exhumed coffins. There was a plaque on one of the graves: HUSSEIN ONYANGO OBAMA, B. 1895. D. 1979. The
other was covered with yellow bathroom tiles, with a bare space on the headstone where the plaque should have been.
Roy bent down and brushed away a train of ants that marched along the length of the grave.
“Six years,” Roy said. “Six years, and there’s still nothing to say who is buried here. I tell you now, Barack-when I
die, you make sure that my name is on the grave.” He shook his head slowly before heading back toward the house.
How to explain the emotions of that day? I can summon each moment in my mind almost frame by frame. I remember
Auma and myself joining Granny at the afternoon market, the same clearing where the matatu had first dropped us off,
only now full of women who sat on straw mats, their smooth brown legs sticking straight out in front of them from
under wide skirts; the sound of their laughter as they watched me help Granny pick stems off collard greens that she’d
brought from Kisumu, and the nutty-sweet taste of a sugarcane stalk that one of the women put into my hand. I
remember the rustle of corn leaves, the concentration on my uncles’ faces, the smell of our sweat as we mended a hole
in the fence bounding the western line of the property. I remember how, in the afternoon, a young boy named Godfrey
appeared in the compound, a boy who Auma explained was staying with Granny because his family lived in a village
where there was no school; I remember Godfrey’s frantic steps as he chased a big black rooster through the banana and
papaya trees, the knot in his young brow as the bird kept flapping out of his reach, the look in his eyes when finally
Granny grabbed the rooster from behind with one hand and unceremoniously drew her knife across the bird’s neck-a
look that I remembered as my own.
It wasn’t simply joy that I felt in each of these moments. Rather, it was a sense that everything I was doing, every
touch and breath and word, carried the full weight of my life; that a circle was beginning to close, so that I might finally
recognize myself as I was, here, now, in one place. Only once that afternoon would I feel that mood broken, when, on
our way back from the market, Auma ran ahead to get her camera, leaving Granny and me alone in the middle of the
road. After a long pause, Granny looked at me and smiled. “Halo!” she said. “Musawa!” I said. Our mutual vocabulary
exhausted, we stared ruefully down at the dirt until Auma finally returned. And Granny then turned to Auma and said,
in a tone I could understand, that it pained her not to be able to speak to the son of her son.
“Tell her I’d like to learn Luo, but it’s hard to find time in the States,” I said. “Tell her how busy I am.”
“She understands that,” Auma said. “But she also says that a man can never be too busy to know his own people.”
I looked at Granny, and she nodded at me, and I knew then that at some point the joy I was feeling would pass and
that that, too, was part of the circle: the fact that my life was neither tidy nor static, and that even after this trip hard
choices would always remain.
Night fell quickly, the wind making swift tracks through the darkness. Bernard, Roy, and I went to the water tank and
bathed ourselves in the open air, our soapy bodies glowing from the light of an almost full moon. When we returned to
the house, the food was waiting for us, and we ate purposefully, without words. After dinner, Roy left, muttering that
he had some people he wanted to visit. Yusuf went to his hut and brought back an old transistor radio that he said had
once belonged to our grandfather. Fiddling with the knob, he caught a scratchy BBC newscast, fading in and out of
range, the voices like hallucinatory fragments from another world. A moment later we heard a strange, low-pitched
moan off in the distance.