Dreams from My Father (5 page)

In such surroundings, my racial stock caused my grandparents few problems, and they quickly adopted the scornful attitude local residents took toward visitors who expressed such hang-ups. Sometimes when Gramps saw tourists watching me play in the sand, he would come up beside them and whisper, with appropriate reverence, that I was the great-grandson of King Kamehameha, Hawaii’s first monarch. “I’m sure that your picture’s in a thousand scrapbooks, Bar,” he liked to tell me with a grin, “from Idaho to Maine.” That particular story is ambiguous, I think; I see in it a strategy to avoid hard issues. And yet Gramps would just as readily tell another story, the one about the tourist who saw me swimming one day and, not knowing who she was talking to, commented that “swimming must just come naturally to these Hawaiians.” To which he responded that that would be hard to figure, since “that boy happens to be my grandson, his mother is from Kansas, his father is from the interior of Kenya, and there isn’t an ocean for miles in either damn place.” For my grandfather, race wasn’t something you really needed to worry about anymore; if ignorance still held fast in certain locales, it was safe to assume that the rest of the world would be catching up soon.

In the end I suppose that’s what all the stories of my father were really about. They said less about the man himself than about the changes that had taken place in the people around him, the halting process by which my grandparents’ racial attitudes had changed. The stories gave voice to a spirit that would grip the nation for that fleeting period between Kennedy’s election and the passage of the Voting Rights Act: the seeming triumph of universalism over parochialism and narrow-mindedness, a bright new world where differences of race or culture would instruct and amuse and perhaps even ennoble. A useful fiction, one that haunts me no less than it haunted my family, evoking as it does some lost Eden that extends beyond mere childhood.

There was only one problem: my father was missing. He had left paradise, and nothing that my mother or grandparents told me could obviate that single, unassailable fact. Their stories didn’t tell me why he had left. They couldn’t describe what it might have been like had he stayed. Like the janitor, Mr. Reed, or the black girl who churned up dust as she raced down a Texas road, my father became a prop in someone else’s narrative. An attractive prop—the alien figure with the heart of gold, the mysterious stranger who saves the town and wins the girl—but a prop nonetheless.

I don’t really blame my mother or grandparents for this. My father may have preferred the image they created for him—indeed, he may have been complicit in its creation. In an article published in the
Honolulu Star-Bulletin
upon his graduation, he appears guarded and responsible, the model student, ambassador for his continent. He mildly scolds the university for herding visiting students into dormitories and forcing them to attend programs designed to promote cultural understanding—a distraction, he says, from the practical training he seeks. Although he hasn’t experienced any problems himself, he detects self-segregation and overt discrimination taking place between the various ethnic groups and expresses wry amusement at the fact that “Caucasians” in Hawaii are occasionally at the receiving end of prejudice. But if his assessment is relatively clear-eyed, he is careful to end on a happy note: One thing other nations can learn from Hawaii, he says, is the willingness of races to work together toward common development, something he has found whites elsewhere too often unwilling to do.

I discovered this article, folded away among my birth certificate and old vaccination forms, when I was in high school. It’s a short piece, with a photograph of him. No mention is made of my mother or me, and I’m left to wonder whether the omission was intentional on my father’s part, in anticipation of his long departure. Perhaps the reporter failed to ask personal questions, intimidated by my father’s imperious manner; or perhaps it was an editorial decision, not part of the simple story that they were looking for. I wonder, too, whether the omission caused a fight between my parents.

I would not have known at the time, for I was too young to realize that I was supposed to have a live-in father, just as I was too young to know that I needed a race. For an improbably short span it seems that my father fell under the same spell as my mother and her parents; and for the first six years of my life, even as that spell was broken and the worlds that they thought they’d left behind reclaimed each of them, I occupied the place where their dreams had been.

