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Not to say that everything I learned from the leaders cheered my heart. If they often revealed a strength of spirit that I hadn’t imagined, they also forced me to acknowledge the unspoken forces that retarded our efforts, secrets that we kept from each other as well as from ourselves.

That’s how it was with Ruby, for example. After our aborted meeting with the police commander, I had worried that she might back away from organizing. Instead, she had thrown herself headlong into the project, working hard to build a network of neighbors that could be regularly delivered to our events, coming up with ideas for registering voters or working with school parents. She was what every organizer dreamed about-someone with untapped talent, smart, steady, excited by the idea of a public life, eager to learn. And I liked her son, Kyle Jr. He had just turned fourteen, and in all of his awkwardness-one moment frisky and bumping into me while we shot baskets together in the neighborhood park, the next instant bored and sullen-I could see all the contours of my own youthful struggles. Sometimes Ruby would question me about him, exasperated with a mediocre report card or a cut on his chin, baffled by a young man’s unruly mind.

“Last week he said he was going to be a rap artist,” she would report. “Today he tells me he’s going to the Air Force Academy to be a fighter pilot. When I ask him why, he just says ‘So I can fly.’ Like I was stupid. I swear, Barack, sometimes I don’t know whether to hug him or beat his skinny behind.”

“Try both,” I would tell her.

One day just before Christmas, I asked Ruby to stop by my office so I could give her a present for Kyle. I was on the phone when she walked in, and out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw something different about her, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was. Only after I had hung up and she turned toward me did I realize that her eyes, normally a warm, dark brown that matched the color of her skin, had turned an opaque shade of blue, as if someone had glued plastic buttons over her irises. She asked me if something was wrong.

“What did you do to your eyes?”

“Oh, these.” Ruby shook her head and laughed. “They’re just contacts, Barack. The company I work for makes cosmetic lenses, and I get them at a discount. You like them?”

“Your eyes looked just fine the way they were.”

“It’s just for fun,” she said, looking down. “Something different, you know.”

I stood there, not knowing what to say. Finally I remembered Kyle’s gift and handed it to her. “For Kyle,” I said. “A book on airplanes…I thought he might like it.”

Ruby nodded and put the book inside her purse. “That’s nice of you, Barack. I’m sure he will.” Then, abruptly, she stood up and straightened her skirt. “Well, I better get going,” she said, and hurried out the door.

For the rest of the day and into the next, I thought about Ruby’s eyes. I had handled the moment badly, I told myself, made her feel ashamed for a small vanity in a life that could afford few vanities. I realized that a part of me expected her and the other leaders to possess some sort of immunity from the onslaught of images that feed every American’s insecurities-the slender models in the fashion magazines, the square-jawed men in fast cars-images to which I myself was vulnerable and from which I had sought protection. When I mentioned the incident to a black woman friend of mine, she stated the issue more bluntly.

“What are you surprised about?” my friend said impatiently. “That black people still hate themselves?”

No, I told her, it wasn’t exactly surprise that I was feeling. Since my first frightening discovery of bleaching creams in Life magazine, I’d become familiar with the lexicon of color consciousness within the black community-good hair, bad hair; thick lips or thin; if you’re light, you’re all right, if you’re black, get back. In college, the politics of black fashion, and the questions of self-esteem that fashion signified, had been a frequent, if delicate, topic of conversation for black students, especially among the women, who would smile bitterly at the sight of the militant brother who always seemed to be dating light-skinned girls-and tongue-lash any black man who was foolish enough to make a remark about black women’s hairstyles.

Mostly I had kept quiet when these subjects were broached, privately measuring my own degree of infection. But I noticed that such conversations rarely took place in large groups, and never in front of whites. Later, I would realize that the position of most black students in predominantly white colleges was already too tenuous, our identities too scrambled, to admit to ourselves that our black pride remained incomplete. And to admit our doubt and confusion to whites, to open up our psyches to general examination by those who had caused so much of the damage in the first place, seemed ludicrous, itself an expression of self-hatred-for there seemed no reason to expect that whites would look at our private struggles as a mirror into their own souls, rather than yet more evidence of black pathology.

