The Bridge_The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

Chapter Six
A Narrative of Ascent
When Obama left Cambridge to start his public life, he could not have anticipated some of the breaks that would accelerate his career: the political elders who stepped aside and provided him with crucial openings; a devastating electoral loss that turned out to be a kind of gift; political rivals who imploded as the news of their unfortunate personal lives became public; invitations to speak at an antiwar rally in 2002 and, two years later, at a national convention. In retrospect, the greatest break of all may have been that Jerry Kellman called him not from an immensity like New York (where he might have got lost or waited far longer to emerge), or from a city like Detroit or Washington, D.C. (where he might have run for mayor, but without hope of a larger career). Chicago itself was, for Obama, a stroke of fortune: a big-time metropolis and a political center with a large African-American base, but situated in a state whose demographics reflected the country as a whole. After the fall of the old Daley machine, Chicago was opening up to younger politicians, to blacks and Latinos. Chicago was home for Obama, it was a community; it was also an ideal place to begin a life in politics. Obama did not stay long enough to become a fixture of Chicago--his roots were not deep--but the city provided a series of profound lessons and opportunities.
When Obama returned to Chicago after graduation, he certainly could have taken a job with the corporate law firm or investment bank of his choosing. Instead, he accepted a place at the best-known civil-rights firm in town, Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland. The firm, with around a dozen lawyers, had its offices in a brick town house on West Erie Street, north of the Loop; the concentration was on voting rights, tenant rights, employment rights, anti-trust, whistleblower cases--a classic liberal "good guy" firm. Judson Miner, a liberal advocate who had been Harold Washington's corporation counsel, brought Obama to the firm and convinced him over a series of long lunches that he could work on cases that would "let him sleep soundly at night." The work, Miner promised, would feel like an extension of his work as an organizer on the South Side.
Obama also had Doug Baird's offer to teach law part-time at the University of Chicago. He was given the rank of a lecturer--a non-tenured, adjunct position--and provided with a stipend, benefits, and a small office on the sixth floor of the D'Angelo Law Library. At first, Baird did not require Obama to teach at all; both he and the dean, Geoffrey Stone, understood that Obama would spend most of his time writing a book about race and voting rights. When he decided to turn the book into a more personal rumination on family and race, they were unfazed.
All of Obama's employers in Chicago--Allison Davis and Judson Miner at the law firm, the deans at the university--proved indulgent of Obama's divided attentions; sooner or later, they figured, he would increase his commitments or go into politics. His intelligence, charm, and serene ambition were plain to see. The first time he met Geoffrey Stone, Obama was not yet thirty, and yet Stone's assistant, Charlotte Maffia, joined the legion predicting something large for him: she said that he would soon be governor of Illinois. Only occasionally were there rumbles of resentment about the young lawyer taking time to indulge his literary ambition. "He spent a lot of time working on his book," Allison Davis admitted to a reporter for Chicago magazine. "Some of my partners weren't happy with that, Barack sitting there with his keyboard on his lap and his feet up on the desk writing the book."
Obama was starting his new life in Chicago in a far different spirit than he had the first time. Gone was the self-conscious asceticism, the intermittent periods of loneliness. When he started his life as a lawyer and teacher in 1992, he had a community and a partner. The writing was going slowly, but his relationship with Michelle Robinson had survived the separations during law school. They were living together now in Hyde Park and were engaged to be married.
In the spring of 1992, before he could get much work done as a lawyer or complete his book, Obama made a commitment to lead a voter registration drive in the African-American and Hispanic communities called Project Vote. The drive was aimed at combating the Reagan Administration's rollback of social programs by registering as many as a hundred and fifty thousand of the four hundred thousand unregistered African-Americans in Illinois. The work had to be accomplished by October 5th.
Project Vote, which was founded by the civil-rights activist Sandy Newman in 1982, just before Harold Washington's first successful race for City Hall, could not rely on the old Democratic Party machine's method of padding the rolls by handing out cash payments known as "bounties." The program needed a director who was familiar with the city and who had organizing skills, someone who could reach people in the churches, the schools, the community centers, and on the street. "I kept hearing about Obama in community-organizing circles," Newman, who was Project Vote's national director, said. A well-known activist in town, Jacky Grimshaw, pressed Newman to interview Obama, saying that he had the right managerial and diplomatic skills to recruit volunteers and persuade community groups to join in the effort. After talking through the job with Obama, Newman called John Schmidt, a partner at the law firm of Skadden Arps, who had agreed to co-chair the Chicago branch of Project Vote, and asked him to meet with Obama.
Schmidt called Obama, who was doing some training work with organizers on the West Side, and invited him to the office. As they talked, Schmidt realized that in his long career in law and as a close aide to Richard M. Daley at City Hall, he had never before met someone who had deliberately spurned a sure clerkship at the Supreme Court. The work they discussed was tedious, and Schmidt worried that Obama would walk away from it after a few days or weeks. Traditionally, the Chicago machine did not want anyone registering to vote if that person was not going to vote with the machine. As a result, election law in the city required that registrars come for training sessions at the Board of Elections, downtown, teach people to fill out the forms precisely, collect the forms, and get them on the rolls. It meant getting people, mainly churchwomen, to stand outside of Sunday services all over the city and persuade people to sign up.
Obama said he didn't mind the prospect of such work. His one reservation about taking the job was that he would miss the deadline, June 15th, for handing in his book manuscript. He wondered if he could work on Project Vote part-time--a suggestion that Newman dismissed. "I told him, 'Do you want to write this memoir at such a young age or rescue democracy?'" Newman recalled. The stakes were high: the Reagan-Bush era was in its eleventh year, and the Democrats in Illinois had a chance not only to elect Bill Clinton to the White House, but also to elect an African-American, Carol Moseley Braun, to the Senate. Obama accepted Newman's offer to run Project Vote in Illinois--which would be centered mainly in Cook County. The salary was around twenty-five thousand dollars. To a great degree, it was an extension of his work as a community organizer, but it was also a bridge to electoral politics. Through Project Vote, he had to call on committeemen, aldermen, state legislators, lawyers, activists, clergy--the intricate web of associations that formed the political culture of Chicago and the state of Illinois. If he could register a significant number of new Democratic voters, he would bank the sort of capital that counts most: political I.O.U.s.
Obama heard that Sam Burrell, an alderman on the far West Side, in the Twenty-ninth Ward, had done successful work registering voters and so he arranged to meet with one of Burrell's aides, a young woman named Carol Anne Harwell, and tried to enlist her to help with Project Vote. "I don't think Barack had ever been that far west," Harwell recalled. "He came to the office in his raggedy black car and he was wearing a leather bomber jacket and carried a briefcase and a satchel." Obama struck Harwell as intelligent and eager, but despite his years as an organizer, lacking in street savvy. "He didn't know all the slang," she said. "If you had said, 'Oh, that's dope,' he wouldn't have known that. Hip-hop wasn't his thing." After Harwell agreed to work as Obama's assistant, she discovered what Obama was carrying around in his satchel--a laptop and his book manuscript.
Obama had some money to work with. Ed Gardner, whose family owned the SoftSheen hair-products company, agreed to help underwrite the campaign. The co-chairs of the finance committee were Schmidt and John Rogers, the founder of Ariel Investments, one of the biggest black-owned businesses in town, and a teammate of Craig Robinson's at Princeton. Schmidt and Rogers called on wealthy Chicagoans like the developer and ex-alderman Bill Singer and the developer and arts patron Lewis Manilow.
Obama was more concerned with the apathy and the political disconnection of unregistered voters than with resources. "Today, we see hundreds of young blacks talking 'black power' and wearing Malcolm X T-shirts," he told the Sun-Times columnist Vernon Jarrett early in the campaign, "but they don't bother to register and vote. We remind them that Malcolm once made a speech titled 'The Ballot or the Bullet,' and that today we've got enough bullets in the streets but not enough ballots." Obama had visited the one-party state of Kenya, and he told Jarrett that his African relatives and friends looked at their American brothers and sisters with envy: "They can't understand why we don't relish the opportunity to vote for whomever we please."
Obama set up an office on South Michigan Avenue and went looking for registrars who could be both persuasive and reliable. He himself trained seven hundred registrars--there were eleven thousand overall--and helped devise a public-relations campaign with a black-owned firm called Brainstorm Communications. Obama and his team thought that posters and registers using a straightforward slogan like "Register to Vote" would do nothing to appeal to young people. That year, Spike Lee had come out with his popular biopic of Malcolm X, and Obama and his colleagues thought for a while about using Malcolm's slogan, "By Any Means Necessary." They settled on "It's a Power Thing."
"We took the 'X' from Malcolm, put it on some kente paper, and made posters and T-shirts with the slogan 'It's a Power Thing' that were so popular that we ended up trademarking them," Carol Anne Harwell said. "Of course, people in the African-American community knew that the 'X' referred to Malcolm, but we also had white girls going around wearing them, and one told us, 'Look at this! I'm Number Ten!'"
Project Vote volunteers put up the posters all over African-American neighborhoods and in Hispanic areas like Pilsen. The two major black-owned radio stations in town, WVON and WGCI, ran ads that told people where they could sign up; black-owned fast-food restaurants allowed registrars to approach potential voters over their burgers and fries.
Obama faced generational resistance from some longtime activists and black nationalists. Lutrelle (Lu) Palmer, the head of the Black Independent Political Organization and a popular journalist-activist known as "the Panther with a pen," was one of a small contingent that saw Obama as too young, too haughty, and too inexperienced to be taken seriously. Palmer helped register thousands of voters for Harold Washington's 1983 campaign; he had no patience for Obama's desire to continue along the same lines. In an interview with the Chicago Reader, Palmer said that Obama "came to our office and tried to get us involved [in Project Vote], and we were turned off then. We sent him running. We didn't like his arrogance, his air."
