The Other Barack (22 page)

But Obama was still enthralled with developments halfway around the world, with his future and his soul utterly committed elsewhere. Listening to him talk in the months after Barack Jr. was born, Abercrombie began to doubt that the marriage would survive. Obama, he knew, was not about to give up his dream. And Dunham, clearly ambitious herself, was not likely to subordinate herself to his plans. “Obama had gotten into this so far, but his commitment to Kenya was far more powerful than the vagaries of a marriage literally made on the fly,” said Abercrombie. “I always thought that the principal reason that Ann did not go with him was his utter and total dedication to independence. I think she began to think, Did she really want to go into this patriarchal world where she would play a secondary role?”

Just months after Barack Jr. was born, Dunham struck out on her own, at least for a while. Sometime in the fall of 1961 she moved back to Seattle with her baby and enrolled at U-Dub. She rented a one-room apartment on the first floor of one of the stately old homes of Capitol Hill. Dunham
got in touch with a few of her friends from Mercer Island who were living in the city and explained that she was eventually going to Boston.

Her babysitter was a young woman named Mary Toutonghi, who lived in the basement and managed the building with her husband. Toutonghi, who had a toddler of her own and was pregnant, often stuck around after Dunham returned, and the two talked about their babies and their plans for the future. Dunham told Toutonghi that her husband was still in school in Hawaii and eventually they were going to go to Africa, but she did not explain why they were apart. “The thing that struck me was that she was very much in love with her husband,” recalled Toutonghi, who later became a speech pathologist and moved to Alaska. “She talked about him very positively.”

But the situation was complicated. Dunham told her babysitter that when she and her husband returned to Kenya, he would have to marry a full-blooded Kenyan woman in order to father purely African children, which was necessary for him to secure his place in his tribe and establish Kenyan heirs. Dunham, for all her intelligence and budding cultural savvy, bought the unlikely story. Obama had manufactured the scenario, either angling to ensure that he could take a third wife on his return home or to dissuade her from following him to Kenya when he returned as he knew he would eventually. He had also advised Dunham that their son might encounter a negative reception from his relatives, given his mixed race. But if Obama had been trying to dissuade his wife from accompanying him to Kenya with such stories, Dunham was undeterred. She told Toutonghi that she had discussed this predicament with both her parents and her husband at length and that she was willing to travel to Kenya. Obama was her husband, and she could handle any of the cultural challenges that lay ahead. “I wondered why she wasn't upset about this,” recalled Toutonghi. “My feeling was that I could not have done it. But she was accepting of the situation, and that is what made me feel she obviously loved him a great deal.”

 

AS THE CONSTRUCTION CREWS
on campus were gearing up for a busy building season in the spring of 1962, Obama was finalizing plans for the next chapter of his American education.

Months earlier he had asked Mooney if she would help him prepare his résumé that would accompany his applications for financial assistance. From her dining room table in Tulsa, Mooney continued the job she had started three years earlier, now with the help of her husband. She and Obama could be proud of the accomplishments they typed on his résumé. In three years he had not only completed the coursework for a BA with a grade point average of 3.6, but he had also been named Phi Beta Kappa as well. He declared his goal to be “government work in economic development in East Africa.”

Mooney sent the résumé to Tom Mboya, recently named Kenya's Minister for Labor and married not so long ago himself, and asked in a letter if he could help Obama secure a financial backer for his graduate studies. “As a fellow Luo I am sure you will be pleased with his accomplishments,” she wrote. “And it will be an even greater honor if he can work for his PhD at Harvard. He has the opportunity and the brains. Now surely someone has the money.”
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As Obama sought to tailor his résumé for the college admissions staff, his ever-changing marital status changed yet again. Suddenly, Kezia was back in the picture. Obama described his family on his résumé as “a wife and two children in Kenya.” He made no mention of Dunham or Barack Jr., nor would he ever tell the Kirks about his Hawaiian family. If Obama was going to be competitive on the Ivy League circuit, claiming a proper African family would be a better bet than an interracial one of questionable legitimacy.

