The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  The first weeks of school were a misery. When roll was called--"Ba-rack Obama"--the kids laughed at the strangeness of the boy's name.

  "Would you prefer if we called you 'Barry'?" Miss Hefty asked. "Barack is such a beautiful name. Your grandfather tells me your father is Kenyan. I used to live in Kenya...."

  Mabel Hefty was an earnest traveler. She had spent the previous year in Africa teaching in a village primary school. But when she tried to engage Barry in a high-minded conversation about his Kenyan background ("Do you know what tribe your father is from?"), Obama went silent. One kid made monkey sounds. One classmate asked if his father was a cannibal; another asked if she could just touch his hair. He was a curiosity, a source of giddy fascination--the last thing a child wants to be. Barack preferred "Barry."

  Of the more than thirty-five hundred students at Punahou when Obama arrived, only three or four were black. Obama kept the miseries he felt that autumn neatly submerged. "One of the challenges for a ten-year-old boy coming to a new place is to figure out how you fit in," Obama said in a speech in 2004 on the campus. "And it was a challenge for me, partly because I was one of the few African-Americans in the school, partly because I was new and a lot of the students had been together since kindergarten."

  Before Obama arrived, perhaps the loneliest child in Punahou was Joella Edwards. (Obama calls her "Coretta" in his memoir.) The daughter of a doctor, Joella suffered mightily at Punahou. "Some kids--not all of them, but enough--called me 'jello,' 'pepper,' 'Aunt Jemima,' 'burnt toast with guava jelly,'" she said. "And they'd use that local term, popolo. They could be brutal. Back then, it was a different time and space, it was the sixties and early seventies, and America as a whole didn't talk about race. I remember cringing at the word 'black.' Black was a color in the crayon box. Because of that, you couldn't really say what you wanted to say.

  "If I had been on the mainland with other blacks as peers, it would have been a lot different," Edwards continued. "The only other peer I had was Barry. When we met, we were ten--it's so crazy! He came to school and I was so excited! This kid had my same coloring. He looked like me. He was just like me. We didn't avoid each other. We were drawn to each other. But we had to keep a distance." Edwards and Obama both remember that, any time they drifted together, someone was sure to mock them as a couple--the two black kids. Barry and Joella sittin' in a tree... K-i-s-s-i-n-g.... And yet Barry never rejected Joella. "He was my knight in shining armor," said Edwards, who lives now in Florida. "He was me--except with different anatomy."

  Joella came home crying on a regular basis. When she tried to raise her grades and started studying harder, her teacher accused her of cheating on a paper. Only when she re-did a paper in the presence of the teacher did anyone believe she had done her own work. After ninth grade, rather than endure more humiliation, she dropped out and enrolled in a public school. "I was a basket case for years," she said.

  Barry's discomfort at Punahou only increased that first year. For months he had told small, childhood fibs to his classmates. His father was an African prince, he told them, the son of a tribal chief. In truth, he knew little about his father--mainly "scraps of information I'd picked up from my mother." But now, in 1971, Barack Obama, Sr., was coming to Honolulu for a month-long stay. He had not seen Barry since he was a toddler. When Obama arrived in Oahu, his son was surprised at how diminished he looked, compared with the old pictures. He was fragile--oddly cautious "when he lit a cigarette or reached for his beer"--and his eyes had a yellow, malarial tint.

  Obama tells the story of his father's visit with clarity that makes the reader wince: the old man trying to reassert his authority ten years too late; the mysterious renewed intimacy between his father and mother; Stanley Dunham declaring that this was his house and no one was going to boss anyone around; Ann trying vainly to keep the peace; the boy's sad confusion when his father commands him to work harder and forbids him to watch "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" on television. "We all stood accused," he wrote a quarter-century later. "I felt as if something had cracked open between all of us, goblins rushing out of some old, sealed-off lair." There were some good times--Obama took Barry to a Dave Brubeck concert in Honolulu that helped make him a lifelong jazz fan--but it was a complicated visit, fraught with the boy's knowledge that it could not last.

