“I’m not trying to prove anything, Will.” I started the car and began to pull away, but not fast enough to avoid hearing
Will’s parting words.
“You don’t have to prove nothing to us, Barack. We love you, man. Jesus loves you!”
Almost a year had passed since my arrival in Chicago, and our labor had finally begun to bear fruit. Will’s and Mary’s
street corner group had grown to fifty strong; they organized neighborhood cleanups, sponsored career days for area
youth, won agreements from the alderman to improve sanitation services. Farther north, Mrs. Crenshaw and Mrs.
Stevens had pressed the Park District into overhauling run-down parks and playlots; work there had already begun.
Streets had been repaired, sewers rooted, crime-watch programs instituted. And now the new job intake center, where
once only an empty storefront had been.
As the organization’s stock had grown, so had my own. I began receiving invitations to sit on panels and conduct
workshops; local politicians knew my name, even if they still couldn’t pronounce it. As far as our leadership was
concerned, I could do little wrong. “You should have seen him when he first got here,” I’d overhear Shirley tell a new
leader one day. “He was just a boy. I swear, you look at him now, you’d think he was a different person.” She spoke
like a proud parent: I’d become a sort of surrogate prodigal son.
The appreciation of those you worked with, concrete improvements in the neighborhood, things you could hang a
price tag on. It should have been enough. And yet what Will had said was true. I wasn’t satisfied.
Maybe it was connected to Auma’s visit and the news she had brought of the Old Man. Where once I’d felt the need
to live up to his expectations, I now felt as if I had to make up for all his mistakes. Only the nature of those mistakes
still wasn’t clear in my mind; I still couldn’t read the signposts that might warn me away from the wrong turns he’d
taken. Because of that confusion, because my image of him remained so contradictory-sometimes one thing, sometimes
another, but never the two things at once-I would find myself, at random moments in the day, feeling as if I was living
out a preordained script, as if I were following him into error, a captive to his tragedy.
Then there were my problems with Marty. We had officially separated our respective efforts that spring; since then
he’d been spending most of his time with the suburban churches, where it turned out that parishioners, black and white,
were less concerned about jobs than they were about the same pattern of white flight and dropping property values that
had swept through the South Side a decade before.
These were difficult issues, rife with the racialism and delicacy that Marty found so distasteful. So he had decided to
move on. He had hired another organizer to do most of the day-to-day work in the suburbs and was now busy starting a
new organization in Gary, a city where the economy had long ago collapsed-where things were so bad, Marty said, that
no one would care about the color of an organizer. One day, he asked me to come with him.
“This is a bad training situation for you,” he explained. “The South Side’s too big. Too many distractions. It’s not
your fault. I should have known better.”
“I can’t just leave, Marty. I just got here.”
He looked at me with infinite patience. “Listen, Barack, your loyalty is admirable. But right now you need to worry
about your own development. Stay here and you’re bound to fail. You’ll give up organizing before you gave it a real
shot.”