Chapter Two
Surface and Undertow
Barack Obama's family, broadly defined, is vast. It's multiconfessional, multiracial, multilingual, and multicontinental. He has a Kenyan step-grandmother in a village near Lake Victoria who speaks only Luo and Swahili; a biracial half brother who speaks fluent Mandarin and trades in southern China; a cousin-by-marriage who is an African-American rabbi in Chicago determined to forge closer relations among Jews, Muslims, and Christians on the South Side. As Obama has put it, he has some relatives who look like Bernie Mac and some who look like Margaret Thatcher. He has relatives who have been educated in the finest universities in the world, others who live in remote Kenyan towns, another who has lived in a Nairobi slum, yet another, an African half sister, who wound up in a Boston housing-project with immigration problems. The Obama family tree is as vast and intricate as one of those ancient banyan trees near the beach at Waikiki. As a politician, Obama would make use of that family, asking voters to imagine it--and him--as a metaphor for American diversity.
But as a child, Obama experienced his family as a small unit dominated not so much by the absence of his African father as by the presence of his mother, Ann Dunham. She was now twenty-nine. Her second marriage was all but over. She was faced with trying to find a way to nourish her growing interest in the economic and social anthropology of Indonesia and her overall sense of idealism, and, at the same time, support her ten-year-old son and year-old daughter. She could not go on tutoring Barry before dawn indefinitely; she started thinking about a way to get him an education in the United States.
Dunham's own ambitions were uncertain. Money did not much interest her. "I don't know what she wanted," Barack's sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, said, "beyond what any of us wants--some measure of satisfaction that we have contributed positively to the lives of others and enriched our own understanding of the world around us and taken full measure of our own place in this life and world."
Ann had arrived in Indonesia in the aftermath of political upheaval, but it was not her way to get involved with politics directly. "She was interested in what was happening at the grassroots level, and she understood that better," Maya continued. "She was not an unthinking woman, she wasn't a stick-your-head-in-the-sand Pollyanna, but she really did believe that all this fighting was silly and unnecessary and why can't we all get along?" Was Ann politically naive? "Sometimes perhaps, but more about [America] than about Indonesia," she said. "In part, that was because she came to Hawaii when she was seventeen and didn't really see or feel the full impact of the civil-rights movement on the mainland. We always have to be hopeful about home, and so she always felt we made a lot of progress. Some could interpret it as naive. You could say optimistic. She saw the corruption elsewhere a little more clearly. It's not that she wished to ignore it or didn't see it, but her focus was more on socioeconomic realities on the grassroots level. She was deeply impacted by all of it, by the sharp contrast between the haves and have-nots, by the extremes of poverty and abuse, but also by the fact that there was so much beauty that resided behind it and beneath it and around it. She didn't simply see the challenges; she always saw the beauty."
Ann started to roam the markets of Jakarta and make trips around the country, learning more about Indonesian culture and handicrafts. "She loved batik and Indonesian art and music and all of the human creation that in her estimation elevated the spirit," Maya said. "She saw the beauty of community and kinship, the power of cultural collision and connection. She thought that all of her encounters were delightful--in Indonesia and elsewhere. She was just happy. She enjoyed herself immensely. Although she was aware of struggle and grappled with it, she did so cheerfully and with great optimism and belief that things could get better. Why mourn reality?"
After Barry finished the fourth grade in Jakarta, Ann Dunham put him on a flight to Hawaii to stay with his grandparents for the summer. Obama recalls this moment of re-entry into Hawaiian life with mixed emotions. There was the thrill of returning to America--air-conditioning, fast-food restaurants, and familiar sports--yet there was also the dreariness of staying with grandparents he hardly knew.
Stanley and Madelyn Dunham lived in a two-bedroom apartment in a ten-story high-rise on South Beretania Street, in Honolulu. The building faces a large green and one of the oldest Protestant churches in the city. Stanley, who had switched from the furniture business to selling insurance, was struggling in his work, frustrated with his bosses and with elusive would-be customers. Madelyn was a banking executive--a considerable achievement for a woman with no connections or college degree. The banks in Hawaii then were run by a coterie of wealthy families who were not inclined to treat women and men equally. "They didn't pay someone like Madelyn very much, even as she rose in the ranks. There was still a lot of gender bias," Neil Abercrombie said. "The Dunhams didn't live in that apartment out of some philosophical rejection of materialism. They were renters."
Madelyn Dunham took pride in her advancement and made sure to get to the office before seven each morning. Years later, she confided to her grandson that what she had really wanted all along was "a house with a white picket fence, days spent baking or playing bridge or volunteering at the local library."
One gift that his grandparents could provide Barry was a connection to Punahou, the finest private school in Hawaii and the oldest west of the Mississippi River. Punahou, a seventy-six-acre island of lush greenery and distinguished architecture, was a ten-minute walk from their apartment--a pleasant stroll past a church, over the bridge spanning the H-1 freeway, and you were there. The waiting list was long and the academic requirements considerable, but Stanley's boss at the insurance company, an alumnus, helped Barry get into Punahou. "My first experience with affirmative action, it seems, had little to do with race," Obama writes, winking at a fact that looms so large at elite American prep schools and Ivy League colleges: that affirmative action for alumni children and the well-connected is far more pervasive than any breaks extended on the basis of ethnic background. By the fall, Ann and Maya had returned to Honolulu and reunited with Barry as he started in his new school. Ann began taking graduate courses in anthropology at the University of Hawaii.
Punahou's overall effect is of Phillips Exeter Academy-sur-Mer. Students walk around the campus as if dressed for the beach. Everywhere you go are spreading palms and monkey-pod trees, springy close-cropped lawns, lava-rock walls covered with otherworldly vines of night-blooming cereus flowers that were imported from Mexico and given to the school's founders. No interest is left unindulged. There is an arts and athletic center the size of an airplane hangar; a glass-blowing shed; a vast outdoor pool that glitters in the sunshine. The centerpiece of the campus is Thurston Chapel, a modernist building designed by an emigre architect named Vladimir Ossipoff and surrounded by a lily pond stocked with koi and tilapia.
If Hawaiians of any ethnic background meet each other on the mainland they tend not to begin the conversation with what town they come from. Instead, speaking pidgin, they will ask, "What school you wen grad?" The most exalted answer is Punahou. Happily, Obama was accepted and he got some scholarship money to help with the nineteen-hundred-dollar tuition fees.
In 1829, the Hawaiian queen, Ka'ahumanu, urged the local governor to give a large tract of land to Hiram Bingham, one of the first Christian missionaries on the islands. Bingham hoped to build a school that would equal the best in his native New England. Punahou was founded in 1841; it was devoted at first to educating the children of missionaries and to raising indigenous Hawaiian students "to an elevated state of Christian civilization." One of the early students included Bingham's grandson, Hiram III, who helped discover the lost city of Machu Picchu and became a model for Indiana Jones.
When Barry Obama arrived at Punahou, he was in fifth grade. He had two homeroom teachers, a history teacher from New York named Mabel Hefty and a math and science teacher named Pal Eldredge. Barry was a chunky, laid-back boy, still wearing the leather sandals he'd brought from Indonesia. The novelist Allegra Goodman, who was six years behind Obama at Punahou, describes Mabel Hefty, who died in 1995, as "old-fashioned, Christian, strict." She did not tolerate anyone speaking pidgin. Her classroom, on the third floor of Castle Hall, still had blackout curtains left over from the Second World War.
The first weeks of school were a misery. When roll was called--"Ba-rack Obama"--the kids laughed at the strangeness of the boy's name.
