Dreams from My Father - Barack Obama [101]
We didn’t speak much about our father, though; it was as if our conversation stopped whenever we threatened to skirt his memory. It was only that night, after dinner and a long walk along the lake’s crumbling break wall, that we both sensed we couldn’t go any further until we opened up the subject. I made us some tea and Auma began to tell me about the Old Man, at least what she could remember.
“I can’t say I really knew him, Barack,” she began. “Maybe nobody did … not really. His life was so scattered. People only knew scraps and pieces, even his own children.
“I was scared of him. You know, he was already away when I was born. In Hawaii with your mum, and then at Harvard. When he came back to Kenya, our oldest brother, Roy, and I were small children. We had lived with our mum in the country, in Alego, up until then. I was too young to remember much about him coming. I was four, but Roy was six, so maybe he can tell you more about what happened. I just remember that he came back with an American woman named Ruth, and that he took us from our mother to go live with them in Nairobi. I remember that this woman, Ruth, was the first white person I’d ever been near, and that suddenly she was supposed to be my new mother.”
“Why didn’t you stay with your own mother?”
Auma shook her head. “I don’t know exactly. In Kenya, men get to keep children in a divorce—if they want them, that is. I asked my mum about this, but it’s difficult for her to talk about. She only says that the Old Man’s new wife refused to live with another wife, and that she—my mum—thought us children would be better off living with the Old Man because he was rich.
“In those first years, the Old Man was doing really well, you see. He was working for an American oil company—Shell, I think. It was only a few years after independence, and the Old Man was well connected with all the top government people. He had gone to school with many of them. The vice-president, ministers, they would all come to the house sometimes and drink with him and talk about politics. He had a big house and a big car, and everybody was impressed with him because he was so young but he already had so much education from abroad. And he had an American wife, which was still rare—although later, when he was still married to Ruth, he would go out sometimes with my real mum. As if he had to show people, you see. That he could also have this beautiful African woman whenever he chose. Our four other brothers were born at this time. Mark and David, they were Ruth’s children, born in our big house in Westlands. Abo and Bernard, they were my mum’s children, and lived with her and her family upcountry. Roy and I didn’t know Abo and Bernard then. They never came to the house to see us, and when the Old Man visited them, he would always go alone, without telling Ruth.
“I didn’t think about this much until later, the way our lives were divided in two, because I was so young. I think it was harder on Roy, because he was old enough to remember what it had been like in Alego, living in the village with our mum and our people. For me, things were okay. Ruth, our new mother, was nice enough to us then. She treated us almost like her own children. Her parents were rich, I think, and they would send us beautiful presents from the States. I’d get really excited whenever a package came from them. But I remember sometimes Roy would refuse to take their gifts, even when they sent us sweets. I remember once he refused some chocolates they had sent, but later in the night, when he thought I was asleep, I saw him taking some of the chocolates that I had left on our dresser. But I didn’t say anything, because I think I knew that he was unhappy.
“Then things began to change. When Ruth gave birth to Mark and David,