17 January 2005 by Published in: dreams No comments yet

I don’t know if it’s because it’s MLK day or what, but I had the oddest dream about race last night.

I dreamed that I had gone over to the parent’s house of a good friend of mine. I had met his parents once or twice before, but I didn’t really know them that well. So I was sitting there with my family, in that awkward way you do with people you don’t know that well. Then, this incredibly tall, young, handsome black man parks his Cougar outside the house and comes up the walkway with two young girls (his daughters) who are dressed in Sunday finery with a headful of braids. He is greeted fondly by my friend’s mother and takes a seat in the living room with us. I realize with a jarring shock, then, that this man must be my friend’s biological father and that my friend is black and I have never noticed this before. It is only when the three of them (the father I had previously known, the new arrival and my friend) are in the same room that I notice the differences and the similarites between them. My friend is the spitting image of the good-looking black man and couldn’t look any more different than the still, diminished white man.
The newly arrived black man’s name is DeWalt or DeWitt. The white father is still and uncommunicative, but my friend’s mother is alive an energized. I try to piece together what is going on. Clearly we’ve been invited to discover this odd family arrangement, but I don’t feel sure I can ask any of my hundreds of questions. Anything that I would say runs the risk of being socially embarassing and possibly insulting.

It is time to go to church. All of us, except the white father, get up to go. We climb into D’s Cougar, and we all somehow fit comfortably. His car is tricked out, not externally, but with buttons and panels that allow him to turn his engine from regular to superpowered.

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