The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  In high school, Obama found a few older black friends to talk with. He spent some time with Keith Kakugawa--"Ray" in the memoir--but Keith's bitter monologues about "the white man" seemed to do little but stoke Obama's anger and confusion. (As an adult, Kakugawa spent seven years in prison on drug and auto-theft charges. When he started making trouble for the Obama campaign--telling reporters that Dreams was inaccurate and asking for money--one spokesman, Bill Burton, said, "There's no doubt that Keith's story is tragic and sad.")

  But while Obama's most constant comrades--Greg Orme, Bobby Titcomb, and Mike Ramos--were not black, he had valuable friendships with two older African-American Punahou students: Rik Smith, who is now a physician, and Tony Peterson, who works for the United Methodist Church. The three of them would gather weekly outside Cooke Hall for what they jokingly called Ethnic Corner. They talked about classes, philosophy, race--and not least how race affected their ability to date Punahou girls, who were nearly all either white, Asian, or mixed race. They asked each other what it meant to "act white" or "act black." They even discussed whether there would be a black President in their lifetime--and they decided that it wasn't possible.

  Often they just talked about the same mysteries that bewitch anyone at that age. In the spring of 1976, Tony tape-recorded one session of the Ethnic Corner because he had to write a school essay on the subject of time; he thought he might collect some material from the others:

  RIK: Have you guys ever thought about time?

  BARRY: Yeah.

  TONY: I thought about it.

  RIK: Think about time, okay. What is it? What is time?

  TONY: I don't know.

  BARRY: Eh. Time is just a collection of human.... listen, this is gonna sound good, boy! See, time is just a collection of human experiences combined so that they make a long, flowing stream of thought.

  The dialogue is "No Exit" meets "Fast Times at Ridgemont High." "We were three black guys trying to impress each other with how smart we were," Peterson said, laughing. "We weren't screwing around, we weren't playing the dozens. We were challenging each other."

  They also formed a means of protection for each other, Rik Smith said. Punahou thought of itself as an exemplar of multicultural comity, but Smith, who was two years older than Obama, described a Halloween celebration at Punahou where a couple of students came in blackface and tattered clothing--"minstrel stuff." The kids who had dressed up had no idea that they had done anything racist. In fact, they were offended that Rik took offense. How could they be racist when their hearts were pure? Nearly all teenagers tend to think of themselves as outsiders--there is solace in it, loneliness is transformed into a variety of glamour--but Obama, Smith, and Peterson were always talking among themselves about whether or not they were black first or individuals first. The answers provided by the Punahou School were confusing.

  "Barack's experience was my experience," Smith said. "I talk to my kids about this and my kids can't imagine it in California. As a child in Seattle, I couldn't play at recess because the kids wouldn't let me play baseball. One of the funny stories that I recall is that a haole girl that I liked, a nice individual, would never go out with me. It was weird because I would go sneak into her room at home past midnight and then I would go. But she wouldn't talk to me in school. It was an interesting activity."

  The subjects of the Ethnic Corner were hardly ephemeral. "When Barry gave the speech at the Democratic Convention in 2004 and talked about wanting to eradicate the idea that if a black kid has a book he's acting white--that was a huge part of what we were talking about back in high school," Tony Peterson said. "Kids wrestle with their identities. And if you are biracial and look black and grow up in a white family, the issues are deep."

  Ronald Loui, who is Chinese-American, said, "People in Hawaii have no real access to an understanding of the black-white divide. So many of the icons of that era were black. We were all listening to Earth, Wind & Fire and we all pretended that we were Dr. J on the basketball court, and yet there were parents who were telling their kids to watch out for black people."

  Barry's mother visited Honolulu when she could or brought him to Indonesia during school breaks when she could afford it, but Barry was growing up on the margins of her vision. He could still appreciate her energy, her sweetness, and her intelligence, but she had little to offer now about what troubled him most. When she naively tried to find common ground with her son--"You know, I don't feel white!"--he only got disgusted at her attempt. Living in Indonesia, Ann Dunham had become fixed on the axioms, the hopes, and the mood of the early civil-rights days; she had precious little feel for what had come after: the mutual resentments, Black Power, the Panthers, the clashes over busing and affirmative action. "I remember her feeling saddened by the anger that she sensed in parts of the African-American community," Obama said.

