On Fathers and Senators

"In the end I suppose that's what all the stories of my father were really about. They said less about the man himself than about the changes that had taken place in the people around him, the halting process by which my grandparents' attitudes had changed. The stories gave voice to a spirit that would grip the nation for that fleeting period between Kennedy's election and the passage of the Voting Rights Act: the seeming triumph of universalism over parochialism and narrowmindedness, a bright new world where differences of race or culture would instruct and amuse and perhaps even ennoble. A useful fiction, one that haunts me no less than it haunts my family, evoking as it does some lost Eden that extends beyond mere childhood.

There was only one problem: my father was missing. He had left paradise, and nothing that my mother or grandparents told me could obviate that single, unassailable fact. Their stories didn't tell me why he had left. They couldn't describe what it might have been like had he stayed. Like the janitor, Mr. Reed, or the black girl who churned up dust as she raced down a Texas road, my father became a prop in someone else's narrative. An attractive prop-the alien figure with the heart of gold, the mysterious stranger who saves the town and wins the girl-but a prop nonetheless."

--Quoted from Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, by Barack Obama

I just started reading Senator Obama's first biographical book last night, stirred by his speech in New Hampshire Tuesday night. While I am only a few dozen pages into the book, I gather from its title, and from passages such as those above, that Obama longed to know his absent father as a young child. Perhaps his father's absence carries through this entire book; I have not read enough to know yet.

But it would appear that even our nation's leaders, even our most inspiring and motivating citizens, have or had the same basic need for a close father as the most humble and anonymous among us. The title alone was enough to get me to start with this book when I sought more information on Senator Obama, but passages like this have made me jump into the text with both feet.

And I'll be damned if I'm going to allow myself to become nothing more than a prop in stories told to my children.