“For we are strangers before them, and sojourners, as were all our fathers.”
1 Chronicles 29:15
Several weeks ago I found a book at Lindsay’s new Dollar Tree that I had to buy and bring home. The cover photo shows a dark-haired white woman holding a light-skinned black child to her chest, maybe four years old, with facial features similar to her own. That child is now our President, Barack Obama; the book, titled A Singular Woman (2011) by journalist Janny Scott, is the biography of his mother.
It’s the story of a woman nobody guesses. Born only eight years before I was, who died twelve years younger than I am now, she lived an adventurous, international life that I am not brave enough to choose. But reading her story drove me back to the book by her son, Dreams from My Father (1995, 2004,) that I’ve had on my shelf since Christmas 2008 and had read only part way through. This time I couldn’t put it down.
Barack’s father was the first Kenyan student in the new East-West Center at the University of Hawaii. His mother was a freshman at UH when she met him, fell for him, conceived his child and married him, only to learn later that he already had a family in Africa. Barack was two when his father went back to Kenya; he saw him only once after that, when he was about 10. When he was 21, he learned of his father's death in a car accident, which eventually led him to go to Kenya to meet the rest of his large, extended and not untroubled family.
Listening to Barack’s story after reading his mother’s, it’s clear that at least half of the dreams he received from his father came through her. She was diligent to keep the image of his missing father alive and well, for his sake as well as Barack Sr.’s. It was the elder Barack she fell for, after all: his dreams of making his country better, making the lives of his black countrymen equal to the British who colonized, enslaved, and developed the economy around white values and white definitions of monetary needs. But it was also her child she was protecting from self-doubt and the discrimination he would eventually face. She armored him with an understanding of why he was half black and that it was a good thing.
That halfness drove him to start seeking his career, his calling, off the beaten academic path, into community organizing in the inner-city black sections of Chicago’s South Side. Raised white (but not on the mainland,) he had to learn what it meant to be a black man in America. And that’s where his dreams intersected his father’s, where his father’s dreams touched down on the son’s own soil. Anyone doubting that our president is American, or Christian, need only read the section called “Chicago.” His book opens with the passage from 1 Chronicles at the top of this page.
While reading our President's story, I was struck by the power of his biological father's absence. In his pre-teen days, he had another father figure, an Indonesian diplomat who, despite his education and state position, taught him some of his native village ways while living in Djakarta. As a teen, sent back to Hawaii to get a better education, he had some fatherly relation with his white grandfather. But the man who could tell him why he was there, what his role in the world could or should be, and teach him the ropes to get there - that man was a ghost figuratively before he reached adulthood, and literally when he turned 21.
The national columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. wrote a Mother's Day piece this year titled "It's not OK for fathers to skip out." After telling the story of Kevin Durant, this year's NBA Most Valuable Player, who grew up in a single-parent household and dedicated his success to his mother's stamina and dreams him, Pitts made this simple declaration: "The absence of fathers matters.
"We have evolved a society wherein we pretend the opposite is true. The disappearance of fathers is now nearly the norm. Almost one in four American children lives in a household without their biological dads. For brown kids, that number stands at about 28%. For black kids, it's a little better than half.
"Mass incarceration and the War on Drugs have certainly played a role in this. But just as surely, a role is also played by the new social more which says it's OK for a man or a woman to be feckless, for him to wander away because he is immature, selfish and young, for her to have a baby on her own because the clock is ticking and really, she doesn't need a man for anything more than sperm. This is the new morality, the new American mindset.
"And we tell ourselves it's OK, that this haphazardness has no impact upon the child, that father is not irreplaceable, that his disappearance leaves no scar. But the statistics on poverty, drug use, education and incarceration suggest otherwise. . . . (Durant's MVP acceptance speech) was a testimony to the power of a mother's love. But it was also a reminder: A father's absence has power, too."
The powerful absence of Barack Obama Sr. in Barack Obama's life is something I felt throughout the book, a driving force in some way as important as his mixed blood and international upbringing. I think it allows him to identify with more Americans than all our presidents over the past 100 years combined. His successes - his incredible command of the English language, his rapid political rise to the highest office in the land, and his incredible strength and compassion held tightly together and employed during these last 6 years - these successes stem from what others would call handicaps.
My father was a powerful presence in my life, something I tried to tell him in his father's day card this year. But until I read this book, I hadn't realized that most of what I inherited from him was from his dreams. A carpenter, he believed in building up the community and did it by building something the community needed: a clubhouse, a fire station, a square dance hall, engaging people in the process who didn’t know how to hold a hammer much less use one.
My father understood my move to Lindsay as an immersion in community building long before I did. He would ask me how the town was doing even before I became involved, while I was avoiding it. Now in his late 80’s and tired of politics, we share only what we can stand to contemplate together. But I’ve got his compulsion to improve just as surely as I’ve got his hammering techniques. It changes the way I feel about the last four years here in Lindsay.
When we celebrate the gifts we’ve received from our fathers this weekend, don’t forget the dreams.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Trudy Wischemann is a dreamer who writes. You can send her your father's day dreams c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.
I really like your writing style, great information, thankyou for posting.
ReplyDeletePresident