Wednesday, December 5, 2012

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rejection, the work went badly. Every Sunday night, I would watch him grow more and more irritable as he
gathered his briefcase and set up a TV tray in front of his chair, following the lead of every possible
distraction, until finally he would chase us out of the living room and try to schedule appointments with
prospective clients over the phone. Sometimes I would tiptoe into the kitchen for a soda, and I could hear
the desperation creeping out of his voice, the stretch of silence that followed when the people on the other
end explained why Thursday wasn’t good and Tuesday not much better, and then Gramps’s heavy sigh
after he had hung up the phone, his hands fumbling through the files in his lap like those of a cardplayer
who’s deep in the hole.
Eventually, a few people would relent, the pain would pass, and Gramps would wander into my room to
tell me stories of his youth or the new joke he had read in Reader’s Digest. If his calls had gone especially
well that night, he might discuss with me some scheme he still harbored-the book of poems he had started
to write, the sketch that would soon bloom into a painting, the floor plans for his ideal house, complete with
push-button conveniences and terraced landscaping. I saw that the plans grew bolder the further they
receded from possibility, but in them I recognized some of his old enthusiasm, and I would usually try to
think up encouraging questions that might sustain his good mood. Then, somewhere in the middle of his
presentation, we would both notice Toot standing in the hall outside my room, her head tilted in accusation.
“What do you want, Madelyn?”
“Are you finished with your calls, dear?”
“Yes, Madelyn. I’m finished with my calls. It’s ten o’clock at night!”
“There’s no need to holler, Stanley. I just wanted to know if I could go into the kitchen.”
“I’m not hollering! Jesus H. Christ, I don’t understand why-” But before he could finish, Toot would have
retreated into their bedroom, and Gramps would leave my room with a look of dejection and rage.
Such exchanges became familiar to me, for my grandparents’ arguments followed a well-worn groove,
a groove that originated in the rarely mentioned fact that Toot earned more money than Gramps. She had
proved to be a trailblazer of sorts, the first woman vice-president of a local bank, and although Gramps liked
to say that he always encouraged her in her career, her job had become a source of delicacy and bitterness
between them as his commissions paid fewer and fewer of the family’s bills.
Not that Toot had anticipated her success. Without a college education, she had started out as a
secretary to help defray the costs of my unexpected birth. But she had a quick mind and sound judgment,
and the capacity for sustained work. Slowly she had risen, playing by the rules, until she reached the
threshold where competence didn’t suffice. There she would stay for twenty years, with scarcely a vacation,
watching as her male counterparts kept moving up the corporate ladder, playing a bit loose with information
passed on between the ninth hole and the ride to the clubhouse, becoming wealthy men.
More than once, my mother would tell Toot that the bank shouldn’t get away with such blatant sexism.
But Toot would just pooh-pooh my mother’s remarks, saying that everybody could find a reason to complain
about something. Toot didn’t complain. Every morning, she woke up at five A.M. and changed from the
frowsy muu-muus she wore around the apartment into a tailored suit and high-heeled pumps. Her face
powdered, her hips girdled, her thinning hair bolstered, she would board the six-thirty bus to arrive at her
downtown office before anyone else. From time to time, she would admit a grudging pride in her work and
took pleasure in telling us the inside story behind the local financial news. When I got older, though, she
would confide in me that she had never stopped dreaming of a house with a white picket fence, days spent
baking or playing bridge or volunteering at the local library. I was surprised by this admission, for she rarely
mentioned hopes or regrets. It may or may not have been true that she would have preferred the alternative
history she imagined for herself, but I came to understand that her career spanned a time when the work of
a wife outside the home was nothing to brag about, for her or for Gramps-that it represented only lost years,
broken promises. What Toot believed kept her going were the needs of her grandchildren and the stoicism
of her ancestors.
“So long as you kids do well, Bar,” she would say more than once, “that’s all that really matters.”
That’s how my grandparents had come to live. They still prepared sashimi for the now-infrequent
guests to their apartment. Gramps still wore Hawaiian shirts to the office, and Toot still insisted on being
called Toot. Otherwise, though, the ambitions they had carried with them to Hawaii had slowly drained
away, until regularity-of schedules and pastimes and the weather-became their principal consolation. They
would occasionally grumble about how the Japanese had taken over the islands, how the Chinese
controlled island finance. During the Watergate hearings, my mother would pry out of them that they had
voted for Nixon, the law-and-order candidate, in 1968. We didn’t go to the beach or on hikes together

Barack Obama - Dreams from My Father 24

embassy library, I went into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror with all my senses and limbs
seemingly intact, looking as I had always looked, and wondered if something was wrong with me. The
alternative seemed no less frightening-that the adults around me lived in the midst of madness.
The initial flush of anxiety would pass, and I would spend my remaining year in Indonesia much as I
had before. I retained a confidence that was not always justified and an irrepressible talent for mischief. But
my vision had been permanently altered. On the imported television shows that had started running in the
evenings, I began to notice that Cosby never got the girl on I Spy, that the black man on Mission Impossible
spent all his time underground. I noticed that there was nobody like me in the Sears, Roebuck Christmas
catalog that Toot and Gramps sent us, and that Santa was a white man.
I kept these observations to myself, deciding that either my mother didn’t see them or she was trying to
protect me and that I shouldn’t expose her efforts as having failed. I still trusted my mother’s love-but I now
faced the prospect that her account of the world, and my father’s place in it, was somehow incomplete.

CHAPTER THREE

I T TOOK ME A while to recognize them in the crowd. When the sliding doors first parted, all I could
make out was the blur of smiling, anxious faces tilted over the guardrail. Eventually I spotted a tall, silver-
haired man toward the rear of the crowd, with a short, owlish woman barely visible beside him. The pair
began to wave in my direction, but before I could wave back they disappeared behind frosted glass.
I looked to the front of the line, where a Chinese family seemed to be having some problems with the
customs officials. They had been a lively bunch during the flight from Hong Kong, the father taking off his
shoes and padding up and down the aisles, the children clambering over seats, the mother and
grandmother hoarding pillows and blankets and chattering endlessly to one another. Now the family was
standing absolutely still, trying to will themselves invisible, their eyes silently following the hands that riffled
through their passports and luggage with a menacing calm. The father reminded me of Lolo somehow, and I
looked down at the wooden mask I was carrying in my hand. It was a gift from the Indonesian copilot, a
friend of my mother’s who had led me away as she and Lolo and my new sister, Maya, stood by at the gate.
I closed my eyes and pressed the mask to my face. The wood had a nutty, cinnamon smell, and I felt myself
drifting back across oceans and over the clouds, into the violet horizon, back to the place where I had once
been….
Someone shouted out my name. The mask dropped to my side, and with it my daydream, and I saw
my grandparents again standing there, waving almost frantically now. This time I waved back; and then,
without thinking, I brought the mask again up to my face, swaying my head in an odd little dance. My
grandparents laughed and pointed at me and waved some more until the customs official finally tapped me
on the shoulder and asked me if I was an American. I nodded and handed him my passport.
“Go ahead,” he said, and told the Chinese family to step to one side.
The sliding doors closed behind me. Toot gathered me into a hug and tossed candy-and-chewing-gum
leis around my neck. Gramps threw an arm over my shoulder and said that the mask was a definite
improvement. They took me to the new car they had bought, and Gramps showed me how to operate the
air-conditioning. We drove along the highway, past fast-food restaurants and economy motels and used-car
lots strung with festoons. I told them about the trip and everyone back in Djakarta. Gramps told me what
they’d planned for my welcome-back dinner. Toot suggested that I’d need new clothes for school.
Then, suddenly, the conversation stopped. I realized that I was to live with strangers.
The new arrangement hadn’t sounded so bad when my mother first explained it to me. It was time for
me to attend an American school, she had said; I’d run through all the lessons of my correspondence
course. She said that she and Maya would be joining me in Hawaii very soon-a year, tops-and that she’d try
to make it there for Christmas. She reminded me of what a great time I’d had living with Gramps and Toot
just the previous summer-the ice cream, the cartoons, the days at the beach. “And you won’t have to wake
up at four in the morning,” she said, a point that I found most compelling.
It was only now, as I began to adjust to an indefinite stay and watched my grandparents in the rhythm
of their schedules, that I realized how much the two of them had changed. After my mother and I left, they
had sold the big, rambling house near the university and now rented a small, two-bedroom apartment in a
high-rise on Beretania Street. Gramps had left the furniture business to become a life insurance agent, but
as he was unable to convince himself that people needed what he was selling and was sensitive to

