Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

by Barack Obama

I learned long ago to distrust my childhood and the stories that shaped it. It was only many years later, after I had sat at my father’s grave and spoken to him through Africa’s red soil, that I could circle back and evaluate these early stories for myself. Or, more accurately, it was only then that I understood that I had spent much of my life trying to rewrite these stories, plugging up holes in the narrative, accommodating unwelcome details, projecting individual choices against the blind sweep of history, all in the hope of extracting some granite slab of truth upon which my unborn children can firmly stand.

I enjoyed such moments—but only in brief. If the talk began to wander, or cross the border into familiarity, I would soon find reason to excuse myself. I had grown too comfortable in my solitude, the safest place I knew.

He was an African, I would learn, a Kenyan of the Luo tribe, born on the shores of Lake Victoria in a place called Alego. The village was poor, but his father—my other grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama—had been a prominent farmer, an elder of the tribe, a medicine man with healing powers. My father grew up herding his father’s goats and attending the local school, set up by the British colonial administration, where he had shown great promise. He eventually won a scholarship to study in Nairobi; and then, on the eve of Kenyan independence, he had been selected by Kenyan leaders and American sponsors to attend a university in the United States, joining the first large wave of Africans to be sent forth to master Western technology and bring it back to forge a new, modern Africa.

Instead, the path of my father’s life occupied the same terrain as a book my mother once bought for me, a book called Origins, a collection of creation tales from around the world, stories of Genesis and the tree where man was born, Prometheus and the gift of fire, the tortoise of Hindu legend that floated in space, supporting the weight of the world on its back. Later, when I became more familiar with the narrower path to happiness to be found in television and the movies, I’d become troubled by questions. What supported the tortoise? Why did an omnipotent God let a snake cause such grief? Why didn’t my father return?

Theirs were the faces of American Gothic, the WASP bloodline’s poorer cousins, and in their eyes one could see truths that I would have to learn later as facts: that Kansas had entered the Union free only after a violent precursor to the Civil War, the battle in which John Brown’s sword tasted first blood; that while one of my great-great-grandfathers, Christopher Columbus Clark, had been a decorated Union soldier, his wife’s mother was rumored to have been a second cousin of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy; that although another distant ancestor had indeed been a full-blooded Cherokee, such lineage was a source of considerable shame to Toot’s mother, who blanched whenever someone mentioned the subject and hoped to carry the secret to her grave.

Jim Crow had made its way north into Kansas well before my grandparents were born, but at least around Wichita it appeared in its more informal, genteel form, without much of the violence that pervaded the Deep South. The same unspoken codes that governed life among whites kept contact between the races to a minimum; when black people appear at all in the Kansas of my grandparents’ memories, the images are fleeting—black men who come around the oil fields once in a while, searching for work as hired hands; black women taking in the white folks’ laundry or helping clean white homes. Blacks are there but not there, like Sam the piano player or Beulah the maid or Amos and Andy on the radio—shadowy, silent presences that elicit neither passion nor fear.

I asked Lolo if it had hurt. “Of course it hurt,” he said, taking a sip from the jug. “Sometimes you can’t worry about hurt. Sometimes you worry only about getting where you have to go.”

She remembered what Lolo had told her once when her constant questioning had finally touched a nerve. “Guilt is a luxury only foreigners can afford,” he had said. “Like saying whatever pops into your head.” She didn’t know what it was like to lose everything, to wake up and feel her belly eating itself. She didn’t know how crowded and treacherous the path to security could be. Without absolute concentration, one could easily slip, tumble backward.

What tension I noticed had mainly to do with the gradual shift in my mother’s attitude toward me. She had always encouraged my rapid acculturation in Indonesia: It had made me relatively self-sufficient, undemanding on a tight budget, and extremely well mannered when compared to other American children. She had taught me to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often characterized Americans abroad. But she now had learned, just as Lolo had learned, the chasm that separated the life chances of an American from those of an Indonesian. She knew which side of the divide she wanted her child to be on. I was an American, she decided, and my true life lay elsewhere.

Without the money to send me to the International School, where most of Djakarta’s foreign children went, she had arranged from the moment of our arrival to supplement my Indonesian schooling with lessons from a U.S. correspondence course. Her efforts now redoubled. Five days a week, she came into my room at four in the morning, force-fed me breakfast, and proceeded to teach me my English lessons for three hours before I left for school and she went to work. I offered stiff resistance to this regimen, but in response to every strategy I concocted, whether unconvincing (“My stomach hurts”) or indisputably true (my eyes kept closing every five minutes), she would patiently repeat her most powerful defense: “This is no picnic for me either, buster.”