CHAPTER TWO

T
HE ROAD TO THE
embassy was choked with traffic: cars, motorcycles, tricycle rickshaws, buses and jitneys filled to twice their capacity, a procession of wheels and limbs all fighting for space in the midafternoon heat. We nudged forward a few feet, stopped, found an opening, stopped again. Our taxi driver shooed away a group of boys who were hawking gum and loose cigarettes, then barely avoided a motor scooter carrying an entire family on its back—father, mother, son, and daughter all leaning as one into a turn, their mouths wrapped with handkerchiefs to blunt the exhaust, a family of bandits. Along the side of the road, wizened brown women in faded brown sarongs stacked straw baskets high with ripening fruit, and a pair of mechanics squatted before their open-air garage, lazily brushing away flies as they took an engine apart. Behind them, the brown earth dipped into a smoldering dump where a pair of roundheaded tots frantically chased a scrawny black hen. The children slipped in the mud and corn husks and banana leaves, squealing with pleasure, until they disappeared down the dirt road beyond.

Things eased up once we hit the highway, and the taxi dropped us off in front of the embassy, where a pair of smartly dressed Marines nodded in greeting. Inside the courtyard, the clamor of the street was replaced by the steady rhythm of gardening clippers. My mother’s boss was a portly black man with closely cropped hair sprinkled gray at the temples. An American flag draped down in rich folds from the pole beside his desk. He reached out and offered a firm handshake: “How are you, young man?” He smelled of after-shave and his starched collar cut hard into his neck. I stood at attention as I answered his questions about the progress of my studies. The air in the office was cool and dry, like the air of mountain peaks: the pure and heady breeze of privilege.

Our audience over, my mother sat me down in the library while she went off to do some work. I finished my comic books and the homework my mother had made me bring before climbing out of my chair to browse through the stacks. Most of the books held little interest for a nine-year-old boy—World Bank reports, geological surveys, five-year development plans. But in one corner I found a collection of
Life
magazines neatly displayed in clear plastic binders. I thumbed through the glossy advertisements—Goodyear Tires and Dodge Fever, Zenith TV (“Why not the best?”) and Campbell’s Soup (“Mm-mm good!”), men in white turtlenecks pouring Seagram’s over ice as women in red miniskirts looked on admiringly—and felt vaguely reassured. When I came upon a news photograph, I tried to guess the subject of the story before reading the caption. The photograph of French children dashing over cobblestoned streets: that was a happy scene, a game of hide-and-go-seek after a day of schoolbooks and chores; their laughter spoke of freedom. The photograph of a Japanese woman cradling a young, naked girl in a shallow tub: that was sad; the girl was sick, her legs twisted, her head fallen back against the mother’s breast, the mother’s face tight with grief, perhaps she blamed herself ….

Eventually I came across a photograph of an older man in dark glasses and a raincoat walking down an empty road. I couldn’t guess what this picture was about; there seemed nothing unusual about the subject. On the next page was another photograph, this one a close-up of the same man’s hands. They had a strange, unnatural pallor, as if blood had been drawn from the flesh. Turning back to the first picture, I now saw that the man’s crinkly hair, his heavy lips and broad, fleshy nose, all had this same uneven, ghostly hue.

He must be terribly sick, I thought. A radiation victim, maybe, or an albino—I had seen one of those on the street a few days before, and my mother had explained about such things. Except when I read the words that went with the picture, that wasn’t it at all. The man had received a chemical treatment, the article explained, to lighten his complexion. He had paid for it with his own money. He expressed some regret about trying to pass himself off as a white man, was sorry about how badly things had turned out. But the results were irreversible. There were thousands of people like him, black men and women back in America who’d undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person.

I felt my face and neck get hot. My stomach knotted; the type began to blur on the page. Did my mother know about this? What about her boss—why was he so calm, reading through his reports a few feet down the hall? I had a desperate urge to jump out of my seat, to show them what I had learned, to demand some explanation or assurance. But something held me back. As in a dream, I had no voice for my newfound fear. By the time my mother came to take me home, my face wore a smile and the magazines were back in their proper place. The room, the air, was quiet as before.

