Dreams from My Father - Barack Obama [55]
Just as she was finishing, Reggie wandered out of the kitchen, drunker than I was. He came over and threw his arm around my shoulder. “Obama! Great party, man!” He threw Regina a sloppy grin. “Let me tell you, Regina, Obama and me go way back. Should have seen our parties last year, back at the dorms. Man, you remember that time we stayed up the whole weekend? Forty hours, no sleep. Started Saturday morning and didn’t stop till Monday.”
I tried to change the subject, but Reggie was on a roll. “I’m telling you, Regina, it was wild. When the maids show up Monday morning, we were all still sitting in the hallway, looking like zombies. Bottles everywhere. Cigarette butts. Newspapers. That spot where Jimmy threw up …” Reggie turned to me and started to laugh, spilling more beer on the rug. “You remember, don’t you, man? Shit was so bad, those little old Mexican ladies started to cry. ‘Dios Mio,’ one of ’em says, and the other one starts patting her on the back. Oh shit, we were crazy ….”
I smiled weakly, feeling Regina stare me down like the bum that I was. When she finally spoke it was as if Reggie weren’t there.
“You think that’s funny?” she said to me. Her voice was shaking, barely a whisper. “Is that what’s real to you, Barack—making a mess for somebody else to clean up? That could have been my grandmother, you know. She had to clean up behind people for most of her life. I’ll bet the people she worked for thought it was funny, too.”
She grabbed her purse off the coffee table and headed for the door. I thought about running after her, but I noticed a few people staring at me and I didn’t want a scene. Reggie pulled on my arm, looking hurt and confused, like a lost child.
“What’s her problem?” he said.
“Nothing,” I said. I took the beer out of Reggie’s hand and set it on top of the bookshelf. “She just believes in things that aren’t really there.”
I rose from the couch and opened my front door, the pent-up smoke trailing me out of the room like a spirit. Up above, the moon had slipped out of sight, only its glow still visible along the rim of high clouds. The sky had begun to lighten; the air tasted of dew.
Look at yourself before you pass judgment. Don’t make someone else clean up your mess. It’s not about you. They were such simple points, homilies I had heard a thousand times before, in all their variations, from TV sitcoms and philosophy books, from my grandparents and from my mother. I had stopped listening at a certain point, I now realized, so wrapped up had I been in my own perceived injuries, so eager was I to escape the imagined traps that white authority had set for me. To that white world, I had been willing to cede the values of my childhood, as if those values were somehow irreversibly soiled by the endless falsehoods that white spoke about black.
Except now I was hearing the same thing from black people I respected, people with more excuses for bitterness than I might ever claim for myself. Who told you that being honest was a white thing? they asked me. Who sold you this bill of goods, that your situation exempted you from being thoughtful or diligent or kind, or that morality had a color? You’ve lost your way, brother. Your ideas about yourself—about who you are and who you might become—have grown stunted and narrow and small.
I sat down on the doorstep and rubbed the knot in the back of my neck. How had that happened? I started to ask myself, but before the question had even formed in my mind, I already knew the answer. Fear. The same fear that had caused me to push Coretta away back in grammar school. The same fear that had caused me to ridicule Tim in front of Marcus and Reggie. The constant, crippling fear that I didn’t belong somehow, that