The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  Like Stanley, Frank Marshall Davis was from Kansas. He grew up in Arkansas City, "a yawn town," he called it, fifty miles south of Wichita. In his memoir, Livin' the Blues, Davis writes, "Like virtually all Afro-Americans--and a high percentage of whites--I am ethnic hash"--African mainly, an eighth Mexican, and "I have no idea what." Frank's Kansas was not much like Stanley's--his was a land of lynchings and frontier racism--but they became friends. Frank Davis was a raconteur, capable of expounding on everything from the Harlem Renaissance to the various charms of the surfer girls in Waikiki. He spoke in a fantastically deep Barry White voice and he tended to dominate the discussion, telling stories for hours about his grandmother, who had been a slave; the indignities of being black in Arkansas City, including nearly being lynched when he was five years old; his distinguished career as a columnist and editor in the world of the black press in Chicago, Gary, and Atlanta; his friendships with Richard Wright and Paul Robeson. In the nineteen-thirties and forties, Davis wrote four collections of poems about black life--Black Man's Verse, I Am the American Negro, Through Sepia Eyes, and 47th Street--and won the praise of distinguished critics like Alain Locke, who believed that Davis would help fulfill the promise of a New Negro Renaissance in poetry.

  In 1948, Paul Robeson came to Hawaii on a concert tour sponsored by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, a left-wing union. Robeson was so enamored of the atmosphere on the islands that he told reporters, "It would be a tremendous impact on the United States if Hawaii is admitted as a state. Americans wouldn't believe the racial harmony that exists here. It could speed democracy in the United States." In 1946, Davis had married a much younger woman, a white Chicago socialite named Helen Canfield. Robeson extolled Hawaii to such a degree that Helen read more about the islands, and she and Frank Davis decided to move for a while to Honolulu, thinking that they would stay for the winter. They divorced in 1970, but Davis never left. "I am not too fond of what I read about the current mainland scene, so I prefer staying here," Davis told the newspaper Black World in 1974. "Since we do not have the confrontations that exist between white and Black in so many parts of the mainland, living here has been a relief."

  In Honolulu, Davis ran a paper company, but that soon burned to the ground. He also worked with the I.L.W.U. and wrote for its weekly newspaper, the Honolulu Record, which lasted from 1948 to 1958. Some of his "fellow freedom fighters" back in Chicago accused him of "deserting the battle," he wrote, but in Hawaii he was less angry than he had been on the mainland, more at ease, though he never gave up his political views. He wrote fierce columns about the suppression of unions, conditions on the plantations, the power of the oligarchic Hawaiian families, race relations. He was one of many leftists who, in the nineteen-fifties, were investigated, and tainted, by the House Un-American Activities Committee. In Hawaii he could put many thousands of miles between himself and his would-be tormentors.

  "Virtually from the start I had a sense of human dignity," Davis writes in Livin' the Blues. "On the mainland, whites acted as if dignity were their exclusive possession, something to be awarded only as they saw fit. Yet dignity is a human right, earned by being born. In Hawaii I had at last come into ownership of this birthright, stolen by the white power structure as a penalty of being black. Even on the Chicago South Side, where I was but another drop in a black pool, I was painfully conscious we had been baled, like cotton, into this area because whitey so decreed. It was a relief to soar at last with no wings clipped by the scissors of color." Davis was well aware that "under the placid surface of aloha was an undertow of racism," and he knew that he had given up the pleasures of the South Side. "Hawaii is not for those who can be happy only in Soul City," he warned. "This is no place for those who can identify only with Afro-America. 'Little Harlem' is only a couple of blocks of bars, barbershops, and a soul food restaurant or two."