But, relying on his connections with black church leaders and community activists from his organizing days, Obama more than overcame the resistance. Project Vote met its extraordinary goal of registering nearly a hundred and fifty thousand new voters. For the first time in the history of Chicago, registration in the majority-black wards was greater than that in the majority-white wards. Project Vote played a pivotal role in the election of Carol Moseley Braun, the first African-American woman ever elected to the Senate and only the second African-American to be elected to the chamber since Reconstruction. Bill Clinton, in a three-way race with George H. W. Bush and Ross Perot, became the first Democratic candidate to win Illinois since Lyndon Johnson overwhelmed Barry Goldwater, in 1964.
Obama, who was now thirty-one, was so successful in his leadership of Project Vote that Democratic Party political operatives in Chicago took notice. At the press conference announcing the results of Project Vote, Obama stood quietly to the side and let Jesse Jackson, Bobby Rush, and other senior Democratic Party politicians get the attention. "It wasn't modesty. Barack is not modest," Schmidt said. "But rather than grab the spotlight, it was more important to him to have these people as potential allies down the road. That was way more important than to be a star at a two-bit press conference in 1992. That is very rare. He has always had a level of assurance and foresight that was very unusual."
Obama's effort also attracted the attention of the business community. Crain's Chicago Business reported that Obama had "galvanized Chicago's political community, as no seasoned politico had before."
One of the more important connections Obama formed during Project Vote was with Bettylu Saltzman, the daughter of Philip Klutznick, a rich developer who had been Secretary of Commerce in the Carter Administration. Saltzman was a well-known member of the Lakefront Liberals, left-leaning Chicagoans, predominantly Jewish, who lived in the high-rises along Lake Michigan and were vital fund-raising sources over the years for Illinois Democrats like Paul Douglas, Adlai Stevenson, Paul Simon, and Harold Washington. Saltzman was a regular at a group called the Ladies Who Lunch--a group of influential women in Chicago who included Christie Hefner, the chairman of Playboy Enterprises; the philanthropist Marjorie Benton; Isabel Stewart, who ran the Chicago Foundation for Women; Amina Dickerson, of Kraft Foods; the columnist Laura Washington; and Julia Stasch, of the MacArthur Foundation. Saltzman was also friendly with the wealthiest Jewish business families in town: the Crowns and the Pritzkers. When Obama paid a visit to Saltzman to ask for help on Project Vote, she joined the growing contingent of people who came home to tell a spouse that she had just met the man who could be the first black President. "I told everyone I knew about this guy," she said. "Everyone," in Saltzman's case, turned out to be a core of wealthy Chicagoans who one day would help form the financial base of Obama's political campaigns.
The meeting with Saltzman, and others like it during Project Vote, was Obama's introduction to the northern reaches of Chicago. He already had an education in the diversity of the South Side---the churches, the African-American neighborhoods, the liberal politics of Hyde Park and the university. Now he was reaching to the Gold Coast, the near North Side, the northern suburbs--liberal enclaves, too, but with a great deal more money.
Don Rose, a political consultant who worked with Martin Luther King, Jr., during his Chicago years and with a raft of Democratic politicians, said, "Obama is possibly the best networker I've ever seen. Bill Clinton might be his rival, but Barack is amazing. First, he comes to Chicago with a reference from Newton Minow's daughter, Martha. Then Newt introduces him to a circle of high-class liberal lawyers. He gets this job with the churches as an organizer, and he finds himself a network of pastors and people working in related non-profits and foundations. He also finds himself at the University of Chicago, and that has a network at the law school, the business school--and they are all bowled over to discover this brilliant black guy. There is also a Harvard network. There are also liberal, elite funders and agency heads: Bettylu Saltzman was also part of the Minow grouping and she has lots of friends. It's circle after circle that sometimes touch--or they can be bridged. An ambitious young man can get to know a whole lot of people. If you've impressed one or two people in three or four of these groupings, and you make it your business to do this for business or politics or social prestige, you can really go far."
Saltzman also had friends in the political world. She made sure to contact David Axelrod, a former Chicago Tribune reporter who had become a campaign consultant for Democratic candidates. Axelrod, a strategist who concealed his cunning behind a laconic charm, had worked for Simon, Stevenson, and Harold Washington, and, in 1991, was running the doomed Senate campaign of a personal-injury lawyer named Al Hofeld. He was especially involved with Richard M. Daley. "Bettylu called me up and said, 'I want you to meet this young guy who's running Project Vote,'" Axelrod recalled. "She said, 'I know this is an odd thing, but I think he could be the first black President.' She really did say it. And I thought, Well that's a little grandiose, but I'd like to meet him." Saltzman also knew people in the foundation world, the business world, and the political world. "Barack quickly became part of that circle, and they all took an interest in him, because he was an impressive young guy," Axelrod said.
When a reporter who was writing a profile of Obama for Chicago magazine after the success of Project Vote asked him about running for office, Obama answered coyly. This was clearly not the first time someone had raised the question. "Who knows?" he said. "But probably not immediately. Was that a sufficiently politic 'maybe'? My sincere answer is, I'll run if I feel I can accomplish more that way than agitating from the outside. I don't know if that's true right now. Let's wait and see what happens in 1993. If the politicians in place now at city and state levels respond to African-American voters' needs, we'll gladly work with and support them. If they don't, we'll work to replace them."
Obama married Michelle Robinson, on October 3, 1992, just as Project Vote was winding down before the election. Surrounded by guests from Kenya, Hawaii, and Chicago, Jeremiah Wright presided over the ceremony at Trinity. Wright talked about the importance of marriage and responsibility, especially for black men. Because Michelle's father, Fraser, had died the previous year, her brother Craig walked her down the aisle. At the reception, held at the South Shore Cultural Center, the music was "old-school stuff, music you could move to," Carol Anne Harwell recalled. Santita Jackson, Michelle's high-school classmate and Jesse Jackson's daughter, sang.
Obama's relationship with Michelle was not without its complications. Barack's ambitions and considerable ego often clashed with Michelle's desire for stability and a sense of partnership. But the relationship was his emotional anchor. A few years after the wedding, but before Obama declared his intention to run for his first political office, a photographer named Mariana Cook visited Barack and Michelle at their apartment in Hyde Park and photographed them sitting together on a couch under a couple of Indonesian prints. Cook also interviewed them for a book she was assembling about marriage.
Obama, for his part, clearly believed that he had found something profound in his wife. "All my life, I have been stitching together a family, through stories or memories or friends or ideas," he told Cook. "Michelle has had a very different background--very stable, two-parent family, mother at home, brother and dog, living in the same house all their lives. We represent two strands of family life in this country--the strand that is very stable and solid, and then the strand that is breaking out of the constraints of traditional families, traveling, separated, mobile. I think there was that strand in me of imagining what it would be like to have a stable, solid, secure family life."
Michelle's remarks were no less loving, but it was clear that she felt that her husband was headed into potentially dangerous waters. "There is a strong possibility that Barack will pursue a political career, although it's unclear," she said. "There is a little tension with that. I'm very wary of politics. I think he's too much of a good guy for the kind of brutality, the skepticism. When you are involved in politics, your life is an open book, and people can come in who don't necessarily have good intent. I'm pretty private, and like to surround myself with people that I trust and love. In politics you've got to open yourself to a lot of different people."
With Project Vote and the election over, Obama again turned to his book. He had been committed to writing a book about race since his days at Harvard. Just after he was elected president of the Harvard Law Review, in February, 1990, Jane Dystel, a literary agent in New York, noticed the article in the New York Times about Obama's winning the post. Dystel called Obama in Cambridge and suggested that he write a book. She urged him to put together a proposal that she could submit to publishers. Dystel, whose father had been head of Bantam Books, clearly saw something in Obama, who came to visit her in New York. Her associate Jay Acton, who represented James Baldwin, said maybe they could get Obama to write a book like The Fire Next Time.
Later, when Obama recounted his discussions with publishers to his friend and law colleague Judd Miner, he was amused by the assumptions they made about him. He recalled that one publisher "asked me to write about being poor and rising from the ghetto of Chicago. I told them, 'I never did take that trip but I would like to write about the trip I have taken.'"
After conducting an auction with a few other publishers, Dystel sold Obama's book to Poseidon Press, a small imprint of Simon & Schuster run by an editor named Ann Patty. The advance was reportedly over a hundred thousand dollars. Obama received half that amount on signing the contract.
While Obama was still at Harvard, he made notes for a book. Fairly soon, he realized that he had no interest in writing a straight book about issues--about civil-rights law, affirmative action, or organizing. Instead, he wanted to write about himself, about his struggle with identity and the elusive ghost of his father. Relying on the journals that he had been keeping since his days as an undergraduate, he started working in earnest. After his wedding and honeymoon, he spent a month alone, writing, in a rented hut on Sanur Beach, in Bali.
Obama took a long time to finish. "He had to come to terms with some events in his life that some people pay years of therapy to get comfortable revealing," his friend Valerie Jarrett said. The writing went slowly, she said, "because everything was so raw."
Along the way, Obama experienced some minor dramas of the publishing trade. In the summer of 1993, Simon & Schuster closed Poseidon. When publishers close an imprint, they usually transfer books for which they have high hopes to another imprint inside the house and try to get rid of projects without much promise. Obama had missed deadlines and handed in bloated, yet incomplete, drafts. "We took fliers on things," Ann Patty said, "but, when Poseidon went down, Simon & Schuster kept the gold and got rid of the fliers."
