Columbia’s African American students were also acutely aware that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences included only four black professors. By far the most visible was the handsome, bow-tie-wearing Charles V. Hamilton, best known as the coauthor of Stokely Carmichael’s 1967 book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. Hamilton had arrived at Columbia in 1969, was named to a chaired professorship two years later, and in 1982 was the recipient of the university’s award for excellence in undergraduate teaching. “Everyone knew who Hamilton was,” one 1983 political science major recalled. In addition, as one younger colleague said, “Hamilton was always approachable. The hallway outside his office at the southwest end of the SIPA building was often filled with students.”
But, thirty years later, when asked for the first time whether one particular 1983 African American poli sci major had ever taken one of his courses or sought his counsel, Hamilton said, “I didn’t know him at all.” Black history professor Hollis R. Lynch also has no recollection of Obama, nor does the entire roster of senior political science faculty. Even within Obama’s particular area of concentration, international relations, neither Warner Schilling, Roger Hilsman, Zbigniew Brzezinski, nor John G. Ruggie remembers him. “Never laid eyes on him,” Ruggie said. Indeed, apart from young Michael Baron, “nobody really knew him,” one thirty-year veteran of the department reported. Obama would earn an A on the senior paper he wrote for Baron. It analyzed the decision-making during the arms-reductions negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union. But Baron would discard the paper years before the world beyond Morningside Heights would yearn to read it.40
One week before the end of classes, Obama wrote another long letter to Alex McNear, who had taken leave from Oxy for spring term and was working in Pasadena. Citing “the method of negation” and “comparing what is to what might be,” Barack for a second time referred to something he had said in an earlier letter. Then he referenced their time in L.A. four months earlier: “a young black man” and “a young white woman” “that night in Wahid’s apartment in a timeless reddened room.” He also said his job prospect letters had not produced any firm leads, and that “I feel like forgetting the whole enterprise and taking you with me to Bali or Hawaii to live.” McNear years later recalled no actual invitation, and then Barack’s letter descended into vague declarations. “I am often cruel, and my mind will flash on the screen scenes of violence or petty malevolence or betrayal on my part.” McNear had no idea what he was referencing, and then Barack asked, “am I a blathering chump to you right now, or do you glean some sense from this mess?”
Barack continued on similarly, invoking “the necessary illusion that my struggles are the struggles of the first man, the river is the original river … What else? I enjoy my body, even when it frightens or disgusts me … I recall you saying that you still believe the mind is stronger than the body. A dangerous distinction, Alex, a vestige of western thought.” Rereading that passage years later, McNear felt it was “condescending.” Finally leaving his “river” for firmer ground, Barack wrote that it “looks like I will take a two month vacation to Indonesia and Hawaii next month. Will be stopping in L.A. either on the way over or back, if I come back. Will get in touch before I leave … Love, Barack.”
Photos from sometime around Columbia’s May 17 commencement show that Stan and Madelyn Dunham made the long trip from Honolulu to New York City to see their grandson, although Barack years later explained that “I actually didn’t go to my own graduation ceremony” since “my parents couldn’t come.” Soon after, Barack flew from New York to Los Angeles, where he stayed for several days with Alex McNear in her apartment. “We had this kind of picnic lunch on the floor of my living room,” Alex recalled. Even with Barack’s invocation of “black man” and “white woman” in his letter, blackness and racial identity “really was not something that he talked about a lot,” she remembered. “It barely ever came up.” Reflecting on that visit years later, “I felt he was less engaged” than he had been four months earlier. She thought there was “an enigmatic quality” to Obama, and “most of this relationship really revolved around these letters,” irrespective of their clarity.
Obama then flew to Singapore, where he spent five days with Hasan Chandoo and his family, a visit that coincided with Asad Jumabhoy’s appearance in the championship polo match of the Southeast Asian Games. In a letter to Alex, Barack wrote that Hasan “seemed fine, if more subdued than you remember him.” Barack found Singapore “an incongruous place … slick and modern and ordered, one vast supermarket surrounded by ocean and forest and the poverty of ages. Mostly peopled with businessmen from the states, Japan, Hong Kong as well as various family elites of Southeast Asia.” Hasan, Asad, and Barack went to a discotheque or two, but Barack wrote Alex that he remained largely silent when Hasan talked about the choices he was facing, “primarily to leave a space for our friendship should he move into the business world permanently.”
From Singapore, Barack flew to Indonesia and stayed at his mother’s comfortable Ford Foundation home in South Jakarta. Anthropologist friends of Ann’s often stayed there too, and among the guests that summer was a Rutgers University graduate student, Tim Jessup. Ann’s work at Ford had kept her busy throughout 1982 and into 1983. She had written a brief paper entitled “Civil Rights of Working Indonesian Women” and delivered a lecture entitled “The Effects of Industrialization on Women Workers in Indonesia” to the Indonesian Society of Development. In mid-May, she had spent four days in Kenya, of all places, less than six months after her first husband’s death, but Ann never spoke about this trip to friends.
When she wrote a long priorities analysis for Ford’s continued work in Indonesia, Ann recommended that they “focus on a relatively new program area, women and employment,” and particularly “the role of poor women as workers and income-earners.” The ideal grantee would be “a non-governmental social action group founded by women for women,” but she rued “the general weakness and lack of leadership within the women’s movement in Indonesia.” As Alice Dewey and a colleague wrote years later about Ann, “Java”—Indonesia’s principal island—“was as much her home”—if not far more—“as Honolulu.”
In his letter to Alex, Barack wrote that “my mother and sister are doing well,” but with Ann “the struggling seems out of her, and the colonial residue of her life style—the servants, the shopping at the American supermarket, the office politics of the international agencies—throw up continual contradictions to the professed aims of her work.” Barack was writing not from Jakarta but “from a screened porch somewhere on the northwest tip of Java.” He confessed that “I can’t speak the language” and that Indonesians treated him “with a mixture of puzzlement, deference and scorn because I’m American, my money and my plane ticket back to the U.S. overriding my blackness,” as Obama was now old enough to perceive how many Indonesians loathed his skin color. But he closed by saying, “I feel good, engaged, the mystery of reality, the reality of mystery filling me up.”
From that same porch, sitting “in my sarong, sipping strong coffee and drawing on a clove cigarette, watching the heavy dusk close over the paddy terraces of Java,” Obama also wrote a postcard to Phil Boerner. “Very kick back, so far away from the madness. I’m halfway through my vacation, but still feel the tug of that tense existence…. Right now, my plans are uncertain; most probably I will go back” to New York City “after a month or two in Hawaii.” In early July, he and apparently also his almost thirteen-year-old sister Maya flew from Jakarta to Honolulu. Only then did he actually mail his letter to Alex, writing on the back of the envelope that “with the postal system in Indonesia we’d be dead and gone before it arrived.”41