Rising Star
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The other church Barack visited frequently was St. Sabina. DCP members like Cathy Askew, Nadyne Griffin, and Rosa Thomas knew Barack “was a big admirer of Father Pfleger,” but Cathy’s fellow St. Catherine’s parishioner, Deacon Tommy West, saw the most of Barack at St. Sabina. One of St. Sabina’s wintertime ministries involved a tangible outreach to the homeless, many of whom lived in the relative warmth of Lower Wacker Drive, the underground level of a downtown Chicago roadway. “We brought clothes and food down there for them,” West explained. “My wife made corn bread” and “minestrone soup.” One evening Barack joined Tommy and Mike Pfleger for the trip downtown. “He was with us underground, feeding the homeless,” West recounted. “Lower Wacker—I remember him going to that with us,” Mike agreed. Tommy also remembered Barack saying he was about to go back to school. He “told me when he went down to Wacker Drive with us and we had the soup and the coats.” Tommy had asked why, and he recalls Barack saying, “I just get tired of getting cut off at the pass” by government officials, and “I need some other stuff. I’ve got to go. This is something I have to do.”
But one day in those early months of 1988, Barack went with Mike Pfleger and Tommy West on a different sort of outing. Years later Barack would say that “the single most important thing in terms of establishing” safe neighborhoods “is having a community of parents, men, church leaders who are committed to being present and getting into the community and making sure that the gangbangers aren’t taking over, making sure that there’s zero tolerance for drug dealing.” In 1988 Pfleger shared that sentiment as strongly as anyone could, and he had adopted an interdiction technique that was nonviolent direct action at its most aggressive: walking into a known drug seller’s home in clerical garb, asking if he could use the bathroom, then grabbing whatever narcotics he could and heading for the toilet. Only “a very small group” of men accompanied Mike on such drug raids, and Tommy West—wearing a deacon’s collar—was a regular participant.
Pfleger cannot remember Barack going with him on such a sortie, although “he very well may have.” But Tommy West recalls Barack’s involvement with great clarity. “One time he went with us to this drug dealer’s house, and Father Mike grabbed up the guy’s drugs and ran in the washroom—first he asked the guy, could he use the washroom,” and once in there Mike “dropped it and flushed it, and the guy pulls out his pistol. I said, ‘Look, put that up. He’s a priest—you don’t want to hurt him. Use it on me.’ He said, ‘No, he’s the one who did this.’ I said, ‘Don’t touch him. That’s God’s man. You don’t want God to be down on you the rest of your life. Leave him be and try to find you somewhere else.’ He said, ‘I think I will, because I’m ready to kill him.’ So Barack said, ‘Woo.’” Mike Pfleger looked calmly at his colleagues. “I’m doing God’s work. God is taking care of me.”
“He was around for that one,” Tommy affirmed. “That was the first time I remember him going inside of the drug dealer’s home with us to see what Father Mike did.” Then, with the dealer still holding his gun, Tommy again asked the man to leave: “‘then we can get out of here.’” The dealer did take his gun and leave, and as the raiding party exited as well, “everybody was kind of shook up,” Tommy West recalls with considerable understatement.
Barack had developed significant relationships with Mike Pfleger and Jeremiah Wright, just as he had two years earlier with Bill Stenzel and Tom Kaminski. But at home on South Harper, Sheila Jager never heard a single word about any of them, or about institution-based religious faith. “I don’t think Barack ever attended church once while we were together,” and he “certainly was not religious in the conventional sense,” Sheila reiterated. Barack “never suggested going to church together,” and “I had no awareness of Jeremiah. He certainly never mentioned him to me.”
Barack’s closest Hyde Park male friend, Asif Agha, remembers their conversations similarly. “I always assumed he was an atheist like me.” Barack “had no interest in religion” and knew “nothing about Islam.” Asif’s friend Doug Glick, Barack’s companion on all those long summer drives to and from Madison, bluntly concurred. “I do not believe he believes in Jesus Christ.” Asif states the trio’s consensus succinctly: Barack “did not have a religious bone in his body.”