Dystel took the book, now entitled Dreams from My Father, to Times Books, an imprint at Random House run by the former Washington Post reporter and editor Peter Osnos. Times Books paid Simon & Schuster forty thousand dollars for the book--a very good deal, it turned out, for Random House. Simon & Schuster ended up losing the rest of the advance it had paid.
Henry Ferris, the editor at Times Books who worked directly with Obama, communicated with him almost entirely by telephone and express mail. Obama proved receptive to editing. Ferris asked him to reduce one thirty-page episode to fifteen pages; Obama did it without complaint or hesitation. "He was a quick study," Ferris said. (In a preface to the 2004 paperback edition, Obama writes that he now winces when he reads the book and still has the "urge to cut the book by fifty pages or so" and get rid of "mangled" sentences and expressions of emotion that seem "indulgent or overly practiced.")
Ferris was impressed by his young author's sturdy ego and sense of his own potential. "He thought enough of himself and his story that he thought to write his autobiography at the age of thirty," Ferris said. "He knew his story was special, his parentage was interesting. He had that much of a sense of story. I saw him as a person who at that time was in a position to talk about race relations in this country in a way that certainly I can't and few can. He understood the white world and the black world and he was tossed back and forth between them. That was something that I remember him talking about, being in a position to speak about things in a way that others couldn't."
With Dreams from My Father, Obama was working in the oldest, and arguably the richest, genre of African-American writing: the memoir. The memoir tradition begins with the first slave narratives: A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man, a pamphlet published in Boston in 1760; A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, as Related by Himself, in 1770; and then, in 1789, an international best-seller, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself. Equiano recounted the story of his capture as a boy of eleven, his purchase by a sea captain, and then, after he buys his own freedom, his life in England as an abolitionist. There are more than six thousand slave narratives known to scholars, and, as the literary scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., writes, these texts arose out of the writers' need to assert their own identity, and that of their people, as thinking human beings and not, as they were viewed by American law, as the animal possessions of white men: "Deprived of access to literacy, the tools of citizenship, denied the rights of selfhood by law, philosophy, and pseudo-science, and denied as well the possibility, even, of possessing a collective history as a people, black Americans--commencing with the slave narratives in 1760--published their individual histories in astonishing numbers, in a larger attempt to narrate the collective history of 'the race.'"
Any canon or college syllabus of African-American autobiography tends to begin with certain cornerstone texts: the three slave narratives of Frederick Douglass; Up from Slavery, by Booker T. Washington; Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself; The Souls of Black Folk and Dusk of Dawn, by W. E. B. DuBois; The Big Sea, by Langston Hughes; Black Boy, by Richard Wright; Dust Tracks on a Road, by Zora Neale Hurston; Notes of a Native Son and Nobody Knows My Name, by James Baldwin; The Autobiography of Malcolm X; I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou. (James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man are novels, and yet they are so clearly based on the events of the authors' lives that they are often discussed alongside these memoirs.) Depending on which critic is doing the accounting, the canon of memoirists also includes Ida B. Wells, William Pickens, Anne Moody, Claude Brown, Eldridge Cleaver, Ralph Abernathy, Roger Wilkins, George Jackson, Angela Davis, Alice Walker, Amiri Baraka, John Edgar Wideman, Audre Lorde, John Hope Franklin, bell hooks, Brent Staples, and Itabari Njeri. Some co-authored memoirs by entertainers such as Billie Holiday (Lady Sings the Blues), Dick Gregory (Nigger), Sammy Davis, Jr., (Yes I Can), and Count Basie (Good Morning Blues) can also claim a place on the extended list. One way that Obama joins this tradition is that usually, in European literature, a writer writes his or her novels, plays, and poems, and then, toward the end, writes a memoir; it is more common among African-American writers than Europeans to begin their writing lives by asserting themselves with an autobiography.
As a young man, Obama searched for clues to his own identity by very purposefully reading his way through DuBois, Hughes, Wright, Baldwin, Ellison, and Malcolm X. He has also mentioned texts by Douglass, Marcus Garvey, Martin Delany, and a range of novelists--in particular, Toni Morrison. In fact, reading as a way of becoming is a feature of African-American autobiography, as it is of so many outsider-memoirists of any ethnicity. In memoirs of all kinds, a young person in search of a way to rise above his circumstances or out of his confusion invariably goes to the bookshelf. Malcolm X, for one, provides an extended account of his self-education. He reads histories by Will Durant and H. G. Wells, which gave him a glimpse into "black people's history before they came to this country"; he reads Carter G. Woodson's The Negro in Our History, which "opened my eyes about black empires before the black slave was brought to the United States, and the early Negro struggles for freedom." In Soul on Ice, Eldridge Cleaver recounts his reading of Rousseau, Paine, Voltaire, Lenin, Bakunin, and Nechayev's Catechism of the Revolutionist as a means of detailing his own radical catechism. Young autobiographers also read other memoirs to learn the form. Claude Brown told an audience in New York in 1990 that he carefully studied the structures of Douglass's slave narratives and Richard Wright's Black Boy before writing Manchild in the Promised Land, his memoir of growing up in Harlem in the nineteen-forties and fifties. Even Sammy Davis, Jr., in his Harlem-to-Hollywood autobiography, Yes I Can, is eager to tell the reader that, while he was on "latrine duty" in the Army, he became an obsessive reader of Wilde, Rostand, Poe, Dickens, and Twain; and that helped him endure the racism of his fellow soldiers.
While it is safe to assume that by the time Obama published he was thinking about public office, even he, for all his ambition and his self-assurance, could not have envisioned that Dreams from My Father, just thirteen years later, would provide a trove of material for voters, journalists, speechwriters, and media consultants during a Presidential campaign. After Obama's emergence as a national politician, it was difficult to read it solely in the spirit in which it was written; the book became a sourcebook of stories endlessly called upon for use in politics. Dreams from My Father is important precisely because it was written when Obama was young and unguarded. "Barack is who he says he is," Michelle Obama said. "There is no mystery there. His life is an open book. He wrote it and you can read it. And unlike any candidate he has really exposed himself, pre-political ambition, so it's a book that is kind of free from intent. It is the story of who he is."
Many journalists eager to write or film profiles of Obama when he became a candidate read Dreams from My Father and expressed dismay that he had not written his book according to the precise standards of scholarly or journalistic veracity. In fact, Obama, unlike most other memoir writers, alerts his reader to the flexible terms of his book. He signals his awareness of "the temptation to color events in ways favorable to the writer" and "selective lapses of memory." He does not pretend to a purely factual rendition. He appropriates some of the tools of fiction. While the book is based on his journals and conversations with family members, "the dialogue is necessarily an approximation of what was actually said or relayed to me." Moreover, some of the characters are composites; the names (with the exception of family members or well-known people) are altered; and chronology, he admits, has been changed to help move the story along. What's exceptional about this is not that Obama allows himself these freedoms, but, rather, that he cops to them right away.
W. E. B. DuBois set a standard for forthrightness about the genre of memoir, writing, "Autobiographies do not form indisputable authorities. They are always incomplete, and often unreliable. Eager as I am to put down the truth, there are difficulties; memory fails especially in small details, so that it becomes finally but a theory of my life, with much forgotten and misconceived, with valuable testimony but often less than absolutely true, despite my intention to be frank and fair." His book The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois, he admits, is merely "the Soliloquy of an old man on what he dreams his life has been as he sees it slowly drifting away; and what he would like others to believe."
Obama's memoir is a mixture of verifiable fact, recollection, recreation, invention, and artful shaping. The reader is hardly to be blamed for asking the difference, quite often, between a memoir and a novel that is obviously based on facts. A modern writer like Philip Roth constantly invokes this crossfire of genre distinctions and deliberately arouses in the reader an urge to ask what is true and what is not, all the while reminding the reader that life, as it is lived, is an unstructured mess, whereas the fiction writer constructs the impression of reality by shaping it, using it as the verbal clay he needs to tell his story and thereby reveal emotional or philosophical truths.
African-American autobiographies often follow a structure that the literary scholar Robert Stepto calls a "narrative of ascent." The narrator begins in a state of incarceration or severe deprivation. He breaks those bonds so that he may go out, discover himself, and make his imprint on the world. (When the young Frederick Douglass finally fights back against the evil overseer and "slave-breaker" Edward Covey, he writes, "You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.") Sometimes the narrator will not know one or more of his parents; he may not know his date of birth. ("Of my ancestry," Booker T. Washington writes in Up from Slavery, "I know almost nothing.") He assesses and describes his deprivations, the oppression that keeps him down. He goes through trials. He takes a journey: he travels the Middle Passage; he escapes his slave-master; or, like Wright, he leaves the Jim Crow South for the Northern city, or, like Washington, heads back into the Deep South, or, like Malcolm X, goes from place to place, courting trouble, winding up in prison. He reads. He studies. He has experiences. He struggles with the absence of a father or struggles with the father who is there but cannot be relied upon. He learns. And, as he accumulates experience and endures his trials, he begins to discover his identity, often taking a new name as he does so.
In the case of many authors, including Douglass, Hughes, and Malcolm X, part of that struggle for identity includes wrestling with the fact of a white parent or grandparent. The narrator begins to find his place in a community of African-Americans. He discovers his mission and sets out to fulfill it. Douglass becomes a leading abolitionist, meets with Lincoln in the White House, and presses him to integrate the Union forces. DuBois helps found the N.A.A.C.P., becomes a giant of American scholarship, and ends his long life in Ghana.
