theme: the quest to belong.
A boy wants to find his place in a family where he is visibly different:
chubby where others are thin, dark where others are light.
A youth living in a distant land searches and finds new friends, a new
language and a heartbreaking lesson about his identity in the pages of an
American magazine.
A young black man struggles for acceptance at an institution of privilege,
where he finds himself growing so angry and disillusioned at the world around
him that he turns to alcohol and drugs.
These have been the stories told about the first two character-shaping
decades of U.S. Sen. Barack Obama‘s life, a story line largely shaped by his
own best-selling memoir, political speeches and interviews.
But the reality of Obama‘s narrative is not that simple.
More than 40 interviews with former classmates, teachers, friends and
neighbors in his childhood homes of Hawaii and Indonesia, as well as a review
of public records, show the arc of Obama’s personal journey took him to places
and situations far removed from the experience of most Americans.
At the same time, several of his oft-recited stories may not have happened
in the way he has recounted them. Some seem to make Obama look better in the
retelling, others appear to exaggerate his outward struggles over issues of
race, or simply skim over some of the most painful, private moments of his
life.
The handful of black students who attended Punahou School in Hawaii, for
instance, say they struggled mightily with issues of race and racism there.
But absent from those discussions, they say, was another student then known as
Barry Obama.
In his best-selling autobiography, “Dreams from My Father,” Obama describes
having heated conversations about racism with another black student, “Ray.”
The real Ray, Keith Kakugawa, is half black and half Japanese. In an interview
with the Tribune on Saturday, Kakugawa said he always considered himself mixed
race, like so many of his friends in Hawaii, and was not an angry young black
man.
He said he does recall long, soulful talks with the young Obama and that
his friend confided his longing and loneliness. But those talks, Kakugawa
said, were not about race. “Not even close,” he said, adding that Obama was
dealing with “some inner turmoil” in those days.
“But it wasn’t a race thing,” he said. “Barry’s biggest struggles then were
missing his parents. His biggest struggles were his feelings of abandonment.
The idea that his biggest struggle was race is [bull].”
Then there’s the copy of Life magazine that Obama presents as his racial
awakening at age 9. In it, he wrote, was an article and two accompanying
photographs of an African-American man physically and mentally scarred by his
efforts to lighten his skin. In fact, the Life article and the photographs
don’t exist, say the magazine’s own historians.
Some of these discrepancies are typical of childhood memories — fuzzy in
specifics, warped by age, shaped by writerly license. Others almost certainly
illustrate how carefully the young man guarded the secret of his loneliness
from even those who knew him best. And the accounts bear out much of Obama’s
self-portrait as someone deeply affected by his father’s abandonment yet able
to thrive in greatly disparate worlds.
Still, the story of his early years highlights how politics and
autobiography are similar creatures: Each is shaped to serve a purpose.
In its reissue after he gave the keynote address at the Democratic
convention in 2004, “Dreams from My Father” joined a long tradition of
political memoirs that candidates have used to introduce themselves to the
American people.
From his earliest moments on the national political stage, Obama has
presented himself as having two unique qualifications: a fresh political face
and an ability to bridge the gap between Americans of different races, faiths
and circumstances. Among his supporters, his likability and credibility have
only been boosted by his stories of being an outsider trying to fight his way
in.
As much as he may have felt like an outsider at times, Obama rarely seemed
to show it. Throughout his youth, as depicted in his first book, he always
found ways to meld into even the most uninviting of communities. He learned to
adapt to unfamiliar territory. And he frequently made peace–even allies–with
the very people who angered him most.
Yet even Obama has acknowledged the limits of memoir. In a new introduction
to the reissued edition of “Dreams,” he noted that the dangers of writing an
autobiography included “the temptation to color events in ways favorable to
the writer … [and] selective lapses of memory.”
He added: “I can’t say that I’ve avoided all, or any, of these hazards
successfully.”
Life without a father
It was a complicated time.
Hawaii had become a state only two years before Obama’s birth, and there
were plenty of native Hawaiians still deeply unhappy about it. The U.S.
military was expanding on the island of Oahu, home to the new capital of
Honolulu. And a young, iconoclastic white woman who had defied the social
mores of the day by marrying a dashing black man from Kenya was coping with
the fact that her new husband essentially had abandoned her and their young
child in 1963 to study at Harvard.
Oblivious to all of this was a perpetually smiling toddler the entire
family called Barry. In snapshots, the boy is a portrait of childhood bliss.