Barack Obama - Dreams from My Father 23

It was those sorts of issues, I realize now, less tangible than school transcripts or medical services,
that became the focus of her lessons with me. “If you want to grow into a human being,” she would say to
me, “you’re going to need some values.”
Honesty-Lolo should not have hidden the refrigerator in the storage room when the tax officials came,
even if everyone else, including the tax officials, expected such things. Fairness-the parents of wealthier
students should not give television sets to the teachers during Ramadan, and their children could take no
pride in the higher marks they might have received. Straight talk-if you didn’t like the shirt I bought you for
your birthday, you should have just said so instead of keeping it wadded up at the bottom of your closet.
Independent judgment-just because the other children tease the poor boy about his haircut doesn’t mean
you have to do it too.
It was as if, by traveling halfway around the globe, away from the smugness and hypocrisy that
familiarity had disclosed, my mother could give voice to the virtues of her midwestern past and offer them
up in distilled form. The problem was that she had few reinforcements; whenever she took me aside for
such commentary, I would dutifully nod my assent, but she must have known that many of her ideas
seemed rather impractical. Lolo had merely explained the poverty, the corruption, the constant scramble for
security; he hadn’t created it. It remained all around me and bred a relentless skepticism. My mother’s
confidence in needlepoint virtues depended on a faith I didn’t possess, a faith that she would refuse to
describe as religious; that, in fact, her experience told her was sacrilegious: a faith that rational, thoughtful
people could shape their own destiny. In a land where fatalism remained a necessary tool for enduring
hardship, where ultimate truths were kept separate from day-to-day realities, she was a lonely witness for
secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism.
She had only one ally in all this, and that was the distant authority of my father. Increasingly, she would
remind me of his story, how he had grown up poor, in a poor country, in a poor continent; how his life had
been hard, as hard as anything that Lolo might have known. He hadn’t cut corners, though, or played all the
angles. He was diligent and honest, no matter what it cost him. He had led his life according to principles
that demanded a different kind of toughness, principles that promised a higher form of power. I would follow
his example, my mother decided. I had no choice. It was in the genes.
“You have me to thank for your eyebrows…your father has these little wispy eyebrows that don’t
amount to much. But your brains, your character, you got from him.”
Her message came to embrace black people generally. She would come home with books on the civil
rights movement, the recordings of Mahalia Jackson, the speeches of Dr. King. When she told me stories of
schoolchildren in the South who were forced to read books handed down from wealthier white schools but
who went on to become doctors and lawyers and scientists, I felt chastened by my reluctance to wake up
and study in the mornings. If I told her about the goose-stepping demonstrations my Indonesian Boy Scout
troop performed in front of the president, she might mention a different kind of march, a march of children
no older than me, a march for freedom. Every black man was Thurgood Marshall or Sidney Poitier; every
black woman Fannie Lou Hamer or Lena Horne. To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great
inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear.
Burdens we were to carry with style. More than once, my mother would point out: “Harry Belafonte is
the best-looking man on the planet.”

It was in this context that I came across the picture in Life magazine of the black man who had tried to
peel off his skin. I imagine other black children, then and now, undergoing similar moments of revelation.
Perhaps it comes sooner for most-the parent’s warning not to cross the boundaries of a particular
neighborhood, or the frustration of not having hair like Barbie no matter how long you tease and comb, or
the tale of a father’s or grandfather’s humiliation at the hands of an employer or a cop, overheard while
you’re supposed to be asleep. Maybe it’s easier for a child to receive the bad news in small doses, allowing
for a system of defenses to build up-although I suspect I was one of the luckier ones, having been given a
stretch of childhood free from self-doubt.
I know that seeing that article was violent for me, an ambush attack. My mother had warned me about
bigots-they were ignorant, uneducated people one should avoid. If I could not yet consider my own
mortality, Lolo had helped me understand the potential of disease to cripple, of accidents to maim, of
fortunes to decline. I could correctly identify common greed or cruelty in others, and sometimes even in
myself. But that one photograph had told me something else: that there was a hidden enemy out there, one
that could reach me without anyone’s knowledge, not even my own. When I got home that night from the

Barack Obama - Dreams from My Father 22

the ape; Lolo could sign for our dinners at a company club. Sometimes I would overhear him and my mother
arguing in their bedroom, usually about her refusal to attend his company dinner parties, where American
businessmen from Texas and Louisiana would slap Lolo’s back and boast about the palms they had
greased to obtain the new offshore drilling rights, while their wives complained to my mother about the
quality of Indonesian help. He would ask her how it would look for him to go alone, and remind her that
these were her own people, and my mother’s voice would rise to almost a shout.
They are not my people.
Such arguments were rare, though; my mother and Lolo would remain cordial through the birth of my
sister, Maya, through the separation and eventual divorce, up until the last time I saw Lolo, ten years later,
when my mother helped him travel to Los Angeles to treat a liver ailment that would kill him at the age of
fifty-one. What tension I noticed had mainly to do with the gradual shift in my mother’s attitude toward me.
She had always encouraged my rapid acculturation in Indonesia: It had made me relatively self-sufficient,
undemanding on a tight budget, and extremely well mannered when compared to other American children.
She had taught me to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often characterized Americans
abroad. But she now had learned, just as Lolo had learned, the chasm that separated the life chances of an
American from those of an Indonesian. She knew which side of the divide she wanted her child to be on. I
was an American, she decided, and my true life lay elsewhere.
Her initial efforts centered on education. Without the money to send me to the International School,
where most of Djakarta’s foreign children went, she had arranged from the moment of our arrival to
supplement my Indonesian schooling with lessons from a U.S. correspondence course.
Her efforts now redoubled. Five days a week, she came into my room at four in the morning, force-fed
me breakfast, and proceeded to teach me my English lessons for three hours before I left for school and
she went to work. I offered stiff resistance to this regimen, but in response to every strategy I concocted,
whether unconvincing (“My stomach hurts”) or indisputably true (my eyes kept closing every five minutes),
she would patiently repeat her most powerful defense:
“This is no picnic for me either, buster.”
Then there were the periodic concerns with my safety, the voice of my grandmother ascendant. I
remember coming home after dark one day to find a large search party of neighbors that had been
assembled in our yard. My mother didn’t look happy, but she was so relieved to see me that it took her
several minutes to notice a wet sock, brown with mud, wrapped around my forearm.
“What’s that?”
“What?”
“That. Why do you have a sock wrapped around your arm?”
“I cut myself.”
“Let’s see.”
“It’s not that bad.”
“Barry. Let me see it.”
I unwrapped the sock, exposing a long gash that ran from my wrist to my elbow. It had missed the vein
by an inch, but ran deeper at the muscle, where pinkish flesh pulsed out from under the skin. Hoping to
calm her down, I explained what had happened: A friend and I had hitchhiked out to his family’s farm, and it
started to rain, and on the farm was a terrific place to mudslide, and there was this barbed wire that marked
the farm’s boundaries, and….
“Lolo!”
My mother laughs at this point when she tells this story, the laughter of a mother forgiving her child
those sins that have passed. But her tone alters slightly as she remembers that Lolo suggested we wait until
morning to get me stitched up, and that she had to browbeat our only neighbor with a car to drive us to the
hospital. She remembers that most of the lights were out at the hospital when we arrived, with no
receptionist in sight; she recalls the sound of her frantic footsteps echoing through the hallway until she
finally found two young men in boxer shorts playing dominoes in a small room in the back. When she asked
them where the doctors were, the men cheerfully replied “We are the doctors” and went on to finish their
game before slipping on their trousers and giving me twenty stitches that would leave an ugly scar. And
through it all was the pervading sense that her child’s life might slip away when she wasn’t looking, that
everyone else around her would be too busy trying to survive to notice-that, when it counted, she would
have plenty of sympathy but no one beside her who believed in fighting against a threatening fate.

Barack Obama - Dreams from My Father 21

could soak up the rivers of blood that had once coursed through the streets; the way people could continue
about their business beneath giant posters of the new president as if nothing had happened, a nation busy
developing itself. As her circle of Indonesian friends widened, a few of them would be willing to tell her other
stories-about the corruption that pervaded government agencies, the shakedowns by police and the military,
entire industries carved out for the president’s family and entourage. And with each new story, she would go
to Lolo in private and ask him: “Is it true?”
He would never say. The more she asked, the more steadfast he became in his good-natured silence.
“Why are you worrying about such talk?” he would ask her. “Why don’t you buy a new dress for the party?”
She had finally complained to one of Lolo’s cousins, a pediatrician who had helped look after Lolo during
the war.
“You don’t understand,” the cousin had told her gently.
“Understand what?”
“The circumstances of Lolo’s return. He hadn’t planned on coming back from Hawaii so early, you
know. During the purge, all students studying abroad had been summoned without explanation, their
passports revoked. When Lolo stepped off the plane, he had no idea of what might happen next. We
couldn’t see him; the army officials took him away and questioned him. They told him that he had just been
conscripted and would be going to the jungles of New Guinea for a year. And he was one of the lucky ones.
Students studying in Eastern Bloc countries did much worse. Many of them are still in jail. Or vanished.
“You shouldn’t be too hard on Lolo,” the cousin repeated. “Such times are best forgotten.”
My mother had left the cousin’s house in a daze. Outside, the sun was high, the air full of dust, but
instead of taking a taxi home, she began to walk without direction. She found herself in a wealthy
neighborhood where the diplomats and generals lived in sprawling houses with tall wrought-iron gates. She
saw a woman in bare feet and a tattered shawl wandering through an open gate and up the driveway,
where a group of men were washing a fleet of Mercedes-Benzes and Land Rovers. One of the men shouted
at the woman to leave, but the woman stood where she was, a bony arm stretched out before her, her face
shrouded in shadow. Another man finally dug in his pocket and threw out a handful of coins. The woman
ran after the coins with terrible speed, checking the road suspiciously as she gathered them into her bosom.
Power. The word fixed in my mother’s mind like a curse. In America, it had generally remained hidden
from view until you dug beneath the surface of things; until you visited an Indian reservation or spoke to a
black person whose trust you had earned. But here power was undisguised, indiscriminate, naked, always
fresh in the memory. Power had taken Lolo and yanked him back into line just when he thought he’d
escaped, making him feel its weight, letting him know that his life wasn’t his own. That’s how things were;
you couldn’t change it, you could just live by the rules, so simple once you learned them. And so Lolo had
made his peace with power, learned the wisdom of forgetting; just as his brother-in-law had done, making
millions as a high official in the national oil company; just as another brother had tried to do, only he had
miscalculated and was now reduced to stealing pieces of silverware whenever he came for a visit, selling
them later for loose cigarettes.
She remembered what Lolo had told her once when her constant questioning had finally touched a
nerve. “Guilt is a luxury only foreigners can afford,” he had said. “Like saying whatever pops into your head.”
She didn’t know what it was like to lose everything, to wake up and feel her belly eating itself. She didn’t
know how crowded and treacherous the path to security could be. Without absolute concentration, one
could easily slip, tumble backward.
He was right, of course. She was a foreigner, middle-class and white and protected by her heredity
whether she wanted protection or not. She could always leave if things got too messy. That possibility
negated anything she might say to Lolo; it was the unbreachable barrier between them. She looked out the
window now and saw that Lolo and I had moved on, the grass flattened where the two of us had been. The
sight made her shudder slightly, and she rose to her feet, filled with a sudden panic.
Power was taking her son.