Obama's reading of black memoirists when he was still living in Hawaii was the "homework" of a young man trying "to reconcile the world as I'd found it with the terms of my birth." And yet, in all the books he reads, he keeps finding authors filled with a depressing self-contempt; they flee or withdraw to varying corners of the world, and to Obama they are "all of them exhausted, bitter men, the devil at their heels."
For Obama, the great exception is Malcolm X. Despite their obvious differences of era, religion, temperament, and politics, it is not impossible to figure out why Obama is so taken with Malcolm. Malcolm's is a narrative of mixed races, a missing father, and self-invention. He starts life as Malcolm Little, becomes "Detroit Red" on the street, "Satan" in prison, Minister Malcolm X, and then El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. "His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me," Obama writes. "The blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will."
Obama was disturbed by one line of Malcolm's: "He spoke of a wish he'd once had, the wish that the white blood that ran through him, there by an act of violence, might somehow be expunged." The reference is to a moment in The Autobiography of Malcolm X when, as a minister of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm gives a speech in Detroit and talks about the rape of his grandmother:
We're all black to the white man, but we're a thousand and one different colors. Turn around, look at each other! What shade of black African polluted by the devil white man are you? You see me--well, in the streets they used to call me Detroit Red. Yes! Yes, that raping, redheaded devil was my grandfather! That close, yes! My mother's father! ... If I could drain away his blood that pollutes my body, and pollutes my complexion, I'd do it! Because I hate every drop of the rapist's blood that's in me! And it's not just me, it's all of us! During slavery, think of it, it was a rare one of our black grandmothers, our great-grandmothers and our great-great-grandmothers who escaped the white rapist slavemaster.... Turn around and look at each other, brothers and sisters, and think of this! You and me, polluted all these colors--and this devil has the arrogance and the gall to think we, his victims, should love him!
Obama, who has been raised by a loving white mother and white grandparents, writes that even as a teenager, he knew that the presence of white family, white blood, could never become an abstraction: "If Malcolm's discovery toward the end of his life, that some whites might live beside him as brothers in Islam, seemed to offer some hope of eventual reconciliation, that hope appeared in a distant future, in a far-off land. In the meantime, I looked to see where the people would come from who were willing to work toward this future and populate this new world."
Obama's Malcolm is not the Malcolm of mid-career. He admires "The Ballot or the Bullet" but not the strains of militancy and separatism, the faith in the cosmology of Elijah Muhammad. He admires Malcolm's masculine pride, his eloquence, his determined self-evolution, and the revelation at the end of his life that religious faith and separatism are incompatible. At law school, Obama's habit of mind was always conciliatory. That is the Malcolm he desires as well--the self-confident, charismatic, eloquent leader who comes to see his faith in a broader, more humanist light, the militant who begins to see the value of a broader embrace.
After he became President, Obama told me, "I think that I find the sort of policy prescriptions, the analysis, the theology of Malcolm full of holes, although I did even when I was young. I was never taken with some of his theorizing. I think that what Malcolm X did, though, was to tap into a long-running tradition within the African-American community, which is that at certain moments it's important for African-Americans to assert their manhood, their worth. At times, they can overcompensate, and popular culture can take it into caricature--blaxploitation films being the classic example of it. But if you think about it, of a time in the early nineteen-sixties, when a black Ph.D. might be a Pullman porter and have to spend much of his day obsequious and kow-towing to people, that affirmation that I am a man, I am worth something, I think was important. And I think Malcolm X probably captured that better than anybody."
In the original Simon & Schuster contract, dated November 28, 1990, Dreams from My Father had been tentatively titled "Journeys in Black and White." As Obama writes, the book is a "boy's search for his father, and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American." Obama told me that he was quite "conscious" of the great tradition of African-American memoir and knew that he had a more modest story to tell. "I mean, at that point I'm thirty-three and what have I done?" he said. "The only justification for anybody wanting to read it was to be able to use my experiences as a lens to examine what's happened to issues of race in America, what's happened to issues of class in America, but also to give people a sense of how it's possible for a young person to pull strands of himself together into a coherent whole." The most limited way to read the book is to comb it for its direct referents to reality, to discover "who is who." One can discover that "Marty" is (for the most part) Jerry Kellman. Or that the saturnine nationalist known as "Rafiq" is based on a community activist in Chicago named Salim al Nurridin. Or that the militant-sounding "Ray" at Punahou is an ex-con named Keith Kakugawa. And so on. Some of these real people made news during the campaign when they protested some aspect of their portrayals. (Kakugawa said he wasn't as obsessed with race; al Nurridin disputed the rendition of his ideology.) Ann Dunham, who was dying, in Hawaii, of uterine and ovarian cancer, read drafts of her son's book, and although she admired it, even she had quibbles. She told her friend Alice Dewey that she was really not quite so naive about race as her son made her out to be.
Dreams from My Father is the extended and relatively guileless self-expression of Obama before he became a public man, a politician. We read him, as a young man reflecting on a still younger man, dealing with countless questions: What is race? What does it mean to be African-American? What does it mean to be raised by whites and identify oneself as black? What is the right way to live a life? And how is race relevant to such moral considerations?
Obama's story contains many of the familiar features of African-American autobiography: a search for a missing parent; a search for a racial identity; a search for a community and a mission; a physical journey that echoes all his other searches. Obama, however, is in many ways more privileged than his literary predecessors. He is middle-class. He has benefited from the passage of time and from many laws. He enters institutions of privilege often denied his precursors. And, both as a person and as a story teller, this poses a problem for him. The lawns and quadrangles of Punahou, Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard Law School are not ordinarily the landscapes of epic struggle.
Moreover, Obama has grown up, sometimes to his frustration, after the civil-rights movement. His is hardly a world free of racism, but it is a world in which the popular culture around him is rich with African-American stars, from the musicians he watched on television as a child in Hawaii to the enormously influential figures of his adulthood. What's more, his white friends have listened to those records, watched those shows, idolized those same stars. Knowingly or not, they have come to accept Ralph Ellison's idea that what we understand to be American is, in countless visible and invisible ways, impossible without African-Americans. One of his earliest recognitions of racism comes when, watching television in Indonesia, thousands of miles away from black America, he notices that the Bill Cosby character in "I Spy" never gets any women, while his white partner, Robert Culp, makes out on a regular basis. Back in Hawaii, a classmate asks to touch his hair the way she might tentatively touch the coat of a farm animal. Painful, but, again, they are hardly moments worthy of Manchild in the Promised Land.
Narratives of ascent, by their nature, must begin with deprivation, oppression, and existential dread. Obama seems to sense this problem and, at the very start of his book, darkens his canvas as well as he can. He is twenty-one and living in New York, on East Ninety-fourth Street, between First and Second Avenues. This has always been a world away from East Ninety-fourth Street and Park or Madison or Fifth Avenues, and the block was markedly worse then than it is now. Veteran residents of the building told a reporter for the New York Times that there had been assaults in the hallways and that drug use was common. And yet it was not Bushwick, either. Elaine's and the Ninety-second Street Y are nearby. Obama places himself in that "part of that unnamed, shifting border between East Harlem and the rest of Manhattan," knowing that the mere mention of Harlem, to some white non-New Yorkers, will resonate in a minor key. The block is "uninviting," "treeless," shadowy; the buzzer is broken; the heat is spotty; the sounds of gunfire echo in the night, and a "black Doberman the size of a wolf" prowls nearby, an empty beer bottle clamped in its jaws. And, to flavor the menacing picture with a dash of class resentment, Obama reports that "white people from the better neighborhoods" walk their dogs on his street "to let the animals shit on our curbs."
Obama heightens the facts of his spare and lonely life. His "kindred spirit" is a silent and solitary neighbor who lives alone, and eventually dies alone, a crumpled heap on the third-floor landing. "I wished that I had learned the old man's name," the narrator reports gravely. "I felt as if an understanding had been broken between us--as if, in that barren room, the old man was whispering an untold history." A paragraph later we realize the literary effect for which Obama is striving: the death of the old man with his "untold history" foreshadows by a month the death of the Old Man, Obama's father, who, of course, is himself the great untold story that Obama will set out to explore and tell. As he is cooking his eggs "on a cold, dreary November morning," Obama gets the news on a scratchy line from Nairobi.
Obama's book is a multicultural picaresque, a search both worldly and internal that will take him to Honolulu, Jakarta, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Nairobi, and his ancestral village of Kogelo. Along the way he accumulates knowledge, he peels back layer after layer of secrets, until he becomes his mature, reconciled self. When Obama writes a new preface for the 2004 edition, he is the Democratic Party nominee for U.S. senator from Illinois, and he insists that "what was a more interior, intimate" quest has now "converged with a broader public debate, a debate in which I am professionally engaged, one that will shape our lives and the lives of our children for many years to come." His quest is not just his own; it becomes emblematic of a national political quest. Writers rarely insist so boldly on the importance of their own books.
At the end of each of the memoir's three long sections ("Origins," "Chicago," and "Kenya"), the narrator is in tears and experiences an epiphany: first, he weeps when he sees his father in a dream and resolves to search for him; then he cries in Jeremiah Wright's church when he realizes that he has found both a community and a faith; and, finally, he collapses in tears at his father's grave, when he realizes that after discovering so much about his father--his intelligence, his failures, his tragic end--he is reconciled to his family and his past.
It is not difficult to understand why politically sympathetic readers were prepared to make extravagant, extra-literary claims for Obama's book during his Presidential campaign. They were reading him not as the civil-rights lawyer and law professor he was when the book was first published, but as a candidate who hoped to succeed George W. Bush, a President who was insistently anti-intellectual, an executive who resisted introspection as a suspect indulgence.
