Dreams from My Father (48 page)

Granny stood up and brushed the grass off her skirt. The yard was hushed, the silence broken only by a bird’s anxious trill. “It’s going to rain,” she said, and we all gathered up the mats and cups and carried them into the house.

Once inside, I asked Granny if she had anything left of the Old Man’s or our grandfather’s. She went into her bedroom, sorting through the contents of an old leather trunk. A few minutes later, she emerged with a rust-colored book the size of a passport, along with a few papers of different colors, stapled together and chewed at an angle along one side.

“I’m afraid this is all I could find,” she said to Auma. “The rats got to the papers before I had a chance to put them away.”

Auma and I sat down and set the book and papers on the low table in front of us. The binding on the red book had crumbled away, but the cover was still legible:
Domestic Servant’s Pocket Register,
it read, and in smaller letters,
Issued under the Authority of the Registration of Domestic Servant’s Ordinance,
1928
, Colony and Protectorate of Kenya.
On the book’s inside cover, we found a two-shilling stamp above Onyango’s left and right thumbprints. The swirls were still clear, like an imprint of coral. The box was empty where the photograph once had been.

The preamble explained:
The object of this Ordinance is to provide every person employed in a domestic capacity with a record of such employment, and to safeguard his or her interests as well as to protect employers against the employment of persons who have rendered themselves unsuitable for such work.

The term
servant
was defined:
cook, house servant, waiter, butler, nurse, valet, bar boy, footmen, or chauffeur, or washermen
. The rules governing the carrying of such passbooks: servants found to be working without such books, or in any way injuring such books,
are liable to a fine not exceeding one hundred shillings or to imprisonment not exceeding six months or to both
. And then, the particulars of said Registered Servant, filled out in the elegant, unhurried script of a nameless clerk:

Name:
Hussein II Onyango.

Native Registration Ordinance No.:
Rwl A NBI 0976717.

Race or Tribe:
Ja’Luo.

Usual Place of Residence When Not Employed:
Kisumu.

Sex:
M.

Age:
35.

Height and Build:
6’0"
Medium.

Complexion:
Dark.

Nose:
Flat.

Mouth:
Large.

Hair:
Curly.

Teeth:
Six Missing.

Scars, Tribal Marks, or Other Peculiarities:
None.

Toward the back of the book, we found the particulars of employment,
signed and
testified to by various employers. Capt. C. Harford of Nairobi’s Government House said that Onyango
performed his duties as personal boy with admirable diligence
. Mr. A. G. Dickson found his cooking excellent—
he can read and write English and follows any recipes … apart from other things his pastries are excellent
. He no longer needed Onyango’s services since
I am no longer on Safari
. Dr. H. H. Sherry suggested that Onyango
is a capable cook but the job is not big enough for him
. On the other hand, Mr. Arthur W. H. Cole of the East Africa Survey Group says that after a
week on
the job, Onyango was
found to be unsuitable and certainly not worth
60
shillings per month
.

We moved to the stack of letters. They were from our father, addressed to various universities in the States. There were more than thirty of them, to the presidents of Morgan State, Santa Barbara Junior College, San Francisco State.

Dear President Calhoun,
one letter began.
I have heard of your college from Mrs. Helen Roberts of Palo Alto, California, who is now in Nairobi here. Mrs. Roberts, knowing how much desirous I am to further my studies in the United States of America, has asked me to apply to your esteemed college for admission. I shall therefore be very much pleased if you will kindly
forward me your application form and information regarding the possibility of such scholarships as you may be aware of.
Attached to several letters were recommendations from Miss Elizabeth Mooney, a literacy specialist from Maryland.
It is not possible to obtain Mr. O’Bama’s school transcripts,
she wrote,
since he has been out of school for some years
. However, she expressed confidence in our father’s talents, noting that she had
observed him making use of algebra and geometry
. She added that there was a great need in Kenya for capable and dedicated teachers and that,
given Mr. O’Bama’s desire to be of service to his country, he should be given a chance, perhaps on a one-year basis
.

This was it, I thought to myself. My inheritance. I rearranged the letters in a neat stack and set them under the registry book. Then I went out into the backyard. Standing before the two graves, I felt everything around me—the cornfields, the mango tree, the sky—closing in, until I was left with only a series of mental images, Granny’s stories come to life.