With talented Africans much sought after on campuses across the country, Obama, now twenty-five, was in the catbird seat—as long as no one probed his marital status. He submitted applications to Harvard, Yale, the University of California at Berkeley, and the New School in New York, and he sought financial assistance from them all. When his letters returned, he again had a choice. The New School offered a complete scholarship, including not only tuition and board but also a campus job that would enable him to support Dunham and his son. Harvard offered a scholarship too, but only enough to cover tuition.

There was no discussion. Barack Obama never entertained the possibility of compromise. If he had, he might have considered enrolling at a highly competitive school in New York that would have enabled him to
keep his small family together. But Obama was meant for the best, and that meant Harvard. With only tuition covered, Dunham and the baby would be excluded. Years later Dunham would describe the moment to her son. “Barack was such a stubborn bastard, he had to go to Harvard. ‘How can I refuse the best education?' he told me,” Dunham said to Obama Jr. “That's all he could think about, proving that he was the best.”
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Even before he left Hawaii, Obama was looking homeward. In a letter he wrote to Tom Mboya weeks before he headed to the mainland, Obama said he planned to write his dissertation on the economics of underdeveloped areas and hoped to complete his PhD in two years. Although he had enjoyed his stay in Hawaii, he added, “I will be accelerating my coming home as much as I can.” Obama reminded Mboya that his wife was living in Nairobi and added, “I would really appreciate any help that you can give her.”
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Mboya was irked. Although he was pleased with Obama's achievement and was keeping his eye on his maturation as an economist in hopes of putting him to work in the government upon his return, he was also annoyed with Obama's request. He did not feel that Obama was taking sufficient responsibility for supporting his wife and children in Kenya. Whether Mboya was aware of Obama's family in Hawaii is unclear. Mboya considered himself a family-oriented man, and he was concerned about Kezia and the children. He wrote back chiding Obama for “not taking better care of his family,” said Susan Mboya, Tom Mboya's daughter. “It was all very well to further your career, but only if you know how to take care of your responsibilities.”

Prodded by Mboya's words, Obama did not alter his plans, but instead he took steps to make sure that Kezia and his two children were being properly taken care of. For this he turned to Helen Roberts, the Palo Alto woman who had worked closely with Betty Mooney at the Literacy Center in Nairobi and had returned to Kenya earlier in the year. Obama had already asked Roberts if she would help Kezia find a school she might attend in Nairobi and keep an eye on his small family. Roberts, a straightlaced Methodist who had taken a number of students under her wing, promptly took action.

Within a month Kezia was in Nairobi taking courses at the Church Army school six hours a day and two hours at night while her children
stayed behind in Kogelo with Obama's parents. Although working as a volunteer at the literacy center and dependent upon the small social security check that was virtually her sole source of income, Roberts took it upon herself to buy Kezia some sorely needed glasses and several bolts of material with which to make clothes. Impressed by Kezia's desire to improve herself, Roberts wrote to a fellow literacy worker named Alice Sanderson in May that she was prepared to support Kezia as long as she was in Nairobi. “I got her material for three dresses and will keep her supplied with necessary funds while I am here,” Roberts wrote. “She is learning fast and is very anxious to be a suitable wife for Barack when he returns.”
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By July Kezia had become settled in her urban life and was beginning to think about bringing her children to the city as well. But Roberts was concerned about not only who would support them but also where they would live. “Then the children will also be my responsibility and their transportation and room, etc.,” Roberts wrote her friend. “I don't know what they'll do after I leave. I hope Barack can get enough work to look after them once he gets started in school again. Kezia is very nice and does many things for herself. She can make her own clothes and those for the children, she can knit too.... So I think Barack will notice quite a difference in her when he at last returns.”
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But Obama was not pleased with his children's living arrangements. He did not want the children living with his parents and wrote to Kezia saying so. Nor did his and Kezia's family members feel that living alone in Nairobi with the children was safe. Although Kezia's brother was living in the city, he did not have enough room for her to move in. As no one seemed quite sure where she should go, Kezia returned to Kendu Bay to be with her children during their school vacation. When both children became sick at the end of the month, Roberts gave Kezia more money for their medical care. But she also wrote a stern letter to Obama suggesting that he should be ready “to make some sacrifice for his family,” as she wrote Sanderson. “Barack has never even seen the little girl but he must have known about it before he left Kenya.”
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Obama urged Kezia to remain with her parents in Kendu Bay, and in the end she stayed alternately at both their parents' homes. But by late August Obama had already turned his attention elsewhere. The bird was ready to fly again.
Barack, otenga piny kiborne
, as his old Alego neighbors
liked to say in their own variation of Hussein Onyango's pakruok: For Barack, the bush hawk, no distance is too far.

