Barack and Michelle Read online

  When she was sixteen, Stannie managed to escape for two months to Chicago, where family friends hired her to take care of their children during summer vacation. Flush with her newfound feeling of independence, she went to a downtown art house to see the film Black Orpheus, a 1959 retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.

  Set among the crowded, cliff-hugging favelas of modern-day Rio during Carnaval, Black Orpheus was written, produced, and directed by a white Frenchman. The Portuguese-speaking, all-black cast portrayed characters who were exotically beautiful, sensual, and childlike in their naïveté. The film, which she would revisit many times over the years, might seem condescendingly racist by later standards, but at the time it offered Stanley Ann an enticing first glimpse of a culture vastly different from her own, and would have a profound influence on the way Stanley viewed both the Third World and people of color.

  Stanley Ann’s Chicago sojourn opened her eyes to a world of new possibilities. As expected, nearly all of her friends had applied to the University of Washington. She did not. One afternoon several months before graduation, she opened an official-looking envelope, carefully unfolded the letter inside, then read it and reread it before squealing with delight. She had received early acceptance at the University of Chicago—her ticket out of Seattle and away from her domineering dad.

  Stanley senior had other ideas. Stanley Ann was too young to be on her own, he insisted. Besides, he was packing up his family and moving again—this time to take a higher-paying job selling furniture at a store in Honolulu.

  Stanley senior made the announcement over dinner one night, and with his customary flair. “Hawaii!” he proclaimed. After five rain-soaked years in the Pacific Northwest, Stannie’s father argued, it was “high time we all get some sun.” Besides, Hawaii was far more than America’s newest state—a status it had achieved just the year before—it was the new frontier. “It’s paradise, for Christ’s sake!” he bellowed in the face of his daughter’s reluctance to pull up stakes and relocate yet again. “Everyone wants to live in Hawaii!”

  Everyone but Stannie. She told Maxine Box that she wanted to stay put—if she couldn’t go to the University of Chicago, then at the very least she wanted to join her friends at the University of Washington in Seattle. There were loud arguments between father and daughter—fights that sometimes turned violent—but ultimately Stanley Ann had no choice but to resign herself to yet another move as her father pursued an elusive dream of success. “Remember me,” Stannie wrote wistfully in Maxine’s high school yearbook, “when you are old and gray.”

  The Dunhams’ only child went along to Hawaii, but not without making it clear that she was no longer willing to live in her father’s looming shadow. From now on, she declared, there would be only one Stanley in the family. Henceforth, she was to be called simply Ann.

  The Dunhams arrived in Honolulu in the summer of 1960 and rented a roomy, three-bedroom house near the University of Hawaii’s Manoa campus. Ann enrolled there in the fall of that year and, as one of the few undergraduates who didn’t seem to have roots in the islands, kept mostly to herself. “She was the shy, timid girl in the corner,” a fellow student said. Another student, Neil Abercrombie, recalled that Ann “was scarcely out of high school. She was mostly kind of an observer.”

  In her Russian class, Ann was soon observing a dynamic young graduate student from Kenya named Barack Obama. The first African to enroll at the University of Hawaii, Barack—he pronounced his first name with the emphasis on the first syllable, as in barracks—Obama was already a campus celebrity of sorts. He gave newspaper interviews and spoke at local schools and churches about his upbringing on the shores of Lake Victoria as a member of the Luo tribe. “He had this magnetic personality,” Abercrombie said. “Everything was oratory for him, even the most commonplace observation.”

  Audiences were fascinated to hear that Obama’s father, Onyango Obama, had enlisted in the British colonial forces and traveled to Europe, India, and Zanzibar, where he converted from Christianity to Islam, tacked “Hussein” to the front of his name, and enthusiastically embraced polygamy. Barack Obama, who was the biological son of Onyango’s second wife but was actually raised by Onyango’s third wife, told rapt listeners that he had been raised a Muslim but now considered himself an atheist. He also described how he had attended village schools and herded goats for his father before being accepted to an exclusive Christian boarding school run by the Anglican Church. As part of the “educational airlift” program started by Kenyan nationalist leader Tom Mboya and designed to provide Western educational opportunities to young Africans, twenty-three-year-old Barack received a scholarship to study global economics at the University of Hawaii.

