Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Dreams from My Father, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Family and Community
Fathers, Sons, and Manhood
Race and Identity
Storytelling and Truth
Summary
Analysis
At 21, Barack lives in New York on an uninviting block on the border of East Harlem. He’s solitary and impatient, and he admires the old man living alone next door. Barack occasionally carries the man’s groceries, but otherwise they only nod at each other. However, when Barack’s roommate finds the man dead in the stairwell and Barack sees the man’s barren apartment, Barack begins to question his own solitude. Shortly after his 21st birthday, he receives a phone call from an Aunt Jane in Nairobi. Aunt Jane tells Barack that his father is dead. At this point, Barack sees his father as a myth, since he left Hawaii when Barack was two. He knows his father from the stories that his mother Ann and his grandparents, Gramps and Toot, tell about him—such as the one about how he almost threw someone over the Pali Lookout because the man dropped Barack’s father’s pipe.
By beginning his narrative with his father’s death and his own isolated life as a young man in New York, Barack does two things. First, he makes it clear that this is a story about his father as much as it is a story about him; then, he also encourages the reader to compare his solitary young adulthood to the picture he paints of his childhood, which seems to be one surrounded by loving family members. Mentioning this particular story about his father, meanwhile, also situates his father as someone truly larger than life who didn’t play by normal rules—and possibly not someone whose life Barack can ever live up to.
Themes
While Gramps finds the pipe story hilarious, Ann prefers a “gentler portrait” of Barack’s father. Every so often, Barack’s family members pull out these stories and then don’t speak about his father again for months. However, Ann makes sure that Barack sees photos of his father and knows his father’s story. Barack’s father was Kenyan, from the Luo tribe. He was one of the first Africans to attend college in the United States at the University of Hawaii. There, he met Ann. They had a son—Barack—and two years later, he left to pursue a Ph.D. at Harvard and returned to Kenya. As a child, Barack was content with this story. It’s not until later that he wonders why his father never returned for him.
Here, Barack begins to draw out how people’s interpretations of stories change over time. As a child, Ann’s stories of Barack’s father are more than enough because they tell Barack about who he is, and they tell him his father is a noble, intelligent individual. But as Barack gets older and becomes more interested in what makes a family a family, he begins to ask more questions about this story. Essentially, as he gets older, he sees that Ann leaves important information out—like why his father left at all.
Themes
It didn’t matter to young Barack that his Black father looked nothing like the white people who raised him (his mother and her family are white). He recalls only one story of his father that deals with race. Supposedly, while Barack’s father was out at a bar one night, a white man used an offensive slur. Barack’s father lectured the man about bigotry, and the man offered Barack’s father $100 on the spot. For a long time, Barack suspects that the story is exaggerated, but many years later, when an old friend of his father’s calls Barack out of the blue, the caller repeats the story.
It’s telling that at this point, race isn’t an issue for Barack. He is surrounded by white people who love him, so the color of anyone’s skin simply doesn’t seem to matter. This story, however, introduces him to the idea that to others, at least, race is an issue—and possibly, Barack will have to tackle issues of race himself as he gets older. This story also forces Barack to realize that his father defies all attempts at rationalization; he was truly an individual.
Themes
In 1960, when Barack’s parents married, interracial marriage was still a felony in most U.S. states. He still wonders why Toot and Gramps allowed Ann to marry a Black man, since they came from Kansas and did not seem like political radicals. But Barack’s grandparents often reminded him that Kansas fought with the Union in the Civil War—and Toots has a distant ancestor who was Cherokee. Toot and Gramps grew up 20 miles away from each other during the Depression. Their stories of their youth romanticize the Depression era, but Barack can intuit the hierarchy that governed their world. Toot’s family was “respectable;” Gramps’s was not—his mother committed suicide and his father was a known philanderer. When Gramps and Toot fell in love, Gramps was a bad boy with dreams of the big city.
Though Toot and Gramps try to make the case that they’re not at all racist simply because they come from Kansas and have Native American ancestors, it’s important to keep in mind that they’re still subject to the cultural currents guiding life in America at this time. Barack also begins to dive into the way that Toot and Gramps make the Depression era sound more romantic through the language they use to describe it. He paints a picture of his grandparents as star struck lovers falling in love despite all odds—a story that may be compelling, but which ignores the economic difficulties of the era.