  How could Ann possibly know what it was to be a black man in America--and who, besides a few teenagers no less confused than he, was around to help? "Some of the problems of adolescent rebellion and hormones were compounded by the fact that I didn't have a father," Obama said. "So what I fell into were the exaggerated stereotypes of black male behavior--not focusing on my books, finding respectability, playing a lot of sports."

  "We were all a little untethered," Maya Soetoro-Ng says. Maya, who lived with Ann in Indonesia while Barry attended Punahou, said that she and her older brother struggled with their rootlessness in different ways. "We went to a lot of places--four, five months at a time," including Pakistan, Thailand, India, she said. "Long enough to get a sense of the textures of the place and really know it a bit. I have tremendous wanderlust. Until 2004, when I became a mother, at age thirty-four, the wanderlust eased but it didn't go away. Now its voice is very soft. I think Barack was less in love with it. He had greater examples, in our grandparents and elsewhere, of the beauty of claiming community, of being grounded, of being loyal, of being in one place and really working on the relationship with that place and the people in it. I think that became very desirable to him. I can't speak for him but probably some of our mother's decisions may have looked selfish in comparison."

  As an adult, Obama always expressed deep love for his mother--he readily acknowledged her influence as the most powerful in his young life--but he could also step back and evaluate critically the choices she made as a young woman. "When I think about my mother," he said during the campaign, "I think there was a certain combination of being very grounded in who she was, what she believed in. But also a certain recklessness. I think she was always searching for something. She wasn't comfortable seeing her life confined to a certain box."

  Maya doesn't believe her mother was aware of her son's crisis of identity as he navigated Punahou. "I'm sure part of our mother's optimism was a constant reminder to both of us that we were special because we came from more than one world and we could access many worlds easily," she says. "When we struggled with not feeling entirely at home here or there, I think that she would push an optimistic perspective of things. My brother has never been one to air his grievances or talk about things that were troubling him. He is one of these people who work things out in their own solitary way. He works it out by walking and thinking. He has never been neurotic."

  During Barry's last three years at Punahou, Ann worked in Jakarta doing the fieldwork for her doctoral dissertation in anthropology. Once she finished her master's, however, her interest was more in gaining the knowledge and expertise needed to work in the field of international development. She did not complete the dissertation until 1992, when she was fifty. In the meantime, as she did research and wrote, she worked in development jobs for the Ford Foundation and the World Bank, and as research coordinator for Bank Rakyat, a leading Indonesian bank.

  A disarmingly gregarious personality, Ann knew many foreign diplomats, business people, and development officers, but more and more she came to immerse herself in the life of Indonesians--in Jakarta and in the provinces. Her marriage was strained. Lolo moved inc
reasingly into the international oil business, with its office meetings and golf games and cocktail parties. Ann was repelled by the wealthy, entitled foreigners in their midst who spent their time complaining about the servants, "the locals," and maximizing the ways they could make Jakarta more like "home." Ann's Indonesian was fluent. She invited interesting people to the house for dinner: artists, writers, development officers. She started making frequent trips out of the capital to the regional centers, especially the villages of central Java near Yogyakarta.

  "She home-schooled me and took me to the villages," Maya said. "Blacksmith villages, tile factories, clove cigarette factories, ceramic villages, basket-weaving villages--all manner of textiles and cottage industries." It was an interesting, engaged life, but it did have one distinct cost. Obama admits that, much as he tried to deny it at the time, the separations from his mother took their toll. "I didn't feel [her absence] as a deprivation," he said. "But when I think about the fact that I was separated from her, I suspect it had more of an impact than I know."

