Dreams from My Father - Barack Obama [147]
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?”