Dreams from My Father (36 page)

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” Auma said to him, her voice shaking. “You should be ashamed.”

The waiter replied brusquely in Swahili.

“I don’t care how many mouths you have to feed, you cannot treat your own people like dogs. Here …” Auma snapped open her purse and took out a crumpled hundred-shilling note. “You see!” she shouted. “I can pay for my own damn food.”

She threw the note to the ground, then marched out onto the street. For several minutes we wandered without apparent direction, until I finally suggested we sit down on a bench beside the central post office.

“You okay?” I asked her.

She nodded. “That was stupid, throwing away money like that.” She set down her purse beside her and we watched the traffic pass. “You know, I can’t go to a club in any of these hotels if I’m with another African woman,” she said eventually. “The
askaris
will turn us away, thinking we are prostitutes. The same in any of these big office buildings. If you don’t work there, and you are African, they will stop you until you tell them your business. But if you’re with a German friend, then they’re all smiles. ‘Good evening, miss,’ they’ll say. ‘How are you tonight?’” Auma shook her head. “That’s why Kenya, no matter what its GNP, no matter how many things you can buy here, the rest of Africa laughs. It’s the whore of Africa, Barack. It opens its legs to anyone who can pay.”

I told Auma she was being too hard on the Kenyan, that the same sort of thing happened in Djakarta or Mexico City—just an unfortunate matter of economics. But as we started back toward the apartment, I knew my words had done nothing to soothe her bitterness. I suspected that she was right: not all the tourists in Nairobi had come for the wildlife. Some came because Kenya, without shame, offered to re-create an age when the lives of whites in foreign lands rested comfortably on the backs of the darker races; an age of innocence before Kimathi and other angry young men in Soweto or Detroit or the Mekong Delta started to lash out in street crime and revolution. In Kenya, a white man could still walk through Isak Dinesen’s home and imagine romance with a mysterious young baroness, or sip gin under the ceiling fans of the Lord Delamare Hotel and admire portraits of Hemingway smiling after a successful hunt, surrounded by grim-faced coolies. He could be served by a black man without fear or guilt, marvel at the exchange rate, and leave a generous tip; and if he felt a touch of indigestion at the sight of leprous beggars outside the hotel, he could always administer a ready tonic. Black rule has come, after all. This is their country. We’re only visitors.

Did our waiter know that black rule had come? Did it mean anything to him? Maybe once, I thought to myself. He would be old enough to remember independence, the shouts of
“Uhuru!”
and the raising of new flags. But such memories may seem almost fantastic to him now, distant and naive. He’s learned that the same people who controlled the land before independence still control the same land, that he still cannot eat in the restaurants or stay in the hotels that the white man has built. He sees the money of the city swirling above his head, and the technology that spits out goods from its robot mouth. If he’s ambitious he will do his best to learn the white man’s language and use the white man’s machines, trying to make ends meet the same way the computer repairman in Newark or the bus driver back in Chicago does, with alternating spurts of enthusiasm or frustration but mostly with resignation. And if you say to him that he’s serving the interests of neocolonialism or some other such thing, he will reply that yes, he will serve if that is what’s required. It is the lucky ones who serve; the unlucky ones drift into the murky tide of hustles and odd jobs; many will drown.

Then again, maybe that’s not all that the waiter is feeling. Maybe a part of him still clings to the stories of Mau-Mau, the same part of him that remembers the hush of a village night or the sound of his mother grinding corn under a stone pallet. Something in him still says that the white man’s ways are not his ways, that the objects he may use every day are not of his making. He remembers a time, a way of imagining himself, that he leaves only at his peril. He can’t escape the grip of his memories. And so he straddles two worlds, uncertain in each, always off balance, playing whichever game staves off the bottomless poverty, careful to let his anger vent itself only on those in the same condition.

A voice says to him yes, changes have come, the old ways lie broken, and you must find a way as fast as you can to feed your belly and stop the white man from laughing at you.

A voice says no, you will sooner burn the earth to the ground.