  The disconnection--and time--had a way of catching them all by surprise. When he was in high school, Barry arrived alone at the airport in Jakarta for a summer stay with Ann and Maya. Ann had a panicky feeling as she searched the arrivals area for her son. Somehow, in her mind, Barry was still chubby-cheeked, stocky, not especially tall, and now he was nowhere to be found. Had he slipped by her and wandered off somewhere in the airport? Not likely. Had he missed the plane?

  "And then comes this ... figure! Tall and handsome--another person!" Ann's friend and academic adviser, Alice Dewey, recalled. "Suddenly he was towering over her and speaking in this very low newly-acquired man's voice. The voice that everyone knows nowadays!"

  From the mid-seventies on, Alice Dewey was Ann's "mother hen," both an intimate friend and her academic mentor. When Alice visited Jakarta or, later, Yogyakarta, she often stayed with Ann. Alice Dewey is the granddaughter of the American philosopher John Dewey. Her office, in Saunders Hall, at the University of Hawaii, is small, the sort of alarmingly cluttered warren that always seems one piece of paper away from crashing down and crushing its inhabitant to death. A friendly woman with a white corona of curls and a sharp smile, Dewey sits in a creaky desk chair surrounded by stacks of ancient memos, bulging files, dusty dissertations, each teeteringly perched on the next. Like so many of Ann's friends and acquaintances, she remembers her as restless, curious, funny, tirelessly idealistic. Dewey was angry at the occasional depiction of Dunham during the campaign as a flighty idealist who "ignored" her son to pursue her own muses. "She adored that child," she said, "and they were in constant touch. And he adored her."

  It pained Ann to be apart from Barry for such long stretches, Alice Dewey said, but Ann really believed that it was possible to live an unconventional life and still find a way for her children to grow up into whole, independent people. She struck Alice Dewey as a mature student, somebody with a sense of intellectual penetration long before she even embarked on her dissertation. "She was one of those students that you think, 'Why don't I let her lecture?'"

  Both Dewey and Dunham were deeply interested in the lives and the futures of the craftsmen of central Java. They studied not only their art, but also the effect of modernization on their way of life. Would village craftsmen disappear? Dunham's research and her point of view was a kind of implicit argument with Clifford Geertz and other anthropologists, who believed that village craftsmen were, for various cultural reasons, destined for extinction. Where Geertz saw dispirited, tradition-bound irrationality among villagers, Dunham saw potential vitality. She was convinced that, with the help of modest financing from banks and non-governmental organizations, cottage industries in rural Indonesia could not only sustain ancient crafts and traditions but also provide a strong alternative economy to agriculture. Her mode of work--socially engaged, policy-directed--was hardly fashionable when she was doing her research, yet her conclusions proved prescient. Blacksmithing was just one of the Javanese crafts that began to expand in the nineteen-eighties. The idea of providing microcredits to craftsmen and to small, rural enterprises is common currency in the twenty-first century; it was a fairly radical and unconventional idea when Dunham championed it.

  At first, Ann studied a wide range of crafts--weaving, batik, leather-work, puppetry, ironwork, ceramics, sculpture--and she wanted to include all of these crafts in her dissertation. She examined everything from the way motifs from the Hindu epics were applied to resist-dye batiks to the intricate construction of bamboo birdcages. She tried to cover vast scholarly territory and numerous villages in central Java. "When she came to write her proposal for her dissertation, we told her, for God's sake, choose one," Dewey recalled. "She chose blacksmithing. Iron lives in the ground and so you can talk about the mythological dimensions of the craft, too." Javanese blacksmithing is an art with a history that is more than a thousand years old, and Dunham was entranced by both the objects themselves and the lives of the craftsmen.

