Kellman knew from his years in organizing that “people who were as young as” Barack—not yet twenty-four—sometimes “burn out very quickly” when they “for the first time in their life, encounter significant failure” as novice organizers. For that reason, Kellman wanted to understand why a Columbia graduate who had earned almost $20,000 at BI was applying for this trainee position and its advertised salary of $10,000. Kellman explained CCRC’s hope of staunching the Calumet region’s loss of steel industry jobs, and how church congregations were CCRC’s organizational base. He also made clear that for DCP’s Chicago parishes, he inescapably needed a black organizer. But Jerry had to know why this animated Barack.
“What he told me was that he wanted to make positive changes around economic equality,” Kellman recalled. Barack “was clearly an idealist” and “was very hungry to learn.” Indeed Obama “challenged me on whether we could teach him” more than he had experienced at NYPIRG. “ ‘How are you going to train me?’ and ‘What am I going to learn?’ ” were questions Jerry could answer convincingly given his organizing experience stretching back to IAF. Barack wondered too “how would he survive financially” on $10,000, and Kellman suggested Hyde Park as a place to live while making it clear that if Barack rose from his initial trainee status, his salary would go up as well. Jerry then offered Obama a job on the spot, which he accepted, and upon discovering that Barack did not own a car, which would be essential on the Far South Side, Kellman offered him an additional $1,000 to buy a car. A check would be in the mail as soon as Jerry returned to Chicago, and Barack agreed to make the drive to Chicago as soon as he acquired a car that would get him there. Beenu Mahmood was in Chicago, living in Hyde Park while working as a summer associate at the law firm of Sidley & Austin prior to his final year of law school, so Obama knew he had an initial place to stay.
Either that day or the next, Barack went to Brooklyn to see Genevieve at her Warren Street apartment. “He was very, very sure that Chicago would offer him the organizing experience that New York” had not, she recalled, but what she remembered most clearly was the question he posed to her: “Do you want to move to Chicago with me?” Given how their relationship had “devolved” over the previous two months, Genevieve was surprised, but “I was so sick of the withheldness that I never even hesitated with ‘No.’ ” Years later she would debate with herself whether Barack asked only because he was certain she would decline, or whether he still felt a deep attachment to her.
Only in retrospect would she come to believe that “all the tension he was feeling that May and June had very little to do with me” as opposed to Barack’s need to find a purpose in his life. Now he was headed to a predominantly African American working environment, even though, in her view, “he had zero experience of black culture.” Genevieve had long recognized and teased him about “the grandness of his vision,” even though “it wasn’t at all an articulated vision.” But now Barack was undertaking the most consequential decision of his still young life, leaving a city to which he repeatedly had returned following his college graduation two years earlier for a new metropolis he had glimpsed only as a young child for whom the Field Museum’s shrunken heads were Chicago’s most memorable attraction.
By July 16 Barack was looking to buy an affordable used car, and within a week, he acquired an “old, beat up” blue Honda Civic for the grand sum of $800, $200 less than what Kellman had sent him. Genevieve recorded in her journal “the thought of being alone again and somehow defenseless once Barack’s gone.” He had a good-bye lunch with Andy Roth on the Upper East Side, and early on Friday afternoon, July 26, 1985, Barack pulled away from 350 West 48th Street with all of his worldly possessions in his “raggedy” Honda.
“My radio/cassette sprang to life with a slight touch of the antenna, just as I was about to enter the West Side Highway,” he wrote some days later. “I tuned into the jazz station and drove over the George Washington Bridge, straining my neck to catch a last glimpse of the Manhattan skyline. It was overcast.” Once across the soaring span, he bore right when the expressway forked, with the New Jersey Turnpike bending south and Interstate 80 heading west as the urban clutter of Hackensack and Paterson gave way to the rural countryside of northwest New Jersey before the road descended to the Delaware Water Gap and the historic river that marked the Pennsylvania state line. It was a road he had never traveled, and as Pennsylvania passed by with nary a single city to be seen, all Barack would remember of the transit was “hazy green.”
In Boerum Hill, Genevieve mourned the departure of a man she would never see again, “sitting in a chair weeping about the fact that he had left.” She wrote in her journal, “So. Alone again … Barack’s leaving—now being goneness.” A chapter in both of their lives had closed, and for Barack a brand-new one was about to open.60
“Around 9:00PM, too tired to drive further,” Barack turned off of I-80 at the last exit before the Ohio state line. Leaving the interstate, a local highway afforded an easy right turn onto South Hermitage Road. A Holiday Inn was brightly visible, but so was a sign advertising a budget motel a few hundred yards farther north, on the west side of the road across from the Tam O’Shanter Golf Course. Less than eight weeks earlier a tornado, rare in the Shenango Valley, had leveled many surrounding trees, but the funnel cloud had inflicted only incidental damage on the Fairway Inn.
“I rang the bell at a small, ill-lit lobby, and out came a tall, gangly man with a checkered shirt, plaid jacket and golf hat. He looked like an overgrown leprechaun…. He pulled out a slip of paper and ran off the nightly rates in rapid fire. I told him I would take the cheapest room and gave him my driver’s license,” which featured Barack’s full name. The owner “was struck by my name”—“Hussein …isn’t that some bad guy there in the Middle East?”—“and asked me what I did for a living. I explained my new job, and he went into a ten-minute monologue.”
Ten-minute monologues were not unusual for Bob Elia, but the one he delivered that evening to Barack Hussein Obama would replay itself again and again in Obama’s mind in the years to come. Barack recounted Bob’s monologue in a letter to Genevieve two weeks later, and he would allude to it three years later in a magazine essay. He would also transmogrify Elia into a fictional black security guard in his first book, and he would recount Elia’s monologue virtually word for word almost half a dozen times to diverse audiences more than twenty years later.
Many individuals who come to believe that their lives stand for more—sometimes much more—than the sum of their own personal experiences retrospectively identify one signal event, one single conversation, as representing the moment when they first knew that they could contribute to the world something more eternal than their own individual fate. Such experiences occur in places sacred, historic, and profane: the kitchen of a parsonage at 309 South Jackson Street in a southern capital city on a January night, the front yard of Coffin Point Plantation on St. Helena Island on a balmy New Year’s Eve, or the lobby of a budget motel at 2810 South Hermitage Road in Hermitage, Pennsylvania, on a warm July evening.
A minister of the gospel might understandably believe he was communicating with a higher being—“He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone. No never alone. No never alone.” Someone less religious might hear a voice from history’s recent past, offering fortitude against the national security state. But when Barack Obama’s foundational experience occurred, the voice he was hearing was indisputably that of fifty-two-year-old, six-foot-two-inch Bob Elia.
Bob grew up in nearby Farrell, Pennsylvania, where most of the racially diverse population drew its paychecks at Sharon Steel’s Roemer Works. Bob had a number of black friends across the early decades of his life. By 1985 the local Sharon Herald had for several years been publishing the syndicated columns of conservative black economists Thomas Sowell and Walter E. Williams, and Bob had taken a hankering to both men’s writings, regularly clipping and saving Williams’s essays. Bob often cited their analyses when telling acquaintances how they might better themselves, and operating a motel gave Bob a never-ending population of new guests to whom he