Race is at the core of Obama's story and, like any good storyteller, he heightens whatever opportunity arises to get at his main theme. When he is writing about the more distant past of his mother's side of the family, he tries to plumb the racial memories of his grandparents, people who "like most white Americans at the time" had "never really given black people much thought." Jim Crow around Wichita, Kansas, where they grew up, was in its "more informal, genteel form": "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." But when the Dunhams lived briefly after the war in north Texas, they begin to feel the presence of race. At the bank, Toot, Obama's grandmother, is told that a "nigger" like the janitor, Mr. Reed, should never be called "Mister." His mother, Ann, who was eleven or twelve, is harassed as a "nigger lover" and a "dirty Yankee" for having a black girl as a friend. Here Obama is careful to signal his own doubt; memory, and its deceptive nature, is also his theme. "It's hard to know how much weight to give to these episodes," he writes. Obama is skeptical when his grandfather says that he and Toot left Texas for Seattle to escape Southern racism; Toot suggests that a better job opportunity was more likely the case. Obama's predilection, as the book will show, is to reconcile possibilities. He comes to suspect that, in his grandfather's mind, the wounds of blacks "merged with his own: the absent father and the hint of scandal, a mother who had gone away," the sense that as a young man he had been shunned as not quite respectable--a "wop," his in-laws called him. "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."
Obama is also wise to Hawaii, to the "ugly conquest" of the islands through "aborted treaties and crippling disease," the exploitation by missionaries and the cane and pineapple barons. "And yet, by the time my family arrived"--in 1959, the same year as statehood--"it had somehow vanished from collective memory," he writes, "like morning mist that the sun burned away." There is something deeply attractive about Obama in this mode, when he is unsentimentally trying to grasp the complexity of things.
Obama's novelistic contrivances can sometimes feel strained. In Chapter 2, he recalls a day when he is nine years old and living with his family in Indonesia. He is sitting in the library of the American Embassy, in Jakarta, where his mother teaches English. The scene is painted in palpable detail: the traffic-choked road to the embassy, with its rickshaws and over-crowded jitneys; the "wizened brown women in faded brown sarongs" with their baskets of fruit; the "smartly dressed" Marines at the embassy; his mother's boss, who "smelled of after-shave and his starched collar cut hard into his neck." Obama recalls ignoring the World Bank reports and geological surveys and finding a collection of Life magazines. He thumbs through the ads: "Goodyear Tires and Dodge Fever, Zenith TV ('Why not the best?') and Campbell's Soup ('Mm-mm good!')." Then he comes on a photograph of a Japanese woman "cradling a young, naked girl in a shallow tub": the girl is gnarled and crippled. Then he comes across a photograph of a black man who has used a chemical treatment to whiten his complexion. "There were thousands of people like him," he learns, "black men and women back in America who'd undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person." Reading this, Obama recalls, "I felt my face and neck get hot." The article is like an "ambush" on his sensibilities and innocence. "I imagine other black children, then and now, undergoing similar moments of revelation," Obama writes.
During the Presidential campaign, a journalist from the Chicago Tribune searched for the article. No such article ran. Obama responded feebly, "It might have been an Ebony or it might have been ... who knows what it was?" Archivists at Ebony could not find anything, either. It might have been that Obama was thinking of John Howard Griffin's book Black Like Me. Griffin, a journalist and a burly white Texan who was wounded in the Second World War, decided, in 1959, to explore the lives of African-Americans in the South. On assignment for Sepia, a black-oriented magazine, Griffin shaved off his hair, exposed himself to long sessions of ultraviolet rays, and took huge doses of medication prescribed by a dermatologist to darken his skin; he then traveled around Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi where he discovered the indignities suffered by men and women of color. His book, which was published in 1961, was a best-seller and remained popular for decades in American schools; however, in the Texas town where Griffin lived with his family, he was hanged in effigy.
Obviously, Obama was after an emotional truth here, and there certainly were articles published over time about black men and women who used whitening creams. The scene cannot help but echo that famous moment in Malcolm X's autobiography when he gets his first "self-defacing" conk, allowing a barber to take the kink out of his hair with a stinging lye-and-potato mixture called congolene.
Obama is not always easy on Ann Dunham. That is part of the drama of his book: his obvious love for a woman who is intelligent, idealistic, brave, and engaged with the world but also, at times, maddeningly naive and frequently thousands of miles away. Obama's father, who is almost completely absent from Obama's life as anything more than a ghost, is angry and self-indulgent, brittle with his son on his one trip to Hawaii, and yet he is the singular object of the narrator's imaginings, at the center of a young man's quest to claim a race and a history.
Obama is proud of his mother's broadmindedness, her insistence that her family avoid behaving abroad like "ugly Americans." She demands that the family resist the temptation to treat anyone as an "other," as a "foreigner" or a benighted "local." More than her Indonesian husband, she does not automatically assume that an American habit of mind or culture is superior to the Indonesian. She aspires to be cosmopolitan. This clearly had an enormous influence on Obama, as a person and as a politician. And yet, early in the book, Obama is reflexively suspicious of his mother. He is the adolescent whose vanity resides in the way in which he "sees through" his parent. "My mother's confidence in needlepoint virtues," he writes, "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." He could hardly bear her self-conscious admiration for black culture. When she brings him Mahalia Jackson records and recordings of the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., he rolls his eyes. "Every black man was Thurgood Marshall or Sidney Poitier; every black woman Fannie Lou Hamer or Lena Horne," he writes, echoing the sarcastic tone of his teenaged self. "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."
Obama realizes that he has to learn how to be an African-American almost entirely on his own. It is not something that his mother and grandparents, however well intentioned they may be, can provide.
Obama sometimes felt himself a fake when he tried to imitate the language and resentments of his few black friends. When they would talk about "how white folks will do you," the phrase felt "uncomfortable in my mouth." "I felt like a non-native speaker tripping over a difficult phrase." Poignantly, Obama "ceased to advertise" his mother's race "when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites." But, at the same time, he is well aware that he is no Richard Wright, who made the classic migration from Mississippi to the South Side; nor is he Malcolm Little, whose father, a Baptist minister and Garveyite organizer, was killed in Lansing.
"We were in goddamned Hawaii," Obama writes. "We said what we pleased, ate where we pleased; we sat at the front of the proverbial bus. None of our white friends, guys like Jeff or Scott from the basketball team, treated us any differently than they treated each other. They loved us, and we loved them back. Shit, seemed like half of 'em wanted to be black themselves--or at least Doctor J."
Nevertheless, Obama is lost, almost completely without African-American adults around to help him figure himself out. For an adolescent black kid in an almost wholly white world, Hawaii was a vexed and confusing paradise. "As it was, I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere."
Obama is hardly humorless in private. Occasionally a wry, mocking wit comes through in his public appearances. As a writer, though, he is usually earnest in the extreme. Chapter 5, which covers his years at Occidental, opens with him stretched out on his couch at three in the morning, listening to Billie Holiday singing "I'm a Fool to Want You" after a party at his apartment. Hasan has gone off to his girlfriend's house. He has a drink, a cigarette; we are led to believe that he has been partying pretty hard. He thinks about his father, about the drugs he has taken, about his youthful disaffection, his tussles with his mother. Then the record ends. "I suddenly felt very sober," and he pours himself another drink: "I could hear someone flushing a toilet, walking across a room. Another insomniac, probably, listening to his life tick away. That was the problem with booze and drugs, wasn't it? At some point they couldn't stop that ticking sound, the sound of certain emptiness." It is a 3 A.M. scene in which Sinatra meets Sartre.
Obama emphasizes two aspects of his life at Occidental, nearly to the exclusion of everything else: he rehearses different kinds of African-American voices and describes his increasing politicization. The audiobook version of Dreams from My Father is arguably of greater interest than the text, and one of the reasons is that Obama, who admits that he has become a master of shifting his own voice and syntax to fit the situation, expertly mimics his black Occidental friends: Marcus, "the most conscious of brothers" with a sister in the Black Panthers; Joyce, who insists on her multiracial identity; Tim, with his argyle sweaters and peculiar taste for country music. As the book progresses, he is equally adept at imitating "Rafiq," the black nationalist, "Marty," the organizer, and his Kenyan relatives. He does not mock them; but there is a comic affection in those voices, a rich texture to the performance. He is also telling us something about the diversity of the black community, its range of qualities, anxieties, talents, and backgrounds.
The specifics of Obama's background are sui generis, but at Occidental he begins to identify with a nagging, and fairly common, problem: an anxiety about authenticity. He is reminded again of his bland good fortune at this pleasant college campus near Pasadena: "I was more like the black students who had grown up in the suburbs, kids whose parents had already paid the price of escape. You could spot them right away by the way they talked, the people they sat with in the cafeteria. When pressed, they would sputter and explain that they refused to be categorized. They weren't defined by the color of their skin, they would tell you. They were individuals." But Obama sees the lie in that, too. Race is a "fact." The kids who insist completely on their own individuality, the ones who want to trip the lock of color, of tribe, are also deluded. "They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people."
The role model who shocks Obama into a sense of the life he ought to pursue is the straight-talking Chicago girl he calls Regina. She pointedly asks to call him Barack. She is delightful. She lives with her mother (the father is absent) on the South Side of Chicago. She talks about taverns and pool halls and close-knit neighbors, "about evenings in the kitchen with uncles and cousins and grandparents, the stew of voices bubbling up in laughter." Hers is a vision of black life that fills Obama with longing--"a longing for place, and a fixed and definite history." Not only does he get involved in the anti-apartheid movement; he also resolves to live, as an adult, in a large African-American community. The appearance of Regina, we come to feel, is a harbinger of Michelle Robinson.