Looking back, I’m not sure that Lolo ever fully understood what my mother was going through during
these years, why the things he was working so hard to provide for her seemed only to increase the distance
between them. He was not a man to ask himself such questions. Instead, he maintained his concentration,
and over the period that we lived in Indonesia, he proceeded to climb. With the help of his brother-in-law, he
landed a new job in the government relations office of an American oil company. We moved to a house in a
better neighborhood; a car replaced the motorcycle; a television and hi-fi replaced the crocodiles and Tata,

Barack Obama - Dreams from My Father 20

freedom fighter named Sukarno as the country’s first president. Sukarno had recently been replaced, but all
the reports said it had been a bloodless coup, and that the people supported the change. Sukarno had
grown corrupt, they said; he was a demagogue, totalitarian, too comfortable with the Communists.
A poor country, underdeveloped, utterly foreign-this much she had known. She was prepared for the
dysentery and fevers, the cold water baths and having to squat over a hole in the ground to pee, the
electricity’s going out every few weeks, the heat and endless mosquitoes. Nothing more than
inconveniences, really, and she was tougher than she looked, tougher than even she had known herself to
be. And anyway, that was part of what had drawn her to Lolo after Barack had left, the promise of
something new and important, helping her husband rebuild a country in a charged and challenging place
beyond her parents’ reach.
But she wasn’t prepared for the loneliness. It was constant, like a shortness of breath. There was
nothing definite that she could point to, really. Lolo had welcomed her warmly and gone out of his way to
make her feel at home, providing her with whatever creature comforts he could afford. His family had
treated her with tact and generosity, and treated her son as one of their own.
Still, something had happened between her and Lolo in the year that they had been apart. In Hawaii he
had been so full of life, so eager with his plans. At night when they were alone, he would tell her about
growing up as a boy during the war, watching his father and eldest brother leave to join the revolutionary
army, hearing the news that both had been killed and everything lost, the Dutch army’s setting their house
aflame, their flight into the countryside, his mother’s selling her gold jewelry a piece at a time in exchange
for food. Things would be changing now that the Dutch had been driven out, Lolo had told her; he would
return and teach at the university, be a part of that change.
He didn’t talk that way anymore. In fact, it seemed as though he barely spoke to her at all, only out of
necessity or when spoken to, and even then only of the task at hand, repairing a leak or planning a trip to
visit some distant cousin. It was as if he had pulled into some dark hidden place, out of reach, taking with
him the brightest part of himself. On some nights, she would hear him up after everyone else had gone to
bed, wandering through the house with a bottle of imported whiskey, nursing his secrets. Other nights he
would tuck a pistol under his pillow before falling off to sleep. Whenever she asked him what was wrong, he
would gently rebuff her, saying he was just tired. It was as if he had come to mistrust words somehow.
Words, and the sentiments words carried.
She suspected these problems had something to do with Lolo’s job. He was working for the army as a
geologist, surveying roads and tunnels, when she arrived. It was mind-numbing work that didn’t pay very
much; the refrigerator alone cost two months’ salary. And now with a wife and child to provide for…no
wonder he was depressed. She hadn’t traveled all this way to be a burden, she decided. She would carry
her own weight.
She found herself a job right away teaching English to Indonesian businessmen at the American
embassy, part of the U.S. foreign aid package to developing countries. The money helped but didn’t relieve
her loneliness. The Indonesian businessmen weren’t much interested in the niceties of the English
language, and several made passes at her. The Americans were mostly older men, careerists in the State
Department, the occasional economist or journalist who would mysteriously disappear for months at a time,
their affiliation or function in the embassy never quite clear. Some of them were caricatures of the ugly
American, prone to making jokes about Indonesians until they found out that she was married to one, and
then they would try to play it off-Don’t take Jim too seriously, the heat’s gotten to him, how’s your son by the
way, fine, fine boy.
These men knew the country, though, or parts of it anyway, the closets where the skeletons were
buried. Over lunch or casual conversation they would share with her things she couldn’t learn in the
published news reports. They explained how Sukarno had frayed badly the nerves of a U.S. government
already obsessed with the march of communism through Indochina, what with his nationalist rhetoric and
his politics of nonalignment-he was as bad as Lumumba or Nasser, only worse, given Indonesia’s strategic
importance. Word was that the CIA had played a part in the coup, although nobody knew for sure. More
certain was the fact that after the coup the military had swept the countryside for supposed Communist
sympathizers. The death toll was anybody’s guess: a few hundred thousand, maybe; half a million. Even the
smart guys at the Agency had lost count.
Innuendo, half-whispered asides; that’s how she found out that we had arrived in Djakarta less than a
year after one of the more brutal and swift campaigns of suppression in modern times. The idea frightened
her, the notion that history could be swallowed up so completely, the same way the rich and loamy earth

Barack Obama - Dreams from My Father 19

would fire the servants without compunction if they were clumsy, forgetful, or otherwise cost him money;
and he would be baffled when either my mother or I tried to protect them from his judgment.
“Your mother has a soft heart,” Lolo would tell me one day after my mother tried to take the blame for
knocking a radio off the dresser. “That’s a good thing in a woman. But you will be a man someday, and a
man needs to have more sense.”
It had nothing to do with good or bad, he explained, like or dislike. It was a matter of taking life on its
own terms.
I felt a hard knock to the jaw, and looked up at Lolo’s sweating face.
“Pay attention. Keep your hands up.”
We sparred for another half hour before Lolo decided it was time for a rest. My arms burned; my head
flashed with a dull, steady throb. We took a jug full of water and sat down near the crocodile pond.
“Tired?” he asked me.
I slumped forward, barely nodding. He smiled, and rolled up one of his pant legs to scratch his calf. I
noticed a series of indented scars that ran from his ankle halfway up his shin.
“What are those?”
“Leech marks,” he said. “From when I was in New Guinea. They crawl inside your army boots while
you’re hiking through the swamps. At night, when you take off your socks, they’re stuck there, fat with blood.
You sprinkle salt on them and they die, but you still have to dig them out with a hot knife.”
I ran my finger over one of the oval grooves. It was smooth and hairless where the skin had been
singed. I asked Lolo if it had hurt.
“Of course it hurt,” he said, taking a sip from the jug. “Sometimes you can’t worry about hurt.
Sometimes you worry only about getting where you have to go.”
We fell silent, and I watched him out of the corner of my eye. I realized that I had never heard him talk
about what he was feeling. I had never seen him really angry or sad. He seemed to inhabit a world of hard
surfaces and well-defined thoughts. A queer notion suddenly sprang into my head.
“Have you ever seen a man killed?” I asked him.
He glanced down, surprised by the question.
“Have you?” I asked again.
“Yes,” he said.
“Was it bloody?”
“Yes.”
I thought for a moment. “Why was the man killed? The one you saw?”
“Because he was weak.”
“That’s all?”
Lolo shrugged and rolled his pant leg back down. “That’s usually enough. Men take advantage of
weakness in other men. They’re just like countries in that way. The strong man takes the weak man’s land.
He makes the weak man work in his fields. If the weak man’s woman is pretty, the strong man will take her.”
He paused to take another sip of water, then asked, “Which would you rather be?”
I didn’t answer, and Lolo squinted up at the sky. “Better to be strong,” he said finally, rising to his feet.
“If you can’t be strong, be clever and make peace with someone who’s strong. But always better to be
strong yourself. Always.”

My mother watched us from inside the house, propped up at her desk grading papers. What are they
talking about? she wondered to herself. Blood and guts, probably; swallowing nails. Cheerful, manly things.
She laughed aloud, then caught herself. That wasn’t fair. She really was grateful for Lolo’s solicitude
toward me. He wouldn’t have treated his own son very differently. She knew that she was lucky for Lolo’s
basic kindness. She set her papers aside and watched me do push-ups. He’s growing so fast, she thought.
She tried to picture herself on the day of our arrival, a mother of twenty-four with a child in tow, married to a
man whose history, whose country, she barely knew. She had known so little then, she realized now, her
innocence carried right along with her American passport. Things could have turned out worse. Much
worse.
She had expected it to be difficult, this new life of hers. Before leaving Hawaii, she had tried to learn all
she could about Indonesia: the population, fifth in the world, with hundreds of tribes and dialects; the history
of colonialism, first the Dutch for over three centuries, then the Japanese during the war, seeking control
over vast stores of oil, metal, and timber; the fight for independence after the war and the emergence of a

