Dreams from My Father

In 1983, Barack decides to become a community organizer. He wants to organize Black folks at the grassroots level, though his ideas are vague. At night, he thinks about the Civil Rights Movement. It makes him think that communities need to be created and nurtured—and during the Civil Rights Movement, there was a lot of nurturing. Barack also thinks that, by organizing, he’ll be able to redeem himself. He spends the months before graduation writing to civil rights organizations, Black elected officials, and tenant rights groups. No one writes back. To pay off his loans, Barack takes a job as a research assistant for a consulting house.

Barack is ashamed to be the only Black employee at his level, but the Black secretaries treat him like a son. They seem secretly disappointed that he wants to organize instead, but only the Black security guard says outright that he doesn’t approve. He tells Barack to focus on making money and let the people who are going to make it make it on their own. Barack pays no attention to this, but he sees his dreams disappearing as he’s promoted. One day, Barack’s half sister Auma calls him at his office. She asks to visit and Barack agrees. He excitedly prepares, but several weeks later, Auma calls with the news that their brother David died and she can’t come. Barack wonders who Auma and David are—and who he is if he didn’t cry for his brother.

Barack resigns from his consulting job a few months later and applies again for an organizing job. He works a few odd jobs and is broke within six months. One day, when he attends a talk at Columbia by a speaker proposing establishing economic ties between Africa and Harlem, the speaker and two Marxists lay into a woman who suggests this isn’t possible. Barack feels like the movement is over. Not long after, a Jewish man named Marty Kaufman calls Barack, looking for a trainee to organize in Chicago. Marty is pudgy, unkempt, and insists that Barack must be angry if he wants to organize. He explains that he needs a Black person to help him. Most of his work is with churches, since the unions have so little power anymore—but the churches are notoriously hard to work with.

Marty asks what Barack knows about Chicago, and he really only knows about Harold Washington, the recently elected first Black mayor of the city, and that Chicago is highly segregated. Marty affirms that the segregation and polarization mean that not much is getting done. When Barack asks whose fault that is, Marty says it’s not about fault—it’s about whether Harold Washington can harness polarization and do anything. Marty offers Barack the job, and Barack tries to figure out what he thinks of Marty; Marty seems smart and maybe too sure of himself, and he’s white. While Barack sits by the river to think, a boy asks him why the river sometimes runs in different directions. Realizing he’s never noticed the river, Barack packs up and heads for Chicago a week later.