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Roy/Abongo
Toot is Barack’s maternal grandmother, Ann’s mother, and Gramps’s wife. She insists on being called Toot—short for tutu, or “grandmother” in Hawaiian—because when Barack was born, she felt too young to be a grandparent. She’s from Kansas and grew up in a “respectable” family, so it shocked her parents when she fell in love with Gramps, a bad-boy from a disreputable family. She was happy to follow him, first to Texas, then to Seattle and Hawaii. Toot is generally unprejudiced and concerned with treating everyone kindly and compassionately, although Barack suspects that Toot and Gramps weren’t particularly excited when Ann announced her intentions to marry Barack’s father, a Black man. As time went on, however, they came to love their Black son-in-law and biracial grandson and they remained committed to progressive racial politics. When Barack returned from Indonesia to live with his grandparents and attend the fifth grade, he found them to be changed people. Toot spent most of her time at home reading mystery novels in her room or fighting with Gramps. Many of their conflicts stemmed from the fact that Toot made more money than Gramps after working her way up through various banking jobs. However, while Toot does take pride in her professional success, she also later admits that she regrets not being able to live the life of a happy housewife.
Toot Quotes in Dreams from My Father
The Dreams from My Father quotes below are all either spoken by Toot or refer to Toot. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 1
Quotes
According to her, racism wasn’t even in their vocabulary back then. “Your grandfather and I just figured we should treat people decently, Bar. That’s all.”
She’s wise that way, my grandmother, suspicious of overwrought sentiments or overblown claims, content with common sense. Which is why I tend to trust her account of events; it corresponds to what I know about my grandfather, his tendency to rewrite his history to conform with the image he wished for himself.
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In the end I suppose that’s what all the stories of my father were really about. They said less about the man himself than about the changes that had taken place in the people around him, the halting process by which my grandparents’ racial attitudes had changed. The stories gave voice to a spirit that would grip the nation for that fleeting period between Kennedy’s election and the passage of the Voting Rights Act: the seeming triumph of universalism over parochialism and narrow-mindedness, a bright new world where differences of race or culture would instruct and amuse and perhaps even ennoble.
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Chapter 4
Quotes
“I don’t suppose he would have. Stan doesn’t like to talk about that part of Kansas much. Makes him uncomfortable. He told me once about a black girl they hired to look after your mother. A preacher’s daughter, I think it was. Told me how she became a regular part of the family. That’s how he remembers it, you understand—this girl coming in to look after somebody else’s children, her mother coming to do somebody else’s laundry. A regular part of the family.”
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Toot Quotes in Dreams from My Father
The Dreams from My Father quotes below are all either spoken by Toot or refer to Toot. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 1
Quotes
According to her, racism wasn’t even in their vocabulary back then. “Your grandfather and I just figured we should treat people decently, Bar. That’s all.”
She’s wise that way, my grandmother, suspicious of overwrought sentiments or overblown claims, content with common sense. Which is why I tend to trust her account of events; it corresponds to what I know about my grandfather, his tendency to rewrite his history to conform with the image he wished for himself.
Related Characters:
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Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
In the end I suppose that’s what all the stories of my father were really about. They said less about the man himself than about the changes that had taken place in the people around him, the halting process by which my grandparents’ racial attitudes had changed. The stories gave voice to a spirit that would grip the nation for that fleeting period between Kennedy’s election and the passage of the Voting Rights Act: the seeming triumph of universalism over parochialism and narrow-mindedness, a bright new world where differences of race or culture would instruct and amuse and perhaps even ennoble.
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Chapter 4
Quotes
“I don’t suppose he would have. Stan doesn’t like to talk about that part of Kansas much. Makes him uncomfortable. He told me once about a black girl they hired to look after your mother. A preacher’s daughter, I think it was. Told me how she became a regular part of the family. That’s how he remembers it, you understand—this girl coming in to look after somebody else’s children, her mother coming to do somebody else’s laundry. A regular part of the family.”
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