"Would you prefer if we called you 'Barry'?" Miss Hefty asked. "Barack is such a beautiful name. Your grandfather tells me your father is Kenyan. I used to live in Kenya...."
Mabel Hefty was an earnest traveler. She had spent the previous year in Africa teaching in a village primary school. But when she tried to engage Barry in a high-minded conversation about his Kenyan background ("Do you know what tribe your father is from?"), Obama went silent. One kid made monkey sounds. One classmate asked if his father was a cannibal; another asked if she could just touch his hair. He was a curiosity, a source of giddy fascination--the last thing a child wants to be. Barack preferred "Barry."
Of the more than thirty-five hundred students at Punahou when Obama arrived, only three or four were black. Obama kept the miseries he felt that autumn neatly submerged. "One of the challenges for a ten-year-old boy coming to a new place is to figure out how you fit in," Obama said in a speech in 2004 on the campus. "And it was a challenge for me, partly because I was one of the few African-Americans in the school, partly because I was new and a lot of the students had been together since kindergarten."
Before Obama arrived, perhaps the loneliest child in Punahou was Joella Edwards. (Obama calls her "Coretta" in his memoir.) The daughter of a doctor, Joella suffered mightily at Punahou. "Some kids--not all of them, but enough--called me 'jello,' 'pepper,' 'Aunt Jemima,' 'burnt toast with guava jelly,'" she said. "And they'd use that local term, popolo. They could be brutal. Back then, it was a different time and space, it was the sixties and early seventies, and America as a whole didn't talk about race. I remember cringing at the word 'black.' Black was a color in the crayon box. Because of that, you couldn't really say what you wanted to say.
"If I had been on the mainland with other blacks as peers, it would have been a lot different," Edwards continued. "The only other peer I had was Barry. When we met, we were ten--it's so crazy! He came to school and I was so excited! This kid had my same coloring. He looked like me. He was just like me. We didn't avoid each other. We were drawn to each other. But we had to keep a distance." Edwards and Obama both remember that, any time they drifted together, someone was sure to mock them as a couple--the two black kids. Barry and Joella sittin' in a tree... K-i-s-s-i-n-g.... And yet Barry never rejected Joella. "He was my knight in shining armor," said Edwards, who lives now in Florida. "He was me--except with different anatomy."
Joella came home crying on a regular basis. When she tried to raise her grades and started studying harder, her teacher accused her of cheating on a paper. Only when she re-did a paper in the presence of the teacher did anyone believe she had done her own work. After ninth grade, rather than endure more humiliation, she dropped out and enrolled in a public school. "I was a basket case for years," she said.
Barry's discomfort at Punahou only increased that first year. For months he had told small, childhood fibs to his classmates. His father was an African prince, he told them, the son of a tribal chief. In truth, he knew little about his father--mainly "scraps of information I'd picked up from my mother." But now, in 1971, Barack Obama, Sr., was coming to Honolulu for a month-long stay. He had not seen Barry since he was a toddler. When Obama arrived in Oahu, his son was surprised at how diminished he looked, compared with the old pictures. He was fragile--oddly cautious "when he lit a cigarette or reached for his beer"--and his eyes had a yellow, malarial tint.
Obama tells the story of his father's visit with clarity that makes the reader wince: the old man trying to reassert his authority ten years too late; the mysterious renewed intimacy between his father and mother; Stanley Dunham declaring that this was his house and no one was going to boss anyone around; Ann trying vainly to keep the peace; the boy's sad confusion when his father commands him to work harder and forbids him to watch "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" on television. "We all stood accused," he wrote a quarter-century later. "I felt as if something had cracked open between all of us, goblins rushing out of some old, sealed-off lair." There were some good times--Obama took Barry to a Dave Brubeck concert in Honolulu that helped make him a lifelong jazz fan--but it was a complicated visit, fraught with the boy's knowledge that it could not last.
Barry started counting off the days in his mind until his father left for Africa, but before the ordeal came to its natural end, he had to endure one last trial: Miss Hefty had invited Obama, Sr., to speak to a combined class with Barry's math teacher, Pal Eldredge. Obama describes the agony of anticipating the event, imagining the exposure of his lies and the mockery that would follow. He remembers that the next day his father spoke of tribes that had their young men kill lions in order to prove their manhood, of Kenya's struggle for independence, and of "the deep gash in the earth where mankind had first appeared."
Pal Eldredge remembers a more prosaic, uneventful, even pleasant presentation: "The whole thing about Barack is that at that time we didn't have a lot of black kids or half-black kids. It was my second year teaching, so I remembered his father and what he talked about. He talked about education and what life was like where he was from."
Mabel Hefty and Pal Eldredge were delighted and, at the conclusion of the presentation, thanked Barack Obama profusely and congratulated Barry for having such a fascinating father. No one said anything about Barry's "lies." To the contrary, the boy who had asked about cannibalism in the first weeks of school said, "Your dad is pretty cool." It was hard for Barry to see it that way. By now, he was aware that he could expect nothing from his father. He was there to check in, to salve his conscience, perhaps, but soon he was gone. He never saw his son again.
* * *
Any reader of Obama's memoir, anyone familiar with his campaign speeches, knows the touchstones of his life and family that he chooses to emphasize: the idealist, who, as a single mother, went on food stamps for a while and struggled with medical-insurance forms as, in her early fifties, she lay dying of cancer; the plainspoken Midwestern grandparents and their warm embrace and quiet desperations; the internal struggle with race and identity as a teenager and a young man; the career as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago. He places less emphasis on an equally crucial part of his background: the elite institutions that also formed him--Punahou School, Occidental College, Columbia University, Harvard Law School, and the University of Chicago Law School.
Obama received a liberal education in the most rounded sense of the term. He was too young for the sixties; rather, his teachers were products of the period and brought new values and historical narratives to the classroom and lecture hall: the antiwar movement, civil rights, gay and women's liberation, ethnic diversity. These were not the struggles of Obama's youth; they were the givens, the environment. This was evident even as early as the mid-and late-seventies at Punahou.
The only trace of Punahou's Congregationalist past was weekly chapel. At Thurston Chapel in the nineteen-seventies, the students heard readings from the Bible, recited secular poetry, listened to renditions of "The Sounds of Silence," "Blowin' in the Wind," and "The Rose." It was the kind of chapel that Ann Dunham, who spoke of a "higher power" and read to her children from religious texts of all kinds, but never joined a church, could easily abide. "We all gathered as a group, mostly to contemplate philosophical and/or spiritual aspects of the world around us, but also to enjoy a bit of community singing, laughing and emotional rekindling of a certain sense of harmony and well-being," Constance Ramos, a classmate of Obama's, wrote in an album of remembrances by the Class of 1979. "The focus was not on any formal religion per se, but, rather, on giving us an appreciation for quiet contemplation about our place in the Universe and the inherent joy that accompanies being a member of a community.
"In the eighth grade," Ramos went on, "we were also required to attend a weekly class called Christian Ethics. We'd lie around on floor cushions and talk freely about various ideas--the meaning of 'friendship,' for example--or what we thought about life in general. We'd listen to Simon and Garfunkel's album Bridge Over Troubled Water, over and over again.... In retrospect, some might say that Christian Ethics was more like a teenage group-therapy session than anything else."