  Dawna Weatherly-Williams, a close friend who lived next door--she called Frank Davis "Daddy"--remembers that Stanley Dunham came by to visit with his grandson sometime in the early nineteen-seventies. "Daddy had his feet propped up and he saw them and called out, 'Hey, Stan! Oh, is this him?'" she recalled. "Stan had been promising to bring Barry by because we all had that in common--Frank's kids were half white, Stan's grandson was half black and my son was half black. Barry was well dressed, in a blazer, I think. He was tired and he was hungry. He had a full face--it wasn't pointed like it is now. We were all grinning like idiots, me and Frank and Stan, because we were thinking that we know this secret about life and we were going to share it with Barry. He hadn't seen anyone that looked like him before.

  "Frank was also a great listener, which may be why Barack liked him, too. I am sure he influenced Barack more than Barack is saying. About social justice, about finding out more about life, about what's important, about how to use your heart and your mind. It's probably good that it wasn't a big thing, that he didn't make too big a thing of it all, because he was way ahead of his time."

  As a teenager, Obama called on Davis on his own, driving along the Ala Wai Canal to the Jungle. One night, Frank gave him some insight into Stanley, telling him a story about how many years before the Dunhams had hired a young black woman to help care for Ann.

  "A preacher's daughter, I think it was. Told me how she became a regular part of the family."

  A regular part of the family--the language that earnest middle-class white people use to soothe their guilt about hiring blacks to clean their houses, to be nannies for their children.

  Barry had told Frank about his grandmother's anxiety at encountering a scary-seeming black man on the street. Everything about the incident was confusing--his grandmother's fears, Stanley's shame--but Frank, who considered himself friends with the family, seemed to understand it all. He explained that even the most sympathetic white people could never fully comprehend a black man's pain. ("He's basically a good man. But he doesn't know me. Any more than he knew that girl that looked after your mother. He can't know me, not the way I know him.") Why was it, after all, that Stanley could visit, drink Frank's whiskey, fall asleep in his chair, and yet Frank couldn't do the same in his house?

  "What I'm trying to tell you is," Frank Davis said, "your grandma's right to be scared. She's at least as right as Stanley is. She understands that black people have a reason to hate. That's just how it is. For your sake, I wish it were otherwise. But it's not. So you might as well get used to it."

  When Obama was running for President, the right-wing blogosphere attacked Frank Marshall Davis. He was, by turns, a card-carrying Communist, a pornographer, a pernicious influence. The attacks were loud and unrelenting. For them, an acquaintanceship with Frank Marshall Davis was all part of an ominous picture of radical associations. And yet, while that relationship was neither constant nor lasting, certainly of no great ideological importance, Davis, by Obama's own accounting, made the young man feel something deep and disorienting. That night in the Jungle in Waikiki, he felt completely alone. To make some sense of himself, he would have to leave Hawaii for another country.

  Chapter Three

  Nobody Knows My Name

  Obama's academic performance at Punahou was unremarkable, but even though he was a B-student his college prospects were promising. Like the best New England prep schools, Punahou routinely sent its top-tier students to the best colleges and universities in the country--and the second-tier students, Obama included, did almost as well. Along with most of his classmates, Obama had developed a case of "rock fever." He was eager to get off the island. From a girl he met in Hawaii, he heard about Occidental, a small, highly regarded school of about sixteen hundred undergraduates in Eagle Rock, California, near Pasadena. Accepted at several colleges, Obama took a flyer: he chose Occidental.

  Obama writes that just before leaving for the mainland and his freshman year, he paid a last visit to Frank Marshall Davis. As he always did, the old man welcomed Obama warmly--and then challenged him. Rattling Obama was his way of giving counsel. He had told Obama tha
t black kids lucky enough to go to college invariably emerge into the world with "an advanced degree in compromise." Now he was telling Obama that no one was telling him the truth about "the real price of admission" to college.

  And what was that? Obama asked.

  "Leaving your race at the door," Davis said. "Leaving your people behind."

  A place like Occidental wouldn't give Obama a real education, Davis insisted, so much as "train" him. "They'll train you so good, you'll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit. They'll give you a corner office and invite you to fancy dinners, and tell you you're a credit to your race. Until you want to actually start running things, and then they'll yank on your chain and let you know that you may be a well-trained, well-paid nigger, but you're a nigger just the same." Go to college, Davis said, but "keep your eyes open."