He played on the beach. He posed in lifeguard stands. He rode a bright blue
tricycle with red, white and blue streamers dangling from the handlebars.
In the six weeks since Obama announced his intention to run for the White
House, he routinely has suggested that his diverse background–raised for a
time in the Third World, schooled at elite institutions and active in urban
politics–makes him the best-suited candidate to speak to rich and poor, black
and white, mainstream voters and those utterly disenchanted with the political
system.
Not as well known is the fact that the many people who raised him were
nearly as diverse as the places where he grew up. There was his mother, Ann, a
brilliant but impulsive woman; his grandmother Madelyn, a deeply private and
stoically pragmatic Midwesterner; his grandfather Stanley, a loving soul
inclined toward tall tales and unrealistic dreams.
“Looking back now, I’d say he really is kind of the perfect combination of
all of them,” said his half sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng. “All of them were
imperfect but all of them loved him fiercely, and I believe he took the best
qualities from each of them.”
During her son’s earliest years, Obama’s mother, whose full name was
Stanley Ann Dunham because her father desperately had wished for a boy,
attended college at the University of Hawaii. Known as Ann throughout her
adult life, she kept to herself. She became estranged from her husband, Barack
Obama Sr., after his departure for Harvard and rarely saw the group of friends
that they had made at the University of Hawaii.
One of those friends, Neil Abercrombie, then a graduate student in the
sociology department, frequently would see young Obama around town with his
grandfather Stanley, whom Obama called “Gramps.”
“Stanley loved that little boy,” said Abercrombie, now a Democratic
congressman from Hawaii. “In the absence of his father, there was not a
kinder, more understanding man than Stanley Dunham. He was loving and
generous.”
A close friend of Obama’s from their teenage years, Greg Orme, spent so
much time with Dunham that he, too, called him “Gramps.” Orme recalled that
years later, at Obama’s wedding reception in Chicago, Obama brought the crowd
to tears when he spoke of his recently deceased maternal grandfather and how
he made a little boy with an absent father feel as though he was never alone.
Madelyn Dunham, a rising executive at the Bank of Hawaii during Obama’s
Punahou days, was more reserved but seemed to love having her grandson’s
friends over to play and hang out.
“Those were robust years full of energy and cacophony, and she loved all of
it,” Soetoro-Ng said of her grandmother, who has lived alone since her husband
died in 1992.
Ann and the boy lived with the Dunhams in Honolulu until Obama was 6. Then
his young mother, now divorced, met and married an Indonesian student studying
at the University of Hawaii.
In one family photo before the mother and son moved to Indonesia, Obama
walks barefoot on Waikiki Beach, arms outstretched as though embracing the
entire beautiful life around him. The sailboat the Manu Kai (bird of the sea,
in English) is about to set sail behind him.
Obama, too, was about to journey far from these familiar shores.
Memories of a racial awakening?
Obama has told the story–one of the watershed moments of his racial
awareness–time and again, in remarkable detail.
He is 9 years old, living in Indonesia, where he and his mother moved with
her new husband, Lolo Soetoro, a few years earlier. One day while visiting his
mother, who was working at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, Obama passed time by
looking through several issues of Life magazine. He came across an article
that he later would describe as feeling like an “ambush attack.”
The article included photos of a black man who had destroyed his skin with
powerful chemical lighteners that promised to make him white. Instead, the
chemicals had peeled off much of his skin, leaving him sad and scarred, Obama
recalled.
“I imagine other black children, then and now, undergoing similar moments
of revelation,” Obama wrote of the magazine photos in “Dreams.”
Yet no such Life issue exists, according to historians at the magazine. No
such photos, no such article. When asked about the discrepancy, Obama said in
a recent interview, “It might have been an Ebony or it might have been … who
knows what it was?” (At the request of the Tribune, archivists at Ebony
searched their catalogue of past articles, none of which matched what Obama
recalled.)
In fact, it is surprising, based on interviews with more than two dozen
people who knew Obama during his nearly four years in Indonesia, that it would
take a photograph in a magazine to make him conscious of the fact that some
people might treat him differently in part because of the color of his skin.
Obama, who has talked and written so much about struggling to find a sense
of belonging due to his mixed race, brushes over this time of his life in
“Dreams.” He describes making friends easily, becoming fluent in Indonesian in
just six months and melding quite easily into the very foreign fabric of
Jakarta.
The reality was less tidy.
