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on the way. In 1962, after graduating from Hawaii, he went to
Harvard to pursue a graduate degree, leaving Ann and their
son in Hawaii. When she went to visit him at Harvard, she
brought the infant along. The trip went badly. Her husband
had not told his friends about her or his wife in Kenya. Ann
returned to Hawaii; it would be another ten years before she
or her son saw his father again.
Ann and her son moved into her parents’ two-bedroom
apartment in Honolulu. She returned to college and her par-
ents often took care of the boy, whom everyone called Barry.
Several years later Ann divorced Obama—by then he had
taken yet another wife—and she married an Indonesian
geologist at the University of Hawaii. In 1967, Ann, her new
husband and six-year-old Barry moved to the outskirts of
Jakarta, Indonesia, where the family lived in a stucco house
on a dirt lane. Chickens and ducks ran around the backyard
and two crocodiles lived in a fenced-in pond on the prop-
erty. Obama’s mother had always encouraged her son to
adapt to different peoples, but soon her thinking shifted.
Now she realized the vast chasm separating the prospects of
young people who grew up in Indonesia compared to the
United States.
She enrolled in a correspondence course for elemen-
tary school children in the United States. At four each
morning, she awakened Barry and together they worked
through the materials. After he had completed fourth grade
in Jakarta, she sent him to Honolulu to live with her par-
ents, promising to follow within a year.
Barry’s grandfather arranged for the boy to attend the
elite Punahou Academy. He was one of the few African
Americans in the school. When some boys teased him about
living in the jungle, he invented stories about how his father
was a warrior and an African prince. Obama nearly per-
suaded himself that this fiction was true.
When his father showed up in Honolulu for a month-
long visit, Barry was appalled. What would he tell his
friends? But he was also confused. His long-absent father
proceeded to boss Ann and her parents and demanded
that Barry work harder in school. When Barry’s teacher
invited his father to give a lecture on Africa, Barry was mor-
tified. But his father’s talk was smooth and gripping. Barry’s
friends were impressed. His father left soon afterwards.
Barry never saw him again.
As a teenager, Barry excelled at basketball; his senior
year, he was on the Punahou team that won the state
championship. He also wrote poetry. But he lacked motiva-
tion and managed only a B– average as a senior. He spent
most of his time hanging out with slacker friends. Privately,
he brooded over his father’s estrangement. He coped with
doubts about himself by using marijuana, booze, and
cocaine. When one of his friends was busted for drug pos-
session, Obama knew it could have been him.N
ot many thirty-three-year-olds write a memoir. But
Barack Obama, who intended to write a book on race
relations, instead explored the meaning of his young life.
The facts were clear enough. He was born on
August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii. His mother was
Stanley (Ann) Dunham, whom a friend described as
“Kansas white.” His father, Barack Obama, Sr., was a Luo
tribesman from Nyanza Province, Kenya who had come to
the University of Hawaii on a program to educate poten-
tial leaders of newly independent African nations. The
couple had met in a Russian-language course at the uni-
versity the previous year. Within a few months, Dunham
was pregnant. Obama told her that he had been married
in Kenya but had since divorced. Ann and Obama married
in February, 1961. She was eighteen when she had
Barack, Jr.
Her husband, however, had lied. Not only was he still
married to a Kenyan, but he had one son by her with another
AMERICAN LIVES
Barack Obama
Stanley (Ann) Dunham with her son, Barack Obama, age two.