That evening, we drove east to Kariako, a sprawling apartment complex surrounded by dirt lots. The moon had dropped behind thick clouds, and light drizzle had begun to fall. As we climbed the dark stairwell, a young man bounded past us onto the broken pavement and into the night. At the top of three flights, Auma pushed against a door that was slightly ajar.

“Barry! You’ve finally come!”

A short, stocky woman with a cheerful brown face gave me a tight squeeze around the waist. Behind her were fifteen or so people, all of them smiling and waving like a crowd at a parade. The short woman looked up at me and frowned.

“You don’t remember me, do you?”

“I …”

“I’m your Aunt Jane. It is me that called you when your father died.” She smiled and took me by the hand. “Come. You must meet everybody here. Zeituni you have already met. This …” she said, leading me to a handsome older woman in a green patterned dress, “this is my sister, Kezia. She is mother to Auma and to Roy Obama.”

Kezia took my hand and said my name together with a few words of Swahili.

“She says her other son has finally come home,” Jane said.

“My son,” Kezia repeated in English, nodding and pulling me into a hug. “My son has come home.”

We continued around the room, shaking hands with aunts, cousins, nephews, and nieces. Everyone greeted me with cheerful curiosity but very little awkwardness, as if meeting a relative for the first time was an everyday occurrence. I had brought a bag of chocolates for the children, and they gathered around me with polite stares as the adults tried to explain who I was. I noticed a young man, sixteen or seventeen, standing against the wall with a watchful expression.

“That’s one of your brothers,” Auma said to me. “Bernard.”

I went over to the young man and we shook hands, studying each other’s faces. I found myself at a loss for words but managed to ask him how he had been.

“Fine, I guess,” he answered softly, which brought a round of laughter from everyone.

After the introductions were over, Jane pushed me toward a small table set with bowls of goat curry, fried fish, collards, and rice. As we ate, people asked me about everyone back in Hawaii, and I tried to describe my life in Chicago and my work as an organizer. They nodded politely but seemed a bit puzzled, so I mentioned that I’d be studying law at Harvard in the fall.

“Ah, this is good, Barry,” Jane said as she sucked on a bone from the curry. “Your father studied at this school, Harvard. You will make us all proud, just like him. You see, Bernard, you must study hard like your brother.”

“Bernard thinks he’s going to be a football star,” Zeituni said.

I turned to Bernard. “Is that right, Bernard?”

“No,” he said, uncomfortable that he’d attracted attention. “I used to play, that’s all.”

“Well … maybe we can play sometime.”

He shook his head. “I like to play basketball now,” he said earnestly. “Like Magic Johnson.”

The meal smothered some of the initial excitement, and the children turned to a large black-and-white TV that was showing the munificence of the president: the president opens a school; the president denounces foreign journalists and various Communist elements; the president encourages the nation to follow the path of
nyayo
—“footsteps toward progress.” I went with Auma to see the rest of the apartment, which consisted of two bedrooms, both jammed from one end to the other with old mattresses.

“How many people live here?” I asked.

“I’m not sure right now,” Auma said. “It always changes. Jane doesn’t know how to say no to anybody, so any relative who moves to the city or loses a job ends up here. Sometimes they stay a long time. Or they leave their children here. The Old Man and my mum left Bernard here a lot. Jane practically raised him.”

“Can she afford it?”

“Not really. She has a job as a telephone operator, which doesn’t pay so much. She doesn’t complain, though. She can’t have her own children, so she looks after others’.”

We returned to the living room, and I sank down into an old sofa. In the kitchen, Zeituni directed the younger women in cleaning the dishes; a few of the children were now arguing about the chocolate I’d brought. I let my eyes wander over the scene—the well-worn furniture, the two-year-old calendar, the fading photographs, the blue ceramic cherubs that sat on linen doilies. It was just like the apartments in Altgeld, I realized. The same chain of mothers and daughters and children. The same noise of gossip and TV. The perpetual motion of cooking and cleaning and nursing hurts large and small. The same absence of men.

We said our good-byes around ten, promising to visit each and every relative in turn. As we walked to the door, Jane pulled us aside and lowered her voice. “You need to take Barry to see your Aunt Sarah,” she whispered to Auma. And then to me: “Sarah is your father’s older sister. The firstborn. She wants to see you very badly.”