Barack Obama - Dreams from My Father 18

hustling odd jobs, catching crickets, battling swift kites with razor-sharp lines-the loser watched his kite soar
off with the wind, and knew that somewhere other children had formed a long wobbly train, their heads
toward the sky, waiting for their prize to land. With Lolo, I learned how to eat small green chill peppers raw
with dinner (plenty of rice), and, away from the dinner table, I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake
meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy). Like many Indonesians, Lolo followed a brand of Islam
that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths. He explained that a man
took on the powers of whatever he ate: One day soon, he promised, he would bring home a piece of tiger
meat for us to share.
That’s how things were, one long adventure, the bounty of a young boy’s life. In letters to my
grandparents, I would faithfully record many of these events, confident that more civilizing packages of
chocolate and peanut butter would surely follow. But not everything made its way into my letters; some
things I found too difficult to explain. I didn’t tell Toot and Gramps about the face of the man who had come
to our door one day with a gaping hole where his nose should have been: the whistling sound he made as
he asked my mother for food. Nor did I mention the time that one of my friends told me in the middle of
recess that his baby brother had died the night before of an evil spirit brought in by the wind-the terror that
danced in my friend’s eyes for the briefest of moments before he let out a strange laugh and punched my
arm and broke off into a breathless run. There was the empty look on the faces of farmers the year the rains
never came, the stoop in their shoulders as they wandered barefoot through their barren, cracked fields,
bending over every so often to crumble earth between their fingers; and their desperation the following year
when the rains lasted for over a month, swelling the river and fields until the streets gushed with water and
swept as high as my waist and families scrambled to rescue their goats and their hens even as chunks of
their huts washed away.
The world was violent, I was learning, unpredictable and often cruel. My grandparents knew nothing
about such a world, I decided; there was no point in disturbing them with questions they couldn’t answer.
Sometimes, when my mother came home from work, I would tell her the things I had seen or heard, and
she would stroke my forehead, listening intently, trying her best to explain what she could. I always
appreciated the attention-her voice, the touch of her hand, defined all that was secure. But her knowledge of
floods and exorcisms and cockfights left much to be desired. Everything was as new to her as it was to me,
and I would leave such conversations feeling that my questions had only given her unnecessary cause for
concern.
So it was to Lolo that I turned for guidance and instruction. He didn’t talk much, but he was easy to be
with. With his family and friends he introduced me as his son, but he never pressed things beyond matter-
of-fact advice or pretended that our relationship was more than it was. I appreciated this distance; it implied
a manly trust. And his knowledge of the world seemed inexhaustible. Not just how to change a flat tire or
open in chess. He knew more elusive things, ways of managing the emotions I felt, ways to explain fate’s
constant mysteries.
Like how to deal with beggars. They seemed to be everywhere, a gallery of ills-men, women, children,
in tattered clothing matted with dirt, some without arms, others without feet, victims of scurvy or polio or
leprosy walking on their hands or rolling down the crowded sidewalks in jerry-built carts, their legs twisted
behind them like contortionists’. At first, I watched my mother give over her money to anyone who stopped
at our door or stretched out an arm as we passed on the streets. Later, when it became clear that the tide of
pain was endless, she gave more selectively, learning to calibrate the levels of misery. Lolo thought her
moral calculations endearing but silly, and whenever he caught me following her example with the few coins
in my possession, he would raise his eyebrows and take me aside.
“How much money do you have?” he would ask.
I’d empty my pocket. “Thirty rupiah.”
“How many beggars are there on the street?”
I tried to imagine the number that had come by the house in the last week. “You see?” he said, once it
was clear I’d lost count. “Better to save your money and make sure you don’t end up on the street yourself.”
He was the same way about servants. They were mostly young villagers newly arrived in the city, often
working for families not much better off than themselves, sending money to their people back in the country
or saving enough to start their own businesses. If they had ambition, Lolo was willing to help them get their
start, and he would generally tolerate their personal idiosyncrasies: for over a year, he employed a good-
natured young man who liked to dress up as a woman on weekends-Lolo loved the man’s cooking. But he
hustling odd jobs, catching crickets, battling swift kites with razor-sharp lines-the loser watched his kite soar
off with the wind, and knew that somewhere other children had formed a long wobbly train, their heads
toward the sky, waiting for their prize to land. With Lolo, I learned how to eat small green chill peppers raw
with dinner (plenty of rice), and, away from the dinner table, I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake
meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy). Like many Indonesians, Lolo followed a brand of Islam
that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths. He explained that a man
took on the powers of whatever he ate: One day soon, he promised, he would bring home a piece of tiger
meat for us to share.
That’s how things were, one long adventure, the bounty of a young boy’s life. In letters to my
grandparents, I would faithfully record many of these events, confident that more civilizing packages of
chocolate and peanut butter would surely follow. But not everything made its way into my letters; some
things I found too difficult to explain. I didn’t tell Toot and Gramps about the face of the man who had come
to our door one day with a gaping hole where his nose should have been: the whistling sound he made as
he asked my mother for food. Nor did I mention the time that one of my friends told me in the middle of
recess that his baby brother had died the night before of an evil spirit brought in by the wind-the terror that
danced in my friend’s eyes for the briefest of moments before he let out a strange laugh and punched my
arm and broke off into a breathless run. There was the empty look on the faces of farmers the year the rains
never came, the stoop in their shoulders as they wandered barefoot through their barren, cracked fields,
bending over every so often to crumble earth between their fingers; and their desperation the following year
when the rains lasted for over a month, swelling the river and fields until the streets gushed with water and
swept as high as my waist and families scrambled to rescue their goats and their hens even as chunks of
their huts washed away.
The world was violent, I was learning, unpredictable and often cruel. My grandparents knew nothing
about such a world, I decided; there was no point in disturbing them with questions they couldn’t answer.
Sometimes, when my mother came home from work, I would tell her the things I had seen or heard, and
she would stroke my forehead, listening intently, trying her best to explain what she could. I always
appreciated the attention-her voice, the touch of her hand, defined all that was secure. But her knowledge of
floods and exorcisms and cockfights left much to be desired. Everything was as new to her as it was to me,
and I would leave such conversations feeling that my questions had only given her unnecessary cause for
concern.
So it was to Lolo that I turned for guidance and instruction. He didn’t talk much, but he was easy to be
with. With his family and friends he introduced me as his son, but he never pressed things beyond matter-
of-fact advice or pretended that our relationship was more than it was. I appreciated this distance; it implied
a manly trust. And his knowledge of the world seemed inexhaustible. Not just how to change a flat tire or
open in chess. He knew more elusive things, ways of managing the emotions I felt, ways to explain fate’s
constant mysteries.
Like how to deal with beggars. They seemed to be everywhere, a gallery of ills-men, women, children,
in tattered clothing matted with dirt, some without arms, others without feet, victims of scurvy or polio or
leprosy walking on their hands or rolling down the crowded sidewalks in jerry-built carts, their legs twisted
behind them like contortionists’. At first, I watched my mother give over her money to anyone who stopped
at our door or stretched out an arm as we passed on the streets. Later, when it became clear that the tide of
pain was endless, she gave more selectively, learning to calibrate the levels of misery. Lolo thought her
moral calculations endearing but silly, and whenever he caught me following her example with the few coins
in my possession, he would raise his eyebrows and take me aside.
“How much money do you have?” he would ask.
I’d empty my pocket. “Thirty rupiah.”
“How many beggars are there on the street?”
I tried to imagine the number that had come by the house in the last week. “You see?” he said, once it
was clear I’d lost count. “Better to save your money and make sure you don’t end up on the street yourself.”
He was the same way about servants. They were mostly young villagers newly arrived in the city, often
working for families not much better off than themselves, sending money to their people back in the country
or saving enough to start their own businesses. If they had ambition, Lolo was willing to help them get their
start, and he would generally tolerate their personal idiosyncrasies: for over a year, he employed a good-
natured young man who liked to dress up as a woman on weekends-Lolo loved the man’s cooking. But he

Barack Obama - Dreams from My Father 17

birds of paradise, a white cockatoo, and finally two baby crocodiles, half submerged in a fenced-off pond
toward the edge of the compound. Lolo stared down at the reptiles. “There were three,” he said, “but the
biggest one crawled out through a hole in the fence. Slipped into somebody’s rice field and ate one of the
man’s ducks. We had to hunt it by torchlight.”
There wasn’t much light left, but we took a short walk down the mud path into the village. Groups of
giggling neighborhood children waved from their compounds, and a few barefoot old men came up to shake
our hands. We stopped at the common, where one of Lolo’s men was grazing a few goats, and a small boy
came up beside me holding a dragonfly that hovered at the end of a string. When we returned to the house,
the man who had carried our luggage was standing in the backyard with a rust-colored hen tucked under his
arm and a long knife in his right hand. He said something to Lolo, who nodded and called over to my mother
and me. My mother told me to wait where I was and sent Lolo a questioning glance.
“Don’t you think he’s a little young?”
Lolo shrugged and looked down at me. “The boy should know where his dinner is coming from. What
do you think, Barry?” I looked at my mother, then turned back to face the man holding the chicken. Lolo
nodded again, and I watched the man set the bird down, pinning it gently under one knee and pulling its
neck out across a narrow gutter. For a moment the bird struggled, beating its wings hard against the
ground, a few feathers dancing up with the wind. Then it grew completely still. The man pulled the blade
across the bird’s neck in a single smooth motion. Blood shot out in a long, crimson ribbon. The man stood
up, holding the bird far away from his body, and suddenly tossed it high into the air. It landed with a thud,
then struggled to its feet, its head lolling grotesquely against its side, its legs pumping wildly in a wide,
wobbly circle. I watched as the circle grew smaller, the blood trickling down to a gurgle, until finally the bird
collapsed, lifeless on the grass.
Lolo rubbed his hand across my head and told me and my mother to go wash up before dinner. The
three of us ate quietly under a dim yellow bulb-chicken stew and rice, and then a dessert of red, hairy-
skinned fruit so sweet at the center that only a stomachache could make me stop. Later, lying alone
beneath a mosquito net canopy, I listened to the crickets chirp under the moonlight and remembered the
last twitch of life that I’d witnessed a few hours before. I could barely believe my good fortune.

