Dreams from My Father (Adapted for Young Adults) Read online

  ALSO BY BARACK OBAMA

  A Promised Land

  The Audacity of Hope

  Text copyright © 2021 by Barack Obama

  Cover photograph copyright © The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  This work is based on Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, copyright © 1995, 2004 by Barack Obama. Originally published in hardcover by Times Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 1995, and in paperback by Kodansha Ltd. in 1996. Subsequently published in paperback and in slightly different form with preface and keynote address by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2004, and in hardcover without keynote address by Crown, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2007.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Photograph credits appear on this page.

  Visit us on the Web! GetUnderlined.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9780385738729 (trade) — ISBN 9780385907446 (lib. bdg.) — ebook ISBN 9780375895821

  Cover design by Christopher Brand

  Family tree designed by Barbara M. Bachman

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  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Barack Obama

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  The Obama Family Tree

  Introduction

  Part One: Origins

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part Two: Chicago

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Photograph Insert

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part Three: Kenya

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Epilogue

  Postscript

  Photograph Credits

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers.

  1 Chronicles 29:15

  THE OBAMA FAMILY TREE

  For a verbal description of this family tree, go to this location.

  INTRODUCTION

  I was in my early thirties when I wrote Dreams from My Father. At the time, I was a few years out of law school. Michelle and I were newly married and just beginning to think about having kids. My mother was still alive. And I was not yet a politician.

  I look back now and understand that I was at an important crossroads then, thinking hard about who I wanted to be in the world and what sort of contribution I could make. I was passionate about civil rights, curious about public service, full of loose ideas, and entirely uncertain about which path I should take. I had more questions than answers. Was it possible to create more trust between people and lessen our divides? How much did small steps toward progress matter—improving conditions at a school, say, or registering more people to vote—when our larger systems seemed so broken? Would I accomplish more by working inside existing institutions or outside of them?

  Behind all of this floated something more personal, a deeper set of unresolved questions: Who am I? Where do I come from? How do I belong?

  That’s what compelled me to start writing this book.

  I’ve always believed that the best way to meet the future involves making an earnest attempt at understanding the past. It’s why I enjoy reading different accounts of history and why I value the insights of those who’ve been on this earth longer than I have. Some folks might see history as something we put behind us, a bunch of words and dates carved in stone, a set of dusty artifacts best stored in a vault. But for me, history is alive the same way an old-growth forest is alive, deep and rich, rooted and branching off in unexpected directions, full of shadows and light. What matters most is how we carry ourselves through that forest—the perspectives we bring, the assumptions we make, and our willingness to keep returning to it, to ask the harder questions about what’s been ignored, whose voices have been erased.

  These pages represent my early, earnest attempt to walk through my own past, to examine the strands of my heritage as I considered my future. In writing it, I was able to dwell inside the lives of my parents and grandparents, the landscapes, cultures, and histories they carried, the values and judgments that shaped them—and that in turn shaped me. What I learned through this process helped to ground me. It became the basis for how I moved forward, giving me the confidence to know I could be a good father to my children and the courage to know I was ready to step forward as a leader.

  The act of writing is exactly that powerful. It’s a chance to be inquisitive with yourself, to observe the world, confront your limits, walk in the shoes of others, and try on new ideas. Writing is difficult, but that’s kind of the point. You might spend hours pushing yourself to remember what an old classroom smelled like, or the timbre of your father’s voice, or the precise color of some shells you saw once on a beach. This work can anchor you, and fortify you, and surprise you. In finding the right words, in putting in that time, you may not always hit upon specific answers to life’s big questions, but you will understand yourself better. That’s how it works for me, anyway.

  The young man you meet in these pages is flawed and full of yearning, asking questions of himself and the world around him, learning as he goes. I know now, of course, that this was just the beginning for him. If you’re lucky, life provides you with a good long arc. I hope that my story will encourage you to think about telling your story, and to value the stories of others around you. The journey is always worth taking. Your answers will come.

