She sighed, running her hands through her hair. “We were so young, you know. I was younger than you are now.
Can you determine how old barak was at the time?
It was in this humorless mood that my mother and sister found me when they came to visit during my first summer in New York.“He’s so skinny,” Maya said to my mother.
“He only has two towels!” my mother shouted as she inspected the bathroom. “And three plates!” They both began to giggle.
They stayed with Sadik and me for a few nights, then moved to a condominium on Park Avenue that a friend of my mother’s had offered them while she was away. That summer I had found a job clearing a construction site on the Upper West Side, so my mother and sister spent most of their days exploring the city on their own. When we met for dinner, they would give me a detailed report of their adventures: eating strawberries and cream at the Plaza, taking the ferry to the Statue of Liberty, visiting the Cézannes at the Met. I would eat in silence until they were finished and then begin a long discourse on the problems of the city and the politics of the dispossessed. I scolded Maya for spending one evening watching TV instead of reading the novels I’d bought for her. I instructed my mother on the various ways that foreign donors and international development organizations like the one she was working for bred dependence in the Third World. When the two of them withdrew to the kitchen, I would overhear Maya complaining to my mother.
“Barry’s okay, isn’t he? I mean, I hope he doesn’t lose his cool and become one of those freaks you see on the streets around here.”
This was around the time he started asking friends to call him Barack instead of Barry.