“The first thing to remember is how to protect yourself.”
Lolo and I faced off in the backyard. A day earlier, I had shown up at the house with an egg-sized lump
on the side of my head. Lolo had looked up from washing his motorcycle and asked me what had
happened, and I told him about my tussle with an older boy who lived down the road. The boy had run off
with my friend’s soccer ball, I said, in the middle of our game. When I chased after him, the boy picked up a
rock. It wasn’t fair, I said, my voice choking with aggrievement. He had cheated.
Lolo had parted my hair with his fingers and silently examined the wound. “It’s not bleeding,” he said
finally, before returning to his chrome.
I thought that had ended the matter. But when he came home from work the next day, he had with him
two pairs of boxing gloves. They smelled of new leather, the larger pair black, the smaller pair red, the laces
tied together and thrown over his shoulder.
He now finished tying the laces on my gloves and stepped back to examine his handiwork. My hands
dangled at my sides like bulbs at the ends of thin stalks. He shook his head and raised the gloves to cover
my face.
“There. Keep your hands up.” He adjusted my elbows, then crouched into a stance and started to bob.
“You want to keep moving, but always stay low-don’t give them a target. How does that feel?” I nodded,
copying his movements as best I could. After a few minutes, he stopped and held his palm up in front of my
nose.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s see your swing.”
This I could do. I took a step back, wound up, and delivered my best shot. His hand barely wobbled.
“Not bad,” Lolo said. He nodded to himself, his expression unchanged. “Not bad at all. Agh, but look
where your hands are now. What did I tell you? Get them up….”
I raised my arms, throwing soft jabs at Lolo’s palm, glancing up at him every so often and realizing how
familiar his face had become after our two years together, as familiar as the earth on which we stood. It had
taken me less than six months to learn Indonesia’s language, its customs, and its legends. I had survived
chicken pox, measles, and the sting of my teachers’ bamboo switches. The children of farmers, servants,
and low-level bureaucrats had become my best friends, and together we ran the streets morning and night,

Barack Obama - Dreams from My Father 15

Our audience over, my mother sat me down in the library while she went off to do some work. I finished
my comic books and the homework my mother had made me bring before climbing out of my chair to
browse through the stacks. Most of the books held little interest for a nine-year-old boy-World Bank reports,
geological surveys, five-year development plans. But in one corner I found a collection of Life magazines
neatly displayed in clear plastic binders. I thumbed through the glossy advertisements-Goodyear Tires and
Dodge Fever, Zenith TV (“Why not the best?”) and Campbell’s Soup (“Mm-mm good!”), men in white
turtlenecks pouring Seagram’s over ice as women in red miniskirts looked on admiringly-and felt vaguely
reassured. When I came upon a news photograph, I tried to guess the subject of the story before reading
the caption. The photograph of French children dashing over cobblestoned streets: that was a happy scene,
a game of hide-and-go-seek after a day of schoolbooks and chores; their laughter spoke of freedom. The
photograph of a Japanese woman cradling a young, naked girl in a shallow tub: that was sad; the girl was
sick, her legs twisted, her head fallen back against the mother’s breast, the mother’s face tight with grief,
perhaps she blamed herself….
Eventually I came across a photograph of an older man in dark glasses and a raincoat walking down
an empty road. I couldn’t guess what this picture was about; there seemed nothing unusual about the
subject. On the next page was another photograph, this one a close-up of the same man’s hands. They had
a strange, unnatural pallor, as if blood had been drawn from the flesh. Turning back to the first picture, I now
saw that the man’s crinkly hair, his heavy lips and broad, fleshy nose, all had this same uneven, ghostly
hue.
He must be terribly sick, I thought. A radiation victim, maybe, or an albino-I had seen one of those on
the street a few days before, and my mother had explained about such things. Except when I read the
words that went with the picture, that wasn’t it at all. The man had received a chemical treatment, the article
explained, to lighten his complexion. He had paid for it with his own money. He expressed some regret
about trying to pass himself off as a white man, was sorry about how badly things had turned out. But the
results were irreversible. There were thousands of people like him, black men and women back in America
who’d undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white
person.
I felt my face and neck get hot. My stomach knotted; the type began to blur on the page. Did my
mother know about this? What about her boss-why was he so calm, reading through his reports a few feet
down the hall? I had a desperate urge to jump out of my seat, to show them what I had learned, to demand
some explanation or assurance. But something held me back. As in a dream, I had no voice for my
newfound fear. By the time my mother came to take me home, my face wore a smile and the magazines
were back in their proper place. The room, the air, was quiet as before.

We had lived in Indonesia for over three years by that time, the result of my mother’s marriage to an
Indonesian named Lolo, another student she had met at the University of Hawaii. His name meant “crazy” in
Hawaiian, which tickled Gramps to no end, but the meaning didn’t suit the man, for Lolo possessed the
good manners and easy grace of his people. He was short and brown, handsome, with thick black hair and
features that could have as easily been Mexican or Samoan as Indonesian; his tennis game was good, his
smile uncommonly even, and his temperament imperturbable. For two years, from the time I was four until I
was six, he endured endless hours of chess with Gramps and long wrestling sessions with me. When my
mother sat me down one day to tell me that Lolo had proposed and wanted us to move with him to a
faraway place, I wasn’t surprised and expressed no objections. I did ask her if she loved him-I had been
around long enough to know such things were important. My mother’s chin trembled, as it still does when
she’s fighting back tears, and she pulled me into a long hug that made me feel very brave, although I wasn’t
sure why.
Lolo left Hawaii quite suddenly after that, and my mother and I spent months in preparation-passports,
visas, plane tickets, hotel reservations, an endless series of shots. While we packed, my grandfather pulled
out an atlas and ticked off the names in Indonesia’s island chain: Java, Borneo, Sumatra, Bali. He
remembered some of the names, he said, from reading Joseph Conrad as a boy. The Spice Islands, they
were called back then, enchanted names, shrouded in mystery. “Says here they still got tigers over there,”
he said. “And orangutangs.” He looked up from the book and his eyes widened. “Says here they even got
headhunters!” Meanwhile, Toot called the State Department to find out if the country was stable. Whoever
she spoke to there informed her that the situation was under control. Still, she insisted that we pack several
trunks full of foodstuffs: Tang, powdered milk, cans of sardines. “You never know what these people will

Barack Obama - Dreams from My Father 16

eat,” she said firmly. My mother sighed, but Toot tossed in several boxes of candy to win me over to her
side.
Finally, we boarded a Pan Am jet for our flight around the globe. I wore a long-sleeved white shirt and
a gray clip-on tie, and the stewardesses plied me with puzzles and extra peanuts and a set of metal pilot’s
wings that I wore over my breast pocket. On a three-day stopover in Japan, we walked through bone-
chilling rains to see the great bronze Buddha at Kamakura and ate green tea ice cream on a ferry that
passed through high mountain lakes. In the evenings my mother studied flash cards. Walking off the plane
in Djakarta, the tarmac rippling with heat, the sun bright as a furnace, I clutched her hand, determined to
protect her from whatever might come.
Lolo was there to greet us, a few pounds heavier, a bushy mustache now hovering over his smile. He
hugged my mother, hoisted me up into the air, and told us to follow a small, wiry man who was carrying our
luggage straight past the long line at customs and into an awaiting car. The man smiled cheerfully as he
lifted the bags into the trunk, and my mother tried to say something to him but the man just laughed and
nodded his head. People swirled around us, speaking rapidly in a language I didn’t know, smelling
unfamiliar. For a long time we watched Lolo talk to a group of brown-uniformed soldiers. The soldiers had
guns in their holsters, but they appeared to be in a jovial mood, laughing at something that Lolo had said.
When Lolo finally joined us, my mother asked if the soldiers needed to check through our bags.
“Don’t worry…that’s been all taken care of,” Lolo said, climbing into the driver’s seat. “Those are
friends of mine.”
The car was borrowed, he told us, but he had bought a brand-new motorcycle-a Japanese make, but
good enough for now. The new house was finished; just a few touch-ups remained to be done. I was
already enrolled in a nearby school, and the relatives were anxious to meet us. As he and my mother
talked, I stuck my head out the backseat window and stared at the passing landscape, brown and green
uninterrupted, villages falling back into forest, the smell of diesel oil and wood smoke. Men and women
stepped like cranes through the rice paddies, their faces hidden by their wide straw hats. A boy, wet and
slick as an otter, sat on the back of a dumb-faced water buffalo, whipping its haunch with a stick of bamboo.
The streets became more congested, small stores and markets and men pulling carts loaded with gravel
and timber, then the buildings grew taller, like buildings in Hawaii-Hotel Indonesia, very modern, Lolo said,
and the new shopping center, white and gleaming-but only a few were higher than the trees that now cooled
the road. When we passed a row of big houses with high hedges and sentry posts, my mother said
something I couldn’t entirely make out, something about the government and a man named Sukarno.
“Who’s Sukarno?” I shouted from the backseat, but Lolo appeared not to hear me. Instead, he touched
my arm and motioned ahead of us. “Look,” he said, pointing upward. There, standing astride the road, was
a towering giant at least ten stories tall, with the body of a man and the face of an ape.
“That’s Hanuman,” Lolo said as we circled the statue, “the monkey god.” I turned around in my seat,
mesmerized by the solitary figure, so dark against the sun, poised to leap into the sky as puny traffic swirled
around its feet. “He’s a great warrior,” Lolo said firmly. “Strong as a hundred men. When he fights the
demons, he’s never defeated.”
The house was in a still-developing area on the outskirts of town. The road ran over a narrow bridge
that spanned a wide brown river; as we passed, I could see villagers bathing and washing clothes along the
steep banks below. The road then turned from tarmac to gravel to dirt as it wound past small stores and
whitewashed bungalows until it finally petered out into the narrow footpaths of the kampong. The house
itself was modest stucco and red tile, but it was open and airy, with a big mango tree in the small courtyard
in front. As we passed through the gate, Lolo announced that he had a surprise for me; but before he could
explain we heard a deafening howl from high up in the tree. My mother and I jumped back with a start and
saw a big, hairy creature with a small, flat head and long, menacing arms drop onto a low branch.
“A monkey!” I shouted.
“An ape,” my mother corrected.
Lolo drew a peanut from his pocket and handed it to the animal’s grasping fingers. “His name is Tata,”
he said. “I brought him all the way from New Guinea for you.”
I started to step forward to get a closer look, but Tata threatened to lunge, his dark-ringed eyes fierce
and suspicious. I decided to stay where I was.
“Don’t worry,” Lolo said, handing Tata another peanut. “He’s on a leash. Come-there’s more.”
I looked up at my mother, and she gave me a tentative smile. In the backyard, we found what seemed
like a small zoo: chickens and ducks running every which way, a big yellow dog with a baleful howl, two