  Obama thought of Davis much the way he thought of his mother--as a product of his time. And yet he couldn't dismiss him. Even before Obama joined the swim of African-American life, he had been warned about the perils of selling out, of tokenism and the limits of white tolerance. Obama soon discovered that the political and internal wariness that Davis prescribed was not so easy to uphold at Occidental. With Spanish Revival architecture and unfailing weather, Occidental was a favorite of Hollywood; in films from the Marx Brothers to "Clueless," Occidental was the generic California campus. The college was surrounded by a working-class Hispanic neighborhood, but students seldom got much beyond campus; when they did, it was usually to go roller-skating on the boardwalk at Venice Beach, body-surfing at Newport Beach, or to a concert downtown. Everyone knew everyone. "Oxy is like Peyton Place, it's so small," Obama's classmate and friend Phil Boerner said.

  In September, 1979, Obama moved into a single-room triple in a dormitory known as Haines Hall Annex. He shared Room A104 with a Pakistani named Imad Husain, who is now a banker in Boston, and Paul Carpenter, now a mortgage banker in Los Angeles. His roommates and dorm mates were friendly and inviting. The hallway was unusually diverse for Occidental: there were African-Americans, Asians, Hispanics, Arabs. Occidental draws heavily on middle-and upper-middle-class kids from California, but Obama seemed at ease. Although he was getting financial aid, no one saw him as particularly disadvantaged.

  Occidental required undergraduates to take a core curriculum. The year before Obama arrived, the multicultural movement had exerted some influence on Occidental; reading lists now included more texts from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, as well as from the United States and Europe. Obama took courses mainly in politics, history, and literature, and a minimum of science. From the start, one of his favorite professors was Roger Boesche, a Tocqueville scholar, who taught American and European political thought. As a freshman, Obama took a survey course in American politics with Boesche, which covered the British and American liberal theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and The Federalist Papers. The following year he took Boesche's political theory course, in which he read excerpts from Nietzsche, Tocqueville, Sartre, Marcuse, and Habermas. Boesche was an outspoken liberal on the political issues of the day--the upcoming election between Reagan and Carter; the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; the potential reinstatement of the draft--and Obama was sympathetic.

  Obama studied regularly, but he also did plenty of hanging out at The Cooler, a ramshackle student center that was a favorite of the crowd he most identified with. As he put it, "The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Frantz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society's stifling constraints." As a memoirist, Obama winks at his own undergraduate pretensions, but he also spent time on more demotic pursuits. He and his friends were big fans of the Lakers and they watched games on TV at a local pizza joint. He also became very disciplined about exercise. Obama took long morning runs and played basketball and tennis.

  At the start, Obama went by either Barry or Obama. Some teachers, seeing his real name on their rolls, tried to call him Barack but they were soon asked to call him Barry. When he did talk about his background, it was with a minimum of anguish or revelation. "I don't see him as tortured," Phil Boerner said. "He seemed pretty happy, even if reserved at times. Some of the things I later discovered about his early life, he really didn't mention. We were living in the moment."

  The bands pounding out of the stereo in Obama's room and the rooms along the dorm hallway included the B-52s, The Specials, Talking Heads, Roxy Music, UB40, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Wonder, Earth, Wind & Fire, Bob Marley, Black Uhuru, The Flying Lizards. Obama also had a taste for jazz, for Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Billie Holiday, along with middle-brow contemporaries like Grover Washington, Jr. Obama's accustomed uniform was shorts or jeans, T-shirt or Hawaiian aloha shirt, and flip-flops. Part of his getup was also a Marlboro dangling from his lips. ("I smoke like this because I want to keep my weight down," Obama told one friend. "After I get married, I'll stop and just get real fat.") By the standards of the time and place, he was hardly heroic in his drug use. Marijuana and hash were almost as common as beer at the Haines dorm parties, and Obama was not reluctant to join in the fun. The second semester of his sophomore year was known to some in his circle as "the spring of powdered cocaine," and Obama has never denied his acquaintance with "a little blow," either. It wasn't until his junior year, when he transferred to Columbia, that he vowed to stop getting high and to commit himself to his studies and his future.

