Dreams from My Father - Barack Obama [75]
Often, as I listened to these stories, I would find myself reminded of the stories that Gramps and Toot and my mother had told—stories of hardship and migration, the drive for something better. But there was an inescapable difference between what I was now hearing and what I remembered, as if the images of my childhood had been run in reverse. In these new stories, For Sale signs cropped up like dandelions under a summer sun. Stones flew through windows and the strained voices of anxious parents could be heard calling children indoors from innocent games. Entire blocks turned over in less than six months; entire neighborhoods in less than five years.
In these stories, wherever black and white met, the result was sure to be anger and grief.
The area had never fully recovered from this racial upheaval. The stores and banks had left with their white customers, causing main thoroughfares to decompose. City services had declined. Still, when the blacks who’d now lived in their homes for ten or fifteen years looked back on the way things had turned out, they did so with some measure of satisfaction. On the strength of two incomes, they had paid off house notes and car notes, maybe college educations for the sons or daughters whose graduation pictures filled every mantelpiece. They had kept their homes up and kept their children off the streets; they had formed block clubs to make sure that others did too.
It was when they spoke of the future that a certain disquiet entered their voices. They would mention a cousin or sibling who came by every so often asking for money; or an adult child, unemployed, who still lived at home. Even the success of those children who’d made it through college and into the white-collar world harbored within it an element of loss—the better these children did, the more likely they were to move away. In their place, younger, less stable families moved in, the second wave of migrants from poorer neighborhoods, newcomers who couldn’t always afford to keep up with their mortgage payments or invest in periodic maintenance. Car thefts were up; the leafy parks were empty. People began to spend more time inside; they invested in elaborate wrought-iron doors; they wondered if they could afford to sell at a loss and retire to a warmer climate, perhaps move back to the South.
So despite the deserved sense of accomplishment these men and women felt, despite the irrefutable evidence of their own progress, our conversations were marked by another, more ominous strain. The boarded-up homes, the decaying storefronts, the aging church rolls, kids from unknown families who swaggered down the streets—loud congregations of teenage boys, teenage girls feeding potato chips to crying toddlers, the discarded wrappers tumbling down the block—all of it whispered painful truths, told them the progress they’d found was ephemeral, rooted in thin soil; that it might not even last their lifetimes.
And it was this dual sense, of individual advancement and collective decline, that I thought accounted for some of the attitudes agitating Will when we’d spoken the night of the rally. I heard it in the excessive pride some of the men took in the well-stocked bars they’d built in their basements, with the lava lamps and the mirrored walls. In the protective plastic that the women kept over their spotless carpets and sofas. In all of it, one saw a determined effort to shore up the belief that things had