In Barack’s daily life with Sheila, “he didn’t tell me a whole lot about” who he was dealing with in his work, Sheila explains, “although he did bring a lot of their ideas home.” Barack “never compartmentalized ideas, which we discussed freely.” At home “we spent a great deal of our time discussing/talking about all sorts of things, which was one of the things I liked so much about him.” And, just like at DCP, Barack “was also a very good listener.” Yet “we lived a very isolated existence,” and even their immediate neighbors at 5429 South Harper barely remember either Barack or Sheila.
One longtime older resident had no recollection at all, and custodian Joe Vukojevic, who lived directly across the hall from Barack and Sheila, only remembered being introduced to Barack’s mother Ann during her summer 1987 visit. Barack and Sheila’s immediate upstairs neighbors, John Morillo and Andrea Atkins, thought Joe the janitor was “a very nice guy” but “practically never” saw Sheila or Barack. They would remember the unusual name on the mailbox, and saying hi to Sheila, but Barack was “just another guy doing laundry” in the basement laundry room.68
On January 31, the Daily Calumet reported that South Chicago Savings Bank president Jim Fitch was privately brokering talks to allow Waste Management to use the O’Brien Locks site as a new landfill in exchange for a $20 million community trust fund. Fitch then called for another gathering of neighborhood representatives at 7:30 P.M. Monday, February 8, at his bank to discuss “the structure of the community trust.” Since the Daily Cal story “events have been evolving rapidly,” Fitch explained, and “conversations with Waste Management have continued.”
UNO’s Bruce Orenstein and Mary Ellen Montes had previously attended Fitch’s conclaves, but now they grew concerned. If UNO and the city’s Howard Stanback hoped to have the community fund managed by mayoral allies, they could not allow Fitch to continue driving the conversation with WMI. Bruce and Lena called on Fitch at his bank in advance of the meeting and told him he lacked the authority to have this gathering because he had not been involved in the fight to stop the landfills. Bruce recounts telling him, “We think you’re undermining our agenda, you’re undermining the agenda of the community, the wishes of the community.” Bruce and Lena “really asked him to stop,” but Fitch was no rookie at power politics. He recognized their raw grab for control and brusquely dismissed them.
Orenstein next called Barack to ask for DCP’s support in a confrontational move straight out of the Alinsky-style community organizing playbook. Local print and broadcast journalists were notified, a press release was prepared, and late Monday afternoon prior to the scheduled meeting, Barack, Loretta Augustine, and other DCP members drove to UNO’s office on East 91st Street, less than two blocks from Fitch’s South Chicago Savings Bank. “We met there, we practiced,” Bruce remembered. “Barack and I and Mary Ellen and Loretta have devised this thing,” and shortly after 7:30 P.M., Mary Ellen led a column of more than one hundred participants, including some children, out the door and down the street toward the bank’s second-floor conference room. The goal was “to let Fitch know in no uncertain terms he does not represent the will of the community on this issue,” Bruce recounted. “We just wanted to tell him that in front of everybody else who was around the table,” including UNO and DCP’s old friend Bob Klonowski, pastor of Hegewisch’s Lebanon Lutheran Church. Bruce remembered the group very quietly “walking up the stairs and being actually quite nervous,” for “it was quite a confrontational approach to things.”
But with Mary Ellen in the lead, the “ambush”—as the Daily Cal’s front-page headline the next day called it—worked to perfection. “Mary Ellen led the charge and we walked in and the camera lights went on,” Bruce recalled. “Barack and L
oretta and the TV cameras and the Chicago Tribune” reporter Casey Bukro all followed Lena into the conference room. “Everybody looks up” as Mary Ellen approached Fitch. “Tonight we publicly take the position ‘No deals Jim Fitch, no deals Waste Management,’” Lena proclaimed. “We will fight you every step of the way.” As a confrontational leader, “she was fantastic,” Bruce knew. “Then we turned on our heels and walked out.” It was a “very memorable action,” even “a hoot of an action,” and from Bruce’s perspective, Barack had shown no discomfort with these tactics: “I certainly think he enjoyed it.”
