When Barry Became Barack

Conservative critics have blasted him, partly for "moral equivalence." (Obama's grandmother, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer pointed out, "never spread racial hatred.") Other critics questioned his loyalties to America. They will continue to do so, particularly if he wins the Democratic nomination. Obama responds by telling his own story, and wrapping it into the larger chronicle of America. His pitch is that he can see America as few others can, and that this ability will enable him to pull a majority of the country together and get things done. "That's what we are doing with our speeches and that's to some degree what I think this campaign is about and what America is about," he told NEWSWEEK in one of two recent interviews. "People from diverse backgrounds and unlikely places finding a common culture and a common set of values and ideals that make them American." That is perhaps Obama's greatest talent: to weave compelling narratives about himself that seem to include everyone in a common epic. The stories have a fierce intelligence, but like any good mythmaker, Obama sands down pieces that don't quite fit. How Barry became Barack is just such a story.

Obama's first questions about his own identity came early, when he lived for several years in Indonesia. He moved there with his idealistic mother—whom he has described as a "lonely witness for secular humanism"—when he was 6. The Asian archipelago was an eye-opener for a child who had been raised in the relative comforts of Hawaii. He didn't know what to make of the leper who came to his door, who had a hole where his nose was supposed to be and made a discomfiting "whistling sound" as he asked for food. He had to learn how to deal with street beggars of all types. Obama's bighearted mother gave easily. His Indonesian stepfather, an unsentimental man with a more practical view of the world, counseled the boy that the demands of the needy had no end; it was best to be strong because "men take advantage of weakness in other men."

The young Obama grappled, to the extent a child can, with the guilt of the privileged. But for the first time, he also confronted the potential burden of being dark-skinned. This occurred, according to his autobiography, at the library of the U.S. Embassy, where his mother was teaching English to local businessmen. Barry was there leafing through magazines when he came across disturbing photos of a black man who had tried to erase the darkness from his skin by using chemicals. The man had a ghostly pallor, as if he had suffered from radiation poisoning. After "a stretch of childhood free from self-doubt," seeing the photos was "violent for me," Obama later wrote. He had been warned before about bigots and wasn't completely ignorant about the evils of the world. "But that one photograph had told me something else: that there was a hidden enemy out there, one that could reach me without anyone's knowledge, not even my own."

The boy's mother tried her best to armor him against self-doubt. "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," she told him. She also taught him "to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often characterized Americans abroad," and made sure he was respectful of Indonesians and their culture. "My mother always distinguished between certain aspects of Americans abroad that she was embarrassed by: the expats who would never eat in a local restaurant or never socialize with Indonesians or had a patronizing attitude," Obama recalled to NEWSWEEK. "She was always concerned about me never thinking I was superior to Indonesians in that way."

He ate lots of the local street food: chicken satay, traditional fried rice and meatballs the size of tennis balls. He saw shadow-puppet shows and listened to Indonesian music. His backyard was home to baby crocodiles, birds of paradise and a cockatoo. "It wasn't all grim," says Obama's half sister, Maya. Jakarta was like a vast, sprawling village at the time, lit by kerosene lamps—a young boy's paradise.

But Obama's mother didn't want Barry to be denied the many opportunities that American kids had. So she tutored him at 4 a.m., before he went to his Indonesian school, administering three-hour English lessons. Obama got a glancing exposure to Islam. He went to a public school where he had a bit of Islamic instruction, perhaps once a week. But Indonesia wore its religion lightly. "Nobody wore headscarves on the streets," he says. "I mean, women were driving on Vespas, and when you went to the villages they were all taking baths in the river." His mother taught him what she thought of as "Midwestern, traditional American values"—honesty, fairness, plain speaking. "She believed in saying what you mean and meaning what you say, even if it made a situation uncomfortable," he recalls. "To her that was part of her American tradition that she was proud of, and she wanted to make sure that was part of me."