When Barry Became Barack

Yet the poverty and corruption of Indonesia would come to instill "a relentless skepticism" in the child, he later wrote. Obama's mother eventually stifled her idealism, and sent her son back to Hawaii to live with his grandparents.

There's no escape from adolescence and the torrent of questions that accompany it. Like all young boys, Obama was plagued by doubts and worries—about girls, about being teased, about his ability to "fit in." He became more aware of his blackness. At his new school, a redheaded girl wanted to touch his hair, and a boy wanted to know if his father ate people. Obama gave a slight shove to a black girl when other kids taunted the two of them, saying she was his girlfriend. Barry later felt guilty about it. When his father came to visit from Kenya—for the first and only time—the 10-year-old was nervous. He didn't want to be seen as different from the other kids, but with no choice, he couldn't resist fibbing that his father was a prince, his grandfather a chief, and that his family name meant "burning spear." In 1975, when Obama started high school in Hawaii, teacher Eric Kusunoki read the roll call and stumbled on Obama's first name. "Is Barack here?" he asked, pronouncing it BAR-rack. "He said, 'Just call me Barry'," recalls Kusunoki. "He didn't say it like he was exasperated or anything; he just corrected me."

Keith Kakugawa was a close friend of Obama's at the Punahou School. (He appears in "Dreams" as a revised character named "Ray" who may be a composite of more than one Obama friend.) He says that Obama, being a dark-skinned kid growing up in a white household, sensed that something was amiss. "He felt that he was not getting a part of who he was, the history," says Kakugawa, who is also of mixed race. He recalls Obama's reading black authors —James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes—looking for clues. Keith didn't know at first that Obama's given name was Barack. "We were in the library and there was a Malcolm X book," Kakugawa tells NEWSWEEK. "He grabbed it and looked at it and he's checking it out, and I said, 'Hold on, man. What you gonna do? Change your name to something Muslim?' He said, 'Well, my name is Barack Obama.' And I said, 'No it isn't.' And we got in an argument about that in the library and they had to tell us, 'Shhhh'."

Back in Hawaii in the 1970s, it could seem that everyone was some kind of a minority. The fact that Obama was half-black and half-white didn't matter much to anyone but Obama, Kakugawa says: "He made everything out like it was all racial." On one occasion, Obama thought he'd gotten a bad break on the school basketball team because he was black. But Kakugawa recalls his father's telling the teenager, "No, Barry, it's not because you're black. It's because you missed two shots in a row." (Here, Kakugawa's memory is different from Obama's. The Ray character in the book is the one obsessed with being discriminated against.)

Darin Maurer, another buddy of Obama's in Hawaii, never noticed any internal struggle. The two met in seventh grade, drawn together by a shared interest in basketball. Both Darin and his mother recall Obama as very integrated. Suzanne Maurer recalls that Barry and her white son, who had very curly hair, both sported Afro-style haircuts at one point. Mostly, both Maurers remember how smart Obama was. "He could whip out a paper that was due the next day the night before, while all the other kids were spending weeks writing," recalls Suzanne. Darin remembers some racial tensions in Hawaii at that time—expressed by Native Islanders against both whites and blacks. There were derogatory native words for both races. "I wouldn't be very surprised about any sort of derogatory stuff about a black person," says Darin, a pastor who now lives in Texas. "I knew that's what you had to accept … It wasn't like it was debilitating. It was just a challenge."

Mostly, perhaps, Barry was feeling stifled in Hawaii, which is best known for its laid-back love of sun and surf. He didn't want to go the way his friend Keith ultimately went. Kakugawa flew off to the mainland and later struggled with drugs, moving in and out of prison, and was homeless for a period. Even as a teenager, Obama had broad ambitions, and seemed determined to make something of himself.