“Anyway, one weekend she invited me to her family’s country house. The parents were there, and they were very
nice, very gracious. It was autumn, beautiful, with woods all around us, and we paddled a canoe across this round, icy
lake full of small gold leaves that collected along the shore. The family knew every inch of the land. They knew how
the hills had formed, how the glacial drifts had created the lake, the names of the earliest white settlers-their ancestors-
and before that, the names of the Indians who’d once hunted the land. The house was very old, her grandfather’s house.
He had inherited it from his grandfather. The library was filled with old books and pictures of the grandfather with
famous people he had known-presidents, diplomats, industrialists. There was this tremendous gravity to the room.
Standing in that room, I realized that our two worlds, my friend’s and mine, were as distant from each other as Kenya is
from Germany. And I knew that if we stayed together I’d eventually live in hers. After all, I’d been doing it most of my
life. Between the two of us, I was the one who knew how to live as an outsider.”
“So what happened.”
I shrugged. “I pushed her away. We started to fight. We started thinking about the future, and it pressed in on our
warm little world. One night I took her to see a new play by a black playwright. It was a very angry play, but very
funny. Typical black American humor. The audience was mostly black, and everybody was laughing and clapping and
hollering like they were in church. After the play was over, my friend started talking about why black people were so
angry all the time. I said it was a matter of remembering-nobody asks why Jews remember the Holocaust, I think I said-
and she said that’s different, and I said it wasn’t, and she said that anger was just a dead end. We had a big fight, right
in front of the theater. When we got back to the car she started crying. She couldn’t be black, she said. She would if she
could, but she couldn’t. She could only be herself, and wasn’t that enough.”
“That’s a sad story, Barack.”
“I suppose. Maybe even if she’d been black it still wouldn’t have worked out. I mean, there are several black ladies
out there who’ve broken my heart just as good.” I smiled and scraped the cut-up peppers into the pot, and then turned
back to Auma. “The thing is,” I said, no longer smiling, “whenever I think back to what my friend said to me, that night
outside the theater, it somehow makes me ashamed.”
“Do you ever hear from her?”
“I got a postcard at Christmas. She’s happy now; she’s met someone. And I have my work.”
“Is that enough?”
“Sometimes.”
I took the next day off, and we spent the day together, visiting the Art Institute (I wanted to go see the shrunken heads
at the Field Museum, but Auma refused), digging old photos out of my closet, visiting the supermarket, where Auma
decided that Americans were friendly and overweight. She was stubborn sometimes, sometimes impish, sometimes
burdened with the weight of the world, and always asserting a self-reliance that I recognized as a learned response-my
own response to uncertainty.
We didn’t speak much about our father, though; it was as if our conversation stopped whenever we threatened to skirt
his memory. It was only that night, after dinner and a long walk along the lake’s crumbling break wall, that we both