Obama and his mother joined her new husband, a kind man who later would
become a detached heavy drinker and womanizer, family members in Indonesia
say. Their Jakarta neighborhood resembled a village more than the bustling
metropolis the city is today. Electricity had arrived only a couple of years
earlier. Half the homes were old bamboo huts; half, including the Soetoro
house, were nicer, with brick or concrete and red-tiled roofs.
Former playmates remember Obama as “Barry Soetoro,” or simply “Barry,” a
chubby little boy very different from the gangly Obama people know today. All
say he was teased more than any other kid in the neighborhood–primarily
because he was bigger and had black features.
He was the only foreign child in the neighborhood. He also was one of the
only neighborhood children whose parents enrolled him in a new Catholic school
in an area populated almost entirely by Betawis, the old tribal landowning
Jakarta natives who were very traditional Muslims. Some of the Betawi children
threw rocks at the open Catholic classrooms, remembered Cecilia Sugini
Hananto, who taught Obama in 2nd grade.
Teachers, former playmates and friends recall a boy who never fully grasped
their language and who was very quiet as a result. But one word Obama learned
quickly in his new home was curang, which means “cheater.”
When kids teased him, Obama yelled back, “Curang, curang!” When a friend
gave him shrimp paste instead of chocolate, he yelled, “Curang, curang!”
Zulfan Adi was one of the neighborhood kids who teased Obama most
mercilessly. He remembers one day when young Obama, a hopelessly upbeat boy
who seemed oblivious to the fact that the older kids didn’t want him tagging
along, followed a group of Adi’s friends to a nearby swamp.
“They held his hands and feet and said, `One, two, three,’ and threw him in
the swamp,” recalled Adi, who still lives in the same house where he grew up.
“Luckily he could swim. They only did it to Barry.”
The other kids would scrap with him sometimes, but because Obama was bigger
and better-fed than many of them, he was hard to defeat.
“He was built like a bull. So we’d get three kids together to fight him,”
recalled Yunaldi Askiar, 45, a former neighborhood friend. “But it was only
playing.”
Obama has claimed on numerous occasions to have become fluent in Indonesian
in six months. Yet those who knew him disputed that during recent interviews.
Israella Pareira Darmawan, Obama’s 1st-grade teacher, said she attempted to
help him learn the Indonesian language by going over pronunciation and vowel
sounds. He struggled greatly with the foreign language, she said, and with his
studies as a result.
The teacher, who still lives in Obama’s old neighborhood, remembers that he
always sat in the back corner of her classroom. “His friends called him
`Negro,'” Darmawan said. The term wasn’t considered a slur at the time in
Indonesia.
Still, all of his teachers at the Catholic school recognized leadership
qualities in him. “He would be very helpful with friends. He’d pick them up if
they fell down,” Darmawan recalled. “He would protect the smaller ones.”
Third-grade teacher Fermina Katarina Sinaga, now 67, has perhaps the most
telling story. In an essay about what he wanted to be when he grew up, Obama
“wrote he wanted to be president,” Sinaga recalled. “He didn’t say what
country he wanted to be president of. But he wanted to make everybody happy.”
When Obama was in 4th grade, the Soetoro family moved. Their new
neighborhood was only 3 miles to the west, but a world away. Elite Dutch
colonists once lived there; the Japanese moved in during their occupation of
Indonesia in World War II. In the early 1970s, diplomats and Indonesian
businessmen lived there in fancy gated houses with wide paved roads and
sculpted bushes.
Obama never became terribly close with the children of the new school–this
time a predominantly Muslim one–where he was enrolled. As he had at the old
school, Obama sat in a back corner. He sketched decidedly American cartoon
characters during class.
“He liked drawing Spider-Man and Batman,” said another friend, Widiyanto
Hendro Cahyono, 46. “Barry liked to draw heroes.”
Then, one day about a year after he had arrived, Obama was gone.
“Suddenly we asked, `Where’s Barry?'” remembered Ati Kisjanto, 45. “And we
were told he had already moved away.”
Not one of `the brothers’
As much as young Obama stood out physically in the classrooms of Indonesia,
so, too, did he at Punahou School, the elite private prep academy his mother
moved him back to Hawaii to attend.
Obama, his mother and new baby sister, Maya, moved into a small apartment
near the school’s sprawling, lush campus. And from the first day of 5th grade
right up until his graduation in 1979, the young man was one of only a small
number of black students at a school heavily populated by the children of
Hawaii’s wealthy, most of them white and Asian.
