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 Chicago’s southern edge sits the Altgeld Gardens public housing project, “the Gardens” for short. This nickname is ironic—there’s a grove of trees and the Calumet River nearby, but the fish in the river are discolored and disfigured. There’s a landfill on one side and a sewage treatment plant on another. Despite these location issues, Altgeld was designed with the same kind of hope as other Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) housing projects—but unlike in some of the other projects, Altgeld’s occupants try to make the place feel like home. However, the CHA stops performing maintenance.
Barack’s descriptions of Altgeld paint a picture of a community that’s trying to make the best of a bad situation. Meanwhile, the proximity of the landfill and the sewage treatment plant suggests that the people in power when Altgeld was built didn’t care about the quality of life of poor Black people—something that speaks to the city’s racist history. Of course, Altgeld’s residents still deal with this same kind of racism in the present, as shown by the city failing to maintain the building.
Themes
The choked gray sky makes Barack suspect this is hopeless. And the aftermath of the police meeting hasn’t helped this outlook—working with the Catholic parishes in the city proves difficult, as the white Catholic priests serving in Black churches are disillusioned and feel that they can’t help the neighborhoods. Others, including Angela, Shirley, and Mona, are also disillusioned. They feel like Marty doesn’t listen to them, and they’re disappointed that the job bank turned out to be a bust. Though Marty goes weekly to harangue the people administering the job bank, the women suspect he’s pushing a secret agenda—the money went somewhere, after all. For his part, Marty refuses to listen when Barack suggests he be more tactful; he insists that it’s not his job to make people like him.
With the failure of the job bank, Barack has to face the unfortunate fact that Marty cannot work miracles, as smart and as dedicated as he might be. And because the Black people he works with and tries to serve are naturally suspicious of a white man who comes off as tactless, Marty’s failures seem even worse—and also, given Barack’s involvement with Marty, he’s implicated in Marty’s mistakes. Overall, as Barack describes the state of things in Altgeld, he pulls out threads of hopelessness and disaffection, things he’ll have to push against if he wants to make a difference.
Themes
One Saturday, Marty takes Barack and Angela to a meeting with a local union president. Marty insists that the steel company is going out of business and he lays out a plan to try to preserve jobs by working with churches, the city, and banks, but the union officials insist that they have to focus on negotiating with management right now. Marty is stunned. After the meeting, Angela confides in Barack that she didn’t understand Marty’s plan. Barack realizes that Angela is questioning whether they should even be trying to keep the steel plant open. That won’t help those who are already unemployed, and the job board won’t help Black people who don’t have any education. Barack realizes that Marty wants to treat Black and white people exactly the same, with no understanding of how history keeps Black people from moving up.
In this instance, Barack figures out where Marty’s perceived tactlessness comes from: Marty doesn’t want to acknowledge that racism is alive and well in Chicago and that it still influences the lives of Black people in the city. By ignoring this, he ignores an important and instructive story about the city, one that Angela and many others seem to know very well. Learning this also helps Barack conceptualize his grandparents’ story, as they were able to move up in the world because, as white people, they didn’t face racism like Black people do.
Themes
Barack enters a church in Altgeld to find Angela, Shirley, Will, and Mary all looking morose. Angela announces she’s quitting; after two years, she feels like she’s accomplished nothing. Shirley backs this up. Barack feels panic and then anger. He remembers Frank saying that this is the way things are and looks out the window at boys destroying a boarded-up building across the street. He half wants to join them and asks what will happen to the boys outside if they’re not going to fight for them. Barack isn’t sure this play will work, but Will asks what they’re going to do. Barack asks him for his opinion and they spend their time talking about their strategy to help Altgeld.
As a dreamer who believes in creating communities, Barack cannot simply accept that he can’t do anything; he won’t abandon Chicago to get even worse. But at the same time, he’s also fighting years’ worth of abandonment, mistreatment, and neglect of Black Chicagoans by their local government. As Barack regains Angela’s support and starts to brainstorm solutions, he steps in as a guide and as someone willing to work for boys like he sees outside.
Themes
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Later, when Barack calls Marty, Marty isn’t surprised by what happened. He suggests that Barack find some new leaders so Will isn’t responsible for their success or failure—Will is a known eccentric who struggles to connect with people in interviews. He has the idea to host street corner meetings in Altgeld’s vicinity, as he knows the unemployed, struggling people there won’t go to meetings at a foreign church. Barack helps Will and Mary prepare a flyer and stands with them on a corner. To his surprise, about 20 people show up and talk for an hour about what they want fixed in their community. Barack, Will, and Mary repeat these meetings on other blocks and eventually hold meetings in a church basement.
For as clueless or as uncaring as Marty might seem about how his behavior appears to others, he does recognize the importance of optics when it comes to other people—hence his telling Barack to find someone other than Will to be the face of this push, and hence his hiring Barack, a Black man, in the first place. And yet, Will still understands Chicago differently than Marty does, despite his eccentricities. As a part of the community, he understands better that outdoor meetings like these will be far more successful than Marty’s preferred indoor meetings.