We had lived in Indonesia for over three years by that time, the result of my mother’s marriage to an Indonesian named Lolo, another student she had met at the University of Hawaii. His name meant “crazy” in Hawaiian, which tickled Gramps to no end, but the meaning didn’t suit the man, for Lolo possessed the good manners and easy grace of his people. He was short and brown, handsome, with thick black hair and features that could have as easily been Mexican or Samoan as Indonesian; his tennis game was good, his smile uncommonly even, and his temperament imperturbable. For two years, from the time I was four until I was six, he endured endless hours of chess with Gramps and long wrestling sessions with me. When my mother sat me down one day to tell me that Lolo had proposed and wanted us to move with him to a faraway place, I wasn’t surprised and expressed no objections. I did ask her if she loved him—I had been around long enough to know such things were important. My mother’s chin trembled, as it still does when she’s fighting back tears, and she pulled me into a long hug that made me feel very brave, although I wasn’t sure why.

Lolo left Hawaii quite suddenly after that, and my mother and I spent months in preparation—passports, visas, plane tickets, hotel reservations, an endless series of shots. While we packed, my grandfather pulled out an atlas and ticked off the names in Indonesia’s island chain: Java, Borneo, Sumatra, Bali. He remembered some of the names, he said, from reading Joseph Conrad as a boy. The Spice Islands, they were called back then, enchanted names, shrouded in mystery. “Says here they still got tigers over there,” he said. “And orangutangs.” He looked up from the book and his eyes widened. “Says here they even got
headhunters
!” Meanwhile, Toot called the State Department to find out if the country was stable. Whoever she spoke to there informed her that the situation was under control. Still, she insisted that we pack several trunks full of foodstuffs: Tang, powdered milk, cans of sardines. “You never know what these people will eat,” she said firmly. My mother sighed, but Toot tossed in several boxes of candy to win me over to her side.

Finally, we boarded a Pan Am jet for our flight around the globe. I wore a long-sleeved white shirt and a gray clip-on tie, and the stewardesses plied me with puzzles and extra peanuts and a set of metal pilot’s wings that I wore over my breast pocket. On a three-day stopover in Japan, we walked through bone-chilling rains to see the great bronze Buddha at Kamakura and ate green tea ice cream on a ferry that passed through high mountain lakes. In the evenings my mother studied flash cards. Walking off the plane in Djakarta, the tarmac rippling with heat, the sun bright as a furnace, I clutched her hand, determined to protect her from whatever might come.

Lolo was there to greet us, a few pounds heavier, a bushy mustache now hovering over his smile. He hugged my mother, hoisted me up into the air, and told us to follow a small, wiry man who was carrying our luggage straight past the long line at customs and into an awaiting car. The man smiled cheerfully as he lifted the bags into the trunk, and my mother tried to say something to him but the man just laughed and nodded his head. People swirled around us, speaking rapidly in a language I didn’t know, smelling unfamiliar. For a long time we watched Lolo talk to a group of brown-uniformed soldiers. The soldiers had guns in their holsters, but they appeared to be in a jovial mood, laughing at something that Lolo had said. When Lolo finally joined us, my mother asked if the soldiers needed to check through our bags.

“Don’t worry … that’s been all taken care of,” Lolo said, climbing into the driver’s seat. “Those are friends of mine.”

The car was borrowed, he told us, but he had bought a brand-new motorcycle—a Japanese make, but good enough for now. The new house was finished; just a few touch-ups remained to be done. I was already enrolled in a nearby school, and the relatives were anxious to meet us. As he and my mother talked, I stuck my head out the backseat window and stared at the passing landscape, brown and green uninterrupted, villages falling back into forest, the smell of diesel oil and wood smoke. Men and women stepped like cranes through the rice paddies, their faces hidden by their wide straw hats. A boy, wet and slick as an otter, sat on the back of a dumb-faced water buffalo, whipping its haunch with a stick of bamboo. The streets became more congested, small stores and markets and men pulling carts loaded with gravel and timber, then the buildings grew taller, like buildings in Hawaii—Hotel Indonesia, very modern, Lolo said, and the new shopping center, white and gleaming—but only a few were higher than the trees that now cooled the road. When we passed a row of big houses with high hedges and sentry posts, my mother said something I couldn’t entirely make out, something about the government and a man named Sukarno.