Obama is on the move in his book, but he moves not to escape the onerous bonds known to the early memoirists--the bonds of slavery, Jim Crow, prison, or an oppressive home. He is on the move in order to satisfy an inner search, to answer the questions of his divided self.
As a well-read student who is coming of age in the era of multiculturalism and critical theory, Obama is keenly aware of the academic notions that identity is, in some measure, a social construction. Race is a fact, a matter of genetics and physical attributes, but it is also a matter of social and self-conception. A commanding theme of the book is a young man's realization that he has a say in all of this; that he is not merely a "product" of family history; he has to make sense of his circumstances and his inheritances, and then decide what he wants to make of it all and who he wants to be. Identity and race are matters over which he has some influence.
In Chicago, Obama enters a realm of political work where an essential part of his job coincides with his internal search: he essentially canvasses the South Side. And, as he asks about the problems of one pastor, priest, and community activist after another, he adds to his store of knowledge about the way people live. Every possible form of black politics and political thinking--liberal integrationism, black nationalism, Afrocentrism, apathy, activism, even the tendency to conspiracy thinking--is heard and, in the memoir, given voice. At a meeting with a colleague called Deacon Will, a roomful of people are inspired by Will's moving description of his own life. "Then, as if the sight of this big man weeping had watered the dry surface of their hearts, the others in the room began speaking about their own memories in solemn, urgent tones," Obama writes. "They talked about life in small Southern towns: the corner stores where men had gathered to learn the news of the day or lend a hand to women with their groceries, the way adults looked after each other's children ('Couldn't get away with nothing, 'cause your momma had eyes and ears up and down the whole block'), the sense of public decorum that such familiarity had helped sustain. In their voices was no little bit of nostalgia, elements of selective memory; but the whole of what they recalled rang vivid and true, the sound of shared loss." The scene is sentimental, but the reader cannot help thinking that it, and a hundred instances like it, shaped Obama's thinking and political style: the belief in "sacred stories" as a form of political communication, understanding, and cohesion.
Obama is less sentimental about politics. In fact, as he recalls his daily encounters with the despair of the de-industrialized South Side, his instinct to personalize his vision is combined with a capacity to see problems with a certain dispassion, a clear-eyed sense of how markets and shifting economic fortunes create or destroy places like the South Side with a historical ruthlessness:
I tried to imagine the Indonesian workers who were now making their way to the sort of factories that had once sat along the banks of the Calumet River, joining the ranks of wage labor to assemble the radios and sneakers that sold on Michigan Avenue. I imagined those same Indonesian workers ten, twenty years from now, when their factories would have closed down, a consequence of new technology or lower wages in some other part of the globe. And then the bitter discovery that their markets have vanished; that they no longer remember how to weave their own baskets or carve their own furniture or grow their own food; that even if they remember such craft, the forests that gave them wood are now owned by timber interests, the baskets they once wove have been replaced by more durable plastics.
It is a passage that sounds strikingly similar to his mother's descriptions in her dissertation of how modern economic change threatened the culture of the Javanese villages where she was finishing her doctoral fieldwork. In Chicago, Obama is doing his own sort of fieldwork.
On the South Side, Obama could take in the full range of black political opinion. His neighborhood, Hyde Park-Kenwood, was also home to Louis Farrakhan, to Jesse Jackson's headquarters, and to intellectuals of varying ideologies and tempers. Obama's exposure to the sort of political viewpoints that are aired regularly on the street and black radio, but never on "Meet the Press" or "Washington Week," is something that he takes seriously. Obama allows Rafiq many paragraphs to dilate on a black-nationalist vision, one that interests, but, finally, frustrates the narrator. He reads issues of The Final Call, the newspaper of the Nation of Islam, and he listens to the nationalists on the radio, but he worries that what had been a generation ago, in Malcolm X's voice, a wake-up call and a summons to pride, has now become fantastical delusion, "one more excuse for inaction." Obama determines that the sort of black nationalism he is hearing from Rafiq and others has "twin strands": one that is an affirming message "of solidarity and self-reliance, discipline and communal responsibility" and another that depends on hatred of whites. Obama concludes that Rafiq is right to think that "deep down, all blacks were potential nationalists. The anger was there, bottled up and often turned inward." But a nationalism that depends on racial animosity, that is subject to conspiracy theory, contradicts the morality that his mother taught him, a morality of "subtle distinctions" between "individuals of goodwill and those who wished me ill, between active malice and ignorance or indifference." Obama concludes that nationalism, like Reagan's own sunny right-wing vision, depends on "magical thinking." African-Americans, he says, are those "who could least afford such make-believe." If community organizing insists on anything, it is pragmatism. And, since nationalism lacks "a workable plan," Obama looks elsewhere.
Chicago was also a place where Obama was trying to divine how race figured into his life as a man. How does tribe, especially when tribe is so complicated and mixed, figure into the question of whom to love, whom to marry? Obama dates both black and white women, and he is not reluctant to make that experience, too, a part of his narrative. In New York, he tells us, he loved a white woman: "She had dark hair, and specks of green in her eyes. Her voice sounded like a wind chime." They dated for a year. At one point, the woman invites him to her family's country house. It is autumn. They go canoeing across an icy lake. The family knows the land, "the names of the earliest white settlers--their ancestors--and before that, the names of the Indians who'd once hunted the land." The house is a family inheritance, and so, it seems, is the country itself. The library is filled with the pictures of dignitaries whom the grandfather had known. And Obama, who needs not remind us that his own inheritance is a more elusive thing, sees the gulf between him and this woman. "I realized that our two worlds, my friend's and mine, were as distant from each other as Kenya is from Germany," he writes. "And I knew that if we stayed together I'd eventually live in hers. After all, I'd been doing it most of my life. Between the two of us, I was the one who knew how to live as an outsider." He is like the "ethnic" in a hundred novels, the outsider who, with a mixture of wonder and apprehension, enters the world of the established order through romance.
The connection is fraught. After leaving a theater where they have seen a bitterly funny play about race, Obama's girlfriend is confused. She asks why black people are so "angry all the time." They argue. It is a familiar moment of romantic culture-clash; Obama is like one of Jhumpa Lahiri's young Bengali-Americans in the town house of his wealthy Wasp girlfriend. But Obama, as ever, refuses to describe their breakup as evidence of a hopeless gap. "Maybe even if she'd been black it still wouldn't have worked out," he writes. "I mean, there are several black ladies out there who've broken my heart just as good."
Obama ends the Chicago section by discovering Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ. The scene doesn't merely flirt with melodrama; as the portrayal of revelation, it insists on our good faith. As he sits in the pews early one Sunday morning, he hears in the music and in the minister's voice the convergence of "all the notes" of the many life stories he has been listening to for the past three years. Then, as in so many (far greater) memoirs, from Augustine to Malcolm X, Obama dramatizes his spiritual shift, his own leap of faith. Until now, he has resisted or deferred that leap, despite the blandishments of so many well-meaning ministers and activists, but now the stories of suffering and redemption suddenly link with the story of suffering and redemption. "In that single note--hope!--I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones. Those stories--of survival, and freedom, and hope--became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black." Obama's tears this time are not tears of despair, as they were at the end of "Origins." They are tears of release, the joy of having gained something profound: the comfort of community, the immensity of faith.
Obama begins the section on his journey to Kenya, which he made in the summer of 1988, with a series of portentous gestures. He spends three weeks in Europe before going to Africa and he reports gloomy disappointment with Paris, London, and Madrid (a plaza has "De Chirico shadows"). He is a "Westerner not entirely at home in the West, an African on his way to a land full of strangers." On the road between Madrid and Barcelona, he encounters a Spanish-speaking African, a doppelganger from Senegal. ("What was his name? I couldn't remember now; just another hungry man far away from home, one of the many children of former colonies--Algerians, West Indians, Pakistanis--now breaching the barricades of their former masters, mounting their own ragged, haphazard invasion. And yet, as we walked toward the Ramblas, I had felt as if I knew him as well as any man; that, coming from opposite ends of the earth, we were somehow making the same journey.") It is not an especially convincing sequence; even the highly sympathetic reader senses a young man wanting to dramatize his loneliness with maximal symbolic freight and artificial political meaning.
The symbol-laden atmosphere carries over to his five-week tour of Kenya. At the Nairobi airport, he encounters the beautiful Miss Omoro who helps him with his lost baggage and dazzles him by recognizing his name. Throughout the book (and, as we know, throughout his political career), Obama's name has been a symbol of his identity, both of his wrestling match with identity and of the way others see him. "For the first time in my life," Obama writes, "I felt the comfort, the firmness of identity that a name might provide, how it could carry an entire history in other people's memories." And he hasn't even left the airport.
On his first day, he experiences the shock of recognition: everyone looks like him! "All of this while a steady procession of black faces passed before your eyes, the round faces of babies and the chipped, worn faces of the old; beautiful faces that made me understand the transformation that [Obama's friends] claimed to have undergone after their first visit to Africa. For a span of weeks or months, you could experience the freedom that comes from not feeling watched, the freedom of believing that your hair grows as it's supposed to grow and that your rump sways the way a rump is supposed to sway.... Here the world was black, and so you were just you."
