Maggie's Farm

Even if you’re Obama’s own half-brother. Here’s Mark Obama Ndesandjo, describing to Laura Ingraham how it felt to hear Barry falsely claim to have met him only once.

"I don't know him well. I met him for the first time a couple of years ago," Obama told CNN. "He stopped by with his wife for about five minutes during the trip."

But only a few days later, Auma and I came home to find a car waiting for us outside the apartment. The driver, a brown-skinned man with a prominent Adam’s apple, handed Auma a note.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s an invitation from Ruth,” she said. “Mark’s back from America for the summer. She wants to have us over for lunch.”
“Do you want to go?”
Auma shook her head, a look of disgust on her face. “Ruth knows I’ve been here almost six months now. She doesn’t care about me. The only reason she’s invited us is because she’s curious about you. She wants to compare you to Mark.”
“I think maybe I should go,” I said quietly.

Auma looked at the note again, then handed it back to the driver and said something to him in Swahili. “We’ll both go,” she said, and walked into the apartment.

Ruth lived in Westlands, an enclave of expensive homes set off by wide lawns and well-tended hedges, each one with a sentry post manned by brown-uniformed guards. …..
We came to one of the more modest houses on the block and parked along the curve of a looping driveway. A white woman with a long jaw and graying hair came out of the house to meet us. Behind her was a black man of my height and complexion with a bushy Afro and horn-rimmed glasses.
“Come in, come in,” Ruth said. The four of us shook hands stiffly and entered a large living room, where a balding, older black man in a safari jacket was bouncing a young boy on his lap. “This is my husband,” Ruth said, “and this is Mark’s little brother, Joey.”
“Hey, Joey,” I said, bending down to shake his hand. He was a beautiful boy, with honey-colored skin and two front teeth missing. Ruth tousled the boy’s big curls, then looked at her husband and said, “Weren’t you two on your way to the club?”
“Yes, yes,” the man said, standing up. “Come on, Joey…it was nice to meet you both.” The boy stood fast, staring up at Auma and me with a bright, curious smile until his father finally picked him up and carried him out the door.
“Well, here we are,” Ruth said, leading us to the couch and pouring lemonade. “I must say it was quite a surprise to find out you were here, Barry. I told Mark that we just had to see how this other son of Obama’s turned out. Your name is Obama, isn’t it? But your mother remarried. I wonder why she had you keep your name?”
I smiled as if I hadn’t understood the question. “So, Mark,” I said, turning to my brother, “I hear you’re at Berkeley.”
“Stanford,” he corrected. His voice was deep, his accent perfectly American. “I’m in my last year of the physics program there.”
“It must be tough,” Auma offered.
Mark shrugged. “Not really.”
“Don’t be so modest, dear,” Ruth said. “The things Mark studies are so complicated only a handful of people really understand it all.” She patted Mark on the hand, then turned to me. “And Barry, I understand you’ll be going to Harvard. Just like Obama. You must have gotten some of his brains. Hopefully not the rest of him, though. You know Obama was quite crazy, don’t you? The drinking made it worse. Did you ever meet him? Obama, I mean?”
“Only once. When I was ten.”
“Well, you were lucky then. It probably explains why you’re doing so well.”
That’s how the next hour passed, with Ruth alternating between stories of my father’s failure and stories of Mark’s accomplishments. Any questions were directed exclusively to me, leaving Auma to fiddle silently with Ruth’s lasagna.
I wanted to leave as soon as the meal was over, but Ruth suggested that Mark show us the family album while she brought out the dessert.
“I’m sure they’re not interested, Mother,” Mark said.
“Of course they’re interested,” Ruth said. Then, her voice oddly distant: “There are pictures of Obama. From when he was young….”
We followed Mark to the bookcase, and he pulled down a large photo album. Together we sat on the couch, slowly thumbing through laminate pages. Auma and Roy, dark and skinny and tall, all legs and big eyes, holding the two smaller children protectively in their arms. The Old Man and Ruth mugging it up at a beach somewhere. The entire family dressed up for a night out on the town. They were happy scenes, all of them, and all strangely familiar, as if I were glimpsing some alternative universe that had played itself out behind my back. They were reflections, I realized, of my own long-held fantasies, fantasies that I’d kept secret even from myself. The fantasy of the Old Man’s having taken my mother and me back with him to Kenya. The wish that my mother and father, sisters and brothers, were all under one roof. Here it was, I thought, what might have been. And the recognition of how wrong it had all turned out, the harsh evidence of life as it had really been lived, made me so sad that after only a few minutes I had to look away.
On the drive back, I apologized to Auma for having put her through the ordeal. She waved it off.
“It could have been worse,” she said. “I feel sorry for Mark, though. He seems so alone. You know, it’s not easy being a mixed child in Kenya.”
I looked out the window, thinking about my mother, Toot, and Gramps, and how grateful I was to them-for who they were, and for the stories they’d told. I turned back to Auma, and said, “She still hasn’t gotten over him, has she?”
“Who?”
“Ruth. She hasn’t gotten over the Old Man.”
Auma thought for a moment. “No, Barack. I guess she hasn’t. Just like the rest of us.”