  One fascinating tidbit that Barack Obama chose not to share with his audiences—and certainly not with his fellow students—was that he had been married at the age of eighteen in a tribal ceremony to a woman named Kezia. When he left to attend school in Hawaii, Obama left a pregnant Kezia behind with their infant son.

  Ann—Obama called her “Anna”—was soon smitten with the engaging young African, and it became clear that he was attracted to her. “I think she was attracted to his powerful personality,” Abercrombie mused, “and he was attracted to her beauty and her calmness.”

  Before long, Ann brought her African boyfriend home for dinner with her parents. Both Stanley and Madelyn could not help but be impressed by the affable, articulate, supremely confident young economics student, who smoked a pipe and vowed he would return to his country to help “shape the destiny of Africa.” But the obvious physical affection between Ann and their guest clearly rattled Madelyn. “I was feeling protective, I guess,” she later recalled of that first meeting. Ann “was so young,” she went on. “I just didn’t want to see her get hurt. People can be so cruel.”

  If there was any place in America where interracial dating seemed unlikely to raise hackles, it was Hawaii. Here native Hawaiians mingled with Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Filipino, European, and mainland American immigrants—and one in five white women married Asian men. Yet one ingredient was conspicuously absent from Hawaii’s fabled melting pot. In 1960, less than 1 percent of the state’s population was black.

  At the time, interracial marriage was still illegal in twenty-three states. Hawaii, Ann pointed out to her concerned parents, was not one of them. However open-minded they might have considered themselves, the Dunhams were not happy when Ann told them she intended to marry the charming young man from Africa.

  If the Dunhams were distressed at the news, the prospective groom’s father, Hussein Onyango Obama, was downright livid. In a lengthy letter to Stanley and Madelyn, the most senior Obama railed against the idea of a biracial union. He did not, he stated flatly, want the Obama blood “sullied” by a white woman.

  Ann, who had actually started sleeping with Barack just a couple of weeks after their first meeting in September 1960, made the case for marrying him more compelling when she announced in late October that she was pregnant. Whatever the Dunhams’ feelings about the perils of interracial marriage, these were trumped by a desire not to see their only child become an unwed mother.

  On February 21, 1961—a Thursday—Barack Obama and Ann Dunham were reportedly married in a civil ceremony on the island of Maui, although there are no official records showing that a legal ceremony ever took place. There were certainly no witnesses—no family members were present, and none of their friends at the university had the slightest inkling that they were even engaged. “Nobody was invited to the wedding,” Neil Abercrombie said. “Nobody.” (Their only son, also named Barack, would later concede that the circumstances of his parents’ marriage were “murky,” “fragile,” “haphazard”—a “bill of particulars that I’ve never quite had the courage to explore.”)

  When Ann wrote to her friends back in Seattle with the news that she had dropped out of college after a single semester, married an African man, and was expecting a baby, they were understandably surpris
ed. “Shocked—very shocked—is more like it,” said Maxine Box. “I can’t think of anything she said or did that would lead to such a radical thing. We could see Stanley, with her good grades and intelligence, going to college—but not marrying and having a baby right away.” As for marrying a black man: “At that time, you practically crossed the street if you saw a black man and a white woman,” Box explained. “Black and white didn’t go together at that time.”

  Certainly it would have complicated matters even further if Ann and her parents had been made aware of Barack’s still-extant marriage to Kezia, or the two young children they shared. For now, Stanley in particular took pride in the fact that his new son-in-law was a highly educated man of the world who could speak authoritatively on a wide range of subjects, from the global economy to his own experiences traveling throughout Africa and Europe.

  Even a born storyteller like Stanley could not help but be struck by Obama’s thundering voice. “It was a deep, resonant bass with a timbre you could not forget,” Richard Hook said of his friend’s voice. “Barack would walk into a room and say, ‘My name is Barack Obama’…and everyone in the room would instantly look up. Everyone wanted to know who he was.”