“Who’s Sukarno?” I shouted from the backseat, but Lolo appeared not to hear me. Instead, he touched my arm and motioned ahead of us. “Look,” he said, pointing upward. There, standing astride the road, was a towering giant at least ten stories tall, with the body of a man and the face of an ape.

“That’s Hanuman,” Lolo said as we circled the statue, “the monkey god.” I turned around in my seat, mesmerized by the solitary figure, so dark against the sun, poised to leap into the sky as puny traffic swirled around its feet. “He’s a great warrior,” Lolo said firmly. “Strong as a hundred men. When he fights the demons, he’s never defeated.”

The house was in a still-developing area on the outskirts of town. The road ran over a narrow bridge that spanned a wide brown river; as we passed, I could see villagers bathing and washing clothes along the steep banks below. The road then turned from tarmac to gravel to dirt as it wound past small stores and whitewashed bungalows until it finally petered out into the narrow footpaths of the kampong. The house itself was modest stucco and red tile, but it was open and airy, with a big mango tree in the small courtyard in front. As we passed through the gate, Lolo announced that he had a surprise for me; but before he could explain we heard a deafening howl from high up in the tree. My mother and I jumped back with a start and saw a big, hairy creature with a small, flat head and long, menacing arms drop onto a low branch.

“A monkey!” I shouted.

“An ape,” my mother corrected.

Lolo drew a peanut from his pocket and handed it to the animal’s grasping fingers. “His name is Tata,” he said. “I brought him all the way from New Guinea for you.”

I started to step forward to get a closer look, but Tata threatened to lunge, his dark-ringed eyes fierce and suspicious. I decided to stay where I was.

“Don’t worry,” Lolo said, handing Tata another peanut. “He’s on a leash. Come—there’s more.”

I looked up at my mother, and she gave me a tentative smile. In the backyard, we found what seemed like a small zoo: chickens and ducks running every which way, a big yellow dog with a baleful howl, two birds of paradise, a white cockatoo, and finally two baby crocodiles, half submerged in a fenced-off pond toward the edge of the compound. Lolo stared down at the reptiles. “There were three,” he said, “but the biggest one crawled out through a hole in the fence. Slipped into somebody’s rice field and ate one of the man’s ducks. We had to hunt it by torchlight.”

There wasn’t much light left, but we took a short walk down the mud path into the village. Groups of giggling neighborhood children waved from their compounds, and a few barefoot old men came up to shake our hands. We stopped at the common, where one of Lolo’s men was grazing a few goats, and a small boy came up beside me holding a dragonfly that hovered at the end of a string. When we returned to the house, the man who had carried our luggage was standing in the backyard with a rust-colored hen tucked under his arm and a long knife in his right hand. He said something to Lolo, who nodded and called over to my mother and me. My mother told me to wait where I was and sent Lolo a questioning glance.

“Don’t you think he’s a little young?”

Lolo shrugged and looked down at me. “The boy should know where his dinner is coming from. What do you think, Barry?” I looked at my mother, then turned back to face the man holding the chicken. Lolo nodded again, and I watched the man set the bird down, pinning it gently under one knee and pulling its neck out across a narrow gutter. For a moment the bird struggled, beating its wings hard against the ground, a few feathers dancing up with the wind. Then it grew completely still. The man pulled the blade across the bird’s neck in a single smooth motion. Blood shot out in a long, crimson ribbon. The man stood up, holding the bird far away from his body, and suddenly tossed it high into the air. It landed with a thud, then struggled to its feet, its head lolling grotesquely against its side, its legs pumping wildly in a wide, wobbly circle. I watched as the circle grew smaller, the blood trickling down to a gurgle, until finally the bird collapsed, lifeless on the grass.