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WONDER YEARS: (down from below) With mother Ann Dunham; playing with grandfather Stanley Dunham on a Hawaii beach; a young Barack with his grandparents on graduation day |
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As the sun sank over the Pacific Ocean behind him, Frank Marshall Davis looked up from his rickety front porch and saw his friend Stanley Dunham approaching. The grizzled old black man could see that Dunham was bringing along his grandson, whom he had been waiting to meet a caramel-skinned boy of nine called Barry Obama. It was the autumn of 1970.
In a couple of days, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois may become the first black man to be President of the United States. Central to his appeal is his message of racial reconciliation, drawn largely from his own remarkable life story and extended family spread across the globe.
His quest to come to terms with his identity as an African-American essentially began with Davis that day in Honolulu nearly 38 years ago.
Hawaii imbued Obama with the laid back, almost preternatural calm that has underpinned his political career. It insulated him from the racial tensions of inner cities on the American mainland while also posing a conundrum about his blackness that would take him back there in search of an answer.
Frank Marshall Davis had been a noted poet, journalist and radical activist who had once been investigated by the congressional House Un-American Activities Committee. By 1970 Davis, then 65, was living in obscurity but he was a familiar sight on Kuhio Avenue, just off Honolulu’s teeming Waikiki Beach. Dunham was one of many frequent visitors to Davis’s house. Dawna Weatherly-Williams, then 22 now 60, from California, had recently moved to Hawaii with her black husband. She had struck up a friendship with Davis and was chatting with him that late autumn afternoon as Dunham and Barry approached.
Although Dunham was white, he and Davis were in many ways kindred spirits. Both were originally from Kansas. At the age of five Davis had survived an attempted lynching at the hands of a group of older white boys. Dunham, eight years Davis’s junior, insisted that the racism he had witnessed on the mainland was one of the reasons why he had headed west. Both men had eventually arrived in Hawaii in search of a happiness and success that somehow always just eluded them, ending up as salesmen struggling to make a decent living.
The grandson Dunham had brought along to meet Davis represented something else that they shared. The boy was the product of an unlikely union between Dunham’s only daughter, Ann, and Barack Obama Sr, a brilliant and charismatic Kenyan economics student by whom she had become pregnant at the age of 18. Within three years of their hastily arranged wedding (Barack was born less than six months later) the couple had parted, when Obama Sr who, it emerged, already had a wife and two children back in Kenya chose a scholarship to Harvard over his new family.
Obama would visit El Dorado, Kansas, the oil boom town where his grandfather was born, at the height of his Democratic primary battle with Hillary Clinton. He told me and other reporters crammed into the aisle of his “-Force One” campaign plane that he was returning to “the roots of my life that connect to the broader story of the country”, adding, “Those values of hard work and some of those small town virtues are ones I think we need to rediscover.”
The candidate’s ability to move easily in both black and white milieus and everything in between has been a central part of his magnetism. In Chicago, Obama married a strong black woman called Michelle Robinson, a descendant of slaves whose family had lived through the civil rights era.
For both Davis and Obama, Hawaii provided a breathing space at the end and the start, respectively, of their adult lives. The fact that Hawaii, which became the 50th and newest American state in 1959, had never banned interracial marriage unlike 16 other states as late as 1967 was one of the things that drew Davis to the island paradise in 1948. He had just married a white Chicago socialite; only in what he was to describe as a “rainbow land of beautiful colour mixtures” would their union be considered unremarkable.
Sitting on a wooden bench in Honolulu’s Makiki District Park this summer, Weatherly-Williams chain-smoked as she recalled Davis meeting Obama for the first time that day in 1970.
“Stan had been promising to bring Barry by because we all had that in common Frank’s kids were half-white, Stan’s grandson was half-black and my son was half-black,” she said.
Dunham and his grandson were on their way home from Punahou, the private school that Obama was to describe in his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father as an “incubator for island elites”. He had just taken entrance tests in English and mathematics.
“Barry was well-dressed, in a blazer I think,” Weatherly-Williams said. “He was tired and he was hungry. He had a full face it wasn’t pointed like it is now.”
Obama had spent the previous three years in Indonesia with his mother, Ann, an anthropologist who specialised in rural development, and her second husband, Lolo Soetoro. He had returned to Hawaii shortly after his mother gave birth to her second child, Maya, in 1970, and was living with his white grandparents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, whom he knew as Gramps and Toot or Tutu (Hawaiian for grandma). Ann returned to Hawaii in 1972 after her marriage broke up; when she resumed her field work in 1974, Obama moved back in with his grandparents.
For Dunham (who had so wanted his daughter to be a boy that he had named her Stanley Ann), Barry was the son he never had. Ann Dunham believed her son could do anything, while his absent father, via letters, made clear that greatness was expected of him. Obama remarked to his biographer David Mendell, the author of Obama: from Promise to Power (2008) that “there was no shortage of self-esteem”.
While his strong sense of his own worth has led to accusations of arrogance and aloofness, it also underpins Barack Obama’s star political persona. “Sure Barry’s got a bit of an ego,” said Mark Heflin, a Punahou friend. “To be President of the United States you’ve got to have some ego.”