I see my grandfather, standing before his father’s hut, a wiry, grim-faced boy, almost ridiculous in his oversized trousers and his buttonless shirt. I watch his father turn away from him and hear his brothers laugh. I feel the heat pour down his brow, the knots forming in his limbs, the sudden jump in his heart. And as his figure turns and starts back down the road of red earth, I know that for him the path of his life is now altered irreversibly, completely.

He will have to reinvent himself in this arid, solitary place. Through force of will, he will create a life out of the scraps of an unknown world, and the memories of a world rendered obsolete. And yet, as he sits alone in a freshly scrubbed hut, an old man now with milky eyes, I know that he still hears his father and brothers laughing behind him. He still hears the clipped voice of a British captain, explaining for the third and last time the correct proportion of tonic to gin. The nerves in the old man’s neck tighten, the rage builds—he grabs his stick to hit at something, anything. Until finally his grip weakens with the realization that for all the power in his hands and the force of his will, the laughter, the rebukes, will outlast him. His body goes slack in the chair. He knows that he will not outlive a mocking fate. He waits to die, alone.

The picture fades, replaced by the image of a nine-year-old boy—my father. He’s hungry, tired, clinging to his sister’s hand, searching for the mother he’s lost. The hunger is too much for him, the exhaustion too great; until finally the slender line that holds him to his mother snaps, sending her image to float down, down into the emptiness. The boy starts to cry; he shakes off his sister’s hand. He wants to go home, he shouts, back to his father’s house. He will find a new mother. He will lose himself in games and learn the power of his mind.

But he won’t forget the desperation of that day. Twelve years later, at his narrow desk, he will glance up from a stack of forms toward the restless sky and feel that same panic return. He, too, will have to invent himself. His boss is out of the office; he sets the forms aside and from an old file cabinet pulls out a list of addresses. He yanks the typewriter toward him and begins to type, letter after letter after letter, typing the envelopes, sealing the letters like messages in bottles that will drop through a post office slot into a vast ocean and perhaps allow him to escape the island of his father’s shame.

How lucky he must have felt when his ship came sailing in! He must have known, when that letter came from Hawaii, that he had been chosen after all; that he possessed the grace of his name, the
baraka,
the blessings of God. With the degree, the ascot, the American wife, the car, the words, the figures, the wallet, the proper proportion of tonic to gin, the polish, the panache, the entire thing seamless and natural, without the cobbled-together, haphazard quality of an earlier time—what could stand in his way?

He had almost succeeded, in a way his own father could never have hoped for. And then, after seeming to travel so far, to discover that he had not escaped after all! To discover that he remained trapped on his father’s island, with its fissures of anger and doubt and defeat, the emotions still visible beneath the surface, hot and molten and alive, like a wicked, yawning mouth, and his mother gone, gone, away ….

I dropped to the ground and swept my hand across the smooth yellow tile. Oh, Father, I cried. There was no shame in your confusion. Just as there had been no shame in your father’s before you. No shame in the fear, or in the fear of his father before him. There was only shame in the silence fear had produced. It was the silence that betrayed us. If it weren’t for that silence, your grandfather might have told your father that he could never escape himself, or re-create himself alone. Your father might have taught those same lessons to you. And you, the son, might have taught your father that this new world that was beckoning all of you involved more than just railroads and indoor toilets and irrigation ditches and gramophones, lifeless instruments that could be absorbed into the old ways. You might have told him that these instruments carried with them a dangerous power, that they demanded a different way of seeing the world. That this power could be absorbed only alongside a faith born out of hardship, a faith that wasn’t new, that wasn’t black or white or Christian or Muslim but that pulsed in the heart of the first African village and the first Kansas homestead—a faith in other people.

The silence killed your faith. And for lack of faith you clung to both too much and too little of your past. Too much of its rigidness, its suspicions, its male cruelties. Too little of the laughter in Granny’s voice, the pleasures of company while herding the goats, the murmur of the market, the stories around the fire. The loyalty that could make up for a lack of airplanes or rifles. Words of encouragement. An embrace. A strong, true love. For all your gifts—the quick mind, the powers of concentration, the charm—you could never forge yourself into a whole man by leaving those things behind ….

