reached across oceans. He’d spent years trying to make sense of its lines. His mother, Ann Dunham, had been a seventeen-year-old college student in Hawaii in 1960, when she fell for a Kenyan student named Barack Obama. Their marriage was brief and confusing—especially given that her new husband, it turned out, already had a wife in Nairobi. After their divorce, Ann went on to marry a Javanese geologist named Lolo Soetoro and moved to Jakarta, bringing along the junior Barack Obama—my Barack Obama—who was then six years old.
As Barack described it to me, he’d been happy in Indonesia and got along well with his new stepfather, but his mother had concerns about the quality of his schooling. In 1971, Ann Dunham sent her son back to Oahu to attend private school and live with her parents. She was a free spirit who would go on to spend years moving between Hawaii and Indonesia. Aside from making one extended trip back to Hawaii when Barack was ten, his father—a man who by all accounts had both a powerful mind and a powerful drinking problem—remained absent and unengaged.
And yet Barack was loved deeply. His grandparents on Oahu doted on both him and his younger half sister Maya. His mother, though still living in Jakarta, was warm and supportive from afar. Barack also spoke affectionately of another half sister in Nairobi, named Auma. He’d grown up with far less stability than I had, but he didn’t lament it. His story was his story. His family life had left him self-reliant and curiously hardwired for optimism. The fact he’d navigated his unusual upbringing so successfully seemed only to reinforce the idea that he was ready to take on more.
On a humid evening, I went with him as he did a favor for an old friend. One of his former community-organizer co-workers had asked if he could lead a training at a black parish in Roseland, on the Far South Side, an area that had been crippled by the steel mill closings of the mid-1980s. For Barack, it was a welcome one-night return to his old job and the part of Chicago where he’d once worked. It occurred to me as we walked into the church, both of us still dressed in our office clothes, that I’d never thought much about what a community organizer actually did. We followed a stairwell down to a low-ceilinged, fluorescent-lit basement area, where fifteen or so parishioners—mostly women, as I remember—were sitting in folding chairs in what looked to be a room that doubled as a day-care center, fanning themselves in the heat. I took a seat in the back as Barack walked to the front of the room and said hello.
To them, he must have seemed young and lawyerly. I could see that they were sizing him up, trying to figure out whether he was some sort of opinionated outsider or in fact had something of value to offer. The atmosphere was plenty familiar to me. I’d grown up attending my great-aunt Robbie’s weekly Operetta Workshop in an African Methodist Episcopal church not unlike this one. The women in the room were no different from the ladies who sang in Robbie’s choir or who’d turned up with casseroles after Southside died. They were well-intentioned, community-minded women, often single mothers or grandmothers, the type who inevitably stepped in to help when no one else would volunteer.
Barack hung his suit jacket on the back of his chair and took off his wristwatch, laying it on the table in front of him to keep an eye on the time. After introducing himself, he facilitated a conversation that would last about an hour, asking people to share their stories and describe their concerns about life in the neighborhood. Barack, in turn, shared his own story, tying it to the principles of community organizing. He was there to convince them that our stories connected us to one another, and through those connections, it was possible to harness discontent and convert it to something useful. Even they, he said—a tiny group inside a small church, in what felt like a forgotten neighborhood—could build real political power. It took effort, he cautioned. It required mapping strategy and listening to your neighbors and building trust in communities where trust was often lacking. It meant asking people you’d never met to give you a bit of their time or a tiny piece of their paycheck. It involved being told no