  To do her research, Dunham had to insinuate her way into the smithies of Kajar, a village in Gunung Kidul, a region of central Java. When she first started visiting there in the late nineteen-seventies, the village had to be approached by foot for the last mile; electricity did not arrive in Kajar for another decade. The blacksmith's workshop, in Javanese tradition, is sacred and mostly barred to women. The craftsmen think of their work as a spiritual endeavor, their products as sacred as a crucifix or Torah scroll. Offerings are draped on the anvil. Dunham's work was, in many ways, economic anthropology, but she also had the requisite skill of a social anthropologist: the capacity to gain access. She persuaded these craftsmen to let her inside the smithy, observe their work, and interview them at length. She had a capacity to get these craftsmen to reveal even their innermost thoughts; in one passage, Pak Sastro, the head of the blacksmithing cooperative in Kajar, describes a dream he had before being visited by the regional sultan. Because Dunham was American, she was regarded, above all, as a foreign guest and able to transcend, somehow, her status as a woman among men.

  "She really earned their trust," Maya Soetoro-Ng said. "She knew their extended families and their children and grandchildren."

  "The fact that she worked so closely with blacksmiths is proof of her subtlety as a person," Bronwen Solyom, a friend and expert in Indonesian art, said. "If she hadn't been so congenial, she wouldn't have been able to gain access to those men and their venerable skills."

  Even though Dunham narrowed her topic to the smiths of central Java, her dissertation, "Peasant Blacksmithing in Indonesia: Surviving and Thriving Against All Odds," was over a thousand pages long in manuscript. (In 2009, Duke University Press published a condensed version edited by Alice Dewey and another of Dunham's colleagues, Nancy I. Cooper.) Dunham was an indefatigable researcher. Some passages are so detailed and arcane that they nearly reach the level of parody, yet the dissertation reveals, in its study of a single village, the dense textures of culture inherent in any one place. To read it is to learn the history, beliefs, and skill of nearly every inhabitant of the village; its intricate and evolving social, religious, and class structures; its cultural formation through centuries of foreign and indigenous influence. At times it seems that the reader learns more here about the Indonesian keris, the daggers made by the smiths--about iron forging, iron casting, silver and gold smithing---than about the fall of Rome in Gibbon. But one cannot help admiring both the complexity of Kajar and the industry of Ann Dunham. It's clear from the text that Dunham became intimate friends with everyone there: Pak Paeran, the village headman; Pak Sastrosuyono, the leading blacksmithing entrepreneur; the artisans; the bureaucrats. There is an evident affection for the people she writes about and an obvious hope that the Indonesian government, along with international aid and development institutions, will help insure the continuing health of small handicraft industries, as an element both of cultural continuity and of economic diversity. Dunham's text seems directed as much to the agencies and bureaucraci
es that might help the people of Kajar and other Indonesian villagers as to her fellow scholars. "There is a balance there of intimacy and objectivity," Maya Soetoro-Ng said. "She tried to combat others who were simplistic or patronizing to the craftsmen. She emphasized applied anthropology, the idea that this work should be about making lives better."

  In her letters to Dewey, Ann Dunham wrote about her encounters; she wrote with news about her assistants and sources, academic gossip, even updates on the latest Dorothy Sayers mysteries that she was reading as a diversion. On July 28, 1978, while Barry was a junior at Punahou, Dunham wrote to Dewey from Indonesia:

  Dear Alice,

  I finally got back to Gunung Kidul, finishing up our work last week, exhausted but quite satisfied with the results. Kajar is certainly an interesting village from several points of view, not the least of which is political. I can envision a little article someday with a model of the balance of power there and the shifts affected by various styles of tinkering from outside....

  We stayed at the house of Pak Rianto ... [who] in turn rents part of the house of a man called Pak Harjo Bodong (Roughly translated "Father Harjo with the Long Belly Button," though I never had the courage to really ask why.) Pak Harjo Bodong used to be the most famous [smith] in the Wonosari area. He also used to be a famous thief and was in jail four times when he was young.... Lives there with his twelfth wife (he is her tenth husband). They are both in their seventies and quite a sketch....

  We arrived in Kajar just at the time of the peanut harvest. This meant that at every house we surveyed we were given large glasses of sticky tea, refilled at least 3 times despite all my "sampuns," and big plates of peanuts in the shell to consume ... [I won't] ever be able to look a peanut in the face again (yes, peanuts do have faces--smirky, nasty little faces, in fact)....