The Other Barack (21 page)

The Dunhams were also alarmed that, because Obama had been married to his first wife according to traditional law, there was no document showing that he had been divorced. All they had was his say so. Madelyn Dunham was nearly hysterical over reports of the ongoing Mau Mau violence in Kenya, convinced that her only daughter would be beheaded in the wilds of Africa. The final straw came when Hussein threatened to have his son's visa revoked if he did not drop his plan. As the parents ranted and pounded the proverbial tables, Obama and Dunham decided to elope, just as her parents had done several decades earlier.

They chose for the site of their union the island of Maui, one of the most popular of the Hawaiian Islands, with its sweeping beaches and lofty volcanic peaks, long a favorite among honeymooners. Some would later speculate that the couple chose the location to avoid possible scrutiny in bustling downtown Honolulu. Others saw the choice of locale as endearingly romantic. After all, Obama and Dunham would have had to spend on costly airline tickets and a hotel at a time when neither of them had much money.

Obama and Dunham were married, according to their divorce decree, in the picturesque town of Wailuku on February 2, 1961, in the week-long break between final exams and spring registration at UH. Wailuku, which means “water of destruction” in Hawaiian, was a charming municipality of trim storefronts and inviting lawns, veiled in the scent of burning sugar cane from the Wailuku Sugar Company mill. The couple apparently had a quiet civil ceremony with neither of their families in attendance nor the symbolic markers of a cake or ring. She was eighteen; he was twenty-four. On their return to Honolulu a few days later, however, they had a small reception. Anna, now a married lady, was ecstatic. “Big news!” she wrote to Blake. “I married the African. I am now Mrs. Barack Obama and we are expecting a baby in the summer. My parents are dealing with it quite well.”
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For Obama, who would begin his final year at UH when the baby arrived, the situation was infinitely more complex. As usual he told none of his friends that he had gotten married or was expecting a baby. He was already under a significant amount of pressure with his schoolwork and the specter of graduate school looming. That spring he was taking a particularly heavy load, including Public Finance, International Trade Finance, and Problems in International Relations. Nor could he vent his anxiety by talking to people about the prospect of becoming a father, yet again. To the Stardust crowd, at least, he remained a single, unencumbered guy with dazzling prospects.
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Once again, Obama faced the perennial problem of how to raise money. Although he had little contact with Mooney since he left Kenya, Obama turned to his old patron for help. Mooney herself had surprising matrimonial news, although Obama did not reciprocate with his own story. After returning to the United States a few months after Obama left Kenya, Mooney had struck up a correspondence with an old friend from her Koinonia days, a man named Elmer Kirk. A recently widowed electrical engineer, Kirk shared her spiritual devotion as well as her love of travel. He and his family had taken teaching classes at Koininia in the mid-1950s in hopes of traveling to Africa before his wife had fallen sick. After he and Mooney realized that their friendship was much more than that, they married in 1960 and she moved to his home in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with
plans to travel. Mooney assumed her husband's name and now had three stepchildren to think about.

With the financial demands of running a household, Mooney was unable to offer Obama additional support. But she sent letters to many members of her sprawling family to see if others might be willing to help. Indeed, one of her uncles, Roy M. Clark, a retired mailman in El Cajon, California, agreed to contribute $10 each month for his niece's African friend. But Obama was still chronically short.

Obama managed to find alternate funding, but he had to work hard for it. During his second year he received a $190 scholarship from UH and $1,000 from the African American Institute in New York toward his room and board. But he needed another $1,000 to cover his expenses. In the spring of 1961 he was approved for $900 in funds from the Laubach Literacy Fund, which would be doled out to him in monthly increments. He also got approval from INS to work twenty-five hours part time, so he began looking for a job. Still short, the prospect of shouldering the cost of an infant must have been daunting.

