turf or white turf.
Moseley Braun “wasn’t afraid of white people,” said a white supporter. “She could be comfortable speaking to them and not having it in her head all the time that ‘They’re looking at me as a black.’ She operated on the level that, ‘Well, I’m the same as you are, and I have the same training and abilities that you have.’ The one thing about communities like Hyde Park is everybody takes that as, ‘Well, okay, that’s the way it is.’ The fact that you happen to be black doesn’t undercut that.”
By the time Obama arrived in Hyde Park, its biracial character could be seen at Valois Cafeteria (“See Your Food,” their neon sign tells customers invitingly), where the short ribs special was priced for the budgets of winos and grad students alike. Valois was the subject of the book Slim’s Table, which examined the wary relationship between the campus and the ghetto. (Obama ate breakfast there often. After he became president, the owners began setting out a placard each morning listing his favorite meal: eggs, sausage, and pancakes.) But Obama’s favorite Hyde Park restaurant was the Cajun-themed Dixie Kitchen & Bait Shop. As a state senator, he would sing its praises for a local TV show called Check, Please. (The episode never aired because Obama didn’t let anyone else on the panel get a word in.) On the chess tables in Harper Court, black hustlers played aggressive five-minute blitz games against nerdy math majors. The hustlers brought street slang into the chess vernacular, hooting, “Gimme them panties! I want them panties off!” after capturing a rook or a bishop. The tables were torn up after the chess scene got too rowdy. The Hyde Park Hair Salon, Obama’s barbershop, laid out Ebony and Jet for waiting customers, but the owner, Zariff, could cut straight or kinky.
Barack and Michelle bought a two-bedroom condo on East View Park, a fenced-off block of identical three-flats a few hundred yards from Lake Michigan. Obama was often seen at the Hyde Park Co-op with his wife’s grocery list—an errand that gave him a chance to sneak a cigarette—or on the basketball courts near Promontory Point, where high-flying ballers look as though they’re soaring into the empty sky over the lake.
Obama was also building his visibility in Hyde Park’s political and intellectual circles. In hip North Side neighborhoods, lampposts and kiosks are covered with flyers for indie rock concerts. In Hyde Park, they’re papered with lecture notices. The life of the mind is big-time entertainment. The Democratic Socialists of America invited Obama to appear on a panel called “Employment and Survival in Urban America”—a coup for a law lecturer. The headliner was sociologist William Julius Wilson, a U of C idol who always drew a big crowd on campus. (In the mid-1990s, the Princeton Review named U of C America’s worst party school, inspiring this joke: “Q: How many University of Chicago students does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Quiet! I’m trying to study in the dark.” They do cut loose once a year, around Hanukkah, when the university sponsors a debate on the tastiness of latkes vs. hamantaschen.)
Obama also appeared on a panel with fellow Hyde Parker William Ayers, to discuss the question “Should a child ever be called a ‘super predator’?”
Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn were the sixties’ most glamorous radical couple: The Bonnie and Clyde of the Weather Underground, they spent eleven years in hiding after an accidental bombing that destroyed a Greenwich Village town house, killing three of their comrades. Ayers came from an upper-class background—his father, Thomas Ayers, was CEO of Commonwealth Edison, Chicago’s biggest utility—so when the couple came in from the cold, they didn’t do time, the way some biker toolbox bomber and his old lady would have. Their case was dropped, due to FBI misconduct, and Ayers père used all his social clout to restore Bill to respectability. Dad’s campaign was successful. Ayers became a highly regarded professor of education at the University of Illinois–Chicago, while his wife joined the faculty at Northwestern University Law School. As a professor, Ayers advocated “social justice teaching,” a philosophy that gives students more control over their curriculum and parents more control over schools. Like Obama, he lobbied for the creation of local school councils in the late 1980s, although the two men never worked together on that effort.
Ayers and Dohrn settled in Hyde Park, where they were embraced in liberal circles. They became