As he headed east toward Cambridge, leaving in his wake two young families who had no idea whether he would be sending them support, Obama made several stops to visit friends and see some of the country along the way. He paused to catch up with Hal Abercrombie, Neil's brother and one of the original Stardust gang, who lived with his wife, Shirley, in San Francisco. Obama wanted to take the couple out for an elegant dinner, and he chose the Blue Fox, a city landmark renowned for its extensive wine cellar and haute cuisine. They were going to celebrate their good fortune of being young and at large in one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. And they would toast Obama's departure to Cambridge the following day, thus launching the next chapter of his educational career.

But things did not turn out exactly as they had planned. As the threesome stepped onto the restaurant's plush red carpet, the maître d' took a close look at the young blonde couple and their black companion. Although there were several empty tables in the front of the restaurant, the maître d' directed them to a table in the rear just a few feet from the kitchen door and largely obscured from the rest of the room, apparently in an effort to conceal their dark-skinned guest.

The three of them sat in stunned silence for a moment, unable to quite believe what had just happened to them. They decided to ask for a different table and waited for their server to return. And then they waited some more. Not only were they exiled to the rear of the restaurant, no one, it seemed, was in any hurry to take their order. “We all knew it was race, even in San Francisco,” said Abercrombie. “And Obama was livid. I don't think anything like that had ever happened to him before.”

Hawaii was already feeling far away. The spirit of aloha, it seemed, did not travel far.

T
he worn asphalt paths that wind about the campus of Harvard University have felt the tread of generations of aspiring students, some of whom have gone on to greatness and glory, some of whom have not. Two of the men who have walked briskly along those vaunted avenues, supremely confident that they would be among the former category, were both named Barack Hussein Obama.

The first to arrive found a home in the Littauer Center, a formidable granite structure with an imposing six-columned portico and the last of the Harvard buildings constructed in the imperial tradition. That he had made his way from a barefoot childhood on the parched African earth not far from the equator to the nation's oldest and most prestigious center of learning was a monumental achievement.

Barack Obama II, his son, would earn distinction nearly three decades later in the university's far more modest Gannett House, a three-story Greek Revival structure built in 1838. Just a few hundred yards away from the stolid Littauer, Gannett was the home of the illustrious
Harvard Law Review
. There, second-year law student Barack Obama II was named the first black president of the 103-year-old journal, a position considered to be the highest honor a student can attain at Harvard Law School. That victory earned him his first taste of national media attention and positioned him on the path that led ultimately to the presidency.

In a way Harvard was as close as the Obama father and son would come to each other. Although they of course never met on the Harvard campus, their presence there represented a pinnacle of achievement that linked them far more than the awkward month they spent together in a Honolulu
high-rise. What had brought them to Cambridge in the first place were the very characteristics that they shared: well-honed intellects, fierce ambition, and the daring to aspire far beyond the circumstances to which each was born. If they had met on the gently curving walkway that leads from Littauer to Gannett, paralleling bustling Cambridge Street, each might have recognized strokes of himself in the other.