“Now you see what your father suffered.”
“What?” I rubbed my eyes and looked up to find my aunt staring at me.
“Yes, Barry, your father suffered,” she repeated. “I am telling you, his problem was that his heart was too big. When
he lived, he would just give to everybody who asked him. And they all asked. You know, he was one of the first in the
whole district to study abroad. The people back home, they didn’t even know anyone else who had ridden in an
airplane before. So they expected everything from him. ‘Ah, Barack, you are a big shot now. You should give me
something. You should help me.’ Always these pressures from family. And he couldn’t say no, he was so generous.
You know, even me he had to take care of when I became pregnant, he was very disappointed in me. He had wanted
me to go to college. But I would not listen to him, and went off with my husband. And despite this thing, when my
husband became abusive and I had to leave, no money, no job, who do you think took me in? Yes-it was him. That’s
why, no matter what others sometimes say, I will always be grateful to him.”
We were approaching the garage shop; up ahead, we could see Auma talking to her mechanic and hear the engine of
the old VW whine. Beside us, a naked boy, maybe three years old, wandered out from behind a row of oil drums, his
feet caked with what looked like tar. Again Zeituni stopped, this time as if suddenly ill, and spat into the dust.
“When your father’s luck changed,” she said, “these same people he had helped, they forgot him. They laughed at
him. Even family refused to have him stay in their houses. Yes, Barry! Refused! They would tell Barack it was too
dangerous. I knew this hurt him, but he wouldn’t pass blame. Your father never held a grudge. In fact, when he was
rehabilitated and doing well again, I would find out that he was giving help to these same people who had betrayed
him. Ah, I could not understand this thing. I would tell him, ‘Barack, you should only look after yourself and your
children! These others, they have treated you badly. They are just too lazy to work for themselves.’ And you know
what he would say to me? He would say, ‘How do you know that man does not need this small thing more than me?’”
My aunt turned away and, forcing a smile, waved to Auma. And as we began to walk forward, she added, “I tell you
this so you will know the pressure your father was under in this place. So you don’t judge him too harshly. And you
must learn from his life. If you have something, then everyone will want a piece of it. So you have to draw the line
somewhere. If everyone is family, no one is family. Your father, he never understood this, I think.”
I remember a conversation I had once in Chicago when I was still organizing. It was with a woman who’d grown up
in a big family in rural Georgia. Five brothers and three sisters, she had told me, all crowded under a single roof. She
told me about her father’s ultimately futile efforts to farm his small plot of land, her mother’s vegetable garden, the two
pigs they kept penned out in the yard, and the trips with her siblings to fish the murky waters of a river nearby.
Listening to her speak, I began to realize that two of the three sisters she’d mentioned had actually died at birth, but that
in this woman’s mind they had remained with her always, spirits with names and ages and characters, two sisters who
accompanied her while she walked to school or did chores, who soothed her cries and calmed her fears. For this
woman, family had never been a vessel just for the living. The dead, too, had their claims, their voices shaping the
course of her dreams.