Barack Obama, Childhood to Chicago

OBAMA FOR USA. In his memoir, "Dreams From My Father," Barack Obama conjures up an imagined meeting between his white Kansas-born mother and his black Kenyan father that could have come straight out of the iconic, if hopelessly dated, 1960s movie "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner."

In 1960 such a meeting took place in Hawaii, where his mother's parents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, prepared to meet their daughter's beau, an African student reaching toward Phi Beta Kappa, whom she had met in Russian class.

The parents, Barack Obama's beloved "Gramps" and "Toot," were wary. Although Hawaii was a place of rich ethnic blends, racial tensions were still simmering, like those evident in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," where white liberals like the couple portrayed by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn nonetheless cringed over the prospect of a black son-in-law.

The Dunhams' new son-in-law-to-be, Barack (meaning "blessed"), was from the small village of Nyang'oma Kogelo near Lake Victoria. Now an economics student with a polished British accent, as a boy Barack had helped tend his family's goats and his school was a small shack. If the Dunhams were unsettled by the match between Barack Sr. and their daughter, 18-year-old Stanley Ann (her father had wanted a boy and she was named for him), Obama's family in Africa was apoplectic over the prospect of their blood being "sullied by a white woman." ("Dreams From My Father," p. 126.)

In 1961, the short-lived marriage produced a son, also named Barack. But the father soon abandoned his young family to attend Harvard, and then returned to Africa. The son would see his father only once again, when he was 10. Barack Sr. had a new life, wives and children back in Kenya as well as new demons, including depression and alcohol. One crippling car accident was followed by another, this time fatal, his short life ending in Nairobi at age 46 in 1982.

When, as her son became a young adult, Ann tried to explain his father's life to him, "she saw my father as everyone hopes at least one other person might see him; she tried to help the child who never knew him see him the same way. And it was the look on her face that day that I would remember when a few months later I called to tell her that my father had died and heard her cry out over the distance." ("Dreams From My Father, p.127.)

After divorcing Barack Sr., Ann had remarried, another foreign student, Lolo Soetoro, of Indonesia, who was attending the University of Hawaii. After Mr. Soetoro's student visa was revoked, the family moved to Jakarta, where Ann gave birth to Maya, a half-sister who remains close to Barack. He attended an Indonesian school, although campaign attacks suggesting it was militantly Islamic were patently false. To make sure her son kept up his English, Ann would wake him hours before school began to study a correspondence course. When Barack balked at her 4 a.m. home-schooling program, she replied, "this is no picnic for me either, Buster."

Soetoro bought Barack boxing gloves and taught him how to fend off bullies. Ann began bringing home books and records by great black Americans, instilling an uplifting message in her son.

But this blended family, too, soon cracked and Ann returned to Hawaii to be near her parents. Through his boss, Barack's "Gramps" had arranged for him to enter fifth grade at Punahou, an elite prep school founded by missionaries. His grandfather saw the school as his grandson's meal ticket and Barack said he told him "that the contacts I made at Punahou would last a lifetime, that I would move in charmed circles and have all the opportunities that he'd never had."

Barack's sojourn at the school, where there were few other blacks, included learning the folkways of the American elite, grounding that would be helpful at other academic proving grounds, like Columbia University and Harvard Law School. He excelled on the basketball court, with a jump shot that earned him the nickname "Barry O'Bomber." When his mother returned to Indonesia to do field work for her degree, Obama remained with his grandparents to finish his studies at Punahou.

In "Dreams From My Father," Obama writes candidly about the struggle for identity that defined his boyhood. At school he heard a coach use the word "nigger," and his own beloved grandmother "Toot" (his rendering of an abbreviation for "grandparent" in Hawaiian), would occasionally utter "racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe," Obama recalled in his campaign speech on race. He had a pack of close friends and exhibited behavior, including drinking and smoking marijuana, typical of male teenagers. His mother and grandparents worried that he was lackadaisical about his studies, but Barack had begun a habit of disappearing behind his bedroom door to read for hours, shuttered with Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Malcolm X, and "there I would sit and wrestle with words, locked suddenly in desperate argument, trying to reconcile the world as I'd found it with the terms of my birth." ("Dreams From My Father," p. 85.)

His quest for identity continued at the small California liberal arts Occidental College, known for its diverse student body, and also at Columbia, where he transferred after two years. On his first night in New York City, his dorm room unavailable and his finances thin, Obama spent the night curled up in an alleyway, waiting to move into his apartment in Spanish Harlem. The precariousness of his place in the world, the sense that his life could have easily slipped into the stereotype of black male failure, pervades "Dreams From My Father."

"Junkie. Pothead. That's where I'd been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man." ("Dreams From My Father," p. 93.)

Interestingly, when The Times investigated Obama's use of drugs during this period of his life, the paper found that it seemed to be less of an issue than Obama portrayed in his book.

He said he used drugs to help numb the confusion he felt about himself and described partying, smoking "reefer," and doing a little "blow." But Amiekoleh Usafi, a friend from Occidental, said the most she saw Obama indulging in were cigarettes and beer, and others interviewed had similar accounts.

During his Occidental and Columbia years, Obama became far more aware of politics, becoming involved in student anti-apartheid groups. After Columbia, he had difficulty getting hired as a community organizer, the job he wanted, and worked for a year at a business where he wore a suit and could have started down a path toward money and status.

But in 1985, Gerald Kellman, a community organizer in Chicago's tough South Side, interviewed a young applicant who "challenged me on whether we would teach him anything," Mr. Kellman recalled. "He wanted to know things like 'How are you going to train me?' and 'What am I going to learn?'" With a $10,000 salary and $2,000 Mr. Kellman gave him to buy a used car, Obama began a three-year stint as a grassroots organizer in Chicago's projects and churches.

It is a period that looms large in "Dreams From My Father," where Obama recounts the frustrations and triumphs of getting asbestos removed from the apartments at Altgeld Gardens and learning the political skills needed to mediate anger and deal with urban poverty. In the book he vividly recounts his disappointment with himself when he was unable to control a group of residents whose anger boiled over at a tense meeting with city officials. But the job, he wrote, was "the best education I ever had, better than anything I got at Harvard Law School." On the streets of Chicago's South Side, Obama came to terms with his place in black America.