  Pake Zane, who had also known the senior Obama in Hawaii and later visited him in Kenya twice, agreed that Obama’s voice was “startling and at the same time incredibly seductive. He had the same sort of deep tone in his voice that the actor James Earl Jones has, only much louder. He also had a hint of a British accent, very Oxford-sounding.” As for his appearance, Zane recalled that Obama was “not a large man, but he carried himself like a king. And he was one of the blackest people I’ve ever met—almost this beautiful shade of purple.”

  Even friends had to concede that Barack’s cocksure manner “rubbed a lot of people the wrong way at first,” Abercrombie said. “He did not lack for self-importance. He was a self-involved, egotistical, vivid person…. But we forgave him that because he was so genuine. People always liked him. They just thought, ‘Well, that’s Barack.’”

  Although he had been known to thoroughly disarm hate-spewing bigots with soothing calm—one bar patron who started out calling Barack a “nigger” wound up feeling so guilty after Barack gently lectured him on the evils of intolerance that he gave Barack a hundred dollars in cash on the spot—Obama could also be impulsive. On one occasion, Barack drove a visiting fellow African up the road that wound through Oahu’s windward peaks to the Nuuanu Pali Lookout, site of a fierce battle won by King Kamehameha I. It was while standing on the edge of the precipice and marveling at the canyon stretched out before them that the visitor asked to take a puff from Barack’s favorite pipe—and accidentally dropped it over the side.

  Mortified, the visitor apologized and promptly offered to buy Obama a new pipe. But that wouldn’t do. Obama wanted his pipe, and when the visitor refused to climb over the railing and climb down the face of the cliff to get it, Barack grabbed him by the waist and lifted him over the railing. It was only after a frantic Ann interceded that Barack put the terrified man down.

  Barack’s driving proved equally terrifying. An unrepentant speed demon who often absentmindedly reverted to driving on the left-hand side of the road, Obama racked up more than his share of traffic tickets and fender benders. “You really took your life in your hands,” Pake Zane said, “when you drove with him.”

  Obama’s recklessness aside, Stanley, like nearly everyone else, could not help but be impressed by his larger-than-life persona. Madelyn was more circumspect. She did not entirely trust her son-in-law when he claimed to have Ann’s best interests at heart. “I am a little dubious,” she later said, “of the things people from foreign countries tell me.” Nevertheless, she suggested that Ann and her husband move into the Dunhams’ roomy house so that they could all await the new baby’s arrival together.

  On the afternoon of August 4, 1961, Barack drove his pregnant wife the eight miles from their bungalow at 6085 Kalani-anaole Highway due east to Honolulu’s Kapiolani Hospital for Women and Children. Founded in 1890 by Queen Kapiolani, known as “the Queen who loved children,” the hospital was originally called the Kapiolani Maternity Home and was intended strictly for native Hawaiian mothers.

  After just two hours in labor, Ann gave birth to an eight-pound two-ounce boy. In keeping with the tradition established by Stanley’s father, Stanley, they named the baby Barack Hussein Obama.

  While her new husband went back to the University of Hawaii to finish up his studies, Ann devoted herself entirely to the care of little Barack. From the very beginning Stanley and Madelyn called their grandson “Barry”—ostensibly to distinguish him from his father, Barack, but also to ease the path toward social acceptance by Americanizing the child’s name. “It was hard enough to have to deal with the obviously charged issue of having a black grandson back in the early 1960s,” said one of their Kansas relatives. “To have to constantly explain his African name—that was too much. Besides, ‘Barry’ just sounds so nice and friendly. It was a very popular name back then…. ‘Barack’ always seemed harsh—kind of threatening, even.”

  The following June, Barack graduated from the University of Hawaii with a degree in economics. He intended to eventually return to Kenya and lead his generation in building a new, modern Africa. On graduation day, he was interviewed by the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. Barack contrasted the more accepting behavior of whites in the islands with that of whites in other parts of the world, and praised Hawaii as a model for promoting harmony among various ethnic groups. He said nothing of his wife and son.