Barack Obama - Dreams from My Father 14

differences of race or culture would instruct and amuse and perhaps even ennoble. A useful fiction, one that
haunts me no less than it haunted my family, evoking as it does some lost Eden that extends beyond mere
childhood.
There was only one problem: my father was missing. He had left paradise, and nothing that my mother
or grandparents told me could obviate that single, unassailable fact. Their stories didn’t tell me why he had
left. They couldn’t describe what it might have been like had he stayed. Like the janitor, Mr. Reed, or the
black girl who churned up dust as she raced down a Texas road, my father became a prop in someone
else’s narrative. An attractive prop-the alien figure with the heart of gold, the mysterious stranger who saves
the town and wins the girl-but a prop nonetheless.
I don’t really blame my mother or grandparents for this. My father may have preferred the image they
created for him-indeed, he may have been complicit in its creation. In an article published in the Honolulu
Star-Bulletin upon his graduation, he appears guarded and responsible, the model student, ambassador for
his continent. He mildly scolds the university for herding visiting students into dormitories and forcing them
to attend programs designed to promote cultural understanding-a distraction, he says, from the practical
training he seeks. Although he hasn’t experienced any problems himself, he detects self-segregation and
overt discrimination taking place between the various ethnic groups and expresses wry amusement at the
fact that “Caucasians” in Hawaii are occasionally at the receiving end of prejudice. But if his assessment is
relatively clear-eyed, he is careful to end on a happy note: One thing other nations can learn from Hawaii,
he says, is the willingness of races to work together toward common development, something he has found
whites elsewhere too often unwilling to do.
I discovered this article, folded away among my birth certificate and old vaccination forms, when I was
in high school. It’s a short piece, with a photograph of him. No mention is made of my mother or me, and I’m
left to wonder whether the omission was intentional on my father’s part, in anticipation of his long departure.
Perhaps the reporter failed to ask personal questions, intimidated by my father’s imperious manner; or
perhaps it was an editorial decision, not part of the simple story that they were looking for. I wonder, too,
whether the omission caused a fight between my parents.
I would not have known at the time, for I was too young to realize that I was supposed to have a live-in
father, just as I was too young to know that I needed a race. For an improbably short span it seems that my
father fell under the same spell as my mother and her parents; and for the first six years of my life, even as
that spell was broken and the worlds that they thought they’d left behind reclaimed each of them, I occupied
the place where their dreams had been.

CHAPTER TWO

T HE ROAD TO THE embassy was choked with traffic: cars, motorcycles, tricycle rickshaws, buses
and jitneys filled to twice their capacity, a procession of wheels and limbs all fighting for space in the
midafternoon heat. We nudged forward a few feet, stopped, found an opening, stopped again. Our taxi
driver shooed away a group of boys who were hawking gum and loose cigarettes, then barely avoided a
motor scooter carrying an entire family on its back-father, mother, son, and daughter all leaning as one into
a turn, their mouths wrapped with handkerchiefs to blunt the exhaust, a family of bandits. Along the side of
the road, wizened brown women in faded brown sarongs stacked straw baskets high with ripening fruit, and
a pair of mechanics squatted before their open-air garage, lazily brushing away flies as they took an engine
apart. Behind them, the brown earth dipped into a smoldering dump where a pair of roundheaded tots
frantically chased a scrawny black hen. The children slipped in the mud and corn husks and banana leaves,
squealing with pleasure, until they disappeared down the dirt road beyond.
Things eased up once we hit the highway, and the taxi dropped us off in front of the embassy, where a
pair of smartly dressed Marines nodded in greeting. Inside the courtyard, the clamor of the street was
replaced by the steady rhythm of gardening clippers. My mother’s boss was a portly black man with closely
cropped hair sprinkled gray at the temples. An American flag draped down in rich folds from the pole beside
his desk. He reached out and offered a firm handshake: “How are you, young man?” He smelled of after-
shave and his starched collar cut hard into his neck. I stood at attention as I answered his questions about
the progress of my studies. The air in the office was cool and dry, like the air of mountain peaks: the pure
and heady breeze of privilege.

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hill, I can retrace the first steps I took as a child and be stunned by the beauty of the islands. The trembling
blue plane of the Pacific. The moss-covered cliffs and the cool rush of Manoa Falls, with its ginger blossoms
and high canopies filled with the sound of invisible birds. The North Shore’s thunderous waves, crumbling
as if in a slow-motion reel. The shadows off Pali’s peaks; the sultry, scented air.
Hawaii! To my family, newly arrived in 1959, it must have seemed as if the earth itself, weary of
stampeding armies and bitter civilization, had forced up this chain of emerald rock where pioneers from
across the globe could populate the land with children bronzed by the sun. The ugly conquest of the native
Hawaiians through aborted treaties and crippling disease brought by the missionaries; the carving up of rich
volcanic soil by American companies for sugarcane and pineapple plantations; the indenturing system that
kept Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino immigrants stooped sunup to sunset in these same fields; the
internment of Japanese-Americans during the war-all this was recent history. And yet, by the time my family
arrived, it had somehow vanished from collective memory, like morning mist that the sun burned away.
There were too many races, with power among them too diffuse, to impose the mainland’s rigid caste
system; and so few blacks that the most ardent segregationist could enjoy a vacation secure in the
knowledge that race mixing in Hawaii had little to do with the established order back home.
Thus the legend was made of Hawaii as the one true melting pot, an experiment in racial harmony. My
grandparents-especially Gramps, who came into contact with a range of people through his furniture
business-threw themselves into the cause of mutual understanding. An old copy of Dale Carnegie’s How to
Win Friends and Influence People still sits on his bookshelf. And growing up, I would hear in him the breezy,
chatty style that he must have decided would help him with his customers. He would whip out pictures of the
family and offer his life story to the nearest stranger; he would pump the hand of the mailman or make off-
color jokes to our waitresses at restaurants.
Such antics used to make me cringe, but people more forgiving than a grandson appreciated his
curiosity, so that while he never gained much influence, he made himself a wide circle of friends. A
Japanese-American man who called himself Freddy and ran a small market near our house would save us
the choicest cuts of aku for sashimi and give me rice candy with edible wrappers. Every so often, the
Hawaiians who worked at my grandfather’s store as deliverymen would invite us over for poi and roast pig,
which Gramps gobbled down heartily (Toot would smoke cigarettes until she could get home and fix herself
some scrambled eggs). Sometimes I would accompany Gramps to Ali’i Park, where he liked to play
checkers with the old Filipino men who smoked cheap cigars and spat up betel-nut juice as if it were blood.
And I still remember how, one early morning, hours before the sun rose, a Portuguese man to whom my
grandfather had given a good deal on a sofa set took us out to spear fish off Kailua Bay. A gas lantern hung
from the cabin on the small fishing boat as I watched the men dive into inky-black waters, the beams of their
flashlights glowing beneath the surface until they emerged with a large fish, iridescent and flopping at the
end of one pole. Gramps told me its Hawaiian name, humu-humu-nuku-nuku-apuaa, which we repeated to
each other the entire way home.
In such surroundings, my racial stock caused my grandparents few problems, and they quickly adopted
the scornful attitude local residents took toward visitors who expressed such hang-ups. Sometimes when
Gramps saw tourists watching me play in the sand, he would come up beside them and whisper, with
appropriate reverence, that I was the great-grandson of King Kamehameha, Hawaii’s first monarch. “I’m
sure that your picture’s in a thousand scrapbooks, Bar,” he liked to tell me with a grin, “from Idaho to
Maine.” That particular story is ambiguous, I think; I see in it a strategy to avoid hard issues. And yet
Gramps would just as readily tell another story, the one about the tourist who saw me swimming one day
and, not knowing who she was talking to, commented that “swimming must just come naturally to these
Hawaiians.” To which he responded that that would be hard to figure, since “that boy happens to be my
grandson, his mother is from Kansas, his father is from the interior of Kenya, and there isn’t an ocean for
miles in either damn place.” For my grandfather, race wasn’t something you really needed to worry about
anymore; if ignorance still held fast in certain locales, it was safe to assume that the rest of the world would
be catching up soon.

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

Barack Obama - Dreams from My Father 12

“You best talk to your daughter, Mr. Dunham. White girls don’t play with coloreds in this town.”

