by Barack Obama
Sure—but would you let your daughter marry one?
The fact that my grandparents had answered yes to this question, no matter how grudgingly, remains an enduring puzzle to me. There was nothing in their background to predict such a response, no New England transcendentalists or wild-eyed socialists in their family tree. True, Kansas had fought on the Union side of the Civil War; Gramps liked to remind me that various strands of the family contained ardent abolitionists. If asked, Toot would turn her head in profile to show off her beaked nose, which, along with a pair of jet-black eyes, was offered as proof of Cherokee blood.
But an old, sepia-toned photograph on the bookshelf spoke most eloquently of their roots. It showed Toot’s grandparents, of Scottish and English stock, standing in front of a ramshackle homestead, unsmiling and dressed in coarse wool, their eyes squinting at the sun-baked, flinty life that stretched out before them. Theirs were the faces of American Gothic, the WASP bloodline’s poorer cousins, and in their eyes one could see truths that I would have to learn later as facts: that Kansas had entered the Union free only after a violent precursor to the Civil War, the battle in which John Brown’s sword tasted first blood; that while one of my great-great-grandfathers, Christopher Columbus Clark, had been a decorated Union soldier, his wife’s mother was rumored to have been a second cousin of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy; that although another distant ancestor had indeed been a full-blooded Cherokee, such lineage was a source of considerable shame to Toot’s mother, who blanched whenever someone mentioned the subject and hoped to carry the secret to her grave.
That was the world in which my grandparents had been raised, the dab-smack, landlocked center of the country, a place where decency and endurance and the pioneer spirit were joined at the hip with conformity and suspicion and the potential for unblinking cruelty. They had grown up less than twenty miles away from each other—my grandmother in Augusta, my grandfather in El Dorado, towns too small to warrant boldface on a road map—and the childhoods they liked to recall for my benefit portrayed small-town, Depression-era America in all its innocent glory: Fourth of July parades and the picture shows on the side of a barn; fireflies in a jar and the taste of vine-ripe tomatoes, sweet as apples; dust storms and hailstorms and classrooms filled with farm boys who got sewn into their woolen underwear at the beginning of winter and stank like pigs as the months wore on.
Even the trauma of bank failures and farm foreclosures seemed romantic when spun through the loom of my grandparents’ memories, a time when hardship, the great leveler that had brought people closer together, was shared by all. So you had to listen carefully to recognize the subtle hierarchies and unspoken codes that had policed their early lives, the distinctions of people who don’t have a lot and live in the middle of nowhere. It had to do with something called respectability—there were respectable people and not-so-respectable people—and although you didn’t have to be rich to be respectable, you sure had to work harder at it if you weren’t.
Toot’s family was respectable. Her father held a steady job all through the Depression, managing an oil lease for Standard Oil. Her mother had taught normal school before the children were born. The family kept their house spotless and ordered Great Books through the mail; they read the Bible but generally shunned the tent revival circuit, preferring a straight-backed form of Methodism that valued reason over passion and temperance over both.
My grandfather’s station was more troublesome. Nobody was sure why—the grandparents who had raised him and his older brother weren’t very well off, but they were decent, God-fearing Baptists, supporting themselves with work in the oil rigs around Wichita. Somehow, though, Gramps had turned out a bit wild. Some of the neighbors pointed to his mother’s suicide: it was Stanley, after all, then only eight years old, who had found her body. Other, less charitable, souls would simply shake their heads: The boy takes after his philandering father, they would opine, the undoubtable cause of the mother’s unfortunate demise.
Whatever the reason, Gramps’s reputation was apparently well deserved. By the age of fifteen he’d been thrown out of high school for punching the principal in the nose. For the next three years he lived off odd jobs, hopping rail cars to Chicago, then California, then back again, dabbling in moonshine, cards, and women. As he liked to tell it, he knew his way around Wichita, where both his and Toot’s families had moved by that time, and Toot doesn’t contradict him; certainly, Toot’s parents believed the stories that they’d heard about the young man and strongly disapproved of the budding courtship. The first time Toot brought Gramps over to her house to meet the family, her father took one look at my grandfather’s black, slicked-back hair and his perpetual wise-guy grin and offered his unvarnished assessment.
“He looks like a wop.”
My grandmother didn’t care. To her, a home economics major fresh out of high school and tired of respectability, my grandfather must have cut a dashing figure. I sometimes imagine them in every American town in those years before the war, him in baggy pants and a starched undershirt, brim hat cocked back on his head, offering a cigarette to this smart-talking girl with too much red lipstick and hair dyed blond and legs nice enough to model hosiery for the local department store. He’s telling her about the big cities, the endless highway, his imminent escape from the empty, dust-ridden plains, where big plans mean a job as a bank manager and entertainment means an ice-cream soda and a Sunday matinee, where fear and lack of imagination choke your dreams so that you already know on the day that you’re born just where you’ll die and who it is that’ll bury you. He won’t end up like that, my grandfather insists; he has dreams, he has plans; he will infect my grandmother with the great peripatetic itch that had brought both their forebears across the Atlantic and half of a continent so many years before.