UNO and DCP’s press release claimed that “We are diametrically opposed to any ‘buyoff’ deal . . . with Waste Management,” while acknowledging that “communities are due substantial reinvestment.” A simultaneous one by Howard Stanback on behalf of the mayor’s office was deceptively titled “City Reaffirms Landfill Moratorium” and asserted that “Waste Management is misleading the public if they suggest that they are in a position to acquire O’Brien Locks for landfilling.”
As Bruce Orenstein told the Daily Calumet, “If Waste Management gets ahold of that property, out the window goes any protection for the community.” The real issue was not the fate of the O’Brien Locks acreage, whose future looked preordained, but who on the Southeast Side would control whatever community trust fund would receive the $20 or $25 million that Waste Management was clearly willing to pay. Only Hegewisch News editor and community activist Vi Czachorski gave readers a clear understanding of what was happening. “Montes wants a landfill at the O’Brien Locks,” directly across the Calumet River from Hegewisch, and in exchange, she gets “a trust that UNO would operate” rather than Jim Fitch and other traditional Vrdolyak loyalists. But UNO’s Alinskyite “ambush” not only infuriated Fitch’s nascent coalition, it also angered the trio of hardcore landfill opponents—Jim Landing, Marian Byrnes, and Hazel Johnson—who had been reconsidering their own position. Within a week, they were picketing outside Chicago’s City Hall, clear evidence that Bruce and Barack’s strategy of blowing up Fitch’s negotiations had torpedoed any prospect of achieving a community-wide consensus.
For Barack, all this tussling created a fundamental personal tension. He had made clear to John McKnight that he rejected the confrontational politics of the Alinsky tradition, even though he had just helped lead an action that was so pugnacious it had made even the hard-bitten Orenstein nervous. It unquestionably was the “most confrontive meeting he had ever been involved in,” Bruce acknowledged, and “left to his own devices, I don’t think he would have designed an action like that.” True enough. What then accounted for so stark a contradiction?69
A weekend or two after the South Chicago ambush, Barack took Sheila to see a movie that had debuted the Friday before the Fitch action: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, an adaptation of Czech writer Milan Kundera’s 1984 novel. Set in Czechoslovakia in the years leading up to the Prague Spring of 1968, the film featured three leading characters: Tomas, a young doctor, his partner Tereza, and his additional lover Sabina. The movie was not necessarily loyal to the spirit of Kundera’s book, and, at almost three hours’ length, it had not been praised in prominent reviews in the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times. The Tribune’s critic wrote that “the film has no vision and no life,” and warned that it “is likely to be incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t read the novel.”
Vincent Canby’s Times review was more revealing. Tomas, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, lived a compartmentalized life, with “one part of his mind” analyzing something while another “part that’s outside it criticizes” the first. Tereza, played by Juliette Binoche, “falls profoundly in love with” Tomas “without knowing anything about him.” In turn, “Tomas is drawn against his will into commitment to Tereza,” yet with Sabina, played by Lena Olin, he indulges in “a passion for . . . sex that excludes serious emotional commitment . . . while always remaining a little detached.” Tomas “remains committed to Tereza, though still unfaithful.” The film conveyed “an accumulating heaviness” accentuated by its “immense length.”
Almost a quarter century later, Sheila Jager described the film as an indelible memory, explaining that it could offer “some insight into our relationship. . . . Although Barack did not fool around (not that I know of), I remember being powerfully moved by that film when we saw it together because Tomas and Tereza’s relationship seemed to so uncannily mirror the dynamics of our own—Tomas’s ‘neurosis’ like Barack’s ‘calling.’” She believed that perhaps was “why I reacted so hard when I saw that film. Because it was mirroring reality in an eerie sort of way, and I somehow understood what was happening even if I was unaware of what was going on. I remember feeling so trapped and suffocated back then, just like poor Tereza and her cheating husband. I’ll never forget that feeling of desperation, and wondering what I was going to do. I remember him telling me how he wished he could take me to the countryside and live with me,” just as Tomas does with Tereza, “but he couldn’t do that, no matter how much he loved me,” because his destiny inescapably must trump love. “I always knew that I couldn’t marry him,” yet in those early months of 1988, Sheila never doubted Barack, in part because something happened between them, something Barack subsequently never spoke about.