  Barry started counting off the days in his mind until his father left for Africa, but before the ordeal came to its natural end, he had to endure one last trial: Miss Hefty had invited Obama, Sr., to speak to a combined class with Barry's math teacher, Pal Eldredge. Obama describes the agony of anticipating the event, imagining the exposure of his lies and the mockery that would follow. He remembers that the next day his father spoke of tribes that had their young men kill lions in order to prove their manhood, of Kenya's struggle for independence, and of "the deep gash in the earth where mankind had first appeared."

  Pal Eldredge remembers a more prosaic, uneventful, even pleasant presentation: "The whole thing about Barack is that at that time we didn't have a lot of black kids or half-black kids. It was my second year teaching, so I remembered his father and what he talked about. He talked about education and what life was like where he was from."

  Mabel Hefty and Pal Eldredge were delighted and, at the conclusion of the presentation, thanked Barack Obama profusely and congratulated Barry for having such a fascinating father. No one said anything about Barry's "lies." To the contrary, the boy who had asked about cannibalism in the first weeks of school said, "Your dad is pretty cool." It was hard for Barry to see it that way. By now, he was aware that he could expect nothing from his father. He was there to check in, to salve his conscience, perhaps, but soon he was gone. He never saw his son again.

  * * *

  Any reader of Obama's memoir, anyone familiar with his campaign speeches, knows the touchstones of his life and family that he chooses to emphasize: the idealist, who, as a single mother, went on food stamps for a while and struggled with medical-insurance forms as, in her early fifties, she lay dying of cancer; the plainspoken Midwestern grandparents and their warm embrace and quiet desperations; the internal struggle with race and identity as a teenager and a young man; the career as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago. He places less emphasis on an equally crucial part of his background: the elite institutions that also formed him--Punahou School, Occidental College, Columbia University, Harvard Law School, and the University of Chicago Law School.

  Obama received a liberal education in the most rounded sense of the term. He was too young for the sixties; rather, his teachers were products of the period and brought new values and historical narratives to the classroom and lecture hall: the antiwar movement, civil rights, gay and women's liberation, ethnic diversity. These were not the struggles of Obama's youth; they were the givens, the environment. This was evident even as early as the mid-and late-seventies at Punahou.

  The only trace of Punahou's Congregationalist past was weekly chapel. At Thurston Chapel in the nineteen-seventies, the students heard readings from the Bible, recited secular poetry, listened to renditions of "The Sounds of Silence," "Blowin' in the Wind," and "The Rose." It was the kind of chapel that Ann Dunham, who spoke of a "higher power" and read to her children from religious texts of all kinds, but never joined a church, could easily abide. "We all gathered as a group, mostly to contemplate philosophical and/or spiritual aspects of the world around us, but also to enjoy a bit of community singing, laughing and emotional rekindling of a certain sense of harmony and well-being," Constance Ramos, a classmate of Obama's, wrote in an album of remembrances by the Class of 1979. "The focus was not on any formal religion per se, but, rather, on giving us an appreciation for quiet contemplation about our place in the Universe and the inherent joy that accompanies being a member of a community.

  "In the eighth grade," Ramos went on, "we were also required to attend a weekly class called Christian Ethics. We'd lie around on floor cushions and talk freely about various ideas--the meaning of '
friendship,' for example--or what we thought about life in general. We'd listen to Simon and Garfunkel's album Bridge Over Troubled Water, over and over again.... In retrospect, some might say that Christian Ethics was more like a teenage group-therapy session than anything else."

  Barry Obama was never the top student in his class or the hardest worker--a pattern that persisted from fifth grade to the end of high school. ("He was a B student," Eric Kusunoki, Obama's homeroom teacher in high school, said. "I never bugged him about not working harder. Some kids suffer from too much pressure and work their brains out.") The curriculum was more rigorous and multicultural than what he had experienced at his two schools in Indonesia. The sixth-grade curriculum included topics in world cultures and field trips to a local synagogue and a Buddhist temple. Later, in history classes, students read about American failures of policy and moral direction in Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston's Farewell to Manzanar, about the internment of the Japanese-Americans during the Second World War, and Gavan Daws's history of the Hawaiian Islands, Shoal of Time. To learn about the Holocaust they watched Alain Resnais's documentary "Night and Fog." For "Ideas in Western Literature," a popular course in the high school, students read Sartre, Camus, Borges, Hesse, and Kafka.