Obama stood out at Punahou. Most fellow pupils were white, and although there were significant numbers of Oriental, Polynesian, Samoan and native Hawaiian children there was only a tiny handful of African-Americans. In his memoir, Obama recalled an initial “sense that I didn’t belong” that continued to grow. A visit from his father when he was 10 the first time he had seen him since he was two and the last before Barack Sr was killed in a car crash in Kenya in 1982 served only to unsettle him further.
On one level, Punahou was an idyllic setting for any child. His grandfather saw that entry to Punahou would give Obama a leg-up in society. After school, his grandmother would watch him from their cramped 10th-floor apartment as he practised basketball until dark.
The Dunhams were of modest means, Madelyn, a bank manager, being the main breadwinner. They scrimped and saved to help pay the Punahou fees. At Punahou, Obama was pitched in with the offspring of the wealthy but could see how his grandparents struggled. The ease with which he mixes with people at either end of the social spectrum reflects this.
In the old school yearbooks, the young Obama is always grinning. There’s Barry flashing a peace sign beside seven other pupils of varying hues beneath a blackboard with the words “Mixed Races of America” scrawled on it and a picture caption that reads, “Whether you’re a Tamura, a Ching, or an Obama, we share the same world.”
Later on, he looks composed and self-assured. There he is wearing a white Saturday Night Fever outfit with a carefully tended afro. The basketball team photos show that the puppy fat fell off and his physique was transformed into a lean, athletic frame. “He was a happy-go-lucky guy,” Kelli Furushima told me outside the Chowder House restaurant near Waikiki Beach that Obama frequents on his annual holiday in Hawaii, during which he always takes time out to play Scrabble with his sister Maya. “I was one of the cheerleaders that would watch the guys play ball after school. I never really saw him with a steady girlfriend but a lot of girls liked him because he was fun and athletic and tall and dark and handsome in a really cute way.”
But Obama’s memoir records a string of racial slights at Punahou, some minor and unintended, others more serious: a ruddy-faced boy who asked if his father was a cannibal; a 12-year-old whom he rewarded with a bloody nose after he had called him a coon; a tennis pro who warned him his colour might rub off if he touched the match schedule.
When he was 14, Obama and two other black pupils, Rik Smith (a year older and now a California doctor who specialises in geriatrics) and Tony Peterson (two years older and now working in Tennessee for the United Methodist Church), would meet weekly on the steps of the Cooke Library to discuss things that were on their minds. “We talked about race as a social issue,” Peterson said.
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‘We talked about the effects of race... Not out of a deep sense of pain — you know. In Hawaii, we were in a smaller minority but we weren’t a hated minority. There was a respect for black people because the Hawaiians felt a sense of kinship with us.”
Mark Heflin played on the Punahou basketball team with Obama (nicknamed Barry ’Bomber on account of his impressive double-pump drop shot). He said, “Barry had a good style, he was charismatic even back then, and he seemed to flow between lots of groups.”
Peterson explained: “For Barry, this was the beginning of asking what it means to be a black man in America. His experience had been mainly with his white grandparents and his white mom. In Hawaii, there’s lots of cultures around but he didn’t have a strong connecting point to anyone in black culture. I was a safe link to that. Rik and Barry were bi-racial. I was from a military family but I’m thoroughly black. Like most kids trying to discover who they are, for him that was a big issue.”
Basketball was another route into black culture for Obama. This was the era of Julius Erving, better know as Doctor J, a dazzling star who played the game with both ferocity and grace. In his memoir, Obama remarked that half his white basketball friends ‘wanted to be black themselves — or at least Doctor J’.
Unfortunately for Obama, the Punahou coach, Chris McLachlin, was a traditionalist who emphasised the fundamentals of the game, rather than Obama’s flamboyant ‘street’ style. Obama, who protested that this was a ‘white’ method of play, was kept on the bench by McLachlin much of the time.
“He was on a real stacked team, one of the best teams I have ever had,” McLachlin, currently recovering from a stroke, told me as we sat in his living-room, a stone’s throw from Punahou. “He would have started on any other team in the state. He was that good. He just loved the game, would play it 24/7 if he could. First to arrive at practice, last one to leave.”
Obama has continued to play basketball regularly. His wife’s brother was a college basketball star, and during the 2008 campaign it has been a ritual each voting day for Obama to shoot hoops with a close group of aides.
Obama found he could meet other blacks by playing at the Hawaii university courts where, he would write in his memoir, “a handful of black men, mostly gym-rats and has-beens, would teach me an attitude that didn’t just have to do with the sport”. He continued: “That respect came from what you did and not who your daddy was... I was living out a caricature of black male adolescence, itself a caricature of swaggering American manhood.”
At the same time, Obama was also going around with his non-black friends from Punahou, several of them from the basketball team and sometimes accompanied by his grandfather. “Gramps was my buddy,” said Joe Hansen, who was one of the five or six friends who would “‘pile into the apartment and just hang out and watch basketball or do whatever” at weekends. “He was never that authority guy, you know: ‘Don’t do that, don’t do this’ type of thing. He was more like one of the guys, easygoing, and he kind of ran around with us. Tutu was much quieter. I’d say she was the disciplinarian.”
