been present to foil the image, because I hadn’t seen what perhaps most men see at some point in their lives: their
father’s body shrinking, their father’s best hopes dashed, their father’s face lined with grief and regret.
Yes, I’d seen weakness in other men-Gramps and his disappointments, Lolo and his compromise. But these men had
become object lessons for me, men I might love but never emulate, white men and brown men whose fates didn’t speak
to my own. It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in
myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela. And if later I saw that the black men I knew-Frank
or Ray or Will or Rafiq-fell short of such lofty standards; if I had learned to respect these men for the struggles they
went through, recognizing them as my own-my father’s voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking,
granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people’s struggle. Wake
up, black man!
Now, as I sat in the glow of a single light bulb, rocking slightly on a hard-backed chair, that image had suddenly
vanished. Replaced by...what? A bitter drunk? An abusive husband? A defeated, lonely bureaucrat? To think that all
my life I had been wrestling with nothing more than a ghost! For a moment I felt giddy; if Auma hadn’t been in the
room, I would have probably laughed out loud. The king is overthrown, I thought. The emerald curtain is pulled aside.
The rabble of my head is free to run riot; I can do what I damn well please. For what man, if not my own father, has the
power to tell me otherwise? Whatever I do, it seems, I won’t do much worse than he did.
The night wore on; I tried to regain my balance, sensing that there was little satisfaction to be had from my newfound
liberation. What stood in the way of my succumbing to the same defeat that had brought down the Old Man? Who
might protect me from doubt or warn me against all the traps that seem laid in a black man’s soul? The fantasy of my
father had at least kept me from despair. Now he was dead, truly. He could no longer tell me how to live.
All he could tell me, perhaps, was what had happened to him. It occurred to me that for all the new information, I still
didn’t know the man my father had been. What had happened to all his vigor, his promise? What had shaped his
ambitions? I imagined once again the first and only time we’d met, the man I now knew must have been as
apprehensive as I was, the man who had returned to Hawaii to sift through his past and perhaps try and reclaim that
best part of him, the part that had been misplaced. He hadn’t been able to tell me his true feelings then, any more than I
had been able to express my ten-year-old desires. We had been frozen by the sight of the other, unable to escape the
suspicion that under examination our true selves would be found wanting. Now, fifteen years later, I looked into
Auma’s sleeping face and saw the price we had paid for that silence.
Ten days later, Auma and I sat in the hard plastic seats of an airport terminal, looking out at the planes through the
high wall of glass. I asked her what she was thinking about, and she smiled softly.
“I was thinking about Alego,” she said. “Home Square-our grandfather’s land, where Granny still lives. It’s the most
beautiful place, Barack. When I’m in Germany, and it’s cold outside, and I’m feeling lonely, sometimes I close my
eyes and imagine I’m there. Sitting in the compound, surrounded by big trees that our grandfather planted. Granny is
talking, telling me something funny, and I can hear the cow swishing its tall behind us, and the chickens pecking at the
edges of the field, and the smell of the fire from the cooking hut. And under the mango tree, near the cornfields, is the
place where the Old Man is buried....”