It’s hard to know how much weight to give to these episodes, what permanent allegiances were made
or broken, or whether they stand out only in the light of subsequent events. Whenever he spoke to me
about it, Gramps would insist that the family left Texas in part because of their discomfort with such racism.
Toot would be more circumspect; once, when we were alone, she told me that they had moved from Texas
only because Gramps wasn’t doing particularly well on his job, and because a friend in Seattle had
promised him something better. According to her, the word 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.
And yet I don’t entirely dismiss Gramps’s recollection of events as a convenient bit of puffery, another
act of white revisionism. I can’t, precisely because I know how strongly Gramps believed in his fictions, how
badly he wanted them to be true, even if he didn’t always know how to make them so. After Texas I suspect
that black people became a part of these fictions of his, the narrative that worked its way through his
dreams. The condition of the black race, their pain, their wounds, would in his mind become merged with his
own: the absent father and the hint of scandal, a mother who had gone away, the cruelty of other children,
the realization that he was no fair-haired boy-that he looked like a “wop.” Racism was part of that past, his
instincts told him, part of convention and respectability and status, the smirks and whispers and gossip that
had kept him on the outside looking in.
Those instincts count for something, I think; for many white people of my grandparents’ generation and
background, the instincts ran in an opposite direction, the direction of the mob. And although Gramps’s
relationship with my mother was already strained by the time they reached Hawaii-she would never quite
forgive his instability and often-violent temper and would grow ashamed of his crude, ham-fisted manners-it
was this desire of his to obliterate the past, this confidence in the possibility of remaking the world from
whole cloth, that proved to be his most lasting patrimony. Whether Gramps realized it or not, the sight of his
daughter with a black man offered at some deep unexplored level a window into his own heart.
Not that such self-knowledge, even if accessible, would have made my mother’s engagement any
easier for him to swallow. In fact, how and when the marriage occurred remains a bit murky, a bill of
particulars that I’ve never quite had the courage to explore. There’s no record of a real wedding, a cake, a
ring, a giving away of the bride. No families were in attendance; it’s not even clear that people back in
Kansas were fully informed. Just a small civil ceremony, a justice of the peace. The whole thing seems so
fragile in retrospect, so haphazard. And perhaps that’s how my grandparents intended it to be, a trial that
would pass, just a matter of time, so long as they maintained a stiff upper lip and didn’t do anything drastic.
If so, they miscalculated not only my mother’s quiet determination but also the sway of their own
emotions. First the baby arrived, eight pounds, two ounces, with ten toes and ten fingers and hungry for
food. What in the heck were they supposed to do?
Then time and place began to conspire, transforming potential misfortune into something tolerable,
even a source of pride. Sharing a few beers with my father, Gramps might listen to his new son-in-law
sound off about politics or the economy, about far-off places like Whitehall or the Kremlin, and imagine
himself seeing into the future. He would begin to read the newspapers more carefully, finding early reports
of America’s newfound integrationist creed, and decide in his mind that the world was shrinking, sympathies
changing; that the family from Wichita had in fact moved to the forefront of Kennedy’s New Frontier and Dr.
King’s magnificent dream. How could America send men into space and still keep its black citizens in
bondage? One of my earliest memories is of sitting on my grandfather’s shoulders as the astronauts from
one of the Apollo missions arrived at Hickam Air Force Base after a successful splashdown. I remember the
astronauts, in aviator glasses, as being far away, barely visible through the portal of an isolation chamber.
But Gramps would always swear that one of the astronauts waved just at me and that I waved back. It was
part of the story he told himself. With his black son-in-law and his brown grandson, Gramps had entered the
space age.
And what better port for setting off on this new adventure than Hawaii, the Union’s newest member?
Even now, with the state’s population quadrupled, with Waikiki jammed wall to wall with fast-food
emporiums and pornographic video stores and subdivisions marching relentlessly into every fold of green

Barack Obama - Dreams from My Father 11

north into Kansas well before my grandparents were born, but at least around Wichita it appeared in its
more informal, genteel form, without much of the violence that pervaded the Deep South. The same
unspoken codes that governed life among whites kept contact between the races to a minimum; when black
people appear at all in the Kansas of my grandparents’ memories, the images are fleeting-black men who
come around the oil fields once in a while, searching for work as hired hands; black women taking in the
white folks’ laundry or helping clean white homes. Blacks are there but not there, like Sam the piano player
or Beulah the maid or Amos and Andy on the radio-shadowy, silent presences that elicit neither passion nor
fear.
It wasn’t until my family moved to Texas, after the war, that questions of race began to intrude on their
lives. During his first week on the job there, Gramps received some friendly advice from his fellow furniture
salesmen about serving black and Mexican customers: “If the coloreds want to look at the merchandise,
they need to come after hours and arrange for their own delivery.” Later, at the bank where she worked,
Toot made the acquaintance of the janitor, a tall and dignified black World War II vet she remembers only
as Mr. Reed. While the two of them chatted in the hallway one day, a secretary in the office stormed up and
hissed that Toot should never, ever, “call no nigger ‘Mister.’ ” Not long afterward, Toot would find Mr. Reed
in a corner of the building weeping quietly to himself. When she asked him what was wrong, he straightened
his back, dried his eyes, and responded with a question of his own.
“What have we ever done to be treated so mean?”
My grandmother didn’t have an answer that day, but the question lingered in her mind, one that she
and Gramps would sometimes discuss once my mother had gone to bed. They decided that Toot would
keep calling Mr. Reed “Mister,” although she understood, with a mixture of relief and sadness, the careful
distance that the janitor now maintained whenever they passed each other in the halls. Gramps began to
decline invitations from his coworkers to go out for a beer, telling them he had to get home to keep the wife
happy. They grew inward, skittish, filled with vague apprehension, as if they were permanent strangers in
town.
This bad new air hit my mother the hardest. She was eleven or twelve by this time, an only child just
growing out of a bad case of asthma. The illness, along with the numerous moves, had made her something
of a loner-cheerful and easy-tempered but prone to bury her head in a book or wander off on solitary walks-
and Toot began to worry that this latest move had only made her daughter’s eccentricities more
pronounced. My mother made few friends at her new school. She was teased mercilessly for her name,
Stanley Ann (one of Gramps’s less judicious ideas-he had wanted a son). Stanley Steamer, they called her.
Stan the Man. When Toot got home from work, she would usually find my mother alone in the front yard,
swinging her legs off the porch or lying in the grass, pulled into some solitary world of her own.
Except for one day. There was that one hot, windless day when Toot came home to find a crowd of
children gathered outside the picket fence that surrounded their house. As Toot drew closer, she could
make out the sounds of mirthless laughter, the contortions of rage and disgust on the children’s faces. The
children were chanting, in a high-pitched, alternating rhythm:
“Nigger lover!”
“Dirty Yankee!”
“Nigger lover!”
The children scattered when they saw Toot, but not before one of the boys had sent the stone in his
hand sailing over the fence. Toot’s eyes followed the stone’s trajectory as it came to rest at the foot of a
tree. And there she saw the cause for all the excitement: my mother and a black girl of about the same age
lying side by side on their stomachs in the grass, their skirts gathered up above their knees, their toes dug
into the ground, their heads propped up on their hands in front of one of my mother’s books. From a
distance the two girls seemed perfectly serene beneath the leafy shade. It was only when Toot opened the
gate that she realized the black girl was shaking and my mother’s eyes shone with tears. The girls remained
motionless, paralyzed in their fear, until Toot finally leaned down and put her hands on both their heads.
“If you two are going to play,” she said, “then for goodness sake, go on inside. Come on. Both of you.”
She picked up my mother and reached for the other girl’s hand, but before she could say anything more, the
girl was in a full sprint, her long legs like a whippet’s as she vanished down the street.
Gramps was beside himself when he heard what had happened. He interrogated my mother, wrote
down names. The next day he took the morning off from work to visit the school principal. He personally
called the parents of some of the offending children to give them a piece of his mind. And from every adult
that he spoke to, he received the same response:

Barack Obama - Dreams from My Father 10

spinning wildly to the drone of bombing attacks, the voice of Edward R. Murrow and the BBC. I watch as my
mother is born at the army base where Gramps is stationed; my grandmother is Rosie the Riveter, working
on a bomber assembly line; my grandfather sloshes around in the mud of France, part of Patton’s army.
Gramps returned from the war never having seen real combat, and the family headed to California,
where he enrolled at Berkeley under the GI bill. But the classroom couldn’t contain his ambitions, his
restlessness, and so the family moved again, first back to Kansas, then through a series of small Texas
towns, then finally to Seattle, where they stayed long enough for my mother to finish high school. Gramps
worked as a furniture salesman; they bought a house and found themselves bridge partners. They were
pleased that my mother proved bright in school, although when she was offered early admission into the
University of Chicago, my grandfather forbade her to go, deciding that she was still too young to be living on
her own.

And that’s where the story might have stopped: a home, a family, a respectable life. Except something
must have still been gnawing at my grandfather’s heart. I can imagine him standing at the edge of the
Pacific, his hair prematurely gray, his tall, lanky frame bulkier now, looking out at the horizon until he could
see it curve and still smelling, deep in his nostrils, the oil rigs and corn husks and hard-bitten lives that he
thought he had left far behind. So that when the manager of the furniture company where he worked
happened to mention that a new store was about to open in Honolulu, that business prospects seemed
limitless there, what with statehood right around the corner, he would rush home that same day and talk my
grandmother into selling their house and packing up yet again, to embark on the final leg of their journey,
west, toward the setting sun….
He would always be like that, my grandfather, always searching for that new start, always running
away from the familiar. By the time the family arrived in Hawaii, his character would have been fully formed,
I think-the generosity and eagerness to please, the awkward mix of sophistication and provincialism, the
rawness of emotion that could make him at once tactless and easily bruised. His was an American
character, one typical of men of his generation, men who embraced the notion of freedom and individualism
and the open road without always knowing its price, and whose enthusiasms could as easily lead to the
cowardice of McCarthyism as to the heroics of World War II. Men who were both dangerous and promising
precisely because of their fundamental innocence; men prone, in the end, to disappointment.
In 1960, though, my grandfather had not yet been tested; the disappointments would come later, and
even then they would come slowly, without the violence that might have changed him, for better or worse. In
the back of his mind he had come to consider himself as something of a freethinker-bohemian, even. He
wrote poetry on occasion, listened to jazz, counted a number of Jews he’d met in the furniture business as
his closest friends. In his only skirmish into organized religion, he would enroll the family in the local
Unitarian Universalist congregation; he liked the idea that Unitarians drew on the scriptures of all the great
religions (“It’s like you get five religions in one,” he would say). Toot would eventually dissuade him of his
views on the church (“For Christ’s sake, Stanley, religion’s not supposed to be like buying breakfast
cereal!”), but if my grandmother was more skeptical by nature, and disagreed with Gramps on some of his
more outlandish notions, her own stubborn independence, her own insistence on thinking something
through for herself, generally brought them into rough alignment.
All this marked them as vaguely liberal, although their ideas would never congeal into anything like a
firm ideology; in this, too, they were American. And so, when my mother came home one day and
mentioned a friend she had met at the University of Hawaii, an African student named Barack, their first
impulse was to invite him over for dinner. The poor kid’s probably lonely, Gramps would have thought, so
far away from home. Better take a look at him, Toot would have said to herself. When my father arrived at
the door, Gramps might have been immediately struck by the African’s resemblance to Nat King Cole, one
of his favorite singers; I imagine him asking my father if he can sing, not understanding the mortified look on
my mother’s face. Gramps is probably too busy telling one of his jokes or arguing with Toot over how to
cook the steaks to notice my mother reach out and squeeze the smooth, sinewy hand beside hers. Toot
notices, but she’s polite enough to bite her lip and offer dessert; her instincts warn her against making a
scene. When the evening is over, they’ll both remark on how intelligent the young man seems, so dignified,
with the measured gestures, the graceful draping of one leg over another-and how about that accent!
But would they let their daughter marry one?
We don’t know yet; the story to this point doesn’t explain enough. The truth is that, like most white
Americans at the time, they had never really given black people much thought. Jim Crow had made its way