Themes
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Gramps and Toot eloped before Pearl Harbor. Gramps served in the war, and then they headed for California, Kansas, Texas, and Seattle. Despite all their moving, Gramps’s desire for new frontiers persisted: when his furniture business opened a new store in Honolulu, he packed up the family and moved to Hawaii. Barack insists that Gramps was, by the time he got to Hawaii, simultaneously generous, provincial, and easily disappointed. Gramps briefly joined the Unitarian Universalist congregation, but Toot eventually got him to drop that. All of this made them “vaguely liberal.” Barack imagines the scene when Ann first brought Barack’s father home. His grandparents would have been struck by his handsomeness and dignity, but the question remained: would they “let their daughter marry one?”
In this part of the story, Barack finally makes it clear that as liberal as his grandparents were, they still lived in a fundamentally racist society—hence the question of whether they’d let their daughter marry a Black man. The fact that this is a question at all points to an undercurrent of racism, even among people who might otherwise be supportive of Black people’s rights during the 1960s. Barack also paints Gramps as a person trying very hard to figure out his own identity. Figuring out personal identity is also Barack’s project throughout the memoir.
Themes
Barack says that at this point, his grandparents hadn’t given Black people much thought. Jim Crow laws existed in Kansas, but not like in the South. Race only became real for Toot and Gramps in Texas, where Gramps’s boss told him to serve Black and Mexican customers after hours. Meanwhile, at the bank where she worked, Toot was reprimanded for using “Mister” to address the Black janitor. Gramps and Toot withdrew from their coworkers, and Ann grew lonely. One day, Toot came home to find enraged children at the fence, shouting racial slurs into the yard. In the yard, Ann was sitting with a Black girl, reading. When Toot invited the girls inside, the Black girl sprinted away. When Gramps went to the principal, the principal said, “white girls don’t play with coloreds.”
In these moments, Gramps and Toot do prove themselves to be very progressive, especially in comparison with their racist employers and the principal. In this sense, Gramps and Toot aren’t necessarily wrong in their characterizations of themselves later, as they relate these stories to young Barack. It’s essential to Barack’s development that Gramps and Toot present themselves in this way—they want to make sure Barack feels supported, and as though he never has to question their support because of the color of his skin.
Themes
Later, Gramps tells Barack they left Texas because of the racism; Toot, however, insists that “racism” wasn’t part of their vocabulary then. Barack trusts Toot and knows that Gramps tends to rewrite history to make himself look better, but he also knows that Gramps felt empathetic toward Black people due to the prejudice he experienced as a kid. But despite all this, Gramps and Toot didn’t take easily to Ann and Barack’s father’s engagement. The couple married quietly and Barack arrived not long after. Barack believes that his birth helped Gramps come around to the relationship. Hawaii also provided the perfect backdrop, as it is diverse enough to seem like it’s not racist. Gramps and Toot cultivated a diverse circle of friends and Gramps often messed with tourists, alternately telling them that Barack was a Hawaiian monarch or that his roots were in Kenya and Kansas.
In this moment, Barack makes it explicit that stories don’t simply relay factual information—Gramps embellishes stories to make sure that it seems as though he’s on the right side of history. And while Toot doesn’t entirely refute the gist of what Gramps says, she does make it clear that she and Gramps weren’t as educated in the language of racism then as they later became, especially after gaining a Black son-in-law and a biracial grandson. And indeed, though Gramps seem to see his jokes on tourists as a way to call out tourists’ racism, they’re still not respectful to Hawaiian culture.
Themes
Barack supposes that the stories of his father are really about the people telling them and the changing face of 1960s America; they’re stories of the progressive, can-do spirit that gripped the nation at that time. However, Barack’s father disappeared, and the stories never explain this fact—what’s more, Barack realizes that his father is merely a prop in others’ stories. In high school, when Barack discovered an article about his father’s graduation from the University of Hawaii, he was struck that there was no mention of him or his mom, as though they didn’t exist. At the time that Barack’s father left, Barack was too young to know that he was supposed to have a father at home and too young to know what race was.
With this, Barack makes sure the reader grasps that stories are as much about the person telling the stories as they are about the stories’ content. He’s encouraging readers to pay attention in the future to who’s telling what stories, and what’s possible to really know about the truths they claim to convey. By ending the chapter with the note that he’s too young at this point to understand race or what his father should be, he sets the stage for later growth.
Themes