“Of course,” I said. “But why wasn’t she here tonight? Does she live far away?”

Jane looked at Auma, and some unspoken thought passed between them. “Come on, Barack,” Auma said finally. “I’ll explain it to you in the car.”

The roads were empty and slick with rain. “Jane is right, Barack,” Auma told me as we passed the university. “You should go see Sarah. But I won’t go with you.”

“Why not?”

“It’s this business with the Old Man’s estate. Sarah is one of the people who has disputed the will. She’s been telling people that Roy, Bernard, myself—that none of us are the Old Man’s children.” Auma sighed. “I don’t know. A part of me sympathizes with her. She’s had a hard life. She never had the chances the Old Man had, you see, to study or go abroad. It made her very bitter. She thinks that somehow my mum, myself, that we are to blame for her situation.”

“But how much could the Old Man’s estate be worth?”

“Not much. Maybe a small government pension. A piece of worthless land. I try to stay out of it. Whatever is there has probably been spent on lawyers by now. But you see, everyone expected so much from the Old Man. He made them think that he had everything, even when he had nothing. So now, instead of getting on with their lives, they just wait and argue among themselves, thinking that the Old Man somehow is going to rescue them from his grave. Bernard’s learned this same waiting attitude. You know, he’s really smart, Barack, but he just sits around all day doing nothing. He dropped out of school and doesn’t have much prospect for finding work. I’ve told him that I would help him get into some sort of trade school, whatever he wants, just so he’s doing something, you know. He’ll say okay, but when I ask if he’s gotten any applications or talked to the schoolmasters, nothing’s been done. Sometimes I feel like, unless I take every step with him, nothing will happen.”

“Maybe I can help.”

“Yes. Maybe you can talk to him. But now that you’re here, coming from America, you’re part of the inheritance, you see. That’s why Sarah wants to see you so much. She thinks I’m hiding you from her because you’re the one with everything.”

The rain had started up again as we parked the car. A single light bulb jutting from the side of the building sent webbed, liquid shadows across Auma’s face. “The whole thing gets me so tired, Barack,” she said softly. “You wouldn’t believe how much I missed Kenya when I was in Germany. All I could do was think about getting back home. I thought how I never feel lonely here, and family is everywhere, nobody sends their parents to an old people’s home or leaves their children with strangers. Then I’m here and everyone is asking me for help, and I feel like they are all just grabbing at me and that I’m going to sink. I feel guilty because I was luckier than them. I went to a university. I can get a job. But what can I do, Barack? I’m only one person.”

I took Auma’s hand and we remained in the car for several minutes, listening to the rain as it slackened. “You asked me what my dream was,” she said finally. “Sometimes I have this dream that I will build a beautiful house on our grandfather’s land. A big house where we can all stay and bring our families, you see. We could plant fruit trees like our grandfather, and our children would really know the land and speak Luo and learn our ways from the old people. It would belong to them.”

“We can do all that, Auma.”

She shook her head. “Let me tell you what I start thinking then. I think of who will take care of the house if I’m not here? I think, who can I count on to make sure that a leak gets fixed or that the fence gets mended? It’s terrible, selfish, I know. All I can do when I think this way is to get mad at the Old Man because he didn’t build this house for us. We are the children, Barack. Why do we have to take care of everyone? Everything is upside down, crazy. I had to take care of myself, just like Bernard. Now I’m used to living my own life, just like a German. Everything is organized. If something is broken, I fix it. If something goes wrong, it’s my own fault. If I have it, I send money to the family, and they can do with it what they want, and I won’t depend on them, and they won’t depend on me.”

“It sounds lonely.”

“Oh, I know, Barack. That’s why I keep coming home. That’s why I’m still dreaming.”

After two days, I still hadn’t recovered my bag. The airline office downtown told us to call the airport, but whenever we tried the lines were always busy. Auma finally suggested that we drive out there ourselves. At the British Airways desk we found two young women discussing a nightclub that had just opened. I interrupted their conversation to ask about my bag, and one of them thumbed listlessly through a stack of papers.