For a long time I sat between the two graves and wept. When my tears were finally spent, I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America—the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d witnessed in Chicago—all of it was connected with this small plot of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain I felt was my father’s pain. My questions were my brothers’ questions. Their struggle, my birthright.

A light rain began to fall, the drops tapping on the leaves above. I was about to light a cigarette when I felt a hand on my arm. I turned to find Bernard squatting beside me, trying to fit the two of us under a bent-up old umbrella.

“They wanted me to see if you were okay,” he said.

I smiled. “Yeah. I’m okay.”

He nodded, his eyes squinting at the clouds. He turned back to me, and said “Why don’t you let me have a cigarette, and I will sit and smoke with you.”

I looked at his smooth, dark face, and put the cigarette back in the box. “I need to quit,” I said. “Come on, let’s take a walk instead.”

We stood up and started toward the entrance to the compound. The young boy, Godfrey, was standing beside the cooking hut, one leg propped like a crane’s against the mud wall. He looked at us and offered a tentative smile.

“Come on,” Bernard said, waving to the boy. “You can walk with us.” And so the three of us made our way over the widening dirt road, picking at leaves that grew along the way, watching the rain blow down across the several valleys.

I
REMAINED IN
K
ENYA FOR
two more weeks. We all returned to Nairobi and there were more dinners, more arguments, more stories. Granny stayed in Auma’s apartment, and each night I fell asleep to their whispering voices. One day we gathered at a photography studio for a family portrait, and all the women wore flowing African gowns of bright greens and yellows and blues, and the men were all tall and shaven and neatly pressed, and the photographer, a slight Indian man with bushy eyebrows, remarked on what a handsome picture we made.

Roy flew back to Washington, D.C., shortly after that; Granny returned to Home Squared. The days suddenly became very quiet, and a certain melancholy settled over Auma and me, as if we were coming out of a dream. And maybe it was the sense that we, too, would soon be returning to our other lives, once again separate and apart, that made us decide one day to go to see George, our father’s last child.

It turned out to be a painful affair, arranged hastily and without the mother’s knowledge: we simply drove with Zeituni to a neat, single-story schoolhouse, where a group of schoolchildren were playing in a wide, grassy field. After a brief conversation with the teacher supervising the recess, Zeituni led one of the children over to us. He was a handsome, roundheaded boy with a wary gaze. Zeituni leaned down and pointed at Auma and me.

“This is your sister,” she said to the boy, “who used to play with you on her knee. This is your brother, who has come all the way from America to see you.”

The boy shook our hands bravely but kept glancing back at games he’d just left. I realized then that we’d made a mistake. Soon the principal of the school emerged from her office to say that unless we had the mother’s permission, we would have to leave. Zeituni began to argue with the woman, but Auma said, “No, Auntie, she’s right. We should go.” From the car, we watched George return to his friends, quickly indistinguishable from the others with round heads and knobby knees who were chasing a scuffed football through the grass. I found myself suddenly remembering then my first meeting with the Old Man, the fear and discomfort that his presence had caused me, forcing me for the first time to consider the mystery of my own life. And I took comfort in the fact that perhaps one day, when he was older, George, too, might want to know who his father had been, and who his brothers and sisters were, and that if he ever came to me I would be there for him, to tell him the story I knew.

That evening, I asked Auma if she knew of any good books on the Luo, and she suggested we go visit a former history teacher of hers, a tall, willowy woman named Dr. Rukia Odero, who had been a friend of the Old Man’s. When we arrived at her house, Dr. Odero was about to sit down for dinner, and she insisted that we join her. Over a meal of tilapia and
ugali,
the professor insisted I call her Rukia, then asked me about my impressions of the country. Had I been disappointed? she wondered. I told her that I hadn’t, although I was leaving with as many questions as answers.

“That’s good,” Rukia said, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “That’s how we historians make a living, you know. All day long we sit, trying to find new questions. It can be very tiresome, actually. It requires a temperament for mischief. You know, young black Americans tend to romanticize Africa so. When your father and I were young, it was just the opposite—we expected to find all the answers in America. Harlem. Chicago. Langston Hughes and James Baldwin. That’s where we drew our inspiration. And the Kennedys—they were very popular. The chance to study in America was very important. A hopeful time. Of course, when we returned we realized that our education did not always serve us so well. Or the people who had sent us. There was all this messy history to deal with.”