But Obama's naivete and his eagerness to be transformed recedes as he starts listening to his storytelling relatives, men and women who deepen his knowledge about his father and all that his father has come to stand for in his mind. Obama's sister Auma, who studied in Germany, had spent time with Obama in the States. During that first encounter, she not only relayed the basic facts of their father's life in Nairobi--his work for an American oil company and various ministries; the political intrigues in Nairobi; his sad deterioration--but was prepared to separate myth from reality. She is, unlike so many others, properly skeptical, as well as highly intelligent. When she tells a story about how Jomo Kenyatta summoned the Old Man (as she calls Barack, Sr.) and warned him to "keep his mouth shut," she adds, "I don't know how much of these details are true." What is certain is that Barack, Sr., was a man made miserable by his political disappointment, and also by his "survivor's guilt," as one who was lucky enough to be airlifted to another world and return with an education. Auma is sympathetic, but she is also far more clear-eyed than Obama's mother was. The Old Man, she reports, was a miserable husband and a worse father. Drunk and raging, he would stagger into Auma's room late at night, wake her, and rail at her about how he had been betrayed. Obama realizes rather quickly that when he was ten and his father came to visit him, Barack, Sr., was already in the midst of his decline. The revelations are utterly at odds with Obama's long-held myth of his father's grandeur, a myth propagated by his loving and well-meaning mother. It is a myth, he comes to understand, that he can no longer rely on. "I felt as if my world had been turned on its head," Obama writes of his discoveries about his father, "as if I had woken up to find a blue sun in the yellow sky, or heard animals speaking like men." He realizes that he had been "wrestling with nothing more than a ghost." And in that discovery there is a dawning sense of wisdom and, even, liberation: "The fantasy of my father had at least kept me from despair. Now he was dead, truly. He could no longer tell me how to live."
As Obama spends more time in Kenya with Auma and his aunts, cousins, nephews, nieces, and step-siblings, his own vanities begin to peel away. Sitting with his relatives in the shabby apartment belonging to one of them, with its "well-worn" furniture and "two-year-old calendar," he recognizes the same attempt to ward off poverty, the same chatter, the same "absence of men" that he knew on the South Side. The apartment is "just like the apartments in Altgeld." In Africa, he sees that his self-willed collegiate asceticism is "hopelessly abstract, even self-indulgent." And as he walks in the vast Nairobi slum called Mathare, with its tin shacks and open sewage, he, too, comes to see what survivor's guilt is all about.
One day, he and a reluctant Auma go on a safari. Here, again, Obama cannot resist the symbolic weight of what he is seeing. In the Great Rift Valley, where remains of the early hominids, including "Lucy," were found, the same place that Obama's father described to the eager schoolchildren in Hawaii, Obama sits at twilight watching hyenas feed on the carcass of a wildebeest and vultures loom on the perimeter of the kill. "It was a savage scene, and we stayed there for a long time, watching life feed on itself, the silence interrupted only by the crack of bone or the rush of wind, or the hard thump of a vulture's wings as it strained to lift itself into the current," Obama writes. "And I thought to myself: This is what Creation looked like. The same stillness, the same crunching of bone. There in the dusk, over the hill, I imagined the first man stepping forward, naked and rough-skinned, grasping a chunk of flint in his clumsy hand, no words yet for the fear."
Finally, Obama visits the scene of his own origins. With his sister Auma, his stepmother Kezia, his aunt Zeituni, and his brothers Roy and Bernard, he boards a train for Kisumu, the town closest to his ancestral village of Kogelo. He is riding on tracks that the British began laying in 1895, the year that Hussein Onyango Obama was born. While he rides the night train, Obama experiences one of his not infrequent reveries. Colonialism and its legacy are a persistent theme in Obama's book, and once more he crosses the wires of the personal and the political and imagines the result. Would a British officer on the train's maiden voyage "have felt a sense of triumph, a confidence that the guiding light of Western civilization had finally penetrated the African darkness? Or did he feel a sense of foreboding, a sudden realization that the entire enterprise was an act of folly, that this land and its people would outlast imperial dreams?"
In Kogelo, Obama meets "Granny" (this is Mama Sarah, as she is known locally, Barack, Sr.,'s stepmother) and learns from her his family's history as if from a Homeric singer of myth and epic. In interviews with visiting journalists, Sarah is plainspoken. When Obama gets her to recount family history, she is a vatic presence. Sitting outside her simple house, she speaks at great length, beginning:
First there was Miwiru. It's not known who came before. Miwiru sired Sigoma, Sigoma sired Owiny, Owiny sired Kisodhi, Kisodhi sired Ogelo, Ogelo sired Otondi, Otondi sired Obongo, Obongo sired Okoth, and Okoth sired Opiyo. The women who bore them, their names are forgotten, for that was the way of our people.
She tells the whole story: The family's migration from Uganda to Kogelo. Battles with the Bantu. The saga of Onyango. It is a story of Genesis, of Exodus, of generations--all recalled and told in the Luo language, with the sagacity of a village ancient. The opening soliloquy lasts for more than ten pages and, after some narrative business, resumes for eighteen more. It's probably safe to say that these extended quotations are constructed out of Obama's effortful attempts to derive as much information from her as he could, and that he re-created her words in the most poetic way possible, but it is not a wholesale invention. Such recitation is a rich Luo tradition; often, even illiterate elders can recite their family histories for many generations.
The story of father and son, Onyango and Barack, Sr., and their attempts to move out into the greater world and then return, their attempts to be cosmopolitans--one at the high noon of colonialism, the next as colonialism dwindles and disappears--is a remarkable and tragic story. Onyango is, in many ways, an unsympathetic figure: brusque, cruel. But his curiosity and his ambition fascinate his grandson. Onyango, Sarah tells him, "became curious and decided that he must see these white men for himself." He sets out on foot for Nairobi, and returns "many months later" wearing the white man's clothing: trousers, a shirt, and "shoes that covered his feet," a sight that frightened the village children. They think that he has been circumcised or is somehow unclean and, therefore, hiding under these strange garments. He is an exile from Eden, and is now estranged from his village world. Soon, the white man's presence extends to every corner of Kenya and, as Sarah says, infects black Africa and economic norms and cultural values: "With tea, we found that we needed sugar, and teakettles, and cups. All these things we bought with skins and meat and vegetables." Then the Luo start working for wages, for "the white man's coin." Guns, war, a wholesale fall from grace soon follow. "Respect for tradition weakened, for young people saw that the elders had no real power. Beer, which once had been made of honey and which men drank only sparingly, now came in bottles, and many men became drunks. Many of us began to taste the white man's life, and we decided that compared to him, our lives were poor."
At the end of the long day with her grandson, Mama Sarah rummages around in a trunk that contains a few invaluable scraps of the past and gives them to Obama "like messages in bottles": the frayed document that Onyango carried as a servant among British officers, one of Barack, Sr.,'s letters of application to an American university. ("This was it, I thought to myself," Obama writes ruefully. "My inheritance.") Finally, he leaves his grandmother's hut and goes out into the yard to contemplate two concrete slabs covered in tile, the graves of his grandfather and father:
Standing before the two graves, I felt everything around me--the cornfields, the mango tree, the sky--closing in, until I was left with only a series of mental images, Granny's stories come to life....
For a long time I sat between the two graves and wept. When my tears were finally spent, I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America--the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I'd felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I'd witnessed in Chicago--all of it was connected with this small plot of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain I felt was my father's pain. My questions were my brothers' questions. Their struggle, my birthright.
The epilogue of Dreams from My Father ties things together neatly. The dreamy spell of recovering the past is broken before Obama leaves for home. A history teacher named Rukia Odero, a friend of his father's, warns against coming to Africa in a false quest for the "authentic." Obama must realize, she tells him, that every question has not been resolved.
Then the narrator brings us up to date. He admits that Harvard Law School was not always fun ("three years in poorly lit libraries"), but his idealism and heightened rhetoric are undiminished. In the words of the Declaration of Independence, he says, he also hears the spirit of Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany, of Martin and Malcolm, of Japanese families in internment camps and Jewish piece-workers in sweatshops, of dust-bowl farmers and the people of Altgeld.
The story ends as traditional comedies do--with a wedding. When Michelle Robinson appears in the story, everything falls into place. Surrounded by his American and African family, by friends from organizing and from law school, from Punahou, Occidental, and Columbia, Obama and Michelle are married by Reverend Wright. "To a happy ending," Obama says as a toast and, in the African tradition, dribbles a little of his drink on the floor for the elders buried in the earth. Everything is reconciled. As befits the form of so many narratives of ascent, Obama has found himself and he has found a wife, a family, a community, a city, a faith, and a cause. At the same time, he has avoided his father's mistakes and grown out of his own. He is at ease. His wedding unites black and white, America and Kenya. And, since nearly all of the millions of people who have read the book read it in the light of an even greater quest, the hero and his story are elevated to mythic levels.
Peter Osnos and his colleagues at Times Books did not have outsized commercial ambitions for Dreams from My Father. "We had mid-list hopes for Obama," Osnos said. "Most galleys were done plain then, but we did a nice advance reader's edition, which indicates a certain interest. We were going for the multicultural thing." The book was reviewed positively in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe, but it received scant publicity. Obama was interviewed in Los Angeles for the cable-television show "Connie Martinson Talks Books"; at the end of the show, Martinson turned to the author and said, "You know, I've never said this to anyone, but you would have a terrific career in politics." As part of a modest book tour, Obama gave readings for small crowds at bookstores including his local, Fifty-seventh Street Books, in Hyde Park. At Eso Won Books, an African-American bookstore in Los Angeles, just nine people came to see him, and Obama simply sat everyone in a circle and, after reading for a few minutes, shared details of his life and, ever the community organizer, asked people, "Tell me your name and what you do."
