Young Mr. Obama (2 page)

Kellman told Obama to spend his first month conducting “one-on-ones,” interviews with neighborhood residents and with pastors who might be enticed to join the DCP. The idea was to learn the far South Side's story and identify an issue that might become the basis of a “piece”—organizer-speak for a project. At first, as he made the rounds of churches, spending ten or twelve hours a day chatting up pastors and trying to set up appointments over the phone, Obama felt as frustrated as his hapless grandfather back in Hawaii, peddling insurance to unwilling customers. He didn't know the first thing about politics or the black church, whose pastors can be independent, entrepreneurial, and jealous of the power they hold over their congregations. To grow in the black community, DCP would have to enlist Protestant churches—who mistrusted the organization's Catholic roots. Older pastors were unimpressed with Obama. The kid was just out of college, he had a funny name, and when they asked him the all-important question “What church do you belong to?” he didn't have an answer.

Obama found his first ally at Lilydale First Baptist Church. Reverend Alvin Love had arrived just two years before as a twenty-eight-year-old in his first pulpit, so he could relate to Obama's problems with the well-established pastors. The old bulls hadn't welcomed him, either. Lilydale's congregation had migrated from an inner-city neighborhood, taking over a Lutheran church left behind by the fleeing Dutch, so it represented Roseland's changes, as well as its current problems: The church was often covered in graffiti, and burglars had stolen the PA system and the silverware.

When Obama sat down in Love's study, the pastor didn't take him as anything other than a young African-American. But Obama was self-conscious about his exoticness: his Muslim name, his lack of roots in Chicago or the black community in general.

“I know you're wondering about this funny accent,” Obama said, even though Love hadn't detected an accent. “My father is from Kenya and my mother is from Kansas. Some folks call me Yo Mama. Some folks call me Alabama.”

Love chuckled, then Obama asked him, “What do you think about the neighborhood? What do you want to see happen?”

“We've got a drug problem,” Love said, “and people here need jobs.”

The two men talked about their upbringings—Obama's in Hawaii and Indonesia, Love's in Mississippi during the civil rights movement and on the West Side of Chicago during the riots after Martin Luther King's assassination. Obama, who had been reading Taylor Branch's
Parting the Waters: America in the King Years
, was fascinated by the civil rights movement, an episode in black history that he'd missed out on. This brother's looking for a connection with our community, Love thought. He agreed to attend a pastors' meeting at Holy Rosary. Most of his parishioners drove in from other parts of town, so it wouldn't hurt to belong to something that connected Lilydale with Roseland. He thought it might be good for the church and the neighborhood. At the meeting, the pastors discussed how their churches could fight the neighborhood's crime and drug problems. Only eight attended, and six were Catholic priests, but Obama was starting to build the DCP.

Obama was also working with the laid-off steelworkers whose plight had inspired Kellman to start a community organization in the first place. He and Loretta Augustine became fixtures at union halls, where he learned that steelworkers could be just as stubborn as inner-city pastors.

Steel had a century-long history on the southern shore of Lake Michigan. The steelworkers' union had shed blood, when ten men were gunned down by police during a 1937 strike. Its sacrifices were rewarded with wages that made its members blue-collar aristocrats. The sons of those strikers lived in brick bungalows, towed powerful speedboats up to their Wisconsin cottages, and were proud to be part of an industry that called itself “the backbone of America”—the first step in building skyscrapers. They had inherited steelmaking from their fathers, and refused to believe they wouldn't be able to pass it on to their children. Obama and Augustine interviewed men who wore diamond rings and heavy gold chains. Their plan: to ride out the layoffs on unemployment and union benefits. In the past, they'd always gone on strike, come back to work, and made more money than before. They had no skills that could be used outside a steel mill. One man ran a steel-straightening machine. He pushed a button, a bar of steel went in. He pushed the button again, the bar came out.