My mother’s confidence in needlepoint virtues depended on a faith I didn’t possess, a faith that she would refuse to describe as religious; that, in fact, her experience told her was sacrilegious: a faith that rational, thoughtful people could shape their own destiny. In a land where fatalism remained a necessary tool for enduring hardship, where ultimate truths were kept separate from day-to-day realities, she was a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism.

“You have me to thank for your eyebrows … your father has these little wispy eyebrows that don’t amount to much. But your brains, your character, you got from him.”

I kept these observations to myself, deciding that either my mother didn’t see them or she was trying to protect me and that I shouldn’t expose her efforts as having failed. I still trusted my mother’s love—but I now faced the prospect that her account of the world, and my father’s place in it, was somehow incomplete.

There was one other child in my class, though, who reminded me of a different sort of pain. Her name was Coretta, and before my arrival she had been the only black person in our grade. She was plump and dark and didn’t seem to have many friends. From the first day, we avoided each other but watched from a distance, as if direct contact would only remind us more keenly of our isolation.

And if the high didn’t solve whatever it was that was getting you down, it could at least help you laugh at the world’s ongoing folly and see through all the hypocrisy and bullshit and cheap moralism.

And that, I suppose, is what I’d been trying to tell my mother that day: that her faith in justice and rationality was misplaced, that we couldn’t overcome after all, that all the education and good intentions in the world couldn’t help plug up the holes in the universe or give you the power to change its blind, mindless course.

Finally he had asked me what it was that I expected to get out of college. I told him I didn’t know. He shook his big, hoary head. “Well,” he said, “that’s the problem, isn’t it? You don’t know. You’re just like the rest of these young cats out here. All you know is that college is the next thing you’re supposed to do.

“You think that’s funny?” she said to me. Her voice was shaking, barely a whisper. “Is that what’s real to you, Barack—making a mess for somebody else to clean up? That could have been my grandmother, you know. She had to clean up behind people for most of her life. I’ll bet the people she worked for thought it was funny, too.”

What was she asking of me, then? Determination, mostly. The determination to push against whatever power kept her stooped instead of standing straight. The determination to resist the easy or the expedient. You might be locked into a world not of your own making, her eyes said, but you still have a claim on how it is shaped. You still have responsibilities.

His lack of response confused me, but after a pause I took up the attack, asking the Iranian if he knew the names of the untold thousands who had leaped into shark-infested waters before their prison ships had ever reached American ports; asking if, once the ships had landed, he would have still preferred death had he known that revolt might only visit more suffering on women and children. Was the collaboration of some slaves any different than the silence of some Iranians who stood by and did nothing as Savak thugs murdered and tortured opponents of the Shah? How could we judge other men until we had stood in their shoes?

My mother laughed once more, and once again I saw her as the child she had been. Except this time I saw something else: In her smiling, slightly puzzled face, I saw what all children must see at some point if they are to grow up—their parents’ lives revealed to them as separate and apart, reaching out beyond the point of their union or the birth of a child, lives unfurling back to grandparents, great-grandparents, an infinite number of chance meetings, misunderstandings, projected hopes, limited circumstances.

I wandered down Broadway, imagining myself standing at the edge of the Lincoln Memorial and looking out over an empty pavilion, debris scattering in the wind. The movement had died years ago, shattered into a thousand fragments. Every path to change was well trodden, every strategy exhausted. And with each defeat, even those with the best of intentions could end up further and further removed from the struggles of those they purported to serve.

“Most of our work is with churches,” he said. “If poor and working-class people want to build real power, they have to have some sort of institutional base. With the unions in the shape they’re in, the churches are the only game in town. That’s where the people are, and that’s where the values are, even if they’ve been buried under a lot of bullshit. Churches won’t work with you, though, just out of the goodness of their hearts. They’ll talk a good game—a sermon on Sunday, maybe, or a special offering for the homeless. But if push comes to shove, they won’t really move unless you can show them how it’ll help them pay their heating bill.”

You’re right about one thing, though. The whole atmosphere in the city is polarized. A big media circus. Not much is getting done.” I leaned back in my seat. “And whose fault is that?” Marty put his glasses back on and met my stare. “It’s not a question of fault,” he said. “It’s a question of whether any politician, even somebody with Harold’s talent, can do much to break the cycle. A polarized city isn’t necessarily a bad thing for a politician. Black or white.”

Black people in the worst jobs. The worst housing. Police brutality rampant. But when the so-called black committeemen came around election time, we’d all line up and vote the straight Democratic ticket. Sell our soul for a Christmas turkey. White folks spitting in our faces, and we’d reward ’em with the vote.”

Seeing all these black and white faces together in one place, I, too, found myself feeling cheered, recognizing in myself the same vision driving Marty, his confidence in the populist impulse and working-class solidarity; his faith that if you could just clear away the politicians and media and bureaucrats and give everybody a seat at the table, then ordinary people could find common ground.

