Dreams from My Father - Barack Obama [74]
“In fact, I wore a collar when some of us went to meet with Cardinal Bernardin about a month back. Everyone was real uptight about it. Then they got upset when I called the Cardinal ‘Joe’ instead of ‘Your Holiness.’ But you know, Bernardin was cool. He’s a spiritual man. I could tell we understood each other. It’s these rules again that keep us apart—rules of men, not rules of God. See, Barack, I’m in the Catholic church, but I was raised a Baptist. Could’ve joined a Methodist church, Pentecostal, whatever, just as easy. St. Catherine’s is just where God happened to send me. And He cares more about whether I’m about the business of helping others than whether I’m straight on my catechisms.”
I nodded, deciding not to ask what a catechism was. In Indonesia, I had spent two years at a Muslim school, two years at a Catholic school. In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to tell my mother that I made faces during Koranic studies. My mother wasn’t overly concerned. “Be respectful,” she’d said. In the Catholic school, when it came time to pray, I would pretend to close my eyes, then peek around the room. Nothing happened. No angels descended. Just a parched old nun and thirty brown children, muttering words. Sometimes the nun would catch me, and her stern look would force my lids back shut. But that didn’t change how I felt inside. I felt that way now, listening to Will; my silence was like closing my eyes.
The bus came to a stop in the church parking lot, and Will walked to the front of the bus. He thanked everybody for coming and urged them to stay involved. “It’s a long road we’re traveling,” he said, “but tonight showed me what we can do when we put our minds to it. That good feeling you got right now, we got to keep it going till we got this neighborhood back on its feet.”
A few people smiled and offered an amen. But as I stepped off the bus, I heard a woman behind me whispering to her friend, “I don’t need to hear about the neighborhood, girl. Where these jobs they talking about?”
The day after the rally, Marty decided it was time for me to do some real work, and he handed me a long list of people to interview. Find out their self-interest, he said. That’s why people become involved in organizing—because they think they’ll get something out of it. Once I found an issue enough people cared about, I could take them into action. With enough actions, I could start to build power.
Issues, action, power, self-interest. I liked these concepts. They bespoke a certain hardheadedness, a worldly lack of sentiment; politics, not religion. For the next three weeks, I worked day and night, setting up and conducting my interviews. It was harder than I’d expected. There was the internal resistance I felt whenever I picked up the phone to set up the interviews, as images of Gramps’s insurance sales calls crept into my mind: the impatience that waited at the other end of the line, the empty feeling of messages left unreturned. Most of my appointments were in the evening, home visits, and the people were tired after a full day’s work. Sometimes I would arrive only to find that the person had forgotten our appointment, and I’d have to remind him or her of who I was as I was eyed suspiciously from behind a half-opened door.
Still, these were minor difficulties. Once they were overcome, I found that people didn’t mind a chance to air their opinions about a do-nothing alderman or the neighbor who refused to mow his lawn. The more interviews I did, the more I began to hear certain recurring themes. I learned, for example, that most of the people in the area had been raised farther north or on Chicago’s West Side, in the cramped black enclaves that restrictive covenants had created for most of the city’s history. The people I talked to had some fond memories of that self-contained world, but they also remembered the absence of heat and light and space to breathe—that, and the sight of their parents grinding out life in physical labor.
A few had followed their parents into the steel mills or onto the assembly line. But many more had