everything installed in us by our parents and their parents before them. Over
time, we have figured out how to express and overcome our irritations and
occasional rage. When we fight now, it’s far less dramatic, often more efficient,
and always with our love for each other, no matter how strained, still in sight.
We woke the next morning in Nairobi to blue skies and fresh energy, less
zonked by the jet lag and feeling like our happy, regular selves. We met Auma at
a downtown train station, and the three of us boarded a passenger train with
slatted windows to head west out of the city and toward the Obama family’s
ancestral home. Sitting by a window in a cabin packed with Kenyans, some of
whom were traveling with live chickens in baskets, others with hefty pieces of
furniture they’d bought in the city, I was again struck by how strange my girl-
from-Chicago, lawyer-at-a-desk life had suddenly become—how this man sitting
next to me had shown up at my office one day with his weird name and quixotic
smile and brilliantly upended everything. I sat glued to the window as the
sprawling community of Kibera, the largest urban slum in Africa, streamed past,
showing us its low-slung shanties with corrugated-tin roofs, its muddy roads and
open sewers, and a kind of poverty I’d never seen before nor could hardly have
imagined.
We were on the train for several hours. Barack finally opened a book, but I
continued to stare transfixed out the window as the Nairobi slums gave way to
jewel-green countryside and the train rattled north to the town of Kisumu, where
Auma, Barack, and I disembarked into the broiling equatorial heat and took a last,
jackhammering ride on a matatu through the maize fields to their grandmother’s
village of Kogelo.
I will always remember the deep red clay of the earth in that part of Kenya,
so rich it looked almost primordial, how its dust caked the dark skin and hair of
the children who shouted greetings to us from the side of the road. I remember
being sweaty and thirsty as we walked the last bit of the way to Barack’s
grandmother’s compound, to the well-kept concrete home where she’d lived for
years, farming an adjacent vegetable patch and tending several cows. Granny
Sarah, they called her. She was a short, wide-built lady with wise eyes and a
crinkling smile. She spoke no English, only Luo, and expressed delight that we’d
come all this way to see her. Next to her, I felt very tall. She studied me with an
extra, bemused curiosity, as if trying to place where I came from and how
precisely I’d landed on her doorstep. One of her first questions for me was,
“Which one of your parents is white?”