Dreams from My Father - Barack Obama [43]
“Hey, Ray! Mah main man! Wha’s happenin’!”
Ray went up and slapped Kurt’s outstretched palm. But when Kurt repeated the gesture to me, I waved him off.
“What’s his problem?” I overheard Kurt say to Ray as I walked away. A few minutes later, Ray caught up with me and asked me what was wrong.
“Man, those folks are just making fun of us,” I said.
“What’re you talking about?”
“All that ‘Yo baby, give me five’ bullshit.”
“So who’s mister sensitive all of a sudden? Kurt don’t mean nothing by it.”
“If that’s what you think, then hey—”
Ray’s face suddenly glistened with anger. “Look,” he said, “I’m just getting along, all right? Just like I see you getting along, talking your game with the teachers when you need them to do you a favor. All that stuff about ‘Yes, Miss Snooty Bitch, I just find this novel so engaging, if I can just have one more day for that paper, I’ll kiss your white ass.’ It’s their world, all right? They own it, and we in it. So just get the fuck outta my face.”
By the following day, the heat of our argument had dissipated, and Ray suggested that I invite our friends Jeff and Scott to a party Ray was throwing out at his house that weekend. I hesitated for a moment—we had never brought white friends along to a black party—but Ray insisted, and I couldn’t find a good reason to object. Neither could Jeff or Scott; they both agreed to come so long as I was willing to drive. And so that Saturday night, after one of our games, the three of us piled into Gramps’s old Ford Granada and rattled our way out to Schofield Barracks, maybe thirty miles out of town.
When we arrived the party was well on its way, and we steered ourselves toward the refreshments. The presence of Jeff and Scott seemed to make no waves; Ray introduced them around the room, they made some small talk, they took a couple of the girls out on the dance floor. But I could see right away that the scene had taken my white friends by surprise. They kept smiling a lot. They huddled together in a corner. They nodded self-consciously to the beat of the music and said “Excuse me” every few minutes. After maybe an hour, they asked me if I’d be willing to take them home.
“What’s the matter?” Ray shouted over the music when I went to let him know we were leaving. “Things just starting to heat up.”
“They’re not into it, I guess.”
Our eyes met, and for a long stretch we just stood there, the noise and laughter pulsing around us. There were no traces of satisfaction in Ray’s eyes, no hints of disappointment; just a steady gaze, as unblinking as a snake’s. Finally he put out his hand, and I grabbed hold of it, our eyes still fixed on each other. “Later, then,” he said, his hand slipping free from mine, and I watched him walk away through the crowd, asking about the girl he’d been talking to just a few minutes before.
Outside the air had turned cool. The street was absolutely empty, quiet except for the fading tremor of Ray’s stereo, the blue lights flickering in the windows of bungalows that ran up and down the tidy lane, the shadows of trees stretching across a baseball field. In the car, Jeff put an arm on my shoulder, looking at once contrite and relieved. “You know, man,” he said, “that really taught me something. I mean, I can see how it must be tough for you and Ray sometimes, at school parties … being the only black guys and all.”
I snorted. “Yeah. Right.” A part of me wanted to punch him right there. We started down the road toward town, and in the silence, my mind began to rework Ray’s words that day with Kurt, all the discussions we had had before that,