Barry Obama was never the top student in his class or the hardest worker--a pattern that persisted from fifth grade to the end of high school. ("He was a B student," Eric Kusunoki, Obama's homeroom teacher in high school, said. "I never bugged him about not working harder. Some kids suffer from too much pressure and work their brains out.") The curriculum was more rigorous and multicultural than what he had experienced at his two schools in Indonesia. The sixth-grade curriculum included topics in world cultures and field trips to a local synagogue and a Buddhist temple. Later, in history classes, students read about American failures of policy and moral direction in Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston's Farewell to Manzanar, about the internment of the Japanese-Americans during the Second World War, and Gavan Daws's history of the Hawaiian Islands, Shoal of Time. To learn about the Holocaust they watched Alain Resnais's documentary "Night and Fog." For "Ideas in Western Literature," a popular course in the high school, students read Sartre, Camus, Borges, Hesse, and Kafka.
And yet so cheerful was the general atmosphere at Punahou that it was not always easy for some students to imagine the catastrophes of history or the troubled inner lives of literary characters. Jonathan Selinger, who is now a professor of chemical physics at Kent State University, recalled one teacher who had just moved to Hawaii and complained about how hard it was to teach literature at Punahou. "On the mainland, he said, students could relate to literature because so many were depressed or had even considered suicide," Selinger recalled. "In Hawaii, students were just too happy to appreciate great literature."
Barry Obama did not always share that light spirit. He suffered his share of loneliness and confusion in high school. His mother, after three years at the University of Hawaii studying for a master's degree in anthropology, decided that she needed to move back to Indonesia. There she would do the fieldwork for her doctorate, live more cheaply, and satisfy her restless need to explore the world. She was determined to go, but Barry was determined to make his way at Punahou, even if it meant living with his grandparents in the apartment on Beretania Street.
"When she first came back to Hawaii, in the early seventies," Obama's sister, Maya, said, "she never planned on leaving Barack. But she returned [to Indonesia], thinking, Let me work on my marriage and career. Barack had already spent three years at Punahou and he wanted to stay. She felt that was probably the best temporary solution. Still, it was hard. She missed him very much and wrote lots of letters to him and he wrote some back and there were frequent calls and summers and Christmases together. But it was painful not to have him there. The idea of taking him away from all that and thrusting him back into another country was hard. You change so much in three years in adolescence, and it was sort of impossible for him to go back to Indonesia."
Barry was now without a father and, for most of the year, without his mother. At about that time he began what he later called his "fitful interior struggle."
Hawaii does not much resist the image of paradise: the physical beauty, the isolation from the mainland (from everywhere), the languid pace of life, the self-marketing as the "Aloha State," the ultimate vacation spot, are intoxicating. Even in the capital, Honolulu, which can be as overdeveloped as Hong Kong, the mountains and the beach are visible from nearly everywhere. Obama spent plenty of time with his friends having fun: body-surfing at Sandy Beach, camping and hiking in the Mokule'ia Forest Reserve and Peacock Flats, seeing movies at the old Cinerama Theater, hanging out at the Mr. Burger Drive-In near the university or at Zippy's, for the chili with rice. To say nothing of sampling, in time, the ubiquitous brands of marijuana: Maui Wowie, Kaua'i Electric, Puna Butter, Kona Gold. When Barry was in school, the legal driving age was fifteen. Punahou was like a paradise as conceived by well-to-do American teenagers.
Barry was known on campus as a smart, engaging, friendly kid, an obsessive basketball player, tight with the jocks, friendly with the artier types, able to negotiate just about any clique. Unlike some adolescents, he bore his confusions privately, without self-dramatizing. To most kids, he was cheerful--and game. He wrote poems for Ka Wai Ola, the campus literary magazine. He sang in the chorus. He took part in high-school goofs, once helping make a film called "Narc Squad," based on the ABC police drama "The Mod Squad." ("One White, One Black, One Blond" went the "Mod Squad" promo, and, of the three young undercover cops, Barry played the dashiki-wearing character. He peeled it off for the pool party scene.)
But negotiating his identity was far more complicated than anyone could sense. Punahou teachers and graduates tend to view ethnicity as one more element in their rosy view of the school and of Hawaii itself. Obama's self-portrayal in his memoir as a troubled kid trying to cope with race and racism came as a shock to some of his old teachers and classmates. His teacher Eric Kusunoki was surprised by the book. "In Hawaii, ethnicity is blurred. I like to think of kids not in terms of black and white--it's more like a golden brown," he said. "Everyone is mixed and everyone is different. So when I read his book it was kind of a surprise to me. I had him in homeroom every day for four years. He expressed himself quite well and was never upset or lost his cool. He always had a big smile and could negotiate his way through the school."
Constance Ramos, whose background is Filipino-Hungarian, wrote, "I never once thought of Barry as 'Black.' I still don't. On a very deep, emotional level, I honestly don't know what 'Black' means: Why is Barry supposed to fall into that 'color' category, when his skin tone is just about the same as mine? Nobody would call me 'black.' It remains unclear to me why skin color is so important to so many people." She said she felt "betrayed" by Obama's angst-ridden self-portrayal.
There are very few writers and observers about the Punahou scene who allow even a tinge of anxiety, an element of darkness, to cloud the sunny self-regard. The novelist Allegra Goodman is an exception, describing a place where the walls of privilege were manned at all times and nearly impregnable:
The lovely tropical home of so many diverse people is not beyond distinctions--it is all about them. Tensions simmer between native Hawaiians and newcomers. The rich layered cultures of Polynesia, Asia, and America bump up against bigotry and ignorance, often voiced in racist jokes and sometimes expressed in physical violence. Punahou's student body is multicultural, and its financial aid generous. But, for some, Punahou symbolizes exclusive privilege. More than once when I was a student there, rough kids from outside breached the walls. Teachers sounded the alarm: "The mokes are on campus again"--the word "mokes" designating kids who were native and poor.
In high school, Barry eventually stopped writing letters to his father. His effort to understand himself was a lonely one. Touchingly, awkwardly, he was giving himself instruction on how to be black. According to his math and science teacher, Pal Eldredge, the way Barry carried himself changed. "His gait, the way he walked, changed," he said. "And I wasn't the only one who noticed." Step by step he began immersing himself in an African-American culture that seemed to live thousands of miles from where he was. He listened to Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, Grover Washington and Miles Davis; he watched "Soul Train" and Richard Pryor on television. On his own he read Richard Wright's Native Son, the poems of Langston Hughes, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, The Souls of Black Folk, the essays of James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.
Obama could not, and did not, pretend to be starting his journey from the neighborhood. Honolulu was hardly Detroit or Lansing, the South Side or Harlem--much less the hamlets of the Mississippi Delta--but he did not escape moments of real racial humiliation. He fleetingly mentions one incident, when he was eleven or twelve, that one white classmate, Kristen Caldwell, recounted many years later in far greater detail:
When I started reading more about Barack Obama's early years at Punahou, my first instinct was that the racial issues were exaggerated. Then I realized that I really would have had no way of knowing what his experience, his perception had been--just as he wouldn't be aware of mine. I did remember one incident very vividly: We were standing on the lanai (patio) looking at the draw sheets that had just been posted for a tennis tournament ...
Everyone does the same thing: You look for your name, and then run your finger across the draw to see whom you might play as you advance into later rounds of the tournament ...
Barry was doing what we all did, completely normal behavior. But Tom M. came over and told him not to touch the draw sheet because he would get it dirty. He singled him out, and the implication was absolutely clear: Barry's hands weren't grubby; the message was that his darker skin would somehow soil the draw. Those of us standing there were agape, horrified, disbelieving ...
Barry handled it beautifully, with just the right amount of cold burn without becoming disrespectful. "What do you mean by that?" he asked firmly. I could see in his eyes that Tom realized he had gone too far--his remark was uncalled for; he had crossed a line--and there were witnesses. He fumbled in his response, ultimately claiming that he had only been joking. But we all knew it had been no joke, and it wasn't even remotely funny.