Obama was to write that he “learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds”, but occasionally the two would collide. Once Obama invited Hansen and another friend, Tom, who was half-white and half-Chinese, to come along with him to a party. “We stuck out like a sore thumb because we were white and still in high school and this was a college party. People came up to us saying, “Who are you. Why are you here?” and we were saying, “Er, we came with Barry.” It was awkward.”
In his memoir, Obama writes of taking two white friends, “Jeff and Scott”, to a black party and recalls their asking to leave early because they felt uncomfortable: “In the car, Jeff put an arm on my shoulder, looking at once contrite and relieved. “You know, man, that really taught me something. I mean, I can see how it must be tough for you… being the only black guys and all.” I snorted. “Yeah. Right.” A part of me wanted to punch him right there.”
Obama also wrote of becoming involved with drugs: “Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d been headed: the final, fatal role of the young, would-be black man.” His 1979 yearbook entry depicts a pack of Zig-Zag cigarette papers and a matchbook and offers thanks to “Tut, Gramps, Choom Gang” — choom being Hawaiian slang for marijuana.
But former Punahou pupils doubt that Obama was ever seriously involved in drugs. “He was so not a druggie,” Bernice Glenn Bowers laughed. “There’s no way he could be what he was on the court and be a druggie.”
Obama’s grandfather had identified Frank Marshall Davis as someone who could help the boy solve the puzzle of how he, brought up by white people, could relate to a future as a black man. In his memoir, Obama portrays Davis — he never identifies him by his full name — as living “his old Black Power dashiki self” in “the same Sixties time warp that Hawaii had created” and which his mother, spiritually at least, had never left.
His visits to Davis were irregular, but he nevertheless gravitated there at moments of doubt: when he was departing for university; when his grandmother, to her husband’s dismay, had expressed a fear that a black youth might mug her. Frank’s verdict was: “Your grandma’s right to be scared. She’s at least as right as Stanley is. She understands that black people have a reason to hate.” An American university, he told Barry, who was about to go to the small liberal arts college, Occidental College in Los Angeles (where he began to call himself Barack), was a place where the price of admission was “leaving your race at the door” in order to become a “well-trained, well-paid nigger” but “a nigger just the same”.
Obama seems to have taken most of this with a pinch of salt. If the totality of Davis’s writings is anything to go by, he probably also received more sober counsel. In 1944 Davis railed against racism in all its forms, the persecution of Jews and the internment of the Japanese in Hawaii. “It is my contention that whoever is born and reared in America or becomes naturalised should be known only as an American,” he wrote. “Forget whether he has blue eyes or red hair or thick lips or a chocolate complexion. He is an American.”
Kathryn Waddell Takara, a University of Hawaii professor writing a book about Davis called The Fire and the Phoenix, believes that the old poet helped Obama to begin reflecting on his ethnicity and nurtured a sense of possibility in him. “Just the way that Barack Obama carries himself, walks and talks shows he is one of the rare Americans who has this kind of acceptance not only of himself but of others. He’s not weighed down by the shackles of history.”
Tony Peterson said he had “heard echoes of the conversations we used to have” in Obama’s soaring 2004 Democratic convention speech, which launched his national political career. “In particular, the bit about eradicating the slander of a black kid with a book acting white. That’s the kind of thing we used to talk about. I remember we talked about whether we would see a black President in our lifetime. I don’t think any of us thought we would.”
In late January, on his campaign plane as we flew from Kansas after the El Dorado visit, I asked the senator about the wanderlust in his family that he had chosen to reject. “Part of me settling in Chicago and marrying Michelle was a conscious decision to root myself,” he told me. “There’s a glamour, there’s a romance to that kind of life and there’s a part of that still in me. But there’s a curse to it as well. You need a frame for the canvas, because too much freedom’s not freedom.” He laughed and added, “I’m waxing too poetic here.”
Dawna Weatherly-Williams recalled how she had watched the 1974 film The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, in which an old lady and former slave describes how blacks searching for the person who would lead their people to freedom and equality would hold up babies and ask, “Is you the one?”
In 2007 the talk show queen Oprah Winfrey would allude to Miss Jane Pittman and hail Obama as “the one”, later prompting John McCain’s campaign to mock him for having a messiah complex.
Weatherly-Williams pointed towards the horizon to the north, where Stanley Dunham, who had been a US Army sergeant in the Second World War, was buried in the Punchbowl National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, which overlooks Pearl Harbour, in 1992. Then she gazed to the south, towards St Louis Heights, from which Davis’s ashes had been spread five years earlier. The house on Kuhio Avenue has long since been razed and is now occupied by a multi-storey car-park. “I can still see it there, like a ghost,” she said. “Stan felt a similar way about Barry being the one and that’s why it would be so darn cool for him to see what’s happening now. Look what you produced, Stan. I think he and Frank are up there now, cracking jokes and toasting Barack.” |
