That response infuriated the crowd, and shouts of “No” drowned him out. Obama had told Callie and her colleague Vangie Irving, “Try not to let the director hog the microphone,” but Smith resumed his answer—“We’ve started in Altgeld and we’re going from apartment to apartment to determine the severity of the asbestos.” Callie, standing to Smith’s left, reached her right hand to take the microphone from Smith, who parried her with his left hand—“We will install an abatement plan that you’ll be—excuse me, excuse me” and sought to retain the mike as the crowd began chanting, “Take it away, right away.”
Then Vangie Irving reached in, grasped it, and handed it to Callie. As she did so, Smith stood up and slowly walked out. The uproar grew, an older man in the crowd collapsed, and the meeting was over. Outside, Smith had his driver call for an ambulance as some residents chanted, “No more rent.” Smith told reporters, “I’m perfectly willing to meet with them, but I can’t under these circumstances.” Tuesday’s Sun-Times reported Smith saying “that ‘people who do not live in Altgeld’ were behind the meeting.”
As Smith’s black Ford LTD pulled away, Obama called his volunteers together and told Callie that he had messed up and should have coached her on how to deal with Smith and the microphone. Dan Lee told Barack not to blame himself, that they had prepared for every possibility except Smith physically commandeering the mike. Adrienne Jackson believed the crowd had felt empowered by what had happened, that “they had stood up to somebody,” and she viewed the evening “as a success.” The 10:00 P.M. newscasts offered a different verdict on the meeting. WBBM’s coverage said the residents had kept Smith from speaking; WMAQ’s Carol Marin said the moderators had not allowed Smith to use the microphone, and so “Smith walked out.”
Barack was more disconsolate than he should have been, and when he got back to his Hyde Park apartment, he called Johnnie Owens, who had turned down Barack’s invitation to attend. “He was certainly very clearly upset over what had happened,” Owens recalled. “He sounded angry at himself … and felt there was more that he could have done to prepare the leadership and sort of anticipate the problems that occurred.” To everyone else, the Altgeld meeting was a blip in the daily news cycle, and coverage of CHA’s testing and abatement work—the asbestos was far worse at Ida B. Wells than at Altgeld—continued throughout the summer as CHA sought federal funding to help cover the costs.21
In the midst of the asbestos campaign, Obama bought his airplane ticket to Los Angeles for the IAF training in mid-July, with the Chicago archdiocese’s CHD staff reimbursing its $196 cost. He also sent a late May postcard to Phil Boerner, writing, “Work continues to be rough, but I’m learning at a steady clip and am starting to see some results. We were on the tube and made the papers this week” and “I took a busload of public housing tenants downtown to protest living conditions. Still following up on this.” A few days later, he sent a lengthier greeting card to Genevieve, whose birthday was on June 7:
The pace of my life has quickened these past few months; feel like I’ve broken through the lengthy “Buddhist” phase—acting more forcefully, letting myself make mistakes. I’ve stopped eating peanuts, I’m working like a bitch, still writing when I have the time.
Made some good new friends; still miss my old ones. And trying to develop a new kind of discipline in myself—not the stiff martial discipline I’d let myself get locked into, but more the discipline to decide what feels right, to dig deep, take risks and make sure that I’m enjoying myself. A good time, a hungry time, and I give much credit to you for it (your pokes and prods had a subtle but sure effect).
Barack closed by asking, “Still going to stop teaching next year?” and offering “Regards to Sohale, the family, etc. Love—Barack.”
A week or so after the Altgeld meeting, Barack went to dinner with Asif Agha, his girlfriend Tammy Hamlish, an anthropology graduate student, and a mutual friend and classmate whom they wanted to introduce to Barack. Almost a year had passed since twenty-four-year-old Barack had last enjoyed any “female companionship,” as he put it in a note three months earlier to Andy Roth. But Asif and Tammy’s initiative would have momentous consequences, almost as great as Barack’s decision a year earlier to leave New York and find an entirely new life in Chicago.22
Sheila Miyoshi Jager was two years younger than Barack and a 1984 graduate of Bennington College in Vermont. She had attended two years of middle school in France and had spent 1984–85 in Paris, writing a thesis in French on Claude Lévi-Strauss toward an M.A. from Middlebury College. Lévi-Strauss suggested she pursue anthropology and recommended she study Korea, a country he had just visited, and he recommended her highly to his friend Marshall Sahlins, a well-known anthropologist at the University of Chicago. In September 1985 Sheila arrived there to begin the doctoral program in anthropology.
Sheila grew up in Northern California, where her father, Bernd, a polymath psychologist whose Ph.D. dissertation at Duquesne University had dealