Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

The book opens when Barack Obama is twenty-one and a student living a solitary life in a small, shabby apartment in New York. His Aunt Jane, from Nairobi, Kenya, calls him to tell him that his fatherhas died in a car accident. Obama was only two when his father left him as a child in Hawaii, so much of what he knows of his father comes from the stories (some of them not always completely true) his mother and her parents told him as he grew up.

Obama's paternal grandfather, whom he calls "Gramps," told the story of Obama's father dangling a man over the side of a bridge after the man lost his pipe, for example. Ann, Obama's mother, did her best as always to soften these stories by emphasizing how upright and uncompromising a man Obama's father was.Another story Gramps would tell was the time Obama's father was invited to sing African songs for a festival, only to discover that he would have to do so before a big audience. Although Obama's father wasn't much of a singer, he had so much confidence that he received even more applause than the professional singer who preceded him. Confidence, according to Gramps, is the "'secret to a man’s success” (8).

The stories Obama heard about his father were all "compact, apocryphal, told in rapid succession in the course of one evening, then packed away for months, sometimes years, in my family’s memory"(8). The stories were put away, much like the photographs of his father, once his mother began dating the man who became her second husband.

Obama's mother later told him the story of his father growing up in a poor village as the child of a financially comfortable family. When Kenyan independence came, Obama Sr.wentattended the University of Hawaii, where he met Ann. In this telling of the story, Obama's father won over the Dunhams with charm, married Ann, left his wife and son behind when scholarship money wouldn't stretch to cover their experiences at Harvard, and returned to Africa with his love for them still intact.

Obama calls this "a tale that placed [him] in the center of a vast and orderly universe"(10), a narrative that was much like a book of world origin myths given to him by his mother when he was a boy. He never thought until later to ask about gaps or to think about the race of each of his parents.

The only story about racism in his father's life that Obama ever heard was one in which his father shamed a racist who complained about having to eat at a bar with Obama's father, whom the man called a racial slur. Obama's father lectured the man so forcefully that the man apologized and gave money to Obama's father. Obama was always skeptical of this story, but he learned years later from a classmate of his father that the story was true.

Obama often wonders how it was possible that his parents ended up together with no apparent disapproval from the Dunhams. When his parents married in 1960, it was still illegal in many American states for blacks and whites to intermarry, and even in places where it was not forbidden, the social pressure to remain separate was still powerful. Although Toot liked to point to her apparent Cherokee ancestry, pictures of her ancestors reveal people of European descent, while that Cherokee ancestry was a shameful secret in the family.

Ann's parents had grown up in the Midwest near each other during the Great Depression, when "hardship, the great leveler that had brought people closer together, was shared by all" (13). Nevertheless, there were distinctions based on respectability that had nothing to do with how rich a family was. Toot's family was respectable, while Gramps's family was not. By the time Gramps was a teen, he was seen as a wild boy. Toot's father disapproved of their courtship and insulted Gramps the first time he met him by calling him an insulting slur used for Italians because of Gramps's dark hair and eyes.

For Toot, however, Gramps represented adventure and a way out of the stagnant Midwest. Gramps and Toot eloped just before Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor, after which Gramps enlisted to fight in World War II. The Dunhams had Ann (then known as "Stanley Ann") and moved from place to place as Gramps tried to find his way after the war, first as a student and later as a furniture salesman in Seattle, Washington. Toots finished high school there. Still restless, Gramps took a job at the newly opened Hawaiian branch of the furniture company. Obama describes his grandfather as a typical man of his generation, a person whose innocence eventually led to disappointment.

Thinking back on the Dunhams during this period in their lives, Obama writes that they had a streak of nonconformity that led them to join a Unitarian Universalist church (a liberal religious denomination that incorporates aspects of various world religions). While Toot was more skeptical of most things, she was also stubborn and a critical thinker, which meant that she and Gramps usually landed on the same page.

Obama imagines that when his mother brought his father to the Dunhams' home that first time, they likely said nothing about his race. Obama knows that growing up in Kansas, Gramps and Toot would have had little to do with African Americans, who were invisible and infrequent presences in Kansas and in the lives of whites in general in the Midwest because of social segregation.

The Dunhams' first real contact with the uglier, more militant kind of racism would not have come until the family moved to Texas when Ann was still just a girl. Gramps's co-workers at the furniture told him that people of color would only be served after hours, while Toot's co-workers took her to task for attaching "Mr." to the last name of the black janitor at her job.

Ann was a lonely child who was teased because of her masculine name and grew only more so after a pack of white children threw rocks at her and called her a "'[n]igger-lover'" (19) when she invited an African-American girl to read with her in her yard. When Gramps complained to the school and parents, everyone told him that he needed to train his daughter to accept the boundaries.

Gramps always claimed that racism was part of what drove them from Texas, but Toots, whose unsentimental, commonsense approach made her more trustworthy in Obama's eyes, says that their departure resulted from Gramps's struggles at work and the chance for advancement with the move to Hawaii. Nevertheless, Obama gives Gramps some credit because he believes that Gramps's telling of this story is the result of a sense of affinity Gramps felt with African Americans, one based on a shared sense of suffering imposed by the forces of respectability. That identification with African-American suffering is the opposite of what most of Gramps's generation accepted, according to Obama. Even though Gramps and Ann had a difficult relationship because of Gramps's volatile temper and habits, Obama writes that "this desire of his to obliterate the past, this confidence in the possibility of remaking the world from whole cloth […] proved to be his most lasting patrimony" to Ann (21-22).

Accepting Obama Sr. into his world allowed Gramps to understand himself better, even though Obama recognizes years later that his parents' wedding was small and that most of the extended family was not even aware of it. Nevertheless, once Obama came along and Gramps's conversations with Obama Sr. made the world a bigger place again for Gramps, the Dunhams perhaps began to see this marriage as a fortunate thing rather than a trial to survive. Hawaii, a paradise and newly made a state, was the perfect place for Gramps to "[enter] the space age" (23).

The colonialism that allowed the U.S. to take the island was not much on display by the time the Dunhams arrived, and when Obama was a child, the racial diversity of the island and very small black population let everyone buy into the idea of it as the "one true melting pot, an experiment in racial harmony" (24). Gramps was at home in Hawaii. He embraced Hawaiians' scorn for the racial ideas of outsiders, and when confronted with remarks about his grandson's skin color, either sidestepped it or even celebrated it. Race wasn't a worry to him, especially since he believed that the color-blind Hawaiian perspective was inevitably going to overtake the rest of the world.

Thinking over it, Obama believes that he cannot really blame his family for mythologizing Obama Sr. in their stories. Their idealism was common during the hopeful early days of John F. Kennedy's presidency. The only flaw in these stories was that Obama Sr. had left behind Ann and his son. For Obama, his father was only an "attractive prop" (25) in these stories told for his sake and the sake of others.

After reading a short article written by Obama Sr. about his time in Hawaii as a student, Obama realized that his father probably would have approved of these stories. Obama notes, however, that his father fails to mention his white wife and their son in the story, a gap that surely must have caused a fight between his parents. Ultimately Obama believes that "for a short time" his parents and the Dunhams fell under a "spell" that allowed them to cross those racial boundaries (27). Obama closes the chapter by noting that he simply came to "occup[y] the place where their dreams had been"(27).