  And yet so cheerful was the general atmosphere at Punahou that it was not always easy for some students to imagine the catastrophes of history or the troubled inner lives of literary characters. Jonathan Selinger, who is now a professor of chemical physics at Kent State University, recalled one teacher who had just moved to Hawaii and complained about how hard it was to teach literature at Punahou. "On the mainland, he said, students could relate to literature because so many were depressed or had even considered suicide," Selinger recalled. "In Hawaii, students were just too happy to appreciate great literature."

  Barry Obama did not always share that light spirit. He suffered his share of loneliness and confusion in high school. His mother, after three years at the University of Hawaii studying for a master's degree in anthropology, decided that she needed to move back to Indonesia. There she would do the fieldwork for her doctorate, live more cheaply, and satisfy her restless need to explore the world. She was determined to go, but Barry was determined to make his way at Punahou, even if it meant living with his grandparents in the apartment on Beretania Street.

  "When she first came back to Hawaii, in the early seventies," Obama's sister, Maya, said, "she never planned on leaving Barack. But she returned [to Indonesia], thinking, Let me work on my marriage and career. Barack had already spent three years at Punahou and he wanted to stay. She felt that was probably the best temporary solution. Still, it was hard. She missed him very much and wrote lots of letters to him and he wrote some back and there were frequent calls and summers and Christmases together. But it was painful not to have him there. The idea of taking him away from all that and thrusting him back into another country was hard. You change so much in three years in adolescence, and it was sort of impossible for him to go back to Indonesia."

  Barry was now without a father and, for most of the year, without his mother. At about that time he began what he later called his "fitful interior struggle."

  Hawaii does not much resist the image of paradise: the physical beauty, the isolation from the mainland (from everywhere), the languid pace of life, the self-marketing as the "Aloha State," the ultimate vacation spot, are intoxicating. Even in the capital, Honolulu, which can be as overdeveloped as Hong Kong, the mountains and the beach are visible from nearly everywhere. Obama spent plenty of time with his friends having fun: body-surfing at Sandy Beach, camping and hiking in the Mokule'ia Forest Reserve and Peacock Flats, seeing movies at the old Cinerama Theater, hanging out at the Mr. Burger Drive-In near the university or at Zippy's, for the chili with rice. To say nothing of sampling, in time, the ubiquitous brands of marijuana: Maui Wowie, Kaua'i Electric, Puna Butter, Kona Gold. When Barry was in school, the legal driving age was fifteen. Punahou was like a paradise as conceived by well-to-do American teenagers.

  Barry was known on campus as a smart, engaging, friendly kid, an obsessive basketball player, tight with the jocks, friendly with the artier types, able to negotiate just about any clique. Unlike some adolescents, he bore his confusions privately, without self-dramatizing. To most kids, he was cheerful--and game. He wrote poems for Ka Wai Ola, the campus literary magazine. He sang in the chorus. He took part in high-school goofs, once helping make a film called "Narc Squad," based on the ABC police drama "The Mod Squad." ("One White, One Black, One Blond" went the "Mod Squad" promo, and, of the three young undercover cops, Barry played the dashiki-wearing character. He peeled it off for the pool party scene.)

  But negotiating his identity was far more complicated than anyone could sense. Punahou teachers and graduates tend to view ethnicity as one more element in their rosy view of the school and of Hawaii itself. Obama's self-portrayal in his memoir as a troubled kid trying to cope with race and racism came as a shock to some of his old teachers and classmates. His teacher Eric Kusunoki was surprised by the book. "In Hawaii, ethnicity is blurred. I like to think of kids not in terms of black and white--it's more like a golden brown," he said. "Everyone is mixed and everyone is different. So when I read his book it was kind of a surprise to me. I had him in homeroom every day for four years. He expressed himself quite well and was never upset or lost his cool. He always had a big smile and could negotiate his way through the school."

