“Eh, Obama!” A big woman with a scarf on her head strode out of the main house drying her hands on the sides of her
flowered skirt. She had a face like Sayid’s, smooth and big-boned, with sparkling, laughing eyes. She hugged Auma
and Roy as if she were going to wrestle them to the ground, then turned to me and grabbed my hand in a hearty
handshake.
“Halo!” she said, attempting English.
“Musawa!” I said in Luo.
She laughed, saying something to Auma.
“She says she has dreamed about this day, when she would finally meet this son of her son. She says you’ve brought
her a great happiness. She says that now you have finally come home.”
Granny nodded and pulled me into a hug before leading us into the house. Small windows let in little of the afternoon
light, and the house was sparsely furnished-a few wooden chairs, a coffee table, a worn couch. On the walls were
various family artifacts: the Old Man’s Harvard diploma; photographs of him and of Omar, the uncle who had left for
America twenty-five years ago and had never come back. Beside these were two older, yellowing photographs, the first
of a tall young woman with smoldering eyes, a plump infant in her lap, a young girl standing beside her; the second of
an older man in a high-backed chair. The man was dressed in a starched shirt and a kanga; his legs were crossed like an
Englishman’s, but across his lap was what appeared to be some sort of club, its heavy head wrapped in an animal skin.
His high cheekbones and narrow eyes gave his face an almost Oriental cast. Auma came up beside me.
“That’s him. Our grandfather. The woman in the picture is our other grandmother, Akumu. The girl is Sarah. And the
baby...that’s the Old Man.”
I studied the pictures for some time, until I noticed one last picture on the wall. It was a vintage print, the kind that
grace old Coca-Cola ads, of a white woman with thick dark hair and slightly dreamy eyes. I asked what the print was
doing there, and Auma turned to Granny, who answered in Luo.
“She says that that is a picture of one of our grandfather’s wives. He told people that he had married her in Burma
when he was in the war.”
Roy laughed. “She doesn’t look very Burmese, eh, Barack?”
I shook my head. She looked like my mother.
We sat down in the living room and Granny made us some tea. She explained that things were well, although she had
given away some of the land to relatives, since she and Yusuf could not work it all by themselves. She made up the lost
income by selling lunches to the children at the nearby school and bringing goods from Kisumu to the local market
whenever she had some spare cash. Her only real problems were with the roof of the house-she pointed to a few threads
of sunlight that ran from the ceiling to the floor-and the fact that she hadn’t heard anything from her son Omar in over a
year. She asked if I had seen him, and I had to say no. She grunted something in Luo, then started to gather up our cups.
“She says when you see him, you should tell him she wants nothing from him,” Auma whispered. “Only that he
should come visit his mother.”
I looked at Granny, and for the first time since our arrival, her age showed on her face.
After we unpacked our bags, Roy gestured for me to follow him out into the backyard. At the edge of a neighboring
cornfield, at the foot of a mango tree, I saw two long rectangles of cement jutting out of the earth like a pair of
barré
(Barré)
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