  Barack Obama

  June 2021

  PART ONE

  ORIGINS

  CHAPTER 1

  I barely knew my father. He left our home in Hawaii back in 1963, when I was only two. I didn’t even know I was supposed to have a father who lived with his family. All I knew were the stories that my mother and grandparents told.

  They had their
favorites. I can still picture Gramps leaning back in his old stuffed chair, laughing about the time my father—whose name, like mine, was Barack Obama—almost threw a man off the Pali Lookout, a mountain cliff not far from our home in the city of Honolulu, because of a pipe.

  “See, your mom and dad decided to drive this visiting friend around the island—and Barack was probably on the wrong side of the road the whole way—”

  “Your father was a terrible driver,” my mother said to me. “He’d end up on the left side, the way the British drive, and if you said something he’d just huff about silly American rules—”

  “And they got out and stood at the railing of this cliff to admire the view. And your father, he was puffing away on this pipe that I’d given him for his birthday, pointing out all the sights with the stem like a sea captain—”

  “He was really proud of this pipe,” my mother interrupted again.

  “Look, Ann, do you want to tell the story or are you going to let me finish?”

  “Sorry, Dad. Go ahead.”

  “Anyway, the fella asked Barack if he could give the pipe a try. But as soon as he took his first puff, he started coughing up a fit. Coughed so hard that the pipe slipped out of his hand and dropped over the railing, a hundred feet down the face of the cliff. So your dad told him to climb over the railing and bring the pipe back.”

  Gramps was laughing so hard he had to pause. “The man took one look over the side and said he’d buy him a replacement. But Barack said it had been a gift and it couldn’t be replaced. That’s when your dad picked him clear off the ground and started dangling him over the railing!”

  As he laughed, I imagined myself looking up at my father, dark against the brilliant sun, the man’s arms flailing. It was like something out of the Bible—a terrifying yet impressive vision, like a king delivering justice.

  I asked if he’d thrown the man off.

  “No, he put him down,” said Gramps. “After a time. Then your dad patted him on the back and suggested, calm as you please, that they all go have a beer. After that he acted like nothing had happened.”

  My mother said it wasn’t that bad, that my father didn’t hold the man very far out.

  “You were pretty upset when you got home,” Gramps told my mother. “But Barack just shook his head and started to laugh. He had this deep voice, see, and this British accent. He said, ‘I only wanted to teach the chap a lesson about the proper care of other people’s property!’ ”

  My grandmother, Toot, came in from the kitchen and said it was a good thing my father had realized that his friend dropping the pipe had been an accident—or who knows would have happened?

  My mother rolled her eyes and said they were exaggerating. Yes, she said, my father could be domineering, but only because he was honest. “If he thought he was right, he never liked to compromise,” she said.

  She preferred another story Gramps told, about the time my father agreed to sing some African songs at an international music festival, not realizing it was a “big to-do.” It turned out that the woman who performed just before him was a pro with a full band. “Anyone else would have backed out,” said Gramps. “But not Barack. He got up and started singing in front of this big crowd—which is no easy feat, let me tell you—and he wasn’t great, but he was so sure of himself that before you knew it he was getting as much applause as anybody.”

  “Now there’s something you can learn from your dad,” he would tell me. “Confidence. The secret to a man’s success.”

  * * *

  —

  THAT’S HOW ALL the stories went—short, with some tidy moral. Then my family would pack them away like old photos and take them out again, months or years later. My mother kept a few actual photos of my father, too. But when she started dating Lolo, the man she’d eventually marry, she put them in a closet. Every once in a while I’d be rummaging around in search of Christmas ornaments or an old snorkel set, and I’d come across them. Sometimes my mother and I looked at them together. I’d stare at my father’s likeness—the dark laughing face, the big forehead and thick glasses—and she’d say, “You have me to thank for your big eyebrows—your father has these little wispy ones. But your brains, your character, you got from him.”

  I would listen as she told me his story.

  My father was an African, a Kenyan who’d grown up in a tribe called the Luos. He was born on the shores of Lake Victoria in a place called Alego. The village of Alego was poor, but his father—my other grandfather—was an elder of the Luo tribe and a powerful medicine man. My father grew up herding his father’s goats and attending the local school, which had been set up by the British colonialists, who at that time ruled Kenya.

