Dreams from My Father: Chapter 16 Summary & Analysis

Bernard appears on Auma’s doorstep so he can play basketball with Barack. He teases Barack about reading and scaring away women and looks doubtful when Barack says they’ll run to the courts. Bernard has to walk after a quarter mile. As they shoot, Barack thinks of how generous Bernard has been. He’s sweet and patient, but Barack thinks that he’s old enough to be more independent and more driven. Bernard announces that in America, everyone has a car and a phone. He says it’ll be easy to find work there and that he’ll come work for Barack’s business (a business that doesn’t exist). Barack pictures the basketball courts in the U.S. Some of them are dangerous and others are idyllic. Later, they get ice cream and Barack tells Bernard that he needs to set goals and follow through, but he thinks his words must sound hollow.

Barack wonders what family is. It might be a genetic chain, a social construct, or a group of shared memories. He says that in any case, he used to draw circles around himself to delineate family, friends, colleagues, and finally race and humanity. In Africa, though, this doesn’t work. He meets people everywhere who are thrilled to see the Old Man’s son. Family members go out of their way to feed and spend time with him. Barack embraces this at first; it confirms what he knows about the communal culture of Africa. But as days go on, Barack thinks more about what Auma noted about Barack’s good fortune and his perceived responsibility to the family. The situation in Nairobi is tough and most young people are unemployed. Barack knows he has responsibilities, but the politics he turned to in the U.S. won’t help his family.

Barack begins to see the importance of money and half wishes he were the wealthy corporate lawyer his Kenyan family thinks he is. He notices how Auma tries to live up to expectations by saving money to fix up Granny’s house in Alego and purchase land outside Nairobi, but her schedule takes her away from the family and hurts their feelings. Barack realizes that Black people’s success always threatens to abandon other Black people. He is unsettled in part because he sees the same patterns play out in America and in Africa. No one here can tell him how to be responsible to his family or to humanity at large.

Zeituni takes Barack to visit Aunt Sarah. Auma drives them most of the way, as her mechanic lives nearby. They drive to Mathare, a valley that houses a vast shantytown. Zeituni and Barack walk down alone. They enter a crude apartment building and knock on an upper-story apartment door. Sarah only speaks Luo. She wants to know why Barack took so long to visit, suggests his hosts are telling him lies, and she says that he should be caring for her. Then, in English, Sarah spits that Akumu, not Granny, is Barack’s grandmother and asks why he isn’t helping them. Zeituni and Sarah argue in Luo and Zeituni stands to leave. When Sarah asks, Barack gives her money.

Zeituni drags Barack outside when Sarah invites him to stay longer. After a few minutes, Barack asks Zeituni what she and Sarah were fighting about. Zeituni sighs that she doesn’t know the whole truth, but Sarah was always closer to her real mother, Akumu, while the Old Man adopted Granny as his mother after Akumu left. She says that Sarah and the Old Man were a lot alike as kids—Sarah was independent and left several husbands who were lazy or tried to abuse her. She eventually decided that the Old Man should support her, which is why she dislikes Kezia. Zeituni explains that while the Old Man was married to Ruth and visiting Kezia—who was technically still his wife—Kezia was also seeing another man. The Old Man accepted Abo and Bernard as his sons, but there’s nothing to prove their paternity.

Barack looks around and wonders if he should feel differently about Bernard. Zeituni says that now Barack sees how the Old Man suffered. The Old Man’s heart, she says, was too big. He gave to everyone who asked and took Zeituni in when she left her husband. Zeituni says that when the Old Man’s luck changed, everyone forgot him. They abandoned him, and the Old Man never held that against them. Indeed, later when he was doing well again, he started helping again and told Zeituni that those men might need things more than he does. Zeituni warns Barack to not judge the Old Man too harshly, but to learn from his example: draw the line and decide who’s family.

Barack remembers speaking to a woman in Chicago. As he listened to the woman’s stories, he eventually realized that two of the sisters she spoke of died at birth—but she spoke about them like they grew up with her. Barack begins to feel like that as people on the street mistake him for David. Auma explains that she hasn’t seen Ruth and Mark since David’s funeral. After Ruth and the Old Man’s bitter divorce, Ruth married a Tanzanian, changed her sons’ last names, and sent them to an international school. Mark went along with it, but David insisted he was an Obama and ran away. Roy found David and David soon became the family favorite. He died while living with Roy. It broke Roy’s heart, but Ruth believes the Obamas corrupted David.

A few days later, Auma receives an invitation for her and Barack to have lunch with Ruth and Mark. Barack insists they go. Ruth lives in an expensive neighborhood that reminds Barack of some of the wealthy Hawaiian neighborhoods. Those houses were pretty, but they always seemed lonely. Ruth says she wants to see how the other Obama son turned out and asks why Ann didn’t change Barack’s last name when she remarried. Barack asks Mark about his program at Stanford. Ruth alternates between talking about Mark’s accomplishments and the Old Man’s failures. She makes Mark show Barack their photo album and old photos of the Old Man. Barack realizes that these photos reflect what might have been had the Old Man taken him and Ann to Kenya. He realizes that Ruth isn’t over the Old Man.

A week later, Barack invites Mark to lunch. Mark is more relaxed and says he’s glad to be back in Kenya with family, but he doesn’t ever want to live here. He says it’d be silly to be a physicist here and flatly says he’s cutting himself off from his roots. He resents the Old Man for being a drunk who didn’t care about his wife and children. Mark says he loves Shakespeare and Beethoven, but he’s not afraid to be half Kenyan. He begins to say something about acknowledging who he really is, but he says it’s too stressful. Barack pays the bill and they promise to write, both knowing they have no intention of doing so. When Barack tells Auma about this, she laughs—Ruth has the documents to prove that the Old Man is Mark’s father, unlike any of the Old Man’s other wives.