“Think that as long as they follow the letter of Scripture, they don’t need to follow the spirit. Instead of reaching out to people who are hurting, they make them feel unwelcome. They look at people funny unless they’re wearing the right clothes to mass, talk proper and all that. They figure they’re comfortable, so why put themselves out. Well, Christ ain’t about comfort, is he? He preached a social gospel. Took his message to the weak. The downtrodden.

I could tell we understood each other. It’s these rules again that keep us apart—rules of men, not rules of God.

And He cares more about whether I’m about the business of helping others than whether I’m straight on my catechisms.”

He helped me clean up, then took me out for coffee and pointed out some of my mistakes. The problem of gangs was too general to make an impression on people—issues had to be made concrete, specific, and winnable. I should have prepared Ruby more carefully—and set out fewer chairs. Most important, I needed to spend more time getting to know the leaders in the community; flyers couldn’t pull people out on a rainy night.

Both Marty and Smalls knew that in politics, like religion, power lay in certainty—and that one man’s certainty always threatened another’s.

“I’m sorry, Barack,” Angela continued. “It has nothing to do with you. The truth is, we’re just tired. We’ve all been at this for two years, and we’ve got nothing to show for it.” “I understand you’re frustrated, Angela. We’re all a little frustrated. But you need to give it more time. We—” “We don’t have more time,” Shirley broke in. “We can’t keep on making promises to our people, and then have nothing happen. We need something now.”

Will broke off suddenly and bowed his head. I thought he was preparing to sneeze, but when he raised his head back up, I saw tears rolling down his cheeks. He continued in a cracking voice, “And you know, I don’t see kids smiling around here no more. You look at ’em listen to ’em … they seem worried all the time, mad about something. They got nothing they trust. Not their parents. Not God. Not themselves. And that’s not right. That just ain’t the way things supposed to be … kids not smiling.”

Would black consumers buy toothpaste through the mail? And what of the likelihood that the cheapest supplier of whatever it was that went into making toothpaste was a white man? Questions of competition, decisions forced by a market economy and majoritarian rule; issues of power. It was this unyielding reality—that whites were not simply phantoms to be expunged from our dreams but were an active and varied fact of our everyday lives—that finally explained how nationalism could thrive as an emotion and flounder as a program.

I found god in myself and I loved her / I loved her fiercely

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.

The three of them only reflected the attitudes of most of the people who worked in Altgeld: teachers, drug counselors, policemen. Some were there only for the paycheck; others sincerely wanted to help. But whatever their motives, they would all at some point confess a common weariness, a weariness that was bone-deep. They had lost whatever confidence they might have once had in their ability to reverse the deterioration they saw all around them. With that loss of confidence came a loss in the capacity for outrage. The idea of responsibility—their own, that of others—slowly eroded, replaced with gallows humor and low expectations.

“Beautiful, aren’t they?” Dr. Collier said. “They really are.” “The change comes later. In about five years, although it seems like it’s coming sooner all the time.” “What change is that?” “When their eyes stop laughing. Their throats can still make the sound, but if you look at their eyes, you can see they’ve shut off something inside.”

Linda whispered something to Bernadette; Bernadette whispered back. “What’s everybody whispering for?” I asked loudly. The children giggled. Bernadette said, “I feel like I’m waiting to see the principal or something.” “You hear that, everybody,” I said. “They build these big offices to make you feel intimidated. Just remember that this is a public authority. Folks who work here are responsible to you.”

“Don’t worry,” Dr. Collier said. “They’re tough. Not as tough as they sound—none of us are, including you. But they’ll get over it. Something like this is just part of growing up. And sometimes growing up hurts.”

“Who was it that jumped?” “That’s the other thing, Barack!” Johnnie took a drag from his cigarette and let the smoke roll from his mouth. “It was a young white girl, man, sixteen maybe, seventeen. One of these punk rock types, with blue hair and a ring through her nose. Afterward, I’m wondering what she was thinking about while she was riding up the elevator. I mean, folks musta been standing right next to her on the way up. Maybe they looked her over, decided she was a freak, and went back to thinking about their own business. You know, their promotion, or the Bulls game, or whatever. And the whole time this girl’s just standing there next to them with all that pain inside her. Got to be a lot of pain, doc, ’cause right before she jumps, you figure she looks down and knows that shit is gonna hurt.”

“I mean, things were tough when I was coming up, but there were limits. We’d get high, get into fights. But out in public, at home, if an adult saw you getting loud or wild, they would say something. And most of us would listen, you know what I’m saying? “Now, with the drugs, the guns—all that’s disappeared. Don’t take a whole lot of kids carrying a gun. Just one or two. Somebody says something to one of ’em, and—pow!—kid wastes him. Folks hear stories like that, they just stop trying to talk to these young cats out here. We start generalizing about ’em just like the white folks do. We see ’em hanging out, we head the other way. After a while, even the good kid starts realizing ain’t nobody out here gonna look out for him. So he figures he’s gonna have to look after himself. Bottom line, you got twelve-year-olds making their own damn rules.”

