A dream deferred, disappointed

I dreamed I was making photographs of President Obama holding a baby in his arms. He was warm and affable, laughing, tender. Then I was looking at my photos on the computer, and the computer turned into black and white contact sheets. There was Obama, but no baby. I said aloud, “What happened to the baby?” I realized she was me.

I first saw Barack Obama on TV in 2004. I was in Texas, had been back from Africa for five years but was still surfing culture shock, rearing my two African daughters as a single mom. I was engaged by Obama’s easy-going intelligence and uprightness. I bought his book, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, and I identified with him. Our fathers walked away from our mothers and forgot us; our fathers were dead before we went searching for them. We thought learning about our fathers would reveal some mystical bond. We were disappointed. We were not like those blithe, irresponsible fellows, our fathers, nonchalantly moseying away from their mistakes.

There is also Obama’s age. The only healthy sexual relationship I ever had with a man was with a young black scholar named Barthélémy. Bart was 28 and I was 23 and separated from my husband when Bart introduced me to the poetry of Theodore Roethke and the philosophy of Paul Tillich in 1968. I still hear his voice reciting, as he gazed at me, 
“I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, 
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them; 
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one: 
The shapes a bright container can contain!” --Roethke.

Bart was tall and muscular, handsome and easy in his bones, and he walked slowly, shifting his weight like a dancer. One morning at dawn we strolled from my attic apartment in the French Quarter to the ferry. We rode across the Mississippi, leaning into each other to watch the wake of the boat churn muddy water white, smelling damp pine-and-cypress winds blowing toward us from Algiers and Gretna, a sting of creosote and diesel fuel rising up from the ferry itself. Among those fragrances I breathed Bart’s fragrance of cinnamon and Old Spice. If we’d had a son, he’d be a few years younger than Obama but might well look like him. Bart traveled a path that didn’t include me for long, and like Obama’s father, he died in a car accident, but if we’d had a son.... 

I see how disappointing Obama’s presidency has been for him. He is exhausted, worn to the bone, constantly verging on tears of frustration, yet he still smiles with the indomitable ease I felt in Bart. Obama had grand ideals, a vision of what he might accomplish. He has been blocked, opposed, reviled, blamed, demeaned, insulted. Leftists decry his military actions; racists despise him; rightists call him weak; centrists say he didn’t compromise enough; everyone else says he compromised too much. Republicans passed a bill yesterday to repeal the health system they call Obamacare, a compromise between the health care industry and his ideals, but the only assurance of health care poor Americans have ever had. Obama vetoed the bill. If they pass it again, after he’s gone, we could lose the gains he made for us. The child missing from my photograph is not just me; it’s Obama too. The street shot of the young woman reminds me of how we all were, once.