  My grandfather believed that knowledge was the source of power, so he was pleased that Barack showed great promise as a student and won a scholarship to study in the capitol, Nairobi. Then he was selected by Kenyan leaders and American sponsors to go to college in the United States. Kenya was about to become an independent country, and the new leaders sent their best students abroad to learn about economics and technology. They hoped these students would come back home and help make Africa more modern and successful.

  In 1959, at the age of twenty-three, my father arrived at the University of Hawaii to study economics. He was the first African student there and he graduated in only three years, and at the top of his class. He helped organize the International Students Association and became its first president. Then, in a Russian language course, he met an awkward, shy American girl, only eighteen, and they fell in love. Her name was Stanley Ann Dunham, but everyone called her Ann. She was my mother.

  Her parents were not sure about him at first. He was Black and she was white, and it was not common back then for people of different races to date. But he won them over with his charm and intelligence. The young couple married, and a short time later, I was born.

  Then my father was awarded yet another scholarship, this time to get a Ph.D. at Harvard University, more than five thousand miles away in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but he had no money to take his new family with him. We stayed behind. After getting his degree, he returned to Africa—“to make his country a better place,” my mother would say. But she insisted that the bond of love remained strong.

  There were many parts to this story that I didn’t understand. I didn’t know where Alego was on a map or why the British were in charge in Kenya or what a Ph.D. was. My father’s life seemed as mysterious as the stories in a book called Origins my mother once bought for me. It was a collection of tales from different religions and from all over the world—Christian, Jewish, ancient Greek, Indian—about the Earth’s creation, and it led me to ask some difficult questions. Why did God let the snake make such trouble in the Garden of Eden? How did the tortoise from the Hindu stories support the weight of the world on its tiny back? Why didn’t my father return?

  I spent my boyhood living with my mother and grandparents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, Gramps and Toot. Toot is short for Tutu, which means “grandmother” in Hawaiian. Toot decided on the day I was born that she was still too young to be called Granny.

  I loved Hawaii. I breathed it all in: The sultry scented air. The shimmering blue Pacific. The moss-covered cliffs and the cool rush of Manoa Falls, with its ginger blossoms and high canopies filled with the sound of invisible birds. The North Shore’s thunderous waves, so huge that when they broke it seemed I was watching the ocean in slow motion.

  There was only one problem: my father was missing. And nothing that my mother or grandparents told me could make me forget that fact. Their stories didn’t tell me why he had left. And they couldn’t describe what it might have been like had he stayed.

  In photographs, I could see that my father looked nothing like the people around me—he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk. But it wasn’t something we talked about, and it didn’t really register
in my mind.

  In fact, I remember only one story about my father that had anything to do with race. After long hours of study, my father had joined my grandfather and several other friends at a local bar in the beachfront area of Waikiki. Everyone was in a festive mood, eating and drinking to the sounds of a Hawaiian slack-key guitar, when a white man abruptly announced to the bartender, loudly enough for everyone to hear, that he shouldn’t have to drink good liquor “next to a nigger.” The room fell quiet and people turned to my father, expecting a fight. Instead, my father stood up, walked over to the man, smiled, and proceeded to lecture him about the foolishness of bigotry, the promise of the American dream, and the universal rights of man.

  “This fella felt so bad when Barack was finished,” Gramps would say, “that he reached into his pocket and gave Barack a hundred dollars on the spot. Paid for all our drinks and food for the rest of the night—and your dad’s rent for the rest of the month.”

  But it was one thing to be Black in Hawaii, a place where most people’s skin was darker than in the rest of the United States. It was another for someone Black to marry someone white. In 1960, the year my parents married, more than half the states considered it a felony, a serious crime, for people of different races to have children together. Even in the most sophisticated northern cities, there would be hostile stares and whispers. A white woman pregnant with a Black man’s child would probably seriously consider going away until she had the baby and then giving it up for adoption. She might even arrange to end the pregnancy.