Hopes and Dreams

Tonight being an historic occasion, we think it fitting to turn to the forty-second page of “Hopes and Dreams: The Story of Barack Obama” where author Steve Dougherty wrote (emphasis added):

the whole class to break up in laughter. Before the day was out, a red-haired girl asked if she could touch his hair, and a boy asked him if his father was a cannibal.

"The novelty of having me in class quickly wore off for the other kids," Obama would later write. His fellow students, mostly the privileged children of well-off families who lived in houses far grander than the two-bedroom apartment Obama shared with his mother's parents, weren't overtly cruel. They didn't beat him up or mock him. They simply lost interest in the black kid who played soccer, badminton, and chess—games he'd learned from his Indonesian stepfather while living in Jakarta with his mother for four years before returning to Hawaii without her—but who couldn't throw a football or ride a skateboard.

As the months passed, he managed to make a few friends and "to toss a wobbly football around," but mostly he withdrew into a routine of going home after school, reading comics, watching TV, and listening to the radio. "I felt safe," he wrote; "it was as if I had dropped into a long hibernation."

Obama's mother, Ann Dunham (with his Indonesian stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, and half sister Maya Soetoro), insisted that he supplement his schooling by taking U.S. correspondence courses during the four years he lived in Indonesia. Ann woke him at 4:00 a.m. every morning to instruct him for three hours before he left for school and she went to her job at the American embassay. After Barrack Hussein Obama, Sr. (right) spent the Christmas holidays with his then 10-year-old son in Hawaii, where Obama was living with his white grandparents, father and son never met again.

He was shocked out of it a few months after school began when his grandparents on his mother's side ("Gramps" and "Toot," short for tutu, the Hawaiian word

More information about “Hopes and Dreams: The Story of Barack Obama” (and the book itself) is available from:

• Powell's Books
• Barnes & Noble
• Amazon.com

(Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, July 2008. Paperback, 160 pages. ISBN: 1579127908; EAN: 9781579127909.)