thinking about what still needed to be done and opened my eyes every morning with my mental checklists for the day, the week, and the month ahead already made. After graduating our first class of twenty-seven Allies in the spring, we welcomed a new set of forty in the fall and continued to grow from there. In hindsight, I think of it as the best job I ever had, for how wonderfully on the edge I felt while I was doing it and for how even a small victory—whether it was finding a good placement for a native Spanish speaker or sorting through someone’s fears about working in an unfamiliar neighborhood—had to be thoroughly earned.
For the first time in my life, really, I felt I was doing something immediately meaningful, directly impacting the lives of others while also staying connected to both my city and my culture. It gave me a better understanding, too, of how Barack had felt when he’d worked as an organizer or on Project VOTE!, caught up in the all-consuming primacy of an uphill battle—the only kind of battle Barack loved, the kind he would always love—knowing how it can drain you while at the same time giving you everything you’ll ever need.
* * *
While I was focused on Public Allies, Barack had settled into what was—by his standard, anyway—a period of relative tameness and predictability. He was teaching a class on racism and the law at the University of Chicago Law School and working by day at his law firm, mostly on cases involving voting rights and employment discrimination. He still sometimes ran community-organizing workshops as well, leading a couple of Friday sessions with my cohort at Public Allies. Outwardly, it seemed like a perfect existence for an intellectual, civic-minded guy in his thirties who’d flatly turned down any number of more lucrative and prestigious options in favor of his principles. He’d done it, as far as I was concerned. He’d found a noble balance. He was a lawyer, a teacher, and also an organizer. And he was soon to be a published author, too.
After returning from Bali, Barack had spent more than a year writing a second draft of his book during the hours he wasn’t at one of his jobs. He worked late at night in a small room we’d converted to a study at the rear of our apartment—a crowded, book-strewn bunker I referred to lovingly as the Hole. I’d sometimes go in, stepping over his piles of paper to sit on the ottoman in front of his chair while he worked, trying to lasso him with a joke and a smile, to tease him back from whatever far-off fields he’d been galloping through. He was good-humored about my intrusions, but only if I didn’t stay too long.
Barack, I’ve come to understand, is the sort of person who needs a hole, a closed-off little warren where he can read and write undisturbed. It’s like a hatch that opens directly onto the spacious skies of his brain. Time spent there seems to fuel him. In deference to this, we’ve managed to create some version of a hole inside every home we’ve ever lived in—any quiet corner or alcove will do. To this day, when we arrive at a rental house in Hawaii or on Martha’s Vineyard, Barack goes off looking for an empty room that can serve as the vacation hole. There, he can flip between the six or seven books he’s reading simultaneously and toss his newspapers on the floor. For him, the Hole is a kind of sacred high place, where insights are birthed and clarity comes to visit. For me, it’s an off-putting and disorderly mess. One requirement has always been that the Hole, wherever it is, have a door so that I can shut it. For obvious reasons.
Dreams from My Father was published, finally, in the summer of 1995. It got good reviews yet sold only modestly, but that was okay. The important thing was that Barack had managed to process his life story, snapping together the disparate pieces of his Afro-Kansan-Indonesian-Hawaiian-Chicagoan identity, writing himself into a sort of wholeness this way. I was proud of him. Through the narrative, he’d made a kind of literary peace with his phantom father. The work to get there had been one-sided, of course, with Barack alone trying to fill every gap and understand every mystery the senior Obama had ever created. But this was also