Barack Obama - Dreams from My Father 9

my great-great-grandfathers, Christopher Columbus Clark, had been a decorated Union soldier, his wife’s
mother was rumored to have been a second cousin of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy; that
although another distant ancestor had indeed been a full-blooded Cherokee, such lineage was a source of
considerable shame to Toot’s mother, who blanched whenever someone mentioned the subject and hoped
to carry the secret to her grave.
That was the world in which my grandparents had been raised, the dab-smack, landlocked center of
the country, a place where decency and endurance and the pioneer spirit were joined at the hip with
conformity and suspicion and the potential for unblinking cruelty. They had grown up less than twenty miles
away from each other-my grandmother in Augusta, my grandfather in El Dorado, towns too small to warrant
boldface on a road map-and the childhoods they liked to recall for my benefit portrayed small-town,
Depression-era America in all its innocent glory: Fourth of July parades and the picture shows on the side of
a barn; fireflies in a jar and the taste of vine-ripe tomatoes, sweet as apples; dust storms and hailstorms and
classrooms filled with farm boys who got sewn into their woolen underwear at the beginning of winter and
stank like pigs as the months wore on.
Even the trauma of bank failures and farm foreclosures seemed romantic when spun through the loom
of my grandparents’ memories, a time when hardship, the great leveler that had brought people closer
together, was shared by all. So you had to listen carefully to recognize the subtle hierarchies and unspoken
codes that had policed their early lives, the distinctions of people who don’t have a lot and live in the middle
of nowhere. It had to do with something called respectability-there were respectable people and not-so-
respectable people-and although you didn’t have to be rich to be respectable, you sure had to work harder
at it if you weren’t.
Toot’s family was respectable. Her father held a steady job all through the Depression, managing an oil
lease for Standard Oil. Her mother had taught normal school before the children were born. The family kept
their house spotless and ordered Great Books through the mail; they read the Bible but generally shunned
the tent revival circuit, preferring a straight-backed form of Methodism that valued reason over passion and
temperance over both.
My grandfather’s station was more troublesome. Nobody was sure why-the grandparents who had
raised him and his older brother weren’t very well off, but they were decent, God-fearing Baptists,
supporting themselves with work in the oil rigs around Wichita. Somehow, though, Gramps had turned out a
bit wild. Some of the neighbors pointed to his mother’s suicide: it was Stanley, after all, then only eight years
old, who had found her body. Other, less charitable, souls would simply shake their heads: The boy takes
after his philandering father, they would opine, the undoubtable cause of the mother’s unfortunate demise.
Whatever the reason, Gramps’s reputation was apparently well deserved. By the age of fifteen he’d
been thrown out of high school for punching the principal in the nose. For the next three years he lived off
odd jobs, hopping rail cars to Chicago, then California, then back again, dabbling in moonshine, cards, and
women. As he liked to tell it, he knew his way around Wichita, where both his and Toot’s families had
moved by that time, and Toot doesn’t contradict him; certainly, Toot’s parents believed the stories that
they’d heard about the young man and strongly disapproved of the budding courtship. The first time Toot
brought Gramps over to her house to meet the family, her father took one look at my grandfather’s black,
slicked-back hair and his perpetual wise-guy grin and offered his unvarnished assessment.
“He looks like a wop.”
My grandmother didn’t care. To her, a home economics major fresh out of high school and tired of
respectability, my grandfather must have cut a dashing figure. I sometimes imagine them in every American
town in those years before the war, him in baggy pants and a starched undershirt, brim hat cocked back on
his head, offering a cigarette to this smart-talking girl with too much red lipstick and hair dyed blond and legs
nice enough to model hosiery for the local department store. He’s telling her about the big cities, the
endless highway, his imminent escape from the empty, dust-ridden plains, where big plans mean a job as a
bank manager and entertainment means an ice-cream soda and a Sunday matinee, where fear and lack of
imagination choke your dreams so that you already know on the day that you’re born just where you’ll die
and who it is that’ll bury you. He won’t end up like that, my grandfather insists; he has dreams, he has
plans; he will infect my grandmother with the great peripatetic itch that had brought both their forebears
across the Atlantic and half of a continent so many years before.
They eloped just in time for the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and my grandfather enlisted. And at this point
the story quickens in my mind like one of those old movies that show a wall calendar’s pages peeled back
faster and faster by invisible hands, the headlines of Hitler and Churchill and Roosevelt and Normandy

Barack Obama - Dreams from My Father 8

of fire, the tortoise of Hindu legend that floated in space, supporting the weight of the world on its back.
Later, when I became more familiar with the narrower path to happiness to be found in television and the
movies, I’d become troubled by questions. What supported the tortoise? Why did an omnipotent God let a
snake cause such grief? Why didn’t my father return? But at the age of five or six I was satisfied to leave
these distant mysteries intact, each story self-contained and as true as the next, to be carried off into
peaceful dreams.
That my father looked nothing like the people around me-that he was black as pitch, my mother white
as milk-barely registered in my mind.
In fact, I can recall only one story that dealt explicitly with the subject of race; as I got older, it would be
repeated more often, as if it captured the essence of the morality tale that my father’s life had become.
According to the story, after long hours of study, my father had joined my grandfather and several other
friends at a local Waikiki bar. Everyone was in a festive mood, eating and drinking to the sounds of a slack-
key guitar, when a white man abruptly announced to the bartender, loudly enough for everyone to hear, that
he shouldn’t have to drink good liquor “next to a nigger.” The room fell quiet and people turned to my father,
expecting a fight. Instead, my father stood up, walked over to the man, smiled, and proceeded to lecture
him about the folly of bigotry, the promise of the American dream, and the universal rights of man. “This
fella felt so bad when Barack was finished,” Gramps would say, “that he reached into his pocket and gave
Barack a hundred dollars on the spot. Paid for all our drinks and puu-puus for the rest of the night-and your
dad’s rent for the rest of the month.”
By the time I was a teenager, I’d grown skeptical of this story’s veracity and had set it aside with the
rest. Until I received a phone call, many years later, from a Japanese-American man who said he had been
my father’s classmate in Hawaii and now taught at a midwestern university. He was very gracious, a bit
embarrassed by his own impulsiveness; he explained that he had seen an interview of me in his local paper
and that the sight of my father’s name had brought back a rush of memories. Then, during the course of our
conversation, he repeated the same story that my grandfather had told, about the white man who had tried
to purchase my father’s forgiveness. “I’ll never forget that,” the man said to me over the phone; and in his
voice I heard the same note that I’d heard from Gramps so many years before, that note of disbelief-and
hope.

Miscegenation. The word is humpbacked, ugly, portending a monstrous outcome: like antebellum or
octoroon, it evokes images of another era, a distant world of horsewhips and flames, dead magnolias and
crumbling porticos. And yet it wasn’t until 1967-the year I celebrated my sixth birthday and Jimi Hendrix
performed at Monterey, three years after Dr. King received the Nobel Peace Prize, a time when America
had already begun to weary of black demands for equality, the problem of discrimination presumably
solved-that the Supreme Court of the United States would get around to telling the state of Virginia that its
ban on interracial marriages violated the Constitution. In 1960, the year that my parents were married,
miscegenation still described a felony in over half the states in the Union. In many parts of the South, my
father could have been strung up from a tree for merely looking at my mother the wrong way; in the most
sophisticated of northern cities, the hostile stares, the whispers, might have driven a woman in my mother’s
predicament into a back-alley abortion-or at the very least to a distant convent that could arrange for
adoption. Their very image together would have been considered lurid and perverse, a handy retort to the
handful of softheaded liberals who supported a civil rights agenda.
Sure-but would you let your daughter marry one?
The fact that my grandparents had answered yes to this question, no matter how grudgingly, remains
an enduring puzzle to me. There was nothing in their background to predict such a response, no New
England transcendentalists or wild-eyed socialists in their family tree. True, Kansas had fought on the Union
side of the Civil War; Gramps liked to remind me that various strands of the family contained ardent
abolitionists. If asked, Toot would turn her head in profile to show off her beaked nose, which, along with a
pair of jet-black eyes, was offered as proof of Cherokee blood.
But an old, sepia-toned photograph on the bookshelf spoke most eloquently of their roots. It showed
Toot’s grandparents, of Scottish and English stock, standing in front of a ramshackle homestead, unsmiling
and dressed in coarse wool, their eyes squinting at the sun-baked, flinty life that stretched out before them.
Theirs were the faces of American Gothic, the WASP bloodline’s poorer cousins, and in their eyes one
could see truths that I would have to learn later as facts: that Kansas had entered the Union free only after a
violent precursor to the Civil War, the battle in which John Brown’s sword tasted first blood; that while one of