Pressed by both academic and financial concerns in the spring after he was married, Obama also needed to apply once again to the INS for an extension of his stay. Although a largely routine matter, the process entailed an examination of his academic record and general behavior. With his extension due to expire in four months, Obama would have been anxious to present a case that would impress immigration authorities. A bigamist with a mixed-race baby, if that is how authorities chose to see him, was not likely to be the strongest of candidates. And so Obama decided to rewrite his story. In the new version there would be no baby.

Within two months of his marriage to Dunham, Obama told Sumi McCabe, UH's foreign student adviser, that his wife was making arrangements to give their unborn baby up for adoption. According to the INS memo concerning her April conversation with Dahling, the INS administrator, “Subject [Obama] got his USC [United States citizen] wife ‘Hapai' [pidgin for pregnant] and although they were married they do not live together and Miss Dunham is making arrangements with the Salvation Army to give the baby away.”
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Whether Dunham ever took steps to put her baby up for adoption is unclear. It is possible that Obama Sr., not always entirely beholden to the
truth, simply lied about the matter. Salvation Army officials, who might have a record of any conversation they had with Dunham if one had taken place, declined to discuss the matter, citing privacy regulations. In an interview, Robert Gibbs, White House Press Secretary at the time, said that President Obama has never heard that either of his parents considered putting him up for adoption nor has he seen the INS memo. Obama declined to be interviewed on the subject “because of the very personal nature of the request,” according to a White House spokesman. McCabe, eighty-nine and living in a retirement community in Honolulu, remembers Obama well. But she does not recall any conversation about his having a baby or about giving it up.

Interestingly, in his book
Dreams
Obama himself raised the possibility that his mother might have considered adoption. So reviled were relationships between blacks and whites when his parents were married, wrote Obama, that “the hostile stares, the whispers, might have driven a woman in my mother's predicament into a back-alley abortion—or at the very least to a distant convent that could arrange for adoption.”
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Even without the baby in the picture, immigration officials were sufficiently concerned about Obama's marital status that they considered taking deportation measures against him. In his memo Dahling noted that Obama was already married to a Kenyan woman and thus possibly a bigamist. Obama told McCabe that he had divorced his wife, giving her the same explanation he had given the Dunhams. Immigration officials mulled over whether he could be deported if he were convicted of bigamy but decided against pursuing it. Instead, they decided that Obama should be “closely questioned before another extension is granted—and denial be considered. If his USC wife tries to petition for him, make sure an investigation is conducted as to the bona-fide of the marriage.”
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Why Obama claimed that his son was to be given up for adoption is unclear. Perhaps his words were simply a rash response to a crisis situation, one that threatened to collapse his cherished dream. Clearly, Obama was deeply fond of Dunham, so much so that he was willing to marry her. But he also knew that his chance to be a big man in the Kenyan political sphere depended heavily on his success in America. Denial of his request for an extension of his stay—meaning an abrupt termination of his American education and a return back home—would be an unacceptable
humiliation, a painful repetition of the Maseno experience, in which he might find himself punished not for any academic failure but because of the interference of a meddling bureaucrat.

Perhaps Ann Dunham, a frightened eighteen-year-old who was months away from giving birth to a child that many in America would disdain due to his mixed parentage, took the first faltering steps toward putting her baby up for adoption before changing her mind. After all, who in 1961 would adopt a mixed-race infant, particularly in Hawaii, where a black person was regarded as an oddity?

If she did consider it, she did not mention it to her friends back in Seattle or those whom she had gotten to know in Honolulu. Nor do those friends think it likely that she would have done so, as she appeared to be so thrilled about having a baby. Dunham's pregnancy continued uneventfully, and on August 4, 1961, she gave birth to Barack Hussein Obama II at 7:24 p.m. at Kapi'olani Medical Center for Women and Children in Honolulu.
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Births to blacks at the hospital were so rare that Obama Sr.'s race is described as African on his son's Certification of Live Birth issued by the State Health Department and publicly released by Obama's presidential campaign. Dunham's race is described as Caucasian.