Obama talked to the workers about retraining and set up interviews with job counselors. Many of the steelworkers ended up as computer programmers. The less fortunate landed near-minimum-wage jobs at the Sherwin-Williams paint factory or the Jay's Potato Chips plant, or Brach's candy. Not even the most ambitious, though, made as much money as they'd earned pouring steel. As Obama listened to the frustrated workers pour out their stories, he tried to translate them into an “issue”—a project that would bring jobs to the South Side and prove to the local pastors that the DCP could deliver money to their neighborhoods. Augustine, Lloyd, and another DCP board member named Margaret Bagby helped him come up with one.

Barack Obama's very first followers were a trio of middle-aged women who sat on the DCP's board. Their backgrounds could not have been more different from Obama's—or more similar to the great majority of blacks who had grown up in the segregated America of the 1940s and '50s. Augustine was a native South Sider; Lloyd a Southerner, from Nashville; Bagby a country girl from a small Michigan town that was a remnant of the Underground Railroad. All three lived in Golden Gate, the neighborhood of aluminum-clad ranch houses alongside Altgeld, and all three were married to men with blue-collar jobs: Augustine's husband was a postal clerk, Lloyd's was a cop, Bagby's a UPS driver. Augustine, the youngest, was a cherubic woman who had lived several years in Altgeld during the early years of her marriage. But by the time Obama arrived to head the DCP, that marriage was breaking apart, and she was spending more and more time on community activism. That was one reason she became the group's president. Lloyd, thin and sardonic, was the mother of eleven children, several of them born before Obama. Bagby, a quiet, heavyset woman who had joined the DCP after seeing several steelworker neighbors lose their jobs, also had sons older than the kid organizer.

At one point, all the women asked themselves the same question: Why am I following this child? When Kellman had been their organizer, they dutifully obeyed his orders, figuring it was for the good of the neighborhood. With Obama, it was different. They wanted to do what Barack told them to do because Barack told them to do it. The DCP was responsible for its own funding, through church dues and grants, which meant going to foundation boards and asking for money.

“We've got to have funding,” Obama would tell the group in meetings at Holy Rosary, and then he'd tick off the names of organizations that might give them money—the Woods Charitable Trust, the Joyce Foundation, the Wieboldt Foundation—astonishing everyone with his knowledge of the bureaucracy and the research he'd done during the few spare hours he wasn't hauling his ass from meeting to interview to meeting to church service. Lloyd wondered if he ever slept.

“Barack, why don't you make the presentation?” Lloyd would ask him wearily before yet another plea for funds.

“Oh, no,” Obama would say. “This is your neighborhood. You feel this inside. You're going to have to go and talk to these people.”

That was a tenet of community organizing he'd learned from Kellman: You could lead people but you couldn't do the work for them. Obama would call downtown to set up the appointments, and then he'd drill the women there at Holy Rosary, telling them exactly what to say to those white board members who had millions of dollars to hand out. His favorite words of advice were “Stay focused. If everyone around you is acting the fool, screaming and hollering, you stay focused.” On the day of big presentations, he'd drive them to the meeting, all jammed into that rusty blue Honda they thought was the hooptiest car they'd ever seen.

And damn if they didn't get the money every time.

That was Obama's dual nature at work. He was black enough to fit in on the South Side but white enough to believe that if he walked into a room and asked people for money, they would give it to him. To women who'd always thought of their race as a limitation, Obama's attitude was a new way of looking at life.

Augustine became especially close to Obama—close enough to discuss her personal problems with him when he visited her house on DCP business. She thought he was the soberest, hardest-working young man she'd ever met. That $10,000 a year was blood money, because he was working eighty hours a week to earn it. You'd never see him in a pair of jeans, only college-boy chinos and little zip-up boots. You'd never even see him eat, he was so focused. On the way to meetings, Obama would stop his car at restaurants. While the women piled their plates with chicken and mashed potatoes, he ordered a spinach salad.

“Food weighs me down,” Obama explained. “It keeps me from thinking. Makes me sluggish.”

When he was forced to cater a meeting, he brought in sandwiches and chips from Subway. Not only does he have no taste for good food, Lloyd thought, he's cheap, too.

Augustine figured Obama was carrying 140 pounds on his six-foot-one frame. She was so worried about his eating that she invited him to her house for Thanksgiving.

