power, on through Ray and Frank, Marcus and Regina; my move to New York; my father’s death. I can see that my
choices were never truly mine alone-and that that is how it should be, that to assert otherwise is to chase after a sorry
sort of freedom.
But such recognition came only later. At the time, about to graduate from college, I was operating mainly on impulse,
like a salmon swimming blindly upstream toward the site of his own conception. In classes and seminars, I would dress
up these impulses in the slogans and theories that I’d discovered in books, thinking-falsely-that the slogans meant
something, that they somehow made what I felt more amenable to proof. But at night, lying in bed, I would let the
slogans drift away, to be replaced with a series of images, romantic images, of a past I had never known.
They were of the civil rights movement, mostly, the grainy black-and-white footage that appears every February
during Black History Month, the same images that my mother had offered me as a child. A pair of college students, hair
short, backs straight, placing their orders at a lunch counter teetering on the edge of riot. SNCC workers standing on a
porch in some Mississippi backwater trying to convince a family of sharecroppers to register to vote. A county jail
bursting with children, their hands clasped together, singing freedom songs.
Such images became a form of prayer for me, bolstering my spirits, channeling my emotions in a way that words
never could. They told me (although even this much understanding may have come later, is also a construct, containing
its own falsehoods) that I wasn’t alone in my particular struggles, and that communities had never been a given in this
country, at least not for blacks. Communities had to be created, fought for, tended like gardens. They expanded or
contracted with the dreams of men-and in the civil rights movement those dreams had been large. In the sit-ins, the
marches, the jailhouse songs, I saw the African-American community becoming more than just the place where you’d
been born or the house where you’d been raised. Through organizing, through shared sacrifice, membership had been
earned. And because membership was earned-because this community I imagined was still in the making, built on the
promise that the larger American community, black, white, and brown, could somehow redefine itself-I believed that it
might, over time, admit the uniqueness of my own life.
That was my idea of organizing. It was a promise of redemption.
And so, in the months leading up to graduation, I wrote to every civil rights organization I could think of, to any black
elected official in the country with a progressive agenda, to neighborhood councils and tenant rights groups. When no
one wrote back, I wasn’t discouraged. I decided to find more conventional work for a year, to pay off my student loans
and maybe even save a little bit. I would need the money later, I told myself. Organizers didn’t make any money; their
poverty was proof of their integrity.
Eventually a consulting house to multinational corporations agreed to hire me as a research assistant. Like a spy
behind enemy lines, I arrived every day at my mid-Manhattan office and sat at my computer terminal, checking the
Reuters machine that blinked bright emerald messages from across the globe. As far as I could tell I was the only black
man in the company, a source of shame for me but a source of considerable pride for the company’s secretarial pool.
They treated me like a son, those black ladies; they told me how they expected me to run the company one day.
Sometimes, over lunch, I would tell them about all my wonderful organizing plans, and they would smile and say,
“That’s good, Barack,” but the look in their eyes told me they were secretly disappointed. Only Ike, the gruff black
security guard in the lobby, was willing to come right out and tell me I’d be making a mistake.
barré
(Barré)
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