had brought a bag of chocolates for the children, and they gathered around me with polite stares as the adults tried to
explain who I was. I noticed a young man, sixteen or seventeen, standing against the wall with a watchful expression.
“That’s one of your brothers,” Auma said to me. “Bernard.”
I went over to the young man and we shook hands, studying each other’s faces. I found myself at a loss for words but
managed to ask him how he had been.
“Fine, I guess,” he answered softly, which brought a round of laughter from everyone.
After the introductions were over, Jane pushed me toward a small table set with bowls of goat curry, fried fish,
collards, and rice. As we ate, people asked me about everyone back in Hawaii, and I tried to describe my life in
Chicago and my work as an organizer. They nodded politely but seemed a bit puzzled, so I mentioned that I’d be
studying law at Harvard in the fall.
“Ah, this is good, Barry,” Jane said as she sucked on a bone from the curry. “Your father studied at this school,
Harvard. You will make us all proud, just like him. You see, Bernard, you must study hard like your brother.”
“Bernard thinks he’s going to be a football star,” Zeituni said.
I turned to Bernard. “Is that right, Bernard?”
“No,” he said, uncomfortable that he’d attracted attention. “I used to play, that’s all.”
“Well...maybe we can play sometime.”
He shook his head. “I like to play basketball now,” he said earnestly. “Like Magic Johnson.”
The meal smothered some of the initial excitement, and the children turned to a large black-and-white TV that was
showing the munificence of the president: the president opens a school; the president denounces foreign journalists and
various Communist elements; the president encourages the nation to follow the path of nyayo-“footsteps toward
progress.” I went with Auma to see the rest of the apartment, which consisted of two bedrooms, both jammed from one
end to the other with old mattresses.
“How many people live here?” I asked.
“I’m not sure right now,” Auma said. “It always changes. Jane doesn’t know how to say no to anybody, so any
relative who moves to the city or loses a job ends up here. Sometimes they stay a long time. Or they leave their children
here. The Old Man and my mum left Bernard here a lot. Jane practically raised him.”
“Can she afford it?”
“Not really. She has a job as a telephone operator, which doesn’t pay so much. She doesn’t complain, though. She
can’t have her own children, so she looks after others’.”
We returned to the living room, and I sank down into an old sofa. In the kitchen, Zeituni directed the younger women
in cleaning the dishes; a few of the children were now arguing about the chocolate I’d brought. I let my eyes wander
over the scene-the well-worn furniture, the two-year-old calendar, the fading photographs, the blue ceramic cherubs
that sat on linen doilies. It was just like the apartments in Altgeld, I realized. The same chain of mothers and daughters
and children. The same noise of gossip and TV. The perpetual motion of cooking and cleaning and nursing hurts large
and small. The same absence of men.
barré
(Barré)
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