Then and now, Punahou and Hawaii liked to see themselves as more diverse
and colorblind than the rest of the nation. But the reality felt far different
for the handful of African-Americans attending classes there.
Rik Smith, a black Punahou student two years older than Obama, remembers a
Halloween when white students would dress as slaves, coming to school in
tattered clothes with their faces painted black with shoe polish. “Like being
black was a funny costume in and of itself,” recalled Smith, now a doctor who
specializes in geriatrics in California.
“Punahou was an amazing school,” Smith said. “But it could be a lonely
place. … Those of us who were black did feel isolated–there’s no question
about that.”
As a result, the handful of black students at Punahou informally banded
together. “The brothers,” as Lewis Anthony Jr., an African-American in the
class of 1977 put it, hung out together, often talking about issues involving
race and civil rights. They sought out parties, especially at the military
bases on the island, where African-Americans would be in attendance.
Obama, however, was not a part of that group, according to Anthony and
Smith. Both of them seemed surprised to hear that in “Dreams”–which neither
of them had read–Obama writes about routinely going to parties at Schofield
Barracks and other military bases in order to hang out with “Ray,” who like
Anthony and Smith was two years ahead of him in school.
“We’d all do things together, but Obama was never there,” Smith said,
adding that they often brought along the few other black underclassmen. “I
went to those parties up at Schofield but never saw him at any of them.”
Obama devotes many words in his book to exploring his outsider status at
Punahou. But any struggles he was experiencing were obscured by the fact that
he had a racially diverse group of friends–many of whom often would crowd
into his grandparents’ apartment, near Punahou, after school let out.
One of those kids was Orme, a smart, respectful teenager from a white,
middle-class family. Though Orme spent most afternoons with Obama and
considered him one of his closest friends, he said Obama never brought up
issues of race, never talked about feeling out of place at Punahou.
“He never verbalized any of that,” Orme said during a telephone interview
from his home in Oregon. “He was a very provocative thinker. He would bring up
worldly topics far beyond his years. But we never talked race.”
Whatever misgivings Obama had about Punahou, attending the school was
largely his decision.
When his mother, a woman said to have been born with a keen sense of
wanderlust, announced she was returning to Indonesia, Obama, then a teenager,
asked to stay in Hawaii, according to Soetoro-Ng, 36, who still lives in
Honolulu. Once again, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, who had been as much parents
as grandparents throughout the young man’s life, said he could live with them.
“I don’t imagine the decision to let him stay behind was an easy one for
anyone,” Soetoro-Ng said. “But he wanted to remain at Punahou. He had friends
there, he was comfortable there, and to a kid his age, that’s all that
mattered.”
One place Obama has said he found a sense of community was on the
basketball court. A member of the varsity squad, though not a starter, Obama
and his teammates brought Punahou the state championship in 1979, his senior
year.
Adept at nailing long jump shots, Obama was called “Barry O’Bomber” by
teammates. Alan Lum, who later would coach the basketball team at Punahou as
well as teach elementary school there, recalled Obama as always being the
first to confront coaches when he felt they were not fairly allotting playing
time.
Obama wasn’t shy about advocating for himself and his fellow backup
players, Lum said. “He’d go right up to the coach during a game and say,
`Coach, we’re killing this team. Our second string should be playing more.'”
But it was on the court in the off-season that Obama seemed to be even
happier. Back then, Punahou was a completely open campus, with several
basketball courts where 20-something men from Honolulu would come in the late
afternoon for what often turned into flashy, highly competitive pickup
sessions. Many of the men were black.
Orme would stay for the games.
“At the time, it was about basketball,” said Orme, who has remained friends
with Obama over the years and who plays basketball with him almost every
Christmas when the two return to Hawaii to visit family. “But looking back now
I can see he was seeking more from those guys than that. He was probably
studying them and learning from them. He was a younger black man looking for
guidance.”
Old friend disputes memoir
Every senior graduating from Punahou gets to design a quarter-page in the
yearbook. They compose notes to friends and family and include photos or
quotes that best represent them.
On page 271 of the 1979 Oahuan, Obama’s entry reflects the crossroads he
found himself at as he prepared for life beyond Hawaii. He thanked “Tut and
Gramps,” his nicknames for Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, but didn’t mention his
faraway mother.
He also thanked the “Choom Gang,” a reference to “chooming,” Hawaiian slang
for smoking marijuana. Obama admits in “Dreams” that during high school he
frequently smoked marijuana, drank alcohol, even used cocaine occasionally.
“Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d been headed: the final, fatal role of
the young would-be black man,” Obama wrote in “Dreams.”
In the book, Obama discusses race and racism at his high school with one
other Punahou student, “Ray,” the young black man described in detail in
“Dreams” as perpetually angry at the white world around him. “It’s their
world, all right,” Ray supposedly shouts at Obama. “They own it and we in it.
So just get the f— outta my face.”
But Kakugawa, in the interview Saturday, said Obama’s recollection of that
conversation was mistaken. “I did say we were playing in their world,” he
explained, “but that had nothing to do with race. He knew that.”
Kakugawa explained that he had meant they were playing in the world of the
elite people who populated and ran Punahou–famous Hawaiian families like the
Doles, owners of the pineapple fortune, or the original developers of Waikiki,
the tourist mecca. “It just wasn’t a race thing,” he reiterated again and
again.
Obama confirmed in an interview earlier this month that the Ray character
in “Dreams” actually is Kakugawa.
In another passage from the book, Ray complains that white Punahou girls
don’t want to date black guys and that he and Obama don’t get enough playing
time as athletes, speculating that they’d be “treated different if we was
white. Or Japanese. Or Hawaiian. Or f—— Eskimo.”
But Kakugawa, a convicted drug felon, said Saturday that he had never been
the “prototypical angry black guy” that Obama portrays. Because of his
biracial heritage, he said, he was “like everyone in Hawaii, a mix of a lot of
things.”
A close friend and track teammate of Kakugawa, John Hagar, also said he was
surprised by Obama’s description of the character representing Kakugawa as an
angry young black man. “I never picked up on that,” Hagar said. “He was just
one of those perfect [ethnic] mixes of everything you see in Hawaii.”
Asked Saturday about Kakugawa’s recollections, the Obama campaign declined
to make the senator available. But spokesman Bill Burton said Obama “stands by
his recollections of these events as related in his book.”
“There’s no doubt that Keith’s story is tragic and sad,” Burton added.
While Obama rocketed to political prominence, his friend headed down the
troubled road Obama had feared he was following. Since 1995, Kakugawa has
spent more than 7 years in California prisons and months in Los Angeles County
Jail on cocaine and auto theft charges.
Another story put forth in “Dreams” as one of Obama’s pivotal moments of
racial awakening checks out essentially as he wrote it. Obama recounts taking
two white friends, including Orme, to a party attended almost entirely by
African-Americans.
According to the book, the characters representing Orme and the other
friend asked to leave the party after just an hour, saying they felt out of
place. The night, Obama later wrote, made him furious as he realized that
whites held a “fundamental power” over blacks.
“One of us said that being the different guys in the room had awakened a
little bit of empathy to what he must feel all the time at school. And he
clearly didn’t appreciate that,” Orme said. “I never knew, until reading the
book later, how much that night had upset him.”
As Obama’s senior year drew to a close, his mother sent him letters from
afar, about life in Indonesia and her work there with non-profit groups doing
economic development. She also sent advice about his future. College would be
his next stop. She mixed encouragement to keep up his grades with laments
about American politics.
“It is a shame we have to worry so much about [grade point], but you know
what the college entrance competition is these days,” she wrote. “Did you know
that in Thomas Jefferson’s day, and right up through the 1930s, anybody who
had the price of tuition could go to Harvard? … I don’t see that we are
producing many Thomas Jeffersons nowadays. Instead we are producing Richard
Nixons.”
In the spring of 1979, Obama’s mother and Maya, Barack’s younger half
sister by almost nine years, flew to Hawaii for his high school graduation. If
young Obama had struggled to find a place at Punahou, it was well hidden on
this day as well. He laughed and posed for photos with friends.
With a trimmed Afro, Hawaiian flower leis around his neck, Obama was
surrounded by the disparate people who shaped him. In one photo he hugs his
beaming sister.
In a striking snapshot with his grandparents, Stanley smiles proudly while
Madelyn hugs him fiercely, as though she doesn’t want to let him go forth into
a world far from the remote island that for so long had been his home.
———-
Kirsten Scharnberg reported from Honolulu and Kim Barker from Jakarta,
Indonesia; Tribune staff reporter Ray Gibson contributed to this report.
kscharnberg@tribune.com
kbarker@tribune.com
COMING TUESDAY: His mother blazed her own trail against conformity in the
Eisenhower era. IN TEMPO
IN THE WEB EDITION: More photos of Obama’s life at chicagotribune.com/obama