Some of our innocence was gone: That was the price of an ugly remark, one I've never forgotten.
It wasn't a singular incident. In the ninth grade, classmate Ronald Loui recalled, a physical-education teacher advised the students to change their style of running. "You should try to run like a black man," the teacher said. "Not so straight up, tilt your pelvis!" Obama, the only black kid in the class, "was really embarrassed but, in part to get away from the uncomfortable situation, he took off running," Loui said.
In high school, Obama found a few older black friends to talk with. He spent some time with Keith Kakugawa--"Ray" in the memoir--but Keith's bitter monologues about "the white man" seemed to do little but stoke Obama's anger and confusion. (As an adult, Kakugawa spent seven years in prison on drug and auto-theft charges. When he started making trouble for the Obama campaign--telling reporters that Dreams was inaccurate and asking for money--one spokesman, Bill Burton, said, "There's no doubt that Keith's story is tragic and sad.")
But while Obama's most constant comrades--Greg Orme, Bobby Titcomb, and Mike Ramos--were not black, he had valuable friendships with two older African-American Punahou students: Rik Smith, who is now a physician, and Tony Peterson, who works for the United Methodist Church. The three of them would gather weekly outside Cooke Hall for what they jokingly called Ethnic Corner. They talked about classes, philosophy, race--and not least how race affected their ability to date Punahou girls, who were nearly all either white, Asian, or mixed race. They asked each other what it meant to "act white" or "act black." They even discussed whether there would be a black President in their lifetime--and they decided that it wasn't possible.
Often they just talked about the same mysteries that bewitch anyone at that age. In the spring of 1976, Tony tape-recorded one session of the Ethnic Corner because he had to write a school essay on the subject of time; he thought he might collect some material from the others:
RIK: Have you guys ever thought about time?
BARRY: Yeah.
TONY: I thought about it.
RIK: Think about time, okay. What is it? What is time?
TONY: I don't know.
BARRY: Eh. Time is just a collection of human.... listen, this is gonna sound good, boy! See, time is just a collection of human experiences combined so that they make a long, flowing stream of thought.
The dialogue is "No Exit" meets "Fast Times at Ridgemont High." "We were three black guys trying to impress each other with how smart we were," Peterson said, laughing. "We weren't screwing around, we weren't playing the dozens. We were challenging each other."
They also formed a means of protection for each other, Rik Smith said. Punahou thought of itself as an exemplar of multicultural comity, but Smith, who was two years older than Obama, described a Halloween celebration at Punahou where a couple of students came in blackface and tattered clothing--"minstrel stuff." The kids who had dressed up had no idea that they had done anything racist. In fact, they were offended that Rik took offense. How could they be racist when their hearts were pure? Nearly all teenagers tend to think of themselves as outsiders--there is solace in it, loneliness is transformed into a variety of glamour--but Obama, Smith, and Peterson were always talking among themselves about whether or not they were black first or individuals first. The answers provided by the Punahou School were confusing.
"Barack's experience was my experience," Smith said. "I talk to my kids about this and my kids can't imagine it in California. As a child in Seattle, I couldn't play at recess because the kids wouldn't let me play baseball. One of the funny stories that I recall is that a haole girl that I liked, a nice individual, would never go out with me. It was weird because I would go sneak into her room at home past midnight and then I would go. But she wouldn't talk to me in school. It was an interesting activity."
The subjects of the Ethnic Corner were hardly ephemeral. "When Barry gave the speech at the Democratic Convention in 2004 and talked about wanting to eradicate the idea that if a black kid has a book he's acting white--that was a huge part of what we were talking about back in high school," Tony Peterson said. "Kids wrestle with their identities. And if you are biracial and look black and grow up in a white family, the issues are deep."
Ronald Loui, who is Chinese-American, said, "People in Hawaii have no real access to an understanding of the black-white divide. So many of the icons of that era were black. We were all listening to Earth, Wind & Fire and we all pretended that we were Dr. J on the basketball court, and yet there were parents who were telling their kids to watch out for black people."
Barry's mother visited Honolulu when she could or brought him to Indonesia during school breaks when she could afford it, but Barry was growing up on the margins of her vision. He could still appreciate her energy, her sweetness, and her intelligence, but she had little to offer now about what troubled him most. When she naively tried to find common ground with her son--"You know, I don't feel white!"--he only got disgusted at her attempt. Living in Indonesia, Ann Dunham had become fixed on the axioms, the hopes, and the mood of the early civil-rights days; she had precious little feel for what had come after: the mutual resentments, Black Power, the Panthers, the clashes over busing and affirmative action. "I remember her feeling saddened by the anger that she sensed in parts of the African-American community," Obama said.
How could Ann possibly know what it was to be a black man in America--and who, besides a few teenagers no less confused than he, was around to help? "Some of the problems of adolescent rebellion and hormones were compounded by the fact that I didn't have a father," Obama said. "So what I fell into were the exaggerated stereotypes of black male behavior--not focusing on my books, finding respectability, playing a lot of sports."
"We were all a little untethered," Maya Soetoro-Ng says. Maya, who lived with Ann in Indonesia while Barry attended Punahou, said that she and her older brother struggled with their rootlessness in different ways. "We went to a lot of places--four, five months at a time," including Pakistan, Thailand, India, she said. "Long enough to get a sense of the textures of the place and really know it a bit. I have tremendous wanderlust. Until 2004, when I became a mother, at age thirty-four, the wanderlust eased but it didn't go away. Now its voice is very soft. I think Barack was less in love with it. He had greater examples, in our grandparents and elsewhere, of the beauty of claiming community, of being grounded, of being loyal, of being in one place and really working on the relationship with that place and the people in it. I think that became very desirable to him. I can't speak for him but probably some of our mother's decisions may have looked selfish in comparison."
As an adult, Obama always expressed deep love for his mother--he readily acknowledged her influence as the most powerful in his young life--but he could also step back and evaluate critically the choices she made as a young woman. "When I think about my mother," he said during the campaign, "I think there was a certain combination of being very grounded in who she was, what she believed in. But also a certain recklessness. I think she was always searching for something. She wasn't comfortable seeing her life confined to a certain box."
Maya doesn't believe her mother was aware of her son's crisis of identity as he navigated Punahou. "I'm sure part of our mother's optimism was a constant reminder to both of us that we were special because we came from more than one world and we could access many worlds easily," she says. "When we struggled with not feeling entirely at home here or there, I think that she would push an optimistic perspective of things. My brother has never been one to air his grievances or talk about things that were troubling him. He is one of these people who work things out in their own solitary way. He works it out by walking and thinking. He has never been neurotic."
During Barry's last three years at Punahou, Ann worked in Jakarta doing the fieldwork for her doctoral dissertation in anthropology. Once she finished her master's, however, her interest was more in gaining the knowledge and expertise needed to work in the field of international development. She did not complete the dissertation until 1992, when she was fifty. In the meantime, as she did research and wrote, she worked in development jobs for the Ford Foundation and the World Bank, and as research coordinator for Bank Rakyat, a leading Indonesian bank.
A disarmingly gregarious personality, Ann knew many foreign diplomats, business people, and development officers, but more and more she came to immerse herself in the life of Indonesians--in Jakarta and in the provinces. Her marriage was strained. Lolo moved increasingly into the international oil business, with its office meetings and golf games and cocktail parties. Ann was repelled by the wealthy, entitled foreigners in their midst who spent their time complaining about the servants, "the locals," and maximizing the ways they could make Jakarta more like "home." Ann's Indonesian was fluent. She invited interesting people to the house for dinner: artists, writers, development officers. She started making frequent trips out of the capital to the regional centers, especially the villages of central Java near Yogyakarta.