Barack was also close with the almost thirty-year-old Mary Ellen Montes—Lena—and he told her too about the vision of his future that otherwise he had only shared with Sheila. “He wanted to be the president,” Lena explained. “He used to say that his goal was to be the president of the United States.” Their ambitions were mutual. “By the time I met Barack, I was thinking about politics as well, with aspirations of being the mayor.” Lena told him, “I could see myself being the mayor of the city of Chicago. That’s where I’d want to end it, and his thing was oh no, he wanted to go on to be the president.” While Barack had told Mike Kruglik and Sokoni Karanja that being mayor of Chicago was his ultimate goal, Lena firmly declared, “That’s not what he’s telling me.”
Lena understood their similar trajectories. “You start to feel and realize your potential, so as you’re growing in this arena, why wouldn’t you think about those things? . . . That’s why I thought about the mayor,” and for Barack “it’s because of what he realized as he’s growing in the public arena and realizing his potential.” She knew that getting a law degree was “absolutely” his first step toward electoral politics. Across those months, “our conversations—they were real. They were genuine, sincere conversations about ourselves and what we wanted to do, what we were doing, what we were thinking of.” Lena knew Barack lived with someone. “I hear of her,” Lena explained. “Asian woman.” No, “I never met her. . . . I remember him saying she was Asian.” What did Barack tell Lena about that relationship? “He gave the impression that they lived together more because of convenience—they both needed a place to stay.”
Barack’s diminution of his life with Sheila to Lena was reminiscent of how he had characterized it to Phil Boerner eighteen months earlier: “winter’s fast approaching, and it is nice to have someone to come home to,” given his “mortal fear of Chicago winters.” After years of distancing himself from his mother, Barack’s identification as African American—not international, not hapa, not biracial—was now complete. This transformation had been immensely aided by his exposure to and ease with strong black women like Loretta Augustine, Marlene Dillard, Aletha Strong Gibson, and Yvonne Lloyd, but this success came at a high price, one visible only in the light of the distance, the unknowable distance, that was always impenetrably there. That distance, that lightness, would extend well beyond 1988.70
Two days after the action against Jim Fitch, a remarkable, substantive victory was announced by attorney Tom Geoghegan: Navistar, the renamed International Harvester, would pay $14.8 million to Frank Lumpkin and twenty-seven hundred other surviving former Wisconsin steelworkers. The largest individual payment would be $17,200, though Frank, with a better-protected pension, would receive only $4,000.
No one in Chicago doubted that Frank deserved the most credit for this achievement, and the ex-workers approved the settlement in an overwhelming vote of 583 to 75. But Frank was never someone to pat himself on the back. “It is a victory of sorts,” he told the Daily Cal. “It was the best we could get, and that’s the way everyone who voted for it felt. But we appreciate the feeling that the little guy has won and that giants can fall.” Tribune business editor Richard Longworth wrote a wonderful tribute to Frank, describing him as “an amazing man . . . who is probably as close to a saint as Chicago has these days.” Tom Geoghegan is “the only other real hero,” a commendation underscored when James B. Moran, the federal judge handling the Wisconsin litigation, publicly praised Tom’s “dedication,” “professionalism,” and “modesty in seeking fees.” Frank also represented the last of a dying breed: at South Works hardly seven hundred men were still working, and Republic LTV was down to 640. Maury Richards would soon be reelected as Local 1033’s president, but even as dedicated a steelworker as Maury was beginning to wonder what his next career would be.71