They eloped just in time for the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and my grandfather enlisted. And at this point the story quickens in my mind like one of those old movies that show a wall calendar’s pages peeled back faster and faster by invisible hands, the headlines of Hitler and Churchill and Roosevelt and Normandy spinning wildly to the drone of bombing attacks, the voice of Edward R. Murrow and the BBC. I watch as my mother is born at the army base where Gramps is stationed; my grandmother is Rosie the Riveter, working on a bomber assembly line; my grandfather sloshes around in the mud of France, part of Patton’s army.
Gramps returned from the war never having seen real combat, and the family headed to California, where he enrolled at Berkeley under the GI bill. But the classroom couldn’t contain his ambitions, his restlessness, and so the family moved again, first back to Kansas, then through a series of small Texas towns, then finally to Seattle, where they stayed long enough for my mother to finish high school. Gramps worked as a furniture salesman; they bought a house and found themselves bridge partners. They were pleased that my mother proved bright in school, although when she was offered early admission into the University of Chicago, my grandfather forbade her to go, deciding that she was still too young to be living on her own.
And that’s where the story might have stopped: a home, a family, a respectable life. Except something must have still been gnawing at my grandfather’s heart. I can imagine him standing at the edge of the Pacific, his hair prematurely gray, his tall, lanky frame bulkier now, looking out at the horizon until he could see it curve and still smelling, deep in his nostrils, the oil rigs and corn husks and hard-bitten lives that he thought he had left far behind. So that when the manager of the furniture company where he worked happened to mention that a new store was about to open in Honolulu, that business prospects seemed limitless there, what with statehood right around the corner, he would rush home that same day and talk my grandmother into selling their house and packing up yet again, to embark on the final leg of their journey, west, toward the setting sun….
He would always be like that, my grandfather, always searching for that new start, always running away from the familiar. By the time the family
arrived in Hawaii, his character would have been fully formed, I think—the generosity and eagerness to please, the awkward mix of sophistication and provincialism, the rawness of emotion that could make him at once tactless and easily bruised. His was an American character, one typical of men of his generation, men who embraced the notion of freedom and individualism and the open road without always knowing its price, and whose enthusiasms could as easily lead to the cowardice of McCarthyism as to the heroics of World War II. Men who were both dangerous and promising precisely because of their fundamental innocence; men prone, in the end, to disappointment.
In 1960, though, my grandfather had not yet been tested; the disappointments would come later, and even then they would come slowly, without the violence that might have changed him, for better or worse. In the back of his mind he had come to consider himself as something of a freethinker—bohemian, even. He wrote poetry on occasion, listened to jazz, counted a number of Jews he’d met in the furniture business as his closest friends. In his only skirmish into organized religion, he would enroll the family in the local Unitarian Universalist congregation; he liked the idea that Unitarians drew on the scriptures of all the great religions (“It’s like you get five religions in one,” he would say). Toot would eventually dissuade him of his views on the church (“For Christ’s sake, Stanley, religion’s not supposed to be like buying breakfast cereal!”), but if my grandmother was more skeptical by nature, and disagreed with Gramps on some of his more outlandish notions, her own stubborn independence, her own insistence on thinking something through for herself, generally brought them into rough alignment.
All this marked them as vaguely liberal, although their ideas would never congeal into anything like a firm ideology; in this, too, they were American. And so, when my mother came home one day and mentioned a friend she had met at the University of Hawaii, an African student named Barack, their first impulse was to invite him over for dinner. The poor kid’s probably lonely, Gramps would have thought, so far away from home. Better take a look at him, Toot would have said to herself. When my father arrived at the door, Gramps might have been immediately struck by the African’s resemblance to Nat King Cole, one of his favorite singers; I imagine him asking my father if he can sing, not understanding the mortified look on my mother’s face. Gramps is probably too busy telling one of his jokes or arguing with Toot over how to cook the steaks to notice my mother reach out and squeeze the smooth, sinewy hand beside hers. Toot notices, but she’s polite enough to bite her lip and offer dessert; her instincts warn her against making a scene. When the evening is over, they’ll both remark on how intelligent the young man seems, so dignified, with the measured gestures, the graceful draping of one leg over another—and how about that accent!
But would they let their daughter marry one?
We don’t know yet; the story to this point doesn’t explain enough. The truth is that, like most white Americans at the time, they had never really given black people much thought. Jim Crow had made its way north into Kansas well before my grandparents were born, but at least around Wichita it appeared in its more informal, genteel form, without much of the violence that pervaded the Deep South. The same unspoken codes that governed life among whites kept contact between the races to a minimum; when black people appear at all in the Kansas of my grandparents’ memories, the images are fleeting—black men who come around the oil fields once in a while, searching for work as hired hands; black women taking in the white folks’ laundry or helping clean white homes. Blacks are there but not there, like Sam the piano player or Beulah the maid or Amos and Andy on the radio—shadowy, silent presences that elicit neither passion nor fear.