I asked her why she thought black Americans were prone to disappointment when they visited Africa. She shook her head and smiled. “Because they come here looking for the authentic,” she said. “That is bound to disappoint a person. Look at this meal we are eating. Many people will tell you that the Luo are a fish-eating people. But that was not true for all Luo. Only those who lived by the lake. And even for those Luo, it was not always true. Before they settled around the lake, they were pastoralists, like the Masai. Now, if you and your sister behave yourself and eat a proper share of this food, I will offer you tea. Kenyans are very boastful about the quality of their tea, you notice. But of course we got this habit from the English. Our ancestors did not drink such a thing. Then there’s the spices we used to cook this fish. They originally came from India, or Indonesia. So even in this simple meal, you will find it very difficult to be authentic—although the meal is certainly African.”

Rukia rolled a ball of
ugali
in her hand and dipped it into her stew. “You can hardly blame black Americans, of course, for wanting an unblemished past. After the cruelties they’ve suffered—still suffer, from what I read in the newspapers. They’re not unique in this desire. The European wants the same thing. The Germans, the English …  they all claim Athens and Rome as their own, when, in fact, their ancestors helped destroy classical culture. But that happened so long ago, so their task is easier. In their schools, you rarely hear about the misery of European peasants throughout most of recorded history. The corruption and exploitation of the Industrial Revolution, the senseless tribal wars—it’s shameful how the Europeans treated their own, much less colored peoples. So this idea about a golden age in Africa, before the white man came, seems only natural.”

“A corrective,” Auma said.

“Truth is usually the best corrective,” Rukia said with a smile. “You know, sometimes I think the worst thing that colonialism did was cloud our view of our past. Without the white man, we might be able to make better use of our history. We might look at some of our former practices and decide they are worth preserving. Others, we might grow out of. Unfortunately, the white man has made us very defensive. We end up clinging to all sorts of things that have outlived their usefulness. Polygamy. Collective land ownership. These things worked well in their time, but now they most often become tools for abuse. By men. By governments. And yet, if you say these things, you have been infected by Western ideology.”

“So how should we adapt?” Auma said.

Rukia shrugged. “I leave such answers up to policy makers. I’m only a historian. But I suspect that we can’t pretend that the contradictions of our situation don’t exist. All we can do is choose. For example, female circumcision is an important Kikuyu custom. With the Masai also. To a modern sensibility, it is barbaric. Perhaps we could arrange to have all these operations performed in hospitals and cut down on the death rate. Keep the bleeding to a minimum. But you cannot really have half a circumcision. This leaves no one satisfied. So we must choose. The same is true of the rule of law, the notion of independent inquiry—these things may conflict with tribal loyalties. You cannot have rule of law and then exempt certain members of your clan. What to do? Again you choose. If you make the wrong choice, then you learn from your mistakes. You see what works.”

I licked my fingers and washed my hands. “But isn’t there anything left that is truly African?”

“Ah, that’s the thing, isn’t it?” Rukia said. “There does seem to be something different about this place. I don’t know what it is. Perhaps the African, having traveled so far so fast, has a unique perspective on time. Or maybe it is that we have known more suffering than most. Maybe it’s just the land. I don’t know. Maybe I am also the romantic. I know that I cannot stay away from here too long. People still talk to each other here. When I visit the States, it seems a very lonely place—”

Suddenly, all the lights in the house went out. Rukia sighed—blackouts were becoming more common, she said—and I handed her my lighter to light the candles she kept on the mantelpiece. Sitting in the darkness, I remembered the stories Zeituni had told us, and remarked that the night runners must be out. Rukia lit the candles, their glow shaping her face into a mask of laughter.

