starting to know him. It was just getting to the
point where…where he might have explained himself. Sometimes I think he might
have really turned the corner, found some inner peace.
When he died, I felt so…so cheated.
As cheated as you must have felt.”
Outside, a car
screeched around a corner; a solitary man crossed under the yellow circle of a
streetlight. As if by force of will, Auma’s body suddenly straightened, her
breath steadied, and she wiped her eyes with her shirtsleeve. “Ah, look at what
you’ve made your sister do,” she said, and let out a fragile laugh. She turned
to me. “You know, the Old Man used to talk about you so much! He would show off
your picture to everybody and tell us how well you were doing in school. I
guess your mum and him used to exchange letters. I think those letters really
comforted him. During the really bad times, when everybody seemed to have
turned against him, he would bring her letters into my room and start reading
them out loud. He would wake me up and make me listen, and when he was
finished, he would shake the letter in his hand and say how kind your mum had
been. ‘You see!’ he would say. ‘At least there are people who truly care for
me.’ He’d say this to himself over and over 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 trees that our grandfather
planted. Granny is talking, telling me something funny, and I can hear the cow
swishing its tall behind us, and the chickens pecking at the edges of the
field, and the smell of the fire from the cooking hut.
And under the mango tree, near the
cornfields, is the place where the Old Man is buried….”
Her flight was starting to board. We remained
seated, and Auma closed her eyes, squeezing my hand. “We need to go home,” she said. “We need to
go home, Barack, and see him there.”
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