We hold these truths to be self-evident. In those words, I hear the spirit of Douglass and Delany, as well as Jefferson
and Lincoln; the struggles of Martin and Malcolm and unheralded marchers to bring these words to life. I hear the
voices of Japanese families interned behind barbed wire; young Russian Jews cutting patterns in Lower East Side
sweatshops; dust-bowl farmers loading up their trucks with the remains of shattered lives. I hear the voices of the
people in Altgeld Gardens, and the voices of those who stand outside this country’s borders, the weary, hungry bands
crossing the Rio Grande. I hear all of these voices clamoring for recognition, all of them asking the very same questions
that have come to shape my life, the same questions that I sometimes, late at night, find myself asking the Old Man.
What is our community, and how might that community be reconciled with our freedom? How far do our obligations
reach? How do we transform mere power into justice, mere sentiment into love? The answers I find in law books don’t
always satisfy me-for every Brown v. Board of Education I find a score of cases where conscience is sacrificed to
expedience or greed. And yet, in the conversation itself, in the joining of voices, I find myself modestly encouraged,
believing that so long as the questions are still being asked, what binds us together might somehow, ultimately, prevail.
That faith, so different from innocence, can sometimes be hard to sustain. Upon my return to Chicago, I would find
the signs of decay accelerated throughout the South Side-the neighborhoods shabbier, the children edgier and less
restrained, more middle-class families heading out to the suburbs, the jails bursting with glowering youth, my brothers
without prospects. All too rarely do I hear people asking just what it is that we’ve done to make so many children’s
hearts so hard, or what collectively we might do to right their moral compass-what values we must live by. Instead I see
us doing what we’ve always done-pretending that these children are somehow not our own.
I try to do my small part in reversing this tide. In my legal practice, I work mostly with churches and community
groups, men and women who quietly build grocery stores and health clinics in the inner city, and housing for the poor.
Every so often I’ll find myself working on a discrimination case, representing clients who show up at my law firm’s
office with stories that we like to tell ourselves should no longer exist. Most of these clients are slightly embarrassed by
what’s happened to them, as are the white co-workers who agree to testify on their behalf; no one wants to be known as
a troublemaker. And yet at some point both plaintiff and witness decide that a principle is at stake, that despite
everything that has happened, those words put to paper over two hundred years ago must mean something after all.
Black and white, they make their claim on this community we call America. They choose our better history.
I think I’ve learned to be more patient these past few years, with others as well as myself. If so, it’s one of several
improvements in my character that I attribute to my wife, Michelle. She’s a daughter of the South Side, raised in one of
those bungalow-style houses that I spent so many hours visiting during my first year in Chicago. She doesn’t always
know what to make of me; she worries that, like Gramps and the Old Man, I am something of a dreamer. Indeed, in her
eminent practicality and midwestern attitudes, she reminds me not a little of Toot. I remember how, the first time I took
her back to Hawaii, Gramps nudged my ribs and said Michelle was quite “a looker.” Toot, on the other hand, described
my bride-to-be as “a very sensible girl”-which Michelle understood to be my grandmother’s highest form of praise.
After our engagement, I took Michelle to Kenya to meet the other half of my family. She was an immediate success
there as well, in part because the number of Luo words in her vocabulary very soon surpassed mine. We had a fine time
in Alego, helping Auma on a film project of hers, listening to more of Granny’s stories, meeting relatives I’d missed