"She home-schooled me and took me to the villages," Maya said. "Blacksmith villages, tile factories, clove cigarette factories, ceramic villages, basket-weaving villages--all manner of textiles and cottage industries." It was an interesting, engaged life, but it did have one distinct cost. Obama admits that, much as he tried to deny it at the time, the separations from his mother took their toll. "I didn't feel [her absence] as a deprivation," he said. "But when I think about the fact that I was separated from her, I suspect it had more of an impact than I know."
The disconnection--and time--had a way of catching them all by surprise. When he was in high school, Barry arrived alone at the airport in Jakarta for a summer stay with Ann and Maya. Ann had a panicky feeling as she searched the arrivals area for her son. Somehow, in her mind, Barry was still chubby-cheeked, stocky, not especially tall, and now he was nowhere to be found. Had he slipped by her and wandered off somewhere in the airport? Not likely. Had he missed the plane?
"And then comes this ... figure! Tall and handsome--another person!" Ann's friend and academic adviser, Alice Dewey, recalled. "Suddenly he was towering over her and speaking in this very low newly-acquired man's voice. The voice that everyone knows nowadays!"
From the mid-seventies on, Alice Dewey was Ann's "mother hen," both an intimate friend and her academic mentor. When Alice visited Jakarta or, later, Yogyakarta, she often stayed with Ann. Alice Dewey is the granddaughter of the American philosopher John Dewey. Her office, in Saunders Hall, at the University of Hawaii, is small, the sort of alarmingly cluttered warren that always seems one piece of paper away from crashing down and crushing its inhabitant to death. A friendly woman with a white corona of curls and a sharp smile, Dewey sits in a creaky desk chair surrounded by stacks of ancient memos, bulging files, dusty dissertations, each teeteringly perched on the next. Like so many of Ann's friends and acquaintances, she remembers her as restless, curious, funny, tirelessly idealistic. Dewey was angry at the occasional depiction of Dunham during the campaign as a flighty idealist who "ignored" her son to pursue her own muses. "She adored that child," she said, "and they were in constant touch. And he adored her."
It pained Ann to be apart from Barry for such long stretches, Alice Dewey said, but Ann really believed that it was possible to live an unconventional life and still find a way for her children to grow up into whole, independent people. She struck Alice Dewey as a mature student, somebody with a sense of intellectual penetration long before she even embarked on her dissertation. "She was one of those students that you think, 'Why don't I let her lecture?'"
Both Dewey and Dunham were deeply interested in the lives and the futures of the craftsmen of central Java. They studied not only their art, but also the effect of modernization on their way of life. Would village craftsmen disappear? Dunham's research and her point of view was a kind of implicit argument with Clifford Geertz and other anthropologists, who believed that village craftsmen were, for various cultural reasons, destined for extinction. Where Geertz saw dispirited, tradition-bound irrationality among villagers, Dunham saw potential vitality. She was convinced that, with the help of modest financing from banks and non-governmental organizations, cottage industries in rural Indonesia could not only sustain ancient crafts and traditions but also provide a strong alternative economy to agriculture. Her mode of work--socially engaged, policy-directed--was hardly fashionable when she was doing her research, yet her conclusions proved prescient. Blacksmithing was just one of the Javanese crafts that began to expand in the nineteen-eighties. The idea of providing microcredits to craftsmen and to small, rural enterprises is common currency in the twenty-first century; it was a fairly radical and unconventional idea when Dunham championed it.
At first, Ann studied a wide range of crafts--weaving, batik, leather-work, puppetry, ironwork, ceramics, sculpture--and she wanted to include all of these crafts in her dissertation. She examined everything from the way motifs from the Hindu epics were applied to resist-dye batiks to the intricate construction of bamboo birdcages. She tried to cover vast scholarly territory and numerous villages in central Java. "When she came to write her proposal for her dissertation, we told her, for God's sake, choose one," Dewey recalled. "She chose blacksmithing. Iron lives in the ground and so you can talk about the mythological dimensions of the craft, too." Javanese blacksmithing is an art with a history that is more than a thousand years old, and Dunham was entranced by both the objects themselves and the lives of the craftsmen.
To do her research, Dunham had to insinuate her way into the smithies of Kajar, a village in Gunung Kidul, a region of central Java. When she first started visiting there in the late nineteen-seventies, the village had to be approached by foot for the last mile; electricity did not arrive in Kajar for another decade. The blacksmith's workshop, in Javanese tradition, is sacred and mostly barred to women. The craftsmen think of their work as a spiritual endeavor, their products as sacred as a crucifix or Torah scroll. Offerings are draped on the anvil. Dunham's work was, in many ways, economic anthropology, but she also had the requisite skill of a social anthropologist: the capacity to gain access. She persuaded these craftsmen to let her inside the smithy, observe their work, and interview them at length. She had a capacity to get these craftsmen to reveal even their innermost thoughts; in one passage, Pak Sastro, the head of the blacksmithing cooperative in Kajar, describes a dream he had before being visited by the regional sultan. Because Dunham was American, she was regarded, above all, as a foreign guest and able to transcend, somehow, her status as a woman among men.
"She really earned their trust," Maya Soetoro-Ng said. "She knew their extended families and their children and grandchildren."
"The fact that she worked so closely with blacksmiths is proof of her subtlety as a person," Bronwen Solyom, a friend and expert in Indonesian art, said. "If she hadn't been so congenial, she wouldn't have been able to gain access to those men and their venerable skills."
Even though Dunham narrowed her topic to the smiths of central Java, her dissertation, "Peasant Blacksmithing in Indonesia: Surviving and Thriving Against All Odds," was over a thousand pages long in manuscript. (In 2009, Duke University Press published a condensed version edited by Alice Dewey and another of Dunham's colleagues, Nancy I. Cooper.) Dunham was an indefatigable researcher. Some passages are so detailed and arcane that they nearly reach the level of parody, yet the dissertation reveals, in its study of a single village, the dense textures of culture inherent in any one place. To read it is to learn the history, beliefs, and skill of nearly every inhabitant of the village; its intricate and evolving social, religious, and class structures; its cultural formation through centuries of foreign and indigenous influence. At times it seems that the reader learns more here about the Indonesian keris, the daggers made by the smiths--about iron forging, iron casting, silver and gold smithing---than about the fall of Rome in Gibbon. But one cannot help admiring both the complexity of Kajar and the industry of Ann Dunham. It's clear from the text that Dunham became intimate friends with everyone there: Pak Paeran, the village headman; Pak Sastrosuyono, the leading blacksmithing entrepreneur; the artisans; the bureaucrats. There is an evident affection for the people she writes about and an obvious hope that the Indonesian government, along with international aid and development institutions, will help insure the continuing health of small handicraft industries, as an element both of cultural continuity and of economic diversity. Dunham's text seems directed as much to the agencies and bureaucracies that might help the people of Kajar and other Indonesian villagers as to her fellow scholars. "There is a balance there of intimacy and objectivity," Maya Soetoro-Ng said. "She tried to combat others who were simplistic or patronizing to the craftsmen. She emphasized applied anthropology, the idea that this work should be about making lives better."
