I PULLED INTO THE AIRPORT parking lot at a quarter past three and ran to the terminal as fast as I could. Panting
for breath, I spun around several times, my eyes scanning the crowds of Indians, Germans, Poles, Thais, and Czechs
gathering their luggage.
Damn! I knew I should have left earlier. Maybe she had gotten worried and tried to call. Had I given her my office
number? What if she’d missed her flight? What if she had walked right past me and I hadn’t even known it?
I looked down at the photograph in my hand, the one she had sent me two months earlier, smudged now from too
much handling. Then I looked up, and the picture came to life: an African woman emerging from behind the customs
gate, moving with easy, graceful steps, her bright, searching eyes now fixed on my own, her dark, round, sculpted face
blossoming like a wood rose as she smiled.
“Barack?”
“Auma?”
“Oh my...”
I lifted my sister off the ground as we embraced, and we laughed and laughed as we looked at each other. I picked up
her bag and we began to walk to the parking garage, and she slipped her arm through mine. And I knew at that moment,
somehow, that I loved her, so naturally, so easily and fiercely, that later, after she was gone, I would find myself
mistrusting that love, trying to explain it to myself. Even now I can’t explain it; I only know that the love was true, and
still is, and I’m grateful for it.
“So, brother,” Auma said as we drove into the city, “you have to tell me everything.”
“About what?”
“Your life, of course.”
“From the beginning?”
“Start anywhere.”
I told her about Chicago and New York, my work as an organizer, my mother and grandparents and Maya-she had
heard so much about them from our father, she said, she felt as if she already knew them. She described Heidelberg,
where she was trying to finish a master’s degree in linguistics, and the trials and tribulations of living in Germany.
“I have no right to complain, I suppose,” she said. “I have a scholarship, a flat. I don’t know what I would be doing if
I was still in Kenya. Still, I don’t care for Germany so much. You know, the Germans like to think of themselves as
very liberal when it comes to Africans, but if you scratch the surface you see they still have the attitudes of their
childhood. In German fairy tales, black people are always the goblins. Such things one doesn’t forget so easily.
Sometimes I try to imagine what it must have been like for the Old Man, leaving home for the first time. Whether he
felt that same loneliness...”
The Old Man. That’s what Auma called our father. It sounded right to me, somehow, at once familiar and distant, an
elemental force that isn’t fully understood. In my apartment, Auma held up the picture of him that sat on my bookshelf,
a studio portrait that my mother had saved.
“He looks so innocent, doesn’t he? So young.” She held the picture next to my face. “You have the same mouth.”
I told her she should lie down and get some rest while I went to my office for a few hours of work.
barré
(Barré)
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