“I can’t come after all,” she said. “One of our brothers, David...he’s been killed. In a motorcycle accident. I don’t
know any more than that.” She began to cry. “Oh, Barack. Why do these things happen to us?”
I tried to comfort her as best I could. I asked her if I could do anything for her. I told her there would be other times
for us to see each other. Eventually her voice quieted; she had to go book a flight home, she said.
“Okay, then, Barack. See you. ’Bye.”
After she hung up, I left my office, telling my secretary I’d be gone for the day. For hours I wandered the streets of
Manhattan, the sound of Auma’s voice playing over and over in my mind. A continent away, a woman cries. On a dark
and dusty road, a boy skids out of control, tumbling against hard earth, wheels spinning to silence. Who were these
people, I asked myself, these strangers who carried my blood? What might save this woman from her sorrow? What
wild, unspoken dreams had this boy possessed?
Who was I, who shed no tears at the loss of his own?
I still wonder sometimes how that first contact with Auma altered my life. Not so much the contact itself (that meant
everything, would mean everything) or the news that she gave me of David’s death (that, too, is an absolute; I would
never know him, and that says enough), but rather the timing of her call, the particular sequence of events, the raised
expectations and then the dashed hopes, coming at a time when the idea of becoming an organizer was still just that, an
idea in my head, a vague tug at my heart.
Maybe it made no difference. Maybe by this time I was already committed to organizing and Auma’s voice simply
served to remind me that I still had wounds to heal, and could not heal myself. Or maybe, if David hadn’t died when he
did, and Auma had come to New York as originally planned, and I had learned from her then what I would only learn
later, about Kenya, and about our father...well, maybe it would have relieved certain pressures that had built up inside
me, showing me a different idea of community, allowing my ambitions to travel a narrower, more personal course, so
that in the end I might have taken my friend Ike’s advice and given myself over to stocks and bonds and the pull of
respectability.
I don’t know. What’s certain is that a few months after Auma’s call I turned in my resignation at the consulting firm
and began looking in earnest for an organizing job. Once again, most of my letters went unanswered, but after a month
or so I was called in for an interview by the director of a prominent civil rights organization in the city. He was a tall,
handsome black man, dressed in a crisp white shirt, a paisley tie, and red suspenders. His office was furnished with
Italian chairs and African sculpture, a bar service built into the exposed brick. Through a tall window, sunlight
streamed down on a bust of Dr. King.
“I like it,” the director said after looking over my résumé. “Particularly the corporate experience. That’s
the real business of a civil rights organization these days. Protest and pickets won’t cut it anymore. To get the job done,
we’ve got to forge links between business, government, and the inner city.” He clasped his broad hands together, then
showed me a glossy annual report opened to a page that listed the organization’s board of directors. There was one
black minister and ten white corporate executives. “You see?” the director said. “Public-private partnerships. The key
to the future. And that’s where young people like yourself come in. Educated. Self-assured. Comfortable in
boardrooms. Why, just last week I was discussing the problem with the secretary of HUD at a White House dinner.