Barack had also heard from Greg Orme in Oregon, who had a new car, a television, and a hot tub. “I must admit large dollops of envy for both groups, my American friends consuming their life in the comfortable mainstream, foreign friends in the international business world. Caught without a class, a structure, or tradition to support me, in a sense the choice to take a different path is made for me. The only way to assuage my feelings of isolation are to absorb all the traditions, classes, make them mine, me theirs. Taken separately, they’re unacceptable and untenable.”
Obama’s statement that he felt isolated was unsurprising given his life over the previous twelve months, nor were his remarks about Hasan and Greg. He did not respond to what Alex had written to him about herself, “since I spent so much of my mental energy with you and now need to refuel” and return to Butler Library. “I trust you know that I miss you, that my concern for you is as wide as the air, my confidence in you as deep as the sea, my love rich and plentiful. Please comfort me with another letter when you get a chance. My regards to everyone. Love, Barack.”
A postscript said he was enclosing a New York Times book review from two weeks earlier of Becoming a Heroine by Rachel Brownstein, which he thought would interest her, as well as an excerpt from W. B. Yeats’s 1928 poem The Tower about “a woman won or lost.” He asked Alex, “Who is the ‘woman’ for you?”29
Back in Butler Library, Barack studied for Gerald Feinberg’s first physics exam on October 12. Students had to answer two out of three questions: “(1) Discuss the present atomic theory of the structure of ordinary matter … (2) Describe the photon theory of light … (3) Discuss how some of the estimates of the number of various subatomic particles … are obtained. Your discussion need not be precise on numbers….”
In early November, Columbia’s Coalition for a Free South Africa hosted the prominent white anti-apartheid activist Donald Woods, and Obama may have been among the large crowd. Two weeks later Columbia’s student newspaper published another front-page article reporting how “this is not an easy place to go through as a minority student.” One black senior complained that white students presume the admissions standards for black undergraduates were lower and that “we can’t do the work”; another commented that Columbia’s core curriculum ignored African Americans and “doesn’t prepare you for the real world.”
Alex McNear wrote to Barack in mid-November, and he quickly replied. “You speak with force, Alex, calm and confident, and I’m frankly amazed, not by the brimming talent, not by the thoughts in themselves but by the sureness of the words.” Admitting that “mixed in with those feelings are bits and pieces of envy, uncertainty, some intimidation,” he confessed that “the prejudiced, frightened male makes its atavistic appearance.” Writing cryptically about what he termed “the habits and grooves of separate existence,” he declared that “we will talk long and deep, Alex, and see what we can make of all this.”
Rereading his letter a quarter century later, McNear noted Obama’s “formalism,” and wondered “were mine very formal” as well? “I just wonder where the tone came from.” Barack also wrote, “I think you may have caught me being a fool in my last letter,” and he referred to a conversation they had had outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “When we spoke in front of the Met, I insisted that I made choices, that I wasn’t kind out of necessity, because it can certainly be argued that I’m compelled by my past to be that way, that no choice is involved … and my insistence arises from my fear of emasculation, that if I can’t be cruel any longer, then I must not be a man.” Citing “the past of my ancestors,” Obama wrote, “I see that in a real sense my gravestone is already planted, the feeble eulogic etchings overgrown with moss, blurred and forgotten.”
Barack went on that “this cordoning off of individuals into compartments is something I fight every day,” and said that Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway expressed his point better than he could. After some musings about birth and death, Barack asserted that “the betrayal lies in separation,” that “we feel betrayed by this act of separation,” and that “because the initial act of separation has traditionally been from the mother, men’s retaliation is indeed towards women.”
Alex understood that “he’s clearly enjoying writing: writing it out, toying it out, figuring it out.” Barack continued that “some choose to escape the pain by limiting their interaction with the world. They abstract themselves … which is perhaps the most tolerable option.” He quoted Friedrich Nietzsche’s statement that “in all desire to know there is a drop of cruelty” before acknowledging that “I’m running out of steam and the thoughts are becoming blurred.” Yet he had two points for subsequent discussion: one, “I see that I have been made a man, and physically, in life, I choose to accept that contingency.” Second, “there is a reason why western man has been able to subjugate women and the dark races, Alex; the ideology they present is backed by a very real power. We will speak of this too.”
Rereading that passage, McNear observed how “very professorial” Obama sounded. Barack then added, “I’ve never tried to put down so comprehensively my views. They come out muddled and incomplete, and I wish I could explain more fully.” To that, Alex would wonder “maybe … that was as close as he could get to intimacy.”
Finally Obama concluded by returning to the real world a month hence, after Columbia’s exams ended. “I arrive in L.A. on December 23rd, and expect to be at Wahid’s apartment that evening. I’ll call you upon arrival … see you then. Love, Barack.”30
Three or four days after Barack mailed that letter to Alex, Sohale answered their phone on East 94th Street and an unfamiliar, foreign-sounding woman asked for Barack. It was Kezia Obama’s sister Silpa Obonyo, known throughout the family as Aunt Jane, a Nairobi telephone operator able to make international calls. She had just phoned Auma Obama, now a twenty-two-year-old student in Germany and no longer using “Rita,” and her reason for calling Barack was the same as for dialing Heidelberg: Barack Obama Sr. was dead at age forty-eight.
He had died in the early-morning hours of Wednesday, November 24, when the vehicle he was driving had gone off Elgon Road and struck a large tree stump. Drunken driving had indeed finally killed him. “The body had to be wedged out of the car,” the Nairobi Times reported. The crash site was in Upper Hill, the Nairobi neighborhood where Obama had been living with twenty-two-year-old Jael Atieno, who six months earlier had given birth to George Hussein Obama.
Barack later wrote, “I felt no pain, only the vague sense of an opportunity lost,” and he called his mother in Jakarta, then his uncle Omar Onyango in Massachusetts. A year earlier Barack and his father had corresponded about his visiting Kenya to meet his relatives there once he graduated from Columbia, but now that idea was on hold.
The Nairobi paper said Obama Sr. “leaves four wives and several children,” and the eleven years that had passed since he last saw his second-eldest son in Honolulu in 1971 had been no happier than the seven that had preceded it. Soon after Obama returned to Nairobi in early 1972, Ruth divorced him, but she did not take her two sons and actually leave him until later that year after Obama put a knife to her neck and struck the youngest boy, David Opiyo. Unemployed and still drinking heavily, Obama was able to secure a job offer from the World Bank for a post in the Ivory Coast, but when his sister Zeituni took him to the Nairobi airport, government officials turned him away and canceled his passport. “He left the airport crying, angry, and frustrated,” Zeituni recalled. Some months later, in mid-1973, yet another drunken car crash left him with two badly broken legs and a shattered kneecap. Obama remained hospitalized for six months, sometimes “in real pain,” Zeituni remembered. His teenage daughter Auma was repeatedly “sent home from school” due to unpaid fees and bounced checks. She and her older brother Roy, alone without a mother or stepmother after Ruth left with Mark and David, relied upon Zeituni for their survival. She “regularly brought us something to eat,” Auma remembered.
Not long after Obama left the hospital, his old Honolulu friend Andy “Pake” Zane and his partner Jane visited Nairobi and were astonished at Obama’s condition. “He was a broken spirit,” just “a shell” of the man Zane and Neil