In her letters to Dewey, Ann Dunham wrote about her encounters; she wrote with news about her assistants and sources, academic gossip, even updates on the latest Dorothy Sayers mysteries that she was reading as a diversion. On July 28, 1978, while Barry was a junior at Punahou, Dunham wrote to Dewey from Indonesia:
Dear Alice,
I finally got back to Gunung Kidul, finishing up our work last week, exhausted but quite satisfied with the results. Kajar is certainly an interesting village from several points of view, not the least of which is political. I can envision a little article someday with a model of the balance of power there and the shifts affected by various styles of tinkering from outside....
We stayed at the house of Pak Rianto ... [who] in turn rents part of the house of a man called Pak Harjo Bodong (Roughly translated "Father Harjo with the Long Belly Button," though I never had the courage to really ask why.) Pak Harjo Bodong used to be the most famous [smith] in the Wonosari area. He also used to be a famous thief and was in jail four times when he was young.... Lives there with his twelfth wife (he is her tenth husband). They are both in their seventies and quite a sketch....
We arrived in Kajar just at the time of the peanut harvest. This meant that at every house we surveyed we were given large glasses of sticky tea, refilled at least 3 times despite all my "sampuns," and big plates of peanuts in the shell to consume ... [I won't] ever be able to look a peanut in the face again (yes, peanuts do have faces--smirky, nasty little faces, in fact)....
I forgot to mention that we grew very fond of Pak Atmo Sadiman dukoh of Kajar.... He was giving me a new Javanese name, "Sri Lestari." I gather it means "Forever Beautiful," and wasn't that gallant of him. Thank God for nice comfortable middle-aged men who don't give you any complexes. Amen! ...
Reading over this letter it sounds rather flippant. It's the influence, I think, of Lord Peter Wimsey who kept me sane all through my weeks in Gunung Kidul. Especially liked Gaudy Night. Unnatural Death was fun but less padded out with good tidbits....
I haven't seen a newspaper or a magazine for the last month, so if anything exciting has happened you might let me know....
Aloha,
Ann
Dunham decorated her house with keris, puppets, prints, and paintings. "Ann loved beautiful things, but not as a connoisseur," Solyom said. "She was a supporter of all kinds of craftsmen, and she collected the things people she knew made." When, years later, Michelle and Barack Obama set up house in Chicago, their decorations included Indonesian prints.
In order to be close to the villages that she was studying, Ann stayed in Yogyakarta and made trips to the villages on the arid plateau of south central Java. Lolo visited frequently, but he continued to work in Jakarta. Ann's three-bedroom house was on the grounds of the sultan's pleasure palace, a landscape of reflecting pools and gardens, ruins and towers, batik sellers and the old bird market. According to Maya, Lolo's aged mother had royal blood and lived with them in Yogyakarta. "She spoke fluent Dutch and Javanese," Maya recalled. "She was a tiny woman. She must have weighed, perhaps, ninety pounds and she birthed fourteen children. She chewed betel nut and spit into a silver spittoon. She was very much the lady, just like our Kansan grandmother, though they were worlds apart. She was very discreet. I would guess in Indonesia we would call it halus---sort of refined, very aware of her language." Dewey said that when Barry came to visit, Ann had to rent a house outside the pleasure palace grounds. The presence of one foreigner was an event; the presence of a teenager with no royal blood at all would have been "too much."
Ann's eventual separation from Lolo was undramatic and relatively free of rancor. After a long time apart, they were finally divorced in 1980. Ann never asked for or received regular alimony or child support, according to the divorce records.
Politically, Dunham was a "garden-variety Democrat," Dewey recalled, but her mind was inclined not so much toward politics as it was toward a kind of engaged service. She joked that she wanted equal pay but wouldn't stop shaving her legs. "She wasn't ideological," Obama says. "I inherited that, I think, from her. She was suspicious of cant."
Mary Zurbuchen, who worked for the Ford Foundation, got to know Dunham when she was working at the foundation in the nineteen-eighties. Although Dunham was always trying to keep her dissertation moving forward, she earned her living, and made her greatest impact, as a development officer. "She was really concerned about women's rights and their livelihoods," Zurbuchen said. Women in Java were often central to the household economy but had no access to credit. Factory jobs were opening for young women, yet there was little talk about improving labor conditions. To raise issues of labor rights or human rights was risky, even for an established foundation like Ford. Dunham opened contact with labor activists. She helped start a consumers' rights organization. "It sounds anodyne now," Zurbuchen said, "but in those days a consumer organization raising questions about additives in food or the marketing of fake drugs--this was a cutting-edge civil-society activity.
"In the expat community, the things she was interested in and that Ford was pushing were not conventional," Zurbuchen went on. "The Indonesian government and the military pushed back. The economic interests, allied with the military, pushed back. If you worked on forestry, it wasn't long before you ran into the military-backed companies who were exploiting the forests. Ann faced pushback on labor-rights issues. She was also interested in family law and inheritance of property rights for women. Women who wanted to ban polygamy and to get their legal rights in the family were also her concern. There has been progress, but it came slowly."
Ann wrote to Alice Dewey in 1984 while she was working for the Ford Foundation and teaching at provincial colleges; back home, her son had graduated from Columbia and was writing business reports for a firm in New York. The letter is filled with details of her frenetic efforts on behalf of women all over Southeast Asia:
Dearest Alice,
Apa kabar? I hope this letter finds you and all the canine, feline and hominid members of your household doing well....
Other than worrying about plans for fall, life is good here. Maybe you remember that I am handling projects for Ford in the areas of women, employment, and industry (small and large).... This year I have major projects for women on plantations in West Java and North Sumatra; for women in kretek factories in Central and East Java; for street-food sellers and scavengers in the cities of Jakarta, Jogja and Bandung; for women in credit cooperatives in East Java; for women in electronics factories, mainly in the Jakarta-Bogor area; for women in cottage industry cooperatives in the district of Klaten; for hand-loom weavers in West Timor; ... for street food sellers in Thailand (with Cristina Szanton as the project leader); etc. In addition I am still team-teaching the Sociology of the Family course with Pujiwati Sayogo at Bogor Agricultural Univ., and I am project specialist on a research project that she is coordinating on The Roles of Rural Women on the Outer Islands of Indonesia.... In April the Foundation is sending me to Bangla Desh for an employment conference. I am hoping to take Maya with me (in lieu of home leave this year) and stop off in Thailand on the way there and Delhi on the way back ...
Maya is enjoying life as an 8th grader at the International School, and she seems to be turning into a people right on schedule. She hates me to brag, but I am forced to mention that she made high honors this term....
Much love,
Ann
When Obama describes his mother as a singular influence, someone directed toward public service and the improvement of the lives of the poor but without an emphasis on ideology, this was the sort of work he is referring to. "He became the kind of person Ann was, the maverick who really wanted to bring change to the world," the Indonesian jounalist Julia Suryakusuma said.
Dunham may have been unable to help her son in all the ways that she had hoped or that he needed, but, in her own way, she did what she could. Obama remembers that even when he was very young she would give him books, record albums, and tape recordings of the great voices of African-American history. Obama teased his mother, saying that she had been a pioneer in Afrocentric education. Similarly, Ann made sure that Maya learned Indonesian. Maya went on to study Javanese dance and got a Ph.D. in education; Alice Dewey was on her dissertation committee. Her husband, Konrad Ng, teaches media studies at the University of Hawaii and has written articles such as "Policing Cultural Traffic: Charlie Chan and Hawaii Detective Fiction."
Ann was able to do what her first husband could not. She was able to negotiate the distances between worlds and cultures and remain whole; the passage enriched her even when it caused complications in her role as a mother to her son. Dunham might not have been the most conventional mother, but she cannot be faulted for stifling her son's ambitions. "I do remember Mom and I making jokes about, 'Oh yeah, you're going to be the first black President,'" Maya said. "I don't know why we would make those jokes. I can only assume it was because he was always right. He was one of those people who even as a young man was like an old man, you know?
