On His Own

Barack Sr., or Senior, as most of his family members call him, carried his sense of purpose into his professional life in Kenya. He went to work at the Ministry of Planning and National Development. By all accounts, he was exceedingly frustrated much of the time, not just with the almost nonexistent pace of change, but also with people he often considered to be his intellectual inferiors. "Senior had no use for diplomatic niceties; people didn't like meeting him," says Walter Ochoro, who worked with him. "He had no time for mediocrity and stupidity. He'd spare you no time."

By now, Senior had already fathered Barry and left him. Yet the particular pride he felt for this son—not even his oldest, and not of full Luo blood since his mother was an American—was apparent. "He used to talk about Barry. He'd say, 'You need to work hard like your cousin Barry'," recalls Hilba Were Ismael, one of Barry's stepsisters. Senior would talk about him as intelligent, like himself. Senior had a photo of Barry that he kept with him in his wallet, a black-and-white school picture, and he would show it to brothers, sisters, cousins, anyone who would look, anyone who showed an interest, anyone who wanted to know about the American son of the brilliant economist. "Look at my son," he would proudly say.

It is a reassuring story: at least Senior did not forget the son he had forsaken. But that snapshot—a kind of photographic trophy—was of a real boy, thousands of miles away, who was forced to live with an idealized image of his distant father. Then, as it so often does, reality intruded. The occasion was the Christmas visit.

Mabel Hefty had a special morning planned for her fifth-grade homeroom class at Castle Hall on the campus of the elite Punahou School in Honolulu. Miss Hefty was something of an internationalist—she had taught in Kenya for a time—and had invited a guest speaker: Dr. Barack Obama Sr. It was a grand enough occasion that a neighboring homeroom teacher, Pal Eldredge, whom the young Obama recalled as a "big, no-nonsense Hawaiian," brought his students in for the program, too. As Eldredge, now retired, recalls the morning, Barry could not have been more delighted. The son, Eldredge says, introduced the father to the classroom, which was filled with 54 students. Barack Obama Sr. was dressed in traditional Kenyan clothing—Eldredge remembers it looking something like a skirt—and spoke about the importance of education. "He was like a visiting professor," says Eldredge. "It was a special occasion." Obama Sr. spoke for about 30 minutes and then answered the fifth graders' questions. Eldredge recalls the young Barack's warm reaction to the performance: "He seemed to be real proud, right at his side, kind of holding on to his dad's arm." A touching scene of paternal interest in his son, and of the son's pride in the father—except that Barack Obama's recollection of the moment is at odds with the retired teacher's in revealing ways.

Obama was not delighted by the visit. He dreaded it. He had boasted that he came from African royalty, and that his father was a prince. "My grandfather, see, he's a chief," Barry had told his classmates. "It's sort of like the king of the tribe, you know … like the Indians. So that makes my father a prince. He'll take over when my grandfather dies." The truth was more mundane—tragically mundane, in Barry's view. The Obamas were Luo, a nomadic tribe that, as Barry recalled, "raised cattle and lived in mud huts and ate corn meal and yams and something called millet. Their traditional costume was a leather thong across the crotch." Told that Miss Hefty had invited Obama Sr. to the class to talk about life in Kenya, Barry was crushed: his tale of princely blood would be exposed, he feared, by the harsh reality of mud huts. "I couldn't imagine worse news," Obama wrote of the invitation to his father. "I spent that night and all of the next day trying to suppress thoughts of the inevitable … all my lies exposed, the painful jokes afterward. Each time I remembered, my body squirmed as if it had received a jolt to the nerves."

When the day arrived, Barry did not introduce his father, as Eldredge recalls, but sat in his own seat, terrified. "I held my head stiffly, trying to focus on a vacant point on the blackboard behind him," Obama wrote. The father, though, was a hit. "He had been speaking for some time before I could finally bring myself back to the moment," Obama wrote. "He was leaning against Miss Hefty's thick oak desk and describing the deep gash in the earth where mankind had first appeared. He spoke of the wild animals that still roamed the plains, the tribes that still required a young boy to kill a lion to prove his manhood. He spoke of the customs of the Luo, how elders received the utmost respect and made laws for all to follow under great-trunked trees. And he told us of Kenya's struggle to be free, how the British had wanted to stay and unjustly rule the people, just as they had in America; how many had been enslaved only because of the color of their skin, just as they had in America, but that Kenyans, like all of us in the room, longed to be free and develop themselves through hard work and sacrifice." The children were intrigued; the teachers impressed. Writing about the incident long afterward, though, Obama says nothing of his own reaction aside from the initial shame and fear. He was, it seems safe to say, ambivalent about his father's success at charming his immediate world: partly proud, partly angry that his classmates got about as much of his father as he did. Reminded of the episode last week, Obama said: "It was just a tortured moment. Now what is true is the fact that my father's presentation impressed my teachers and my fellow students was an enormous relief. The fact that he's different, but is somehow able to communicate with great confidence a sense of common humanity was actually a great object lesson for me." It was a quick lesson. Two weeks later Obama Sr. left Hawaii for good.

It is interesting that Obama's memory of the homeroom performance is so much colder and more realistic than Eldredge's. Many sons trying to re-imagine a difficult past might recast the morning in the warmer way Eldredge did. There is something cheerful about thinking of Barry clinging affectionately to his father's arm. Yet Obama does not flinch from the painful reality, and depicts the encounter in its complexity—his staring at the blackboard, vacantly, instead of proudly into his father's eyes.

The worst moment of the visit came one evening at Stanley and Madelyn's apartment. Barry had been waiting all year for the annual broadcast of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," but Senior chose this moment to assert paternal authority for the first (and apparently last) time. Ordering his son to turn off the TV and to go read, Senior provoked a family-wide crisis, forcing deep-seated resentments to the surface. As the argument wore on, Barry managed to see the last bit of the holiday special, but he was ready for the father to go: "After a week of my father in the flesh, I had decided that I preferred his more distant image, an image I could alter on a whim—or ignore when convenient. If my father hadn't exactly disappointed me, he remained something unknown, something volatile and vaguely threatening."