It was in observing that division, I think, between what we talked about privately and what we addressed publicly, that I’d learned not to put too much stock in those who trumpeted black self-esteem as a cure for all our ills, whether substance abuse or teen pregnancy or black-on-black crime. By the time I reached Chicago, the phrase self-esteem seemed to be on everyone’s lips: activists, talk show hosts, educators, and sociologists. It was a handy catchall to describe our hurt, a sanitized way of talking about the things we’d been keeping to ourselves. But whenever I tried to pin down this idea of self-esteem, the specific qualities we hoped to inculcate, the specific means by which we might feel good about ourselves, the conversation always seemed to follow a path of infinite regress. Did you dislike yourself because of your color or because you couldn’t read and couldn’t get a job? Or perhaps it was because you were unloved as a child-only, were you unloved because you were too dark? Or too light? Or because your mother shot heroin into her veins…and why did she do that anyway? Was the sense of emptiness you felt a consequence of kinky hair or the fact that your apartment had no heat and no decent furniture? Or was it because deep down you imagined a godless universe?

Maybe one couldn’t avoid such questions on the road to personal salvation. What I doubted was that all the talk about self-esteem could serve as the centerpiece of an effective black politics. It demanded too much honest self-reckoning from people; without such honesty, it easily degenerated into vague exhortation. Perhaps with more self-esteem fewer blacks would be poor, I thought to myself, but I had no doubt that poverty did nothing for our self-esteem. Better to concentrate on the things we might all agree on. Give that black man some tangible skills and a job. Teach that black child reading and arithmetic in a safe, well-funded school. With the basics taken care of, each of us could search for our own sense of self-worth.

Ruby shook up this predisposition of mine, the wall I had erected between psychology and politics, the state of our pocketbooks and the state of our souls. In fact, that particular episode was only the most dramatic example of what I was hearing and seeing every day. It was expressed when a black leader casually explained to me that he never dealt with black contractors (“A black man’ll just mess it up, and I’ll end up paying white folks to do it all over again”); or in another leader’s rationale for why she couldn’t mobilize other people in her church (“Black folks are just lazy, Barack-don’t wanna do nothing”). Often the word nigger replaced black in such remarks, a word I’d once liked to think was spoken in jest, with a knowing irony, the inside joke that marked our resilience as a people. Until the first time I heard a young mother use it on her child to tell him he wasn’t worth shit, or watched teenage boys use it to draw blood in a quick round of verbal sparring. The transformation of the word’s original meaning was never complete; like the other defenses we erected against possible hurt, this one, too, involved striking out at ourselves first.

If the language, the humor, the stories of ordinary people were the stuff out of which families, communities, economies would have to be built, then I couldn’t separate that strength from the hurt and distortions that lingered inside us. And it was the implications of that fact, I realized, that had most disturbed me when I looked into Ruby’s eyes. The stories that I had been hearing from the leadership, all the records of courage and sacrifice and overcoming of great odds, hadn’t simply arisen from struggles with pestilence or drought, or even mere poverty. They had arisen out of a very particular experience with hate. That hate hadn’t gone away; it formed a counternarrative buried deep within each person and at the center of which stood white people-some cruel, some ignorant, sometimes a single face, sometimes just a faceless image of a system claiming power over our lives. I had to ask myself whether the bonds of community could be restored without collectively exorcising that ghostly figure that haunted black dreams. Could Ruby love herself without hating blue eyes?

Rafiq al-Shabazz had settled such questions to his own satisfaction. I had begun to see him more regularly, for the morning after DCP met with the Mayor’s Office of Employment and Training he had called me up and launched into a rapid-fire monologue about the job center we had asked for from the city.

“We gotta talk, Barack,” he said. “What y’all are trying to do with job training needs to fit into the overall comprehensive development plan I’ve been working on. Can’t think about this thing in isolation…got to look at the big picture. You don’t understand the forces at work out here. Is big, man. All kinds of folks ready to stab you in the back.”

“Who is this?”

“Rafiq. What’s the matter, too early for you?”

It was. I put him on hold and got a cup of coffee, then asked him to start all over again, more slowly this time. I eventually gathered that Rafiq had an interest in having the new MET intake center we’d proposed to the city locate in a certain building near his office on Michigan Avenue. I didn’t ask the particular nature of that interest: I doubted that I could get a straight answer out of him, and anyway, I figured that we might be able to use an ally in what was proving to be a series of sticky negotiations with Ms. Alvarez. If the storefront he had in mind met the necessary specifications, I said, then I was willing to propose it as one possible alternative.

So Rafiq and I formed an uneasy alliance, one that didn’t go over too well with the DCP leaders. I understood their concerns: Whenever we sat down with Rafiq to discuss our joint strategy, he would interrupt the discussion with long lectures about secret machinations afoot, and all the black people willing to sell their people down the river. It was an effective negotiating ploy, for with his voice progressively rising, the veins in his neck straining, Angela and Will and the others would suddenly drop into a curious silence, watching Rafiq as if he were an epileptic in the midst of seizure. More than once, I’d have to jump in and start shouting back at him, not so much in anger as simply to slow him down, until finally a small smile would curl under his mustache and we could get back to work.

When the two of us were alone, though, Rafiq and I could sometimes have normal conversations. Over time I arrived at a grudging admiration for his tenacity and bravado, and, within his own terms, a certain sincerity. He confirmed that he had been a gang leader growing up in Altgeld; he had found religion, he said, under the stewardship of a local Muslim leader unaffiliated with Minister Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam. “If it hadn’t been for Islam, man, I’d probably be dead,” he told me one day. “Just had a negative attitude, you understand. Growing up in Altgeld, I’d soaked up all the poison the white man feeds us. See, the folks you’re working with got the same problem, even though they don’t realize it yet. They spend half they lives worrying about what white folks think. Start blaming themselves for the shit they see every day, thinking they can’t do no better till the white man decides they all right. But deep down they know that ain’t right. They know what this country has done to their momma, their daddy, their sister. So the truth is they hate white folks, but they can’t admit it to themselves. Keep it all bottled up, fighting themselves. Waste a lot of energy that way.

“I tell you one thing I admire about white folks,” he continued. “They know who they are. Look at the Italians. They didn’t care about the American flag and all that when they got here. First thing they did is put together the Mafia to make sure their interests were met. The Irish-they took over the city hall and found their boys jobs. The Jews, same thing…you telling me they care more about some black kid in the South Side than they do ’bout they relatives in Israel? Shit. It’s about blood, Barack, looking after your own. Period. Black people the only ones stupid enough to worry about their enemies.”

That was the truth as Rafiq saw it, and he didn’t waste energy picking that truth apart. His was a Hobbesian world where distrust was a given and loyalties extended from family to mosque to the black race-whereupon notions of loyalty ceased to apply. This narrowing vision, of blood and tribe, had provided him with a clarity of sorts, a means of focusing his attention. Black self-respect had delivered the mayor’s seat, he could argue, lust as black self-respect turned around the lives of drug addicts under the tutelage of the Muslims. Progress was within our grasp so long as we didn’t betray ourselves.

But what exactly constituted betrayal? Ever since the first time I’d picked up Malcolm X’s autobiography, I had tried to untangle the twin strands of black nationalism, arguing that nationalism’s affirming message-of solidarity and self-reliance, discipline and communal responsibility-need not depend on hatred of whites any more than it depended on white munificence. We could tell this country where it was wrong, I would tell myself and any black friends who would listen, without ceasing to believe in its capacity for change.

In talking to self-professed nationalists like Rafiq, though, I came to see how the blanket indictment of everything white served a central function in their message of uplift; how, psychologically, at least, one depended on the other. For when the nationalist spoke of a reawakening of values as the only solution to black poverty, he was expressing an implicit, if not explicit, criticism to black listeners: that we did not have to live as we did. And while there were those who could take such an unadorned message and use it to hew out a new life for themselves-those with the stolid dispositions that Booker T. Washington had once demanded from his followers-in the ears of many blacks such talk smacked of the explanations that whites had always offered for black poverty: that we continued to suffer from, if not genetic inferiority, then cultural weakness. It was a message that ignored causality or fault, a message outside history, without a script or plot that might insist on progression. For a people already stripped of their history, a people often ill equipped to retrieve that history in any form other than what fluttered across the television screen, the testimony of what we saw every day seemed only to confirm our worst suspicions about ourselves.