  Phil Boerner, who was not only Obama's freshman-year hallmate but also his roommate when, two years later, they both transferred to Columbia, kept a diary as a young man, and in an entry from 1983 he recalled a typical late-night scene in the dorm featuring his friend:

  Moment: Freshman year at Oxy. The stereo in Barry's room is on--a Hendrix or Stones record is being played--and the record is skipping. I'm in the hall--"The Annex" outside. I hear the record skipping, and conclude that something is amiss. I peek into the room--their door was always unlocked, and it wasn't even closed all the way this time--and see Barry crashed out on his bed. I tiptoe in to turn off the record. Just as I'm creeping up to the stereo, which is right beside his bed, he opens one eye and looks at me. He doesn't say anything, but I feel an explanation is necessary as to why I'm sneaking into his room. Certainly not to steal something, as he might have thought, if he'd been a suspicious person, which he wasn't, and isn't. Well, I said to him, "The record is skipping," and proceeded to turn off the stereo. He mumbled something--"Thanks," perhaps, and rolled over and returned to snoring softly. I crept out of the room, closing the door behind me.

  Obama's circle was multiracial. Among his closest friends were three older students from South Asia: two Pakistanis, Mohammed Hasan Chandoo and Wahid Hamid, and an Indian, Vinai Thummalapally. "I think that one of the reasons he felt comfortable with us was because we were accepted by virtually all people," Hamid said. "We didn't come with a lot of predispositions about race. We weren't carrying that American baggage. We were brown, I suppose you could say, and we got along with people who were white and black. I think we had an immediate connection with him because we allowed him to be who he was, someone able to straddle things. And I think that is how Barack sees himself, as someone able to understand, for obvious reasons of his background, where both whites and blacks come from. As a politician, he is not your typical black candidate or white candidate--that's part of his strength--but it was harder when he was young. But by virtue of his strengths and his skills and talents, he was an endearing individual. People liked him rather immediately. He managed to get along. He was gifted that way--and those gifts allowed the world to be less problematic for him than it could have been for someone without
those skills."

  There were very few black students at Occidental in Obama's time there--around seventy-five out of sixteen hundred. "And you could count the black faculty members on two fingers," one of Obama's classmates said. African-American students really did negotiate Occidental in different ways. Some kept more or less to themselves, sitting at the "black tables" at lunch, constructing an enclosed social world out of a sense both of preserving black culture and of a lack of welcome from the white students. The college's weekly newspaper, The Occidental, quoted one black student, Earl Chew, as saying, "Coming here was hard for me. A lot of things that I knew as a black student--that I knew as a black, period--weren't accepted on this campus."

  Obama moved fairly easily among groups, just as he had at Punahou. Louis Hook, who was a leader of the Black Students Association, recalled that Obama wasn't an especially active member of the group; rather, he "came in and out of it." He said most black students on campus were trying to sustain the "feel of the civil-rights movement" and some of Obama's friends and acquaintances wondered why he hung out with white and South Asian kids as often as he did. Obama, Hook concluded, "was a crossover guy," who "blended across the different communities. That was unusual. Some appreciated it, and some didn't look that highly on it. There was a split among black kids among people who really needed the reinforcement of their own culture and some who could deal inside it and outside it. Obama was in the category that didn't grow up in the African-American tradition. So for him, he could deal with it but was comfortable without it, too."

  Obama discovered that, for the most part, the complaints of the black students at Occidental were the same as everyone else's: "Surviving classes. Finding a well-paying gig after graduation. Trying to get laid." In fact, Obama writes, "I had stumbled upon one of the well-kept secrets about black people: that most of us weren't interested in revolt; that most of us were tired of thinking about race all the time; that if we preferred to keep to ourselves it was mainly because that was the easiest way to stop thinking about it, easier than spending all your time mad or trying to guess whatever it was that white folks were thinking about you."