Dreams from My Father: Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

Barack spends his first night in Manhattan in an alley. The plan was to take over the apartment of a friend of a friend—but no one answered the door. Barack reads over a short letter from his father, the first he’s received in years. The letter is an invitation to visit so Barack can “know [his] people,” although he wonders if it really is that simple. He knows that he doesn’t want to go back to Hawaii, but he doesn’t believe he can waltz off to Africa and call it home. Deciding he needs community, Barack signs up for a transfer program with Columbia University. There’s little keeping him in L.A., as Regina and Hasan have graduated and Marcus dropped out.

The next morning, Barack calls his friend Sadik and takes a cab to Sadik’s apartment. Barack introduces himself to Sadik’s current girlfriend using the name “Barack” (not “Barry”), and Sadik listens to Barack’s idealistic reasons for coming to New York. Sadik reminds Barack to look out for himself and shows him around the city. Eventually, they move in together. Around this time, Barack gives up drugs, starts running, and starts a journal. He applies himself to his studies and refuses invitations to go out. Barack chooses this straight and narrow path in part because the city so easily corrupts people and he’s afraid that he’s weak. Barack also begins to see America’s race and class problems up close. He sees the Black community collapsing there and notices that while he’s doing well, other Black people hold only low-paying jobs.

Barack attempts to live in Harlem, but the brownstones are too expensive and the tenements are uninhabitable. He’s offended, but others insist this is just how New York is. Barack senses that at some point, he’ll end up where he doesn’t want to be: avoiding subways at night, living somewhere with a doorman, and sending his kids to private school. Ann and Maya visit during his first summer. Barack works while Ann and Maya traverse the city, and at night Barack lectures them. One night, Ann takes them to a showing of the movie Black Orpheus. It was the first foreign film she saw when she was 16 and working in Chicago. Barack is disgusted, and embarrassed when he sees how much Ann loves the film. He realizes that people will always look for missing parts of themselves in people of different races.

Several days later, Barack asks Ann for an international stamp so he can mail a letter to his father. With prompting, he mentions that they’re discussing a visit. Ann says that right after they married, Barack’s grandfather, Hussein Onyango, wrote Gramps a nasty letter saying he didn’t want a white woman to sully the Obama blood. Onyango continued to write nasty letters and Toot became hysterical. Barack’s father insisted on going to Harvard—the best school—instead of the New School, which would’ve paid for Ann and Barack to follow. She recounts the story of their first date, which Barack’s father was late for. Barack sees that Ann was a child then, but she also begins to see her as a person separate from him. He realizes how genuinely Ann loved Barack’s father and he thinks of this conversation months later, when he calls to say that his father died.

After Barack’s father dies, Barack calls his uncle Omar in the U.S. to tell him the news. He doesn’t go to the funeral, but he writes a letter to the family in Nairobi. Barack puts his plans to visit on hold and feels no pain—just the sense that he lost an opportunity. A year later, Barack dreams that he meets his father in a jail cell, and then he wakes up crying and digs out his father’s old letters. He realizes how much of a presence his father was in his life, even just as a story or an image. Barack decides he needs to search for his father.