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Chapter 1

Barack Obama was born in 1961. He grew up in Hawaii and lived with his mother, grandparents, and aunts. His father left when he was two years old, so Barack only knew him from stories that were told about him by the rest of his family. Barack’s father had been a student at Harvard University and then moved to Kenya where he worked as an economist for the Kenyan government. In 1987, Barack received a call from Aunt Jane who informed him that his father had died of cancer. This made it clear to Barack that even though someone may be gone physically, they can still live on through their memories and stories told about them by others.

Barack’s grandfather finds the story of Barack’s father hilarious, but Ann prefers a gentler portrait. Every so often, Barack’s family members pull out these stories and then don’t talk about his father for months. However, Ann makes sure that Barack knows about his father. His father was Kenyan and from the Luo tribe. He went to college in Hawaii where he met Ann and they had a son—Barack—and two years later he left to pursue a Ph.D at Harvard and returned to Kenya without them. As a child, Barack was content with this story until later when he wondered why his father never came back for him.

Barack Obama’s father was black, but he didn’t look like the white people who raised him. The only time race ever came up with his father was when a man called Barack’s father out of the blue and said that he’d heard about an incident where Barack’s father had told off another man for saying something racist. That story turned out to be true.

Barack Obama’s parents met and married during the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. His grandparents did not seem like political radicals, but they allowed his mother to marry a Black man. Barack still wonders why they allowed it, since his grandparents grew up in Kansas during the Depression. They were both from respectable families and had similar stories about their childhoods, which romanticized that era of American history. However, Barack sensed some hierarchy within their family units—his grandfather was a bad boy who wanted to get out of Dodge (the small town where he lived) while his grandmother was very conservative for her time period.

Gramps and Toot eloped during World War II. Gramps served in the war, and then they moved to California, Kansas, Texas, and Seattle. Although they kept moving around a lot after that point, Gramps’ desire for new frontiers persisted: when his furniture business opened up a new store in Hawaii, he packed up the family and moved there as well. Barack thinks that this was probably because of how provincial his grandparents were while living in Hawaii; however, Gramps still joined the Unitarian Universalist congregation at some point before getting married again. In addition to being provincial people who easily got disappointed by things like their church attendance or their children’s marriage choices (in other words: vaguely liberal), Obama imagines how shocked they must have been upon meeting Ann for the first time with her African American husband-to-be standing next to her.

Barack Obama’s grandparents had not given much thought to Black people before they moved from Kansas to Texas. In Kansas, there were Jim Crow laws but not as bad as in the South. The issue of race became very real for his grandparents when Barack’s grandfather was told by his boss that he should serve Black and Mexican customers after hours, which made him uncomfortable. Meanwhile, Toot was reprimanded at her bank for using “Mister” with the janitor who was Black. Gramps and Toot withdrew from their coworkers because of this incident; meanwhile Ann grew lonely since she didn’t have many friends around her age. One day when Toot came home from work, she found a group of children shouting racial slurs into the yard where Ann was sitting with a Black girl reading together. When Toot invited them inside, the girls ran away except for Ann who stayed behind until Gramps went to talk to the principal about it later on that day.