The Salvation Army never came for the baby.

A birth announcement in the Sunday
Advertiser
that ran over a week later listed the couple's address as 6085 Kalaniana'ole Highway, a few miles east of the UH campus. But the announcement was inaccurate in one respect: At the time of Barack II's birth, they were already living separately. According to the INS record, Dunham lived with her parents, while Obama lived on the steep slope of Allencaster Street near downtown. Obama had left Atherton House after several months and lived at half a dozen different addresses around the city. But in the first year of Barack Jr.'s life, he would remain on Allencaster Street.

Dunham's plan for her future in the months following her baby's birth was unclear. An INS memo dated August 31, 1961, summarizes the couple's intentions this way: “USC spouse to go to Wash State University next semester. When finished school here plans to go to a mainland school for a Doctor Degree in Economics—after that to return to Kenya. They have one child born Honolulu on 8/4/1961, Barack Obama II.”
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But at the same time, Dunham wrote Blake a note announcing that she was coming through Seattle at the end of August on her way to Boston to look into job possibilities for herself. Her husband, she added, had been accepted into graduate school there and they would likely move there the following year. Dunham would, in fact, enroll at U-Dub the following spring, but she made no mention of that. Blake remembers sitting with Dunham and her three-week-old baby on her mother's porch in the hot August sun sipping lemonade and eating sugar cookies. Dunham was as entranced by her baby boy as she was with his father. “She was wildly in love with Barack Obama, oh, so in love with him,” Blake recalls. “She was excited about her future with this man, who was the rising hope of Africa, which was just about to emerge from under British rule. It was all so romantic. She was going to go to Boston and set up a beachhead for them there and get a job because they needed money. Then, she was going to be his helpmate and raise his children. I remember thinking, wow, that is just incredibly brave. I mean, she was eighteen years old.”

As they were talking, Dunham nursed her baby and cradled him close to her chest. Blake was admiring his long, dark eyelashes when the baby suddenly soiled his diaper. Dunham wrinkled up her nose and thrust Barack Jr. in front of her body, her arms outstretched.

“How about you do it?” she implored.

“Your mother's been changing him up to now, hasn't she?” Blake asked. “You know, you've really got to learn to do it.”

Dunham left later that afternoon, promising to stay in touch. But Blake and Dunham lost contact in the flurry of their young lives and never spoke again. On her return to Honolulu, Obama and Dunham resumed their life as before, still living separately but now with a baby to manage. Obama was working hard to finish his final semester. He was also trying to get used to the turned heads that followed him when he walked down the street with his wife and child, one of the first times he'd been made to feel uncomfortable about the color of his skin while in the United States. One night, at a friend's party, he finally met someone with whom he could frankly discuss his unusual marriage.

His name was Alonzo DeMello, a Lousiana native who had served in the 82nd Airborne Division and one of the few black people that Obama
met in Hawaii. DeMello also married a white woman in 1961. A decade older than Obama, he was long accustomed to what he described as the “terrible discrimination against blacks” in Hawaii. And so when Obama asked him if people stared at him when he walked down the street with his wife, DeMello knew exactly what he was talking about. “I said, ‘Sure, they stare. I stare right back at them,'” said DeMello, eighty-seven. “I mean, my wife was blonde, so people stared all the time. I told him he'd get used to it.”

Of all the people he met in Honolulu, the group with whom Obama was most able to let down his guard was the Stardust crowd, so every now and then he took his new wife and baby to their gatherings. Abercrombie and the others never asked much about the couple's marriage or what their plans were, as Obama had known they would not. This was Hawaii, after all, and there was this beautiful cooing baby at their party to celebrate. Abercrombie recalls Obama balancing Barack Jr. on his knee one night, enthusiastically pointing out his son's dark hair and long fingers to the group. “He was overjoyed,” said Abercrombie. “After all, there was another Obama in the world. Maybe he would take after him.”