  Before he could return to his homeland, however, Obama needed to earn his PhD in economics in the United States. The prestigious New School in New York City offered him a full scholarship—enough money to make it possible to bring both Ann and their infant son with him. Harvard also offered Obama a scholarship, although one that would not afford him the luxury of bringing his young family along.

  Ann was thrilled about the New School offer and was excited about the prospect of moving to New York. Her hopes were dashed when Obama decided instead to accept the Harvard offer. “How,” he asked her, “can I refuse the best education?”

  Yet there were others who agreed with Ann, most notably Kenyan nationalist Tom Mboya, who had become something of a mentor to Barack. Although Obama never mentioned his wife and child to Mboya in his letters, Mboya had been told of their existence and chastised Barack for abandoning them.

  No matter. Late that July of 1962, Obama departed for Harvard—alone. He did not even stay to celebrate his son’s first birthday. “I know he loved Ann,” Abercrombie insisted. “But I think he didn’t want the impediment of being responsible for a family. He expected great things of himself and he was going off to achieve them.”

  At Harvard, Obama rented an apartment just off Central Square and quickly made his presence known. Regardless of his avowed feelings for Ann and little Barry, Barack soon began dating Ruth Nidesand, a tall, blond American teacher from an affluent New England family. Nidesand’s money enabled Barack to move in certain social circles in Cambridge and to indulge his growing fondness for expensive suits, silk ascots, and Johnnie Walker Black Label scotch. “He would shout in that big, deep voice, “Waiter, another double!’” recalled his friend Leo Odera Omolo. Soon Barack was known to his drinking buddies as “Mr. Double Double.” Later, Barack would actually take to calling himself “Dr. Obama.” In fact, while he did earn a master’s in economics from Harvard, he never pursued a doctorate.

  Ann continued to write Barack and to send him photos of their son. Even Obama called his son “Barry” when he showed those photos to his new friends and fellow graduate students at Harvard. Although she was blissfully unaware of her husband’s infidelity, Ann made the decision not to follow him to Massachusetts. “She was under no illusions,” Abercrombie observed. “He was a man of his time, from a very patriarchal society.”

  At her mother’s urging, Ann filed for divorce in January of 1964, charging “gri
evous mental suffering.” Barack did not contest the action; by that time, he was planning to return to Africa with his new love, Ruth Nidesand. The following year, he and Nidesand would marry and go on to have two sons. But the relationship would not be without its tense moments, since Barack senior was still married to his first wife, Kezia. However open-minded Ruth may have been, she was not about to allow Kezia and her two children by Barack to move in. So Barack, a willing polygamist, merely visited his first wife periodically. The inevitable result: two additional children with Kezia.

  Back in Hawaii, Ann had plans of her own. A full year before starting divorce proceedings, she had resumed her studies at the University of Hawaii. While she attended classes—and made ends meet with the help of food stamps—her parents took care of little Barry. One of his earliest words would be toot—short for tutu, the Hawaiian word meaning “grandparent”—and the name by which Madelyn Dunham would be known by her adoring grandchildren. Barry bestowed a somewhat less imaginative nickname on Stanley. To Barry, Stanley senior would always be, simply, Gramps.

  To help offset some of the family’s mounting bills, Toot went back to work—this time as a secretary at the Bank of Hawaii. She was soon promoted to teller and then to assistant loan officer, bringing in enough extra cash to easily support both Ann and her baby.

  Barry’s early childhood—spent primarily in the company of his doting grandparents—was nothing short of idyllic. He learned to snorkle at Hanauma Bay on Oahu’s southeast coast, tagged along when Gramps went spearfishing with his Portuguese sailor friends in Kailua Bay, enjoyed the lomi-lomi salmon and roast pig served at neighborhood luaus, and cooled off on sweltering summer days by downing “shave ice”—Hawaii’s answer to the snow cone.