Themes
Before one meeting, Barack joins Mary at the coffee pot. Barack doesn’t know Mary well, but he knows that she married a Black man who left her after they had two daughters. Her Irish family won’t speak to her, and she reminds Barack of Ann. Mary asks Barack why he’s doing this work, especially since he’s not very religious. People arrive for the meeting before Barack can answer. Will leads the lengthy meeting and then, at the end, suggests they all reflect on their relationships to each other and to God. Everyone is uncomfortable, but Will shares his happy memories of growing up in Altgeld—and he cries as he says that kids here don’t smile anymore. Others share their stories of loss. After the meeting, Barack tells Mary that their reasons for doing this aren’t so different.
Mary’s question to Barack seems to imply that wanting to help others and make Altgeld a robust and thriving community is something unique to people whose religion requires that kind of action. For Barack, though, his life experiences have shown him the importance of cultivating community of some kind, whether that’s hanging out with boys in Djkarta, befriending Ray in high school, or seeking out radical Black students in college. For him, it’s the community aspect that’s important.
Themes
A week later, Barack tries to fit Angela, Mona, and Shirley into his tiny car so they can attend meetings and come up with a job strategy for Altgeld’s residents. Barack figures they can get shops, restaurants, and theaters back into the area and encourage families to start businesses. They go first to the Roseland shopping district to meet with a Rafiq al Shabazz, whom Shirley knows as Wally, a neighbor’s son. Rafiq forces a smile and explains that he’s the president of an organization that helped get Harold Washington elected. He hands Barack a flyer accusing Arab shops of selling bad meat and accuses outsiders—Koreans, Arabs, and Jews—of mistreating Black people. Long term, their goal is to help Black people own local businesses, but Roseland residents just want to move to the suburbs. This will be a disaster, as white folks will move in when Black people leave.
What Rafiq essentially proposes is that Marty is wrong—it’s inappropriate to look at unemployed people in Chicago as more or less the same, regardless of their skin color or country of origin. And while Barack has already seen that he must acknowledge and deal head-on with Chicago’s history of racism and segregation, it’s telling that Rafiq’s flyer is described in a way that suggests that it’s deliberately inflammatory and not factual. Rafiq, in this sense, is possibly trying to rally the Black community around hating others as a way to better themselves.
Themes
Rafiq excuses himself. Outside the building, Shirley says she’s known Rafiq since he was a kid; he changed his name when he gave up the gang life to become a Muslim. The group heads to the Chamber of Commerce next. There, they find Mr. Foster, who was the president of the Chamber until he resigned last week. He tells the group that the Koreans pay their dues and are community-oriented. They give each other loans and pool their money. Black merchants don’t do that—though they also don’t work their families 16 hours per day like many Korean businesses do. When Angela asks about part-time work for Altgeld’s youth, Mr. Foster explains that business owners turn down 30 applicants every week.
Mr. Foster presents a different view on the state of unemployment in Chicago: the Black community is fractured, suspicious of their peers, and won’t work together to help everyone succeed. For Mr. Foster, the Korean businesspeople in Chicago are people to learn from, at least in terms of how they structure and support their community. Such a thing would likely not go over well with Rafiq, as acknowledging that Koreans do some things well would damage his attempts to unite the Black business community against a perceived enemy.
Themes
As Barack studies a Korean clothing shop outside, he remembers the markets in Indonesia and realizes that despite the poverty there, the markets were a mark of a coherent community. He figures it’ll take a long time to put the culture and the community back together in Chicago. He also thinks of Indonesian workers who leave their markets when factories come in—and then are out of work without the market to fall back on when the factories go under. Barack and the women miss their final appointment at the Mayor’s Office of Employment and Training (MET). An assistant gives them a brochure. Barack says they’ve found their issue: none of the programs MET facilitates are accessible to Altgeld’s residents.
With this, Barack begins to see that poverty might not be the exact problem he thinks it is; it certainly wreaks havoc on communities in Chicago, but it’s worth noting that poor communities elsewhere are more mutually supportive. But he also understands that it’s impossible to simply ignore poverty in Chicago—hence him focusing his efforts on getting a MET center someplace where Altgeld’s residents can access it. That will not only give them income; a job will give them dignity and a sense that they belong.
Themes
They quickly draft a letter to Ms. Alvarez, the director of MET, and Barack drills everyone on a meeting script. They plan to demand a job intake and training center in the Far South Side. On the night of the meeting, about 100 people show up. Mona forces Ms. Alvarez to promise a MET intake center in the area within six months, and the only hitch is a shouting drunk man. After the meeting, Barack feels like he can do this. He congratulates himself and notices the drunk man spinning in circles. Barack offers to help, but the man curses at him and wobbles away.
The drunk man is an indicator that, despite Barack’s newfound belief that he can succeed, he’s up against all sorts of obstacles. The job center isn’t going to solve all of the community’s problems, even if it’s a promising start.
Themes