  Constance Ramos, whose background is Filipino-Hungarian, wrote, "I never once thought of Barry as 'Black.' I still don't. On a very deep, emotional level, I honestly don't know what 'Black' means: Why is Barry supposed to fall into that 'color' category, when his skin tone is just about the same as mine? Nobody would call me 'black.' It remains unclear to me why skin color is so important to so many people." She said she felt "betrayed" by Obama's angst-ridden self-portrayal.

  There are very few writers and observers about the Punahou scene who allow even a tinge of anxiety, an element of darkness, to cloud the sunny self-regard. The novelist Allegra Goodman is an exception, describing a place where the walls of privilege were manned at all times and nearly impregnable:

  The lovely tropical home of so many diverse people is not beyond distinctions--it is all about them. Tensions simmer between native Hawaiians and newcomers. The rich layered cultures of Polynesia, Asia, and America bump up against bigotry and ignorance, often voiced in racist jokes and sometimes expressed in physical violence. Punahou's student body is multicultural, and its financial aid generous. But, for some, Punahou symbolizes exclusive privilege. More than once when I was a student there, rough kids from outside breached the walls. Teachers sounded the alarm: "The mokes are on campus again"--the word "mokes" designating kids who were native and poor.

  In high school, Barry eventually stopped writing letters to his father. His effort to understand himself was a lonely one. Touchingly, awkwardly, he was giving himself instruction on how to be black. According to his math and science teacher, Pal Eldredge, the way Barry carried himself changed. "His gait, the way he walked, changed," he said. "And I wasn't the only one who noticed." Step by step he began immersing himself in an African-American culture that seemed to live thousands of miles from where he was. He listened to Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, Grover Washington and Miles Davis; he watched "Soul Train" and Richard Pryor on television. On his own he read Richard Wright's Native Son, the poems of Langston Hughes, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, The Souls of Black Folk, the essays of James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

  Obama could not, and did not, pretend to be starting his journey from the neighborhood. Honolulu was hardly Detroit or Lansing, the South Side or Harlem--much less the hamlets of the Mississippi Delta--but he did not escape moments of real racial humiliation. He fleetingly mentions one incident, when he was eleven or twelve, that one white classmate, Kristen Caldwell, recounted many years later in far greater detail:

  Wh
en I started reading more about Barack Obama's early years at Punahou, my first instinct was that the racial issues were exaggerated. Then I realized that I really would have had no way of knowing what his experience, his perception had been--just as he wouldn't be aware of mine. I did remember one incident very vividly: We were standing on the lanai (patio) looking at the draw sheets that had just been posted for a tennis tournament ...

  Everyone does the same thing: You look for your name, and then run your finger across the draw to see whom you might play as you advance into later rounds of the tournament ...

  Barry was doing what we all did, completely normal behavior. But Tom M. came over and told him not to touch the draw sheet because he would get it dirty. He singled him out, and the implication was absolutely clear: Barry's hands weren't grubby; the message was that his darker skin would somehow soil the draw. Those of us standing there were agape, horrified, disbelieving ...

  Barry handled it beautifully, with just the right amount of cold burn without becoming disrespectful. "What do you mean by that?" he asked firmly. I could see in his eyes that Tom realized he had gone too far--his remark was uncalled for; he had crossed a line--and there were witnesses. He fumbled in his response, ultimately claiming that he had only been joking. But we all knew it had been no joke, and it wasn't even remotely funny.

  Some of our innocence was gone: That was the price of an ugly remark, one I've never forgotten.

  It wasn't a singular incident. In the ninth grade, classmate Ronald Loui recalled, a physical-education teacher advised the students to change their style of running. "You should try to run like a black man," the teacher said. "Not so straight up, tilt your pelvis!" Obama, the only black kid in the class, "was really embarrassed but, in part to get away from the uncomfortable situation, he took off running," Loui said.