It wasn’t until my family moved to Texas, after the war, that questions of race began to intrude on their lives. During his first week on the job there, Gramps received some friendly advice from his fellow furniture salesmen about serving black and Mexican customers: “If the coloreds want to look at the merchandise, they need to come after hours and arrange for their own delivery.” Later, at the bank where she worked, Toot made the acquaintance of the janitor, a tall and dignified black World War II vet she remembers only as Mr. Reed. While the two of them chatted in the hallway one day, a secretary in the office stormed up and hissed that Toot should never, ever, “call no nigger ‘Mister.’ ” Not long afterward, Toot would find Mr. Reed in a corner of the building weeping quietly to himself. When she asked him what was wrong, he straightened his back, dried his eyes, and responded with a question of his own.
“What have we ever done to be treated so mean?”
My grandmother didn’t have an answer that day, but the question lingered in her mind, one that she and Gramps would sometimes discuss once my mother had gone to bed. They decided that Toot would keep calling Mr. Reed “Mister,” although she understood, with a mixture of relief and sadness, the careful distance that the janitor now maintained whenever they passed each other in the halls. Gramps began to decline invitations from his coworkers to go out for a beer, telling them he had to get home to keep the wife happy. They grew inward, skittish, filled with vague apprehension, as if they were permanent strangers in town.
This bad new air hit my mother the hardest. She was eleven or twelve by this time, an only child just growing out of a bad case of asthma. The illness, along with the numerous moves, had made her something of a loner—cheerful and easy-tempered but prone to bury her head in a book or wander off on solitary walks—and Toot began to worry that this latest move had only made her daughter’s eccentricities more pronounced. My mother made few friends at her new school. She was teased mercilessly for her name, Stanley Ann (one of Gramps’s less judicious ideas—he had wanted a son). Stanley Steamer, they called her. Stan the Man. When Toot got home from work, she would usually find my mother alone in the front yard, swinging her legs off the porch or lying in the grass, pulled into some solitary world of her own.
Except for one day. There was that one hot, windless day when Toot came home to find a crowd of children gathered outside the picket fence that surrounded their house. As Toot drew closer, she could make out the sounds of mirthless laughter, the contortions of rage and disgust on the children’s faces. The children were chanting, in a high-pitched, alternating rhythm:
“Nigger lover!”
“Dirty Yankee!”
“Nigger lover!”
The children scattered when they saw Toot, but not before one of the boys had sent the stone in his hand sailing over the fence. Toot’s eyes followed the stone’s trajectory as it came to rest at the foot of a tree. And there she saw the cause for all the excitement: my mother and a black girl of about the same age lying side by side on their stomachs in the grass, their skirts gathered up above their knees, their toes dug into the ground, their heads propped up on their hands in front of one of my mother’s books. From a distance the two girls seemed perfectly serene beneath the leafy shade. It was only when Toot opened the gate that she realized the black girl was shaking and my mother’s eyes shone with tears. The girls remained motionless, paralyzed in their fear, until Toot finally leaned down and put her hands on both their heads.
“If you two are going to play,” she said, “then for goodness sake, go on inside. Come on. Both of you.” She picked up my mother and reached for the other girl’s hand, but before she could say anything more, the girl was in a full sprint, her long legs like a whippet’s as she vanished down the street.
Gramps was beside himself when he heard what had happened. He interrogated my mother, wrote down names. The next day he took the morning off from work to visit the school principal. He personally called the parents of some of the offending children to give them a piece of his mind. And from every adult that he spoke to, he received the same response:
“You best talk to your daughter, Mr. Dunham. White girls don’t play with coloreds in this town.”
It’s hard to know how much weight to give to these episodes, what permanent allegiances were made or broken, or whether
they stand out only in the light of subsequent events. Whenever he spoke to me about it, Gramps would insist that the family left Texas in part because of their discomfort with such racism. Toot would be more circumspect; once, when we were alone, she told me that they had moved from Texas only because Gramps wasn’t doing particularly well on his job, and because a friend in Seattle had promised him something better. According to her, the word racism wasn’t even in their vocabulary back then. “Your grandfather and I just figured we should treat people decently, Bar. That’s all.”
She’s wise that way, my grandmother, suspicious of overwrought sentiments or overblown claims, content with common sense. Which is why I tend to trust her account of events; it corresponds to what I know about my grandfather, his tendency to rewrite his history to conform with the image he wished for himself.
And yet I don’t entirely dismiss Gramps’s recollection of events as a convenient bit of puffery, another act of white revisionism. I can’t, precisely because I know how strongly Gramps believed in his fictions, how badly he wanted them to be true, even if he didn’t always know how to make them so. After Texas I suspect that black people became a part of these fictions of his, the narrative that worked its way through his dreams. The condition of the black race, their pain, their wounds, would in his mind become merged with his own: the absent father and the hint of scandal, a mother who had gone away, the cruelty of other children, the realization that he was no fair-haired boy—that he looked like a “wop.” Racism was part of that past, his instincts told him, part of convention and respectability and status, the smirks and whispers and gossip that had kept him on the outside looking in.