Times Books shipped about twelve thousand copies of Dreams from My Father and sold nine thousand. For less than ten thousand dollars, Times Books licensed the paperback to Kodansha, a Japanese-owned house, which was specializing in multicultural books for an American audience.
Dreams first appeared in the summer of 1995. The nineteen-nineties were rich with books by authors eager to write about themselves, their families, their deprivations, addictions, incarcerations, hallucinations, love affairs, illnesses, losses, and redemptions. Some of these books--like William Styron's Darkness Visible, Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, Mary Karr's The Liar's Club, Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted, Paul Monette's Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, and James McBride's The Color of Water, all published by 1996--fulfilled Obama's literary ambitions: honesty, literary achievement, and astonishing sales. Obama waited more than a decade before his book became a best-seller.
Obama is hardly the only President to exhibit a literary bent before running for office. The most prolific of the literary Presidents was Theodore Roosevelt, who began his first book, a naval history of the War of 1812, while still an undergraduate at Harvard. As a reader, Roosevelt was heroic, capable of consuming two or three books in a night. His biographer Edmund Morris writes that in 1906 (as President!) Roosevelt read five hundred books or more, including all of Trollope's novels, the complete works of Thomas De Quincey, the complete prose of Milton, the poetry of Scott, Poe, and Longfellow, and William Dudley Foulke's Life of Oliver P. Morton. In all, Roosevelt wrote thirty-eight books, including, prior to his political career, biographies of Thomas Hart Benton, the Missouri senator and advocate of westward expansion, and Gouverneur Morris, the author of the preamble of the Constitution; a four-volume history, The Winning of the West; accounts of his many hunting trips; and scores of literary reviews and scientific articles. Woodrow Wilson, who had a doctorate in history and political science from Johns Hopkins, wrote Congressional Government and other academic studies well before his election as governor of New Jersey and then as President. Herbert Hoover was not unliterary. With his wife, Lou, he translated from Latin the Renaissance treatise on mining by Agricola, De re metallica. John Kennedy's literary efforts carried with them the aura of gilded sponsorship and professional assistance: his father promoted for publication his Harvard thesis "Why England Slept" and his aide Theodore Sorensen and others were more than helpful in the industrial production of Profiles in Courage.
Dreams from My Father ought not to be overvalued as a purely literary text; other writer-politicians such as Vaclav Havel and Andre Malraux wrote immensely greater and more mature work before holding office. But few American politicians of consequence before Obama have ventured to describe themselves personally with anything like the force and emotional openness of Dreams from My Father. It is enough to say that Dreams from My Father is a good book that became, through political circumstance, an important one.
Early in the history of the Republic, it was impossible to imagine political self-projections at all. The Founding Fathers were philosopher-statesmen who saw the executive branch as a check on the unruly and corruptible legislature. Campaigning itself was a degradation of the office. "Motives of delicacy," Washington said, "have prevented me hitherto from conversing or writing on this subject, whenever I could avoid it with decency." Washington established the American Presidency as an office neither to be sought nor to be declined. Even in a democracy, it was somehow bestowed, not battled for. The historian M. J. Heale has called the early Presidential posture "the mute tribune."
Self-presentation in the American political culture begins in earnest with Andrew Jackson. After retiring from the military, in 1815, and setting up house on a thousand-acre plantation near Nashville, Jackson hired John Eaton, a young lawyer and one of his former soldiers in the War of 1812, to write his biography. Several years later, Jackson used Eaton's hagiographic Life of Andrew Jackson for his 1824 presidential race. The book, considered the first campaign biography ever published in the United States, presented Jackson as something utterly new in American politics: "the self-made man." When Jackson ultimately won the Presidency in 1828, his choice for Secretary of War was his biographer, John Eaton.
Jackson's brand of self-description has never faded from American politics. In 1852, just after completing The Blithedale Romance, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a slapdash biography of his Bowdoin College friend Franklin Pierce. It took around a month to complete. Hawthorne's reward was a consulship in Liverpool; the country's reward was a miserable President. William Dean Howells wrote a biography of Lincoln in the course of a few weeks and without ever meeting the man. The portrait, which was published in 1860, is the foundation of a million others: the "rude cabin of the settler," the earnest, rail-splitting autodidact, the "young backwoodsman" reading Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England "under a wide-spreading oak" in the woods near New Salem. "People went by, and he took no account of them," Howells wrote of Lincoln's studies in the forest, "the salutations of acquaintances were returned with silence, or a vacant stare."
The stories have their variations: the modest warrior-statesmen dominate, though there occasionally appears an intellectual woodsman, like Lincoln. But the template remains basically the same: the rise from modest circumstances to an adulthood of selfless service to flag and country. The biographers recount Jackson's mother telling her boys about the poverty of Ireland; Henry Clay's loss of his father in childhood; William Henry Harrison's log cabin; and Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan Hill. F.D.R.'s early biographers describe the classrooms of Groton as if they were carved from pinewood. "American campaign biographies still follow a script written nearly two centuries ago," the historian Jill Lepore writes. "East of piffle and west of hokum, the Boy from Hope always grows up to be the Man of the People. Will we ever stop electing Andrew Jackson?"
Obama's Dreams from My Father was not intended as a campaign biography, but it ended up acting as one. For a politician who was making the personal political and placing his own story and background at the center of his candidacy, writing Dreams from My Father was the ultimate act of self-creation. Its stories are at the center of Obama's thinking, his self-regard, his public rhetoric.
In the closing weeks of the 2008 Presidential campaign, as it seemed more and more evident that only a miracle worthy of Dorian Gray could rescue John McCain from defeat, a little-known conservative writer, magazine editor, and former talk-radio-show host named Jack Cashill advanced a theory popular on various right-wing Web sites, including American Thinker and World Net Daily, that Barack Obama was not the author of Dreams from My Father. This was a charge that, if ever proved true, or believed to be true among enough voters, could have been the end of the candidacy. Obama himself admitted that many people had got involved in his campaign "because they feel they know me through my books." This accusation of fraud possessed a diabolical potency for those who wished him ill. It suggested that the man poised to become the first African-American President, one celebrated for his language and his eloquence, could not possibly be such a good writer.
The true author of Obama's book, Jack Cashill suggested, was likely Bill Ayers, best known as the co-founder of the Weather Underground and the "terrorist" referred to in speeches by Sarah Palin. Cashill wrote that he had carefully studied books by Ayers, who had written a memoir and books about education, and through a process that he called "deconstruction," this latter-day Derrida charged that these volumes contained too much in common to skirt suspicion. For instance, Cashill wrote, they both misspelled Frantz Fanon as "Franz." They were both obsessed with eyes: "Ayers is fixated with faces, especially eyes. He writes of 'sparkling' eyes, 'shining' eyes, 'laughing' eyes, 'twinkling' eyes, eyes 'like ice.' ... Obama is also fixated with faces, especially eyes. He also writes of 'sparkling' eyes, 'shining' eyes, 'laughing' eyes, 'twinkling' eyes.... Obama also used the highly distinctive phrase 'like ice.'"
And so on.
Cashill's assertions might well have remained a mere twinkling in the Web's farthest lunatic orbit had it not been for the fact that more powerful voices hoped to give his theory wider currency. A writer for the National Review's popular blog The Corner declared Cashill's scholarly readings "thorough, thoughtful, and alarming." And Rush Limbaugh, during his nationwide radio broadcast on October 10, 2008, digressed from a mocking segment about Dreams from My Father to take up the Ayers-as-author theory:
You know, there are stories out there, he may not have written this book.... There's no evidence that Obama has ever written anything prior to this except a poem, and the poem was as dumb as "A River, Rock, and Tree" that Maya Angelou did at the Slickster's inauguration back in 1993. There's no evidence that he has any kind of writing talent. We haven't seen anything he wrote at Harvard Law, or when he was at Columbia, or any tests that he's written. But if you read his books, if you listen to his audio reading of the book here, you don't hear this when Obama goes out and speaks. I would like for him to be given a test on his own book. You know how Charles Barkley once said he was misquoted in his own book? (laughs) I would like for Obama to actually be given a test on his own book.
This may not have been Limbaugh's most racist insinuation of the campaign. His delighted airing of the song "Barack, the Magic Negro," sung to the tune of "Puff, the Magic Dragon," probably reached a wider audience, and his description of Obama as a "Halfrican American" was, perhaps, more immediately pernicious, as it played on the rumors that the candidate lacked a proper American birth certificate, attended a madrassa as a boy in Indonesia, and was, in fact, either a Kenyan or an Indonesian citizen.
Still, Cashill's and Limbaugh's libel about Obama's memoir--the denial of literacy, the denial of authorship--had a particularly ugly pedigree. Writing elevated a slave from non-being, from commodity, to human status, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has written: a slave wrote, above all, to "demonstrate her or his own membership in the human community." In Frederick Douglass's narrative, his master, Mr. Auld, says, "Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world.... If you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him."
And yet writers like Douglass had to call on white men to authenticate their texts, the better to disprove the antebellum Jack Cashills and Rush Limbaughs ready to declare fraud. For the wary white readership, the abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips provided prefaces for Douglass's book that represented seals of white endorsement. Garrison had first heard Douglass describe his life story at a speech at the Atheneum on Nantucket, in 1841, and now he was prepared to vouch for his text. "Mr. Douglass has very properly chosen to write his own Narrative, in his own style," Garrison wrote, "and according to the best of his ability, rather than to employ some one else. It is, therefore, entirely his own production." Garrison vouched for Douglass's literacy. The title, too, indicates a need to deny a sham. It is called the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself.
A century and a half later, thinking a degree of racial progress had been achieved, Barack Obama and his publisher had not thought to collect such endorsements.