“I'll be all right,” he assured her.

None of them knew anything about Obama's personal life because he never invited them to his apartment. Obama didn't live on the far South Side. He lived in Hyde Park, a few blocks from the University of Chicago, in a timeworn courtyard building with ill-fitting windows, chipped paint, and crooked venetian blinds. It was inexpensive, and it was in an academic ghetto, similar to the neighborhood he'd recently left in New York. Obama quickly discovered the Seminary Co-op Bookstore, an underground warren with sections devoted to such esoteric topics as “Critical Theory & Marxism” and “Christian Theology,” and paid $10 for a share, or membership. He lived as ascetically as a philosophy Ph.D. candidate, spending his meager free time reading serious books on history and politics. Kellman gave him a copy of
The Power Broker
, a thousand-page biography of urban planner Robert Moses; he considered it the best book ever written on how power-hungry politicians and greedy developers can destroy urban neighborhoods. After finishing
Parting the Waters
, Obama told Kellman, “That's my story.” But even Kellman became so concerned about Obama's bookishness and overwork that he urged his protégé to get a social life. He didn't want the young man to burn out.

Obama and Kellman met regularly at the McDonald's on 115th Street, across the street from the Sherwin-Williams plant. The more Kellman got to know his new hire, the more he understood why Obama sympathized with people whose backgrounds were so different from his own. Like the residents of Altgeld Gardens and Roseland, he was an outsider, too. Growing up as an American in Indonesia, and then as a black kid in Hawaii, without a mother or a father, he understood what it was like to be different from the surrounding society. Outsiders can take one of two paths: They can ease their dislocation by conforming, or they can rebel. By quitting his suit-and-tie job to become an organizer, Obama had rebelled. He had thrown in his lot with the outsiders. That was why he worked so well with people facing poverty and discrimination. The difference between Obama and the folks in Altgeld was that he could go back to the inside whenever he wanted. He had an Ivy League education. He had opportunities. Kellman was always expecting Obama to quit organizing for a better-paying career.

The Mayor's Office of Employment and Training, known as the MET, was a citywide network of storefronts that posted job listings on bulletin boards and counseled the out-of-work on résumé writing, interview skills, and training programs. Like every other city service (except the police department), it was out of reach to residents of Altgeld Gardens. The closest branch was on Ninety-fifth Street, in South Chicago. That was an hour-long ride on two buses, and it was in a neighborhood that many blacks considered hostile territory—the Tenth Ward, stronghold of Alderman Edward Vrdolyak, leader of the white bloc that was always trying to thwart Mayor Washington in the city council. Jobs, as Obama had learned from his interviews with the steelworkers, were the Calumet region's greatest need. But the Regional Employment Network, that $500,000 job training program, wasn't doing a damn thing for Altgeld. First of all, it was in the suburbs. Second, Altgeld's people had no education, no marketable skills. Some couldn't even read. When Yvonne Lloyd had worked as a census taker, she'd encountered four generations crammed into a single apartment, all of them illiterate. They needed entry-level jobs. So why not bring a MET office to Altgeld?

It was the Developing Communities Project's first brainstorm. Obama wrote a letter to Maria Cerda, the MET's director, and wangled a meeting in her city hall office. Cerda agreed to visit Altgeld. In preparation for her visit, the group rehearsed as furiously as a theater troupe preparing the debut of a new play. As president, it was Augustine's job to chair the gathering. Hold Ms. Cerda's feet to the fire, Obama drilled her. Get a commitment to bring a center to Altgeld. A “floor team” was trained to keep audience members focused on the topic. Obama was the stage manager, carrying around a clipboard with a schedule of the meeting's events. On the big night, they pulled sliding doors across the Our Lady of the Gardens sanctuary to form a conference room. It was packed. OLG was the hub of community life in the Gardens, and an appearance by a city official was a big event.

Cerda arrived with two bodyguards, which made Lloyd snicker. She's afraid we're going to eat her up, he thought. And when Cerda got up to speak, she delivered a lecture about her résumé and her job at city hall.