“You know about the night runners, then! Yes, they are very powerful in the darkness. There used to be many in our area, back home. It was said they walked with the hippos at night. I remember once—”

As suddenly as they had died, the light bulbs popped back on. Rukia blew out the candles and shook her head. “Alas, in the city the lights do come on eventually. My daughter, she has no use for night runners. You know, her first language is not Luo. Not even Swahili. It is English. When I listen to her talk with her friends, it sounds like gibberish to me. They take bits and pieces of everything—English, Swahili, German, Luo. Sometimes, I get fed up with this. Learn to speak one language properly, I tell them.” Rukia laughed to herself. “But I am beginning to resign myself—there’s nothing really to do. They live in a mixed-up world. It’s just as well, I suppose. In the end, I’m less interested in a daughter who’s authentically African than one who is authentically herself.”

It was getting late; we thanked Rukia for her hospitality and went on our way. But her words would stay with me, bringing into focus my own memories, my own lingering questions. On the last weekend of my stay, Auma and I took the train to the coast and stayed at an old beachfront hotel in Mombasa that had once been a favorite of the Old Man’s. It was a modest, clean place, in August filled mostly with German tourists and American sailors on shore leave. We didn’t do much, just read and swam and walked along the beach, watching pale crabs scurry like ghosts into their sandy holes. The following day we visited Mombasa’s Old Town and climbed the worn stairs of Fort Jesus, first built by the Portuguese to consolidate control of trade routes along the Indian Ocean, later overrun by the swift Omani fleets, later still a beachhead for the British as they moved inland in search of ivory and gold, now an empty casing of stone, its massive walls peeling like papier-mâché in strips of pale orange and green and rose, its dormant cannons pointing out to a tranquil sea where a lone fisherman cast out his net.

On the way back to Nairobi, Auma and I decided to splurge, buying tickets on a bus line that actually assigned seats. The feeling of luxury was short-lived; my knees were pinched by a passenger who wanted his money’s worth from the reclining seats, and a sudden rainstorm sent water streaming through leaks in the roof, which we tried—unsuccessfully—to plug up with tissue.

Eventually, the rain stopped, and we found ourselves looking on a barren landscape of gravel and shrub and the occasional baobab tree, its naked, searching branches decorated with the weaver bird’s spherical nests. I remembered reading somewhere that the baobab could go for years without flowering, surviving on the sparsest of rainfall; and seeing the trees there in the hazy afternoon light, I understood why men believed they possessed a special power—that they housed ancestral spirits and demons, that humankind first appeared under such a tree. It wasn’t merely the oddness of their shape, their almost prehistoric outline against the stripped-down sky. “They look as if each one could tell a story,” Auma said, and it was true, each tree seemed to possess a character, a character neither benevolent nor cruel but simply enduring, with secrets whose depths I would never plumb, a wisdom I would never pierce. They both disturbed and comforted me, those trees that looked as if they might uproot themselves and simply walk away, were it not for the knowledge that on this earth one place is not so different from another—the knowledge that one moment carries within it all that’s gone on before.

It’s been six years since that first trip to Kenya, and much in the world has changed.

For me, it’s been a relatively quiet period, less a time of discovery than of consolidation, of doing the things that we tell ourselves we finally must do to grow up. I went to Harvard Law School, spending most of three years in poorly lit libraries, poring through cases and statutes. The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power—and that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition.

But that’s not all the law is. The law is also memory; the law also records a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience.

We hold these truths to be self-evident.
In those words, I hear the spirit of Douglass and Delany, as well as Jefferson and Lincoln; the struggles of Martin and Malcolm and unheralded marchers to bring these words to life. I hear the voices of Japanese families interned behind barbed wire; young Russian Jews cutting patterns in Lower East Side sweatshops; dust-bowl farmers loading up their trucks with the remains of shattered lives. I hear the voices of the people in Altgeld Gardens, and the voices of those who stand outside this country’s borders, the weary, hungry bands crossing the Rio Grande. I hear all of these voices clamoring for recognition, all of them asking the very same questions that have come to shape my life, the same questions that I sometimes, late at night, find myself asking the Old Man. What is our community, and how might that community be reconciled with our freedom? How far do our obligations reach? How do we transform mere power into justice, mere sentiment into love? The answers I find in law books don’t always satisfy me—for every
Brown
v.
Board of Education
I find a score of cases where conscience is sacrificed to expedience or greed. And yet, in the conversation itself, in the joining of voices, I find myself modestly encouraged, believing that so long as the questions are still being asked, what binds us together might somehow, ultimately, prevail.