The idea of physical assault just never occurred to me. Same thing with the distinction Johnnie made between good kids and bad kids—the distinction didn’t compute in my head. It seemed based on a premise that defied my experience, an assumption that children could somehow set the terms of their own development. I thought about Bernadette’s five-year-old son, scampering about the broken roads of Altgeld, between a sewage plant and a dump. Where did he sit along the spectrum of goodness? If he ended up in a gang or in jail, would that prove his essence somehow, a wayward gene … or just the consequences of a malnourished world?

“The first thing you have to realize,” he said, looking at Johnnie and me in turn, “is that the public school system is not about educating black children. Never has been. Inner-city schools are about social control. Period. They’re operated as holding pens—miniature jails, really. It’s only when black children start breaking out of their pens and bothering white people that society even pays any attention to the issue of whether these children are being educated.

“Just think about what a real education for these children would involve. It would start by giving a child an understanding of himself, his world, his culture, his community. That’s the starting point of any educational process. That’s what makes a child hungry to learn—the promise of being part of something, of mastering his environment. But for the black child, everything’s turned upside down. From day one, what’s he learning about? Someone else’s history. Someone else’s culture. Not only that, this culture he’s supposed to learn is the same culture that’s systematically rejected him, denied his humanity.”

“Is it any wonder that the black child loses interest in learning? Of course not. It’s worst for the boys. At least the girls have older women to talk to, the example of motherhood. But the boys have nothing. Half of them don’t even know their own fathers. There’s nobody to guide them through the process of becoming a man … to explain to them the meaning of manhood. And that’s a recipe for disaster. Because in every society, young men are going to have violent tendencies. Either those tendencies are directed and disciplined in creative pursuits or those tendencies destroy the young men, or the society, or both.

Where I can, I try to fill the void. I expose students to African history, geography, artistic traditions. I try to give them a different values orientation—something to counteract the materialism and individualism and instant gratification that’s fed to them the other fifteen hours of their day. I teach them that Africans are a communal people. That Africans respect their elders. Some of my European colleagues feel threatened by this, but I tell them it’s not about denigrating other cultures. It’s about giving these young people a base for themselves. Unless they’re rooted in their own traditions, they won’t ever be able to appreciate what other cultures have to offer—”

These boys have no margin for error; if they carry guns, those guns will offer them no protection from that truth. And it is that truth, a truth that they surely sense but can’t admit and, in fact, must refuse if they are to wake up tomorrow, that has forced them, or others like them, eventually to shut off access to any empathy they may once have felt. Their unruly maleness will not be contained, as mine finally was, by a sense of sadness at an older man’s injured pride. Their anger won’t be checked by the intimation of danger that would come upon me whenever I split another boy’s lip or raced down a highway with gin clouding my head. As I stand there, I find myself thinking that somewhere down the line both guilt and empathy speak to our own buried sense that an order of some sort is required, not the social order that exists, necessarily, but something more fundamental and more demanding; a sense, further, that one has a stake in this order, a wish that, no matter how fluid this order sometimes appears, it will not drain out of the universe. I suspect that these boys will have to search long and hard for that order—indeed, any order that includes them as more than objects of fear or derision. And that suspicion terrifies me, for I now have a place in the world, a job, a schedule to follow. As much as I might tell myself otherwise, we are breaking apart, these boys and me, into different tribes, speaking a different tongue, living by a different code.

I remember a conversation I had once in Chicago when I was still organizing. It was with a woman who’d grown up in a big family in rural Georgia. Five brothers and three sisters, she had told me, all crowded under a single roof. She told me about her father’s ultimately futile efforts to farm his small plot of land, her mother’s vegetable garden, the two pigs they kept penned out in the yard, and the trips with her siblings to fish the murky waters of a river nearby. Listening to her speak, I began to realize that two of the three sisters she’d mentioned had actually died at birth, but that in this woman’s mind they had remained with her always, spirits with names and ages and characters, two sisters who accompanied her while she walked to school or did chores, who soothed her cries and calmed her fears. For this woman, family had never been a vessel just for the living. The dead, too, had their claims, their voices shaping the course of her dreams.

What had I expected my little lecture to accomplish? My simple formulas for Third World solidarity had little application in Kenya. Here, persons of Indian extraction were like the Chinese in Indonesia, the Koreans in the South Side of Chicago, outsiders who knew how to trade and kept to themselves, working the margins of a racial caste system, more visible and so more vulnerable to resentment. It was nobody’s fault necessarily. It was just a matter of history, an unfortunate fact of life.