"When he went to college," Maya continued, "I would have been nine, ten, eleven, twelve, and we would joke about this, but I think on the one hand we were teasing him, but behind the joke there was the sense that he was going to do something important. I always felt that way about him, and my mother felt pretty early on that he belonged to something bigger."
At Punahou, however, he was not the student-politician sort. Barry Obama was a basketball fanatic, the kid you saw walking down the street to school, to the grocery store, to visit friends, always dribbling a ball slick with wear. On weekends, he played full-court runs at Punahou. In the early mornings before class and after school until dark, he played with schoolmates on the outdoor courts at Punahou. In Tony Peterson's yearbook, he wrote:
Tony, man, I sure am glad I got to know you before you left. All those Ethnic Corner trips to the snack bar and playing ball made the year a lot more enjoyable, even though the snack bar trips cost me a fortune. Anyway, great knowing you and I hope we keep in touch. Good luck in everything you do, and get that law degree. Some day when I am a pro basketballer, and I want to sue my team for more money, I'll call you.
Barry made the junior varsity team in tenth grade and varsity the next year. The basketball court was a circumscribed area of life where Obama felt comfortable and, sometimes, where he encountered a world beyond Punahou. Some of the black soldiers on the island played on the courts near his building and Barry was happy not only to play with them but also to pick up on their language, their manners and style on the court--something that watching N.B.A. games on television did not provide. "He didn't know who he was until he found basketball," his future brother-in-law Craig Robinson said. "It was the first time he really met black people." This was an exaggeration, but not by much.
On the varsity team, Barry played under Chris McLachlin, a locally celebrated coach with a sympathetic manner and a distinctly old-school approach to the game. McLachlin's emphasis on disciplined teamwork and stalwart defense did not encourage the flamboyance of Obama's hero, the Philadelphia 76ers star Julius Erving. McLachlin's teams were successful playing the sort of full-court, maximum-pressure defensive press that Dean Smith used at North Carolina and employing many of the disciplined offensive plays that John Wooden ran at U.C.L.A.
Obama hustled in practice, and he impressed his teammates with his fluidity and an odd, but effective, double-pump jump shot that he took in the lane off the dribble. He had skill and drive, but because the team was so packed with exceptional talent--three players on the starting five in his senior year went on to play serious college ball, and one forward, John Kamana, went on to a career in professional football--Obama did not get nearly as much playing time as he wanted. He groused about that to his friends, but he kept playing.
"Basketball was a good way for me to channel my energy," Obama said during the Presidential race. "It did parallel some of the broader struggles I was going through, because there were some issues in terms of racial identity that played themselves out on the basketball court. You know, I had an overtly black game, behind-the-back passes, and wasn't particularly concerned about fundamentals, whereas our coach was this Bobby Knight guy, and he was all about fundamentals--you know, bounce passes, and four passes before you shoot, and that sort of thing. So we had this little conflict that landed me on the bench when I argued. The truth was, on the playground, I could beat a lot of the guys who were starters, and I think he thought it was useful to have me there in practice."
"We had our clash between his playground style and our very deliberate style," McLachlin said. "He argued for more playing time, even called a meeting for him and a couple of others. He respectfully lobbied for their cause, and rightfully so.... He would have started for anyone else in the state." In his senior year, Obama had a few good games and his grandfather was pleased to hear him complimented on the local radio broadcasts. "It was good to get a few props late in life," Obama joked many years after.
In Barry's senior year, Punahou overpowered Moanalua High School, 60-28, to win the state championship. As he had all season, Obama played a secondary role. "It's never easy when you're young to realize you're never going to be the best at something you love," Larry Tavares said. "Barry had to realize he was going to have to look in other directions."
In 1999, Obama, writing an article for the Punahou Bulletin in the avuncular mode of a successful alumnus, said, "By the time I moved back to Hawaii, and started school at Punahou, I had come to recognize that Hawaii was not immune to issues of race and class, issues that manifested themselves in the poverty among so many native Hawaiian families, and the glaring differences between the facilities we at Punahou enjoyed and the crumbling public schools that so many of our peers were forced to endure. My budding awareness of life's unfairness made for a more turbulent adolescence than perhaps some of my classmates' experiences. As an African-American teenager in a school with few African-Americans, I probably questioned my identity a bit harder than most. As a kid from a broken home and family of relatively modest means, I nursed more resentments than my circumstances justified, and didn't always channel those resentments in particularly constructive ways.
"And yet," he concluded optimistically, "when I look back on my years in Hawaii, I realize how truly lucky I was to have been raised there. Hawaii's spirit of tolerance might not have been perfect or complete, but it was--and is--real. The opportunity that Hawaii offered--to experience a variety of cultures in a climate of mutual respect--became an integral part of my world view, and a basis for the values that I hold most dear."
But, as the author of his own past, Obama cast a far harsher light on his Punahou years. In his memoir, he writes of occasional internal rages, of confusion, of the drugs that provided momentary escape. Exhausted in his attempt to "untangle a mess that wasn't of [his] making"--the mess that was his non-relationship with his father--he stopped caring, or tried to. In what may be the most famous passage in the book, Obama writes, "Pot had helped, and booze, maybe a little blow when you could afford it." When I interviewed Obama in 2006, he denied none of it and made no coy remarks about not inhaling or about being young and foolish. These were the dodges of his two predecessors--Clinton and Bush. Had he inhaled?
"That was the point, wasn't it?" he said with a broad smile.
Indeed it was. "It was Hawaii in the seventies--everywhere you looked there were posters of marijuana leaves," a classmate, Kelli Furushima, said. "It was kind of like the sixties were lingering on and so it was totally party, recreational. It wasn't some sort of deep, dark getaway from society. It was palm trees are swaying, blue skies, waves lapping on the ocean, just part of island life in paradise."
Obama did get high with some frequency, and he was not especially reluctant to advertise the fact. His yearbook, The Oahuan, includes not just a standard senior-year portrait of him in a seventies white leisure suit but also a still-life photograph of a beer bottle and Zig Zag rolling papers. In the caption, Obama wrote thanks to "Tut and Gramps" and the "Choom Gang." "Chooming," in Hawaiian slang, means smoking marijuana.
"I'm sure if my mother had had any clue what that was," Obama said, "she would not have been pleased."
In a letter from Indonesia, Ann tried to prod Barry during his senior year about his grades and college: "It is a shame we have to worry so much about [grade point average], but you know what the college entrance competition is these days. Did you know that in Thomas Jefferson's day, and right up through the 1930s, anybody who had the price of tuition could go to Harvard? ... I don't see that we are producing many Thomas Jeffersons nowadays. Instead we are producing Richard Nixons." Obama had the capacity to be an A student, but his overall aimlessness, the partying, his lack of direction, held him back. Obama admits, "I probably could've been a better ball player and a better student if I hadn't been goofing off so much." Recalling not only the drugs he did take, but also the heroin that was offered to him (and rejected), Obama wonders, in a searching, self-dramatizing moment, if he hadn't been in danger of taking a far more desperate road than that of the typical high-school partier:
Junkie. Pothead. That's where I'd been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man. Except the highs hadn't been about that, me trying to prove what a down brother I was. Not by then, anyway. I got high for just the opposite effect, something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind, something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory.
On one of her trips home during Obama's senior year, Ann Dunham heard about the drug arrest of one of Barry's friends and barged into his room wanting to know about it. She tried to express her concern about his declining grades, his lack of initiative in filling out college applications. Barry flashed his mother the sort of reassuring smile that had been so effective in the past. Barry knew he was adrift. Rage, drugs, disaffection, racial fury--he trusted none of them. "At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap," he wrote. "Following this maddening logic, the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness, of your own defeat. And the final irony: Should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, they would have a name for that, too, a name that could cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. Nigger."
Barry was so far from "black America." The closest center of African-American life was Los Angeles, a five-hour flight away. One of the more thoughtful and consequential things Stanley Dunham did in his role as a surrogate father was to take his grandson to one of his African-American friends in the neighborhood known as the Jungle, in Waikiki. A kind of bohemian beach community of narrow lanes, cheap hotels, rooming houses, students, travelers, and surfer-bums, the Jungle was home to an aging poet, and journalist, named Frank Marshall Davis.
Davis lived at the Koa Cottages on Kuhio Avenue. He wore an aloha shirt and cut-offs. People dropped in on him all the time to drink, maybe smoke a joint, talk, play Scrabble or bridge. His bungalow was like a non-stop salon: literary, political, and relaxed. Frank Davis was one of the more interesting men in Honolulu and Stanley Dunham was one of his regular visitors.
Like Stanley, Frank Marshall Davis was from Kansas. He grew up in Arkansas City, "a yawn town," he called it, fifty miles south of Wichita. In his memoir, Livin' the Blues, Davis writes, "Like virtually all Afro-Americans--and a high percentage of whites--I am ethnic hash"--African mainly, an eighth Mexican, and "I have no idea what." Frank's Kansas was not much like Stanley's--his was a land of lynchings and frontier racism--but they became friends. Frank Davis was a raconteur, capable of expounding on everything from the Harlem Renaissance to the various charms of the surfer girls in Waikiki. He spoke in a fantastically deep Barry White voice and he tended to dominate the discussion, telling stories for hours about his grandmother, who had been a slave; the indignities of being black in Arkansas City, including nearly being lynched when he was five years old; his distinguished career as a columnist and editor in the world of the black press in Chicago, Gary, and Atlanta; his friendships with Richard Wright and Paul Robeson. In the nineteen-thirties and forties, Davis wrote four collections of poems about black life--Black Man's Verse, I Am the American Negro, Through Sepia Eyes, and 47th Street--and won the praise of distinguished critics like Alain Locke, who believed that Davis would help fulfill the promise of a New Negro Renaissance in poetry.
In 1948, Paul Robeson came to Hawaii on a concert tour sponsored by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, a left-wing union. Robeson was so enamored of the atmosphere on the islands that he told reporters, "It would be a tremendous impact on the United States if Hawaii is admitted as a state. Americans wouldn't believe the racial harmony that exists here. It could speed democracy in the United States." In 1946, Davis had married a much younger woman, a white Chicago socialite named Helen Canfield. Robeson extolled Hawaii to such a degree that Helen read more about the islands, and she and Frank Davis decided to move for a while to Honolulu, thinking that they would stay for the winter. They divorced in 1970, but Davis never left. "I am not too fond of what I read about the current mainland scene, so I prefer staying here," Davis told the newspaper Black World in 1974. "Since we do not have the confrontations that exist between white and Black in so many parts of the mainland, living here has been a relief."
In Honolulu, Davis ran a paper company, but that soon burned to the ground. He also worked with the I.L.W.U. and wrote for its weekly newspaper, the Honolulu Record, which lasted from 1948 to 1958. Some of his "fellow freedom fighters" back in Chicago accused him of "deserting the battle," he wrote, but in Hawaii he was less angry than he had been on the mainland, more at ease, though he never gave up his political views. He wrote fierce columns about the suppression of unions, conditions on the plantations, the power of the oligarchic Hawaiian families, race relations. He was one of many leftists who, in the nineteen-fifties, were investigated, and tainted, by the House Un-American Activities Committee. In Hawaii he could put many thousands of miles between himself and his would-be tormentors.
"Virtually from the start I had a sense of human dignity," Davis writes in Livin' the Blues. "On the mainland, whites acted as if dignity were their exclusive possession, something to be awarded only as they saw fit. Yet dignity is a human right, earned by being born. In Hawaii I had at last come into ownership of this birthright, stolen by the white power structure as a penalty of being black. Even on the Chicago South Side, where I was but another drop in a black pool, I was painfully conscious we had been baled, like cotton, into this area because whitey so decreed. It was a relief to soar at last with no wings clipped by the scissors of color." Davis was well aware that "under the placid surface of aloha was an undertow of racism," and he knew that he had given up the pleasures of the South Side. "Hawaii is not for those who can be happy only in Soul City," he warned. "This is no place for those who can identify only with Afro-America. 'Little Harlem' is only a couple of blocks of bars, barbershops, and a soul food restaurant or two."
Dawna Weatherly-Williams, a close friend who lived next door--she called Frank Davis "Daddy"--remembers that Stanley Dunham came by to visit with his grandson sometime in the early nineteen-seventies. "Daddy had his feet propped up and he saw them and called out, 'Hey, Stan! Oh, is this him?'" she recalled. "Stan had been promising to bring Barry by because we all had that in common--Frank's kids were half white, Stan's grandson was half black and my son was half black. Barry was well dressed, in a blazer, I think. He was tired and he was hungry. He had a full face--it wasn't pointed like it is now. We were all grinning like idiots, me and Frank and Stan, because we were thinking that we know this secret about life and we were going to share it with Barry. He hadn't seen anyone that looked like him before.
"Frank was also a great listener, which may be why Barack liked him, too. I am sure he influenced Barack more than Barack is saying. About social justice, about finding out more about life, about what's important, about how to use your heart and your mind. It's probably good that it wasn't a big thing, that he didn't make too big a thing of it all, because he was way ahead of his time."
As a teenager, Obama called on Davis on his own, driving along the Ala Wai Canal to the Jungle. One night, Frank gave him some insight into Stanley, telling him a story about how many years before the Dunhams had hired a young black woman to help care for Ann.
"A preacher's daughter, I think it was. Told me how she became a regular part of the family."
A regular part of the family--the language that earnest middle-class white people use to soothe their guilt about hiring blacks to clean their houses, to be nannies for their children.
Barry had told Frank about his grandmother's anxiety at encountering a scary-seeming black man on the street. Everything about the incident was confusing--his grandmother's fears, Stanley's shame--but Frank, who considered himself friends with the family, seemed to understand it all. He explained that even the most sympathetic white people could never fully comprehend a black man's pain. ("He's basically a good man. But he doesn't know me. Any more than he knew that girl that looked after your mother. He can't know me, not the way I know him.") Why was it, after all, that Stanley could visit, drink Frank's whiskey, fall asleep in his chair, and yet Frank couldn't do the same in his house?
"What I'm trying to tell you is," Frank Davis said, "your grandma's right to be scared. She's at least as right as Stanley is. She understands that black people have a reason to hate. That's just how it is. For your sake, I wish it were otherwise. But it's not. So you might as well get used to it."
When Obama was running for President, the right-wing blogosphere attacked Frank Marshall Davis. He was, by turns, a card-carrying Communist, a pornographer, a pernicious influence. The attacks were loud and unrelenting. For them, an acquaintanceship with Frank Marshall Davis was all part of an ominous picture of radical associations. And yet, while that relationship was neither constant nor lasting, certainly of no great ideological importance, Davis, by Obama's own accounting, made the young man feel something deep and disorienting. That night in the Jungle in Waikiki, he felt completely alone. To make some sense of himself, he would have to leave Hawaii for another country.