Dreams from My Father - Barack Obama [100]
She rubbed her eyes and laughed. “Yah—Otto is different. He’s so sweet! And sometimes I treat him so badly! I don’t know, Barack. Sometimes I think it’s just impossible for me to trust anybody completely. I think of what the Old Man made of his life, and the idea of marriage gives me, how do you say … the shivers. Also, with Otto and his career, we would have to live in Germany, you see. I start imagining what it would be like for me, living my entire life as a foreigner, and I don’t think I could take it.”
She folded her letter and put it back in the envelope. “What about you, Barack?” she asked. “Do you have these problems, or is it just your sister who’s so confused?”
“I think I know what you’re feeling.”
“Tell me.”
I went to the refrigerator and pulled out two green peppers, setting them on the cutting board. “Well … there was a woman in New York that I loved. She was white. She had dark hair, and specks of green in her eyes. Her voice sounded like a wind chime. We saw each other for almost a year. On the weekends, mostly. Sometimes in her apartment, sometimes in mine. You know how you can fall into your own private world? Just two people, hidden and warm. Your own language. Your own customs. That’s how it was.
“Anyway, one weekend she invited me to her family’s country house. The parents were there, and they were very nice, very gracious. It was autumn, beautiful, with woods all around us, and we paddled a canoe across this round, icy lake full of small gold leaves that collected along the shore. The family knew every inch of the land. They knew how the hills had formed, how the glacial drifts had created the lake, the names of the earliest white settlers—their ancestors—and before that, the names of the Indians who’d once hunted the land. The house was very old, her grandfather’s house. He had inherited it from his grandfather. The library was filled with old books and pictures of the grandfather with famous people he had known—presidents, diplomats, industrialists. There was this tremendous gravity to the room. Standing in that room, I realized that our two worlds, my friend’s and mine, were as distant from each other as Kenya is from Germany. And I knew that if we stayed together I’d eventually live in hers. After all, I’d been doing it most of my life. Between the two of us, I was the one who knew how to live as an outsider.”
“So what happened.”
I shrugged. “I pushed her away. We started to fight. We started thinking about the future, and it pressed in on our warm little world. One night I took her to see a new play by a black playwright. It was a very angry play, but very funny. Typical black American humor. The audience was mostly black, and everybody was laughing and clapping and hollering like they were in church. After the play was over, my friend started talking about why black people were so angry all the time. I said it was a matter of remembering—nobody asks why Jews remember the Holocaust, I think I said—and she said that’s different, and I said it wasn’t, and she said that anger was just a dead end. We had a big fight, right in front of the theater. When we got back to the car she started crying. She couldn’t be black, she said. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. She could only be herself, and wasn’t that enough.”
“That’s a sad story, Barack.”
“I suppose. Maybe even if she’d been black it still wouldn’t have worked out. I mean, there are several black ladies out there who’ve broken my heart just as good.” I smiled and scraped the cut-up peppers into the pot, and then turned back to Auma. “The thing is,” I said, no longer smiling, “whenever I think back to what my friend said to me, that night outside the theater, it somehow makes me ashamed.”
“Do you ever hear from her?”
“I got a postcard at Christmas. She’s happy now; she’s met someone. And I have my work.”
“Is that enough?”
“Sometimes.”
I took the next day off, and we spent the day together, visiting the Art Institute (I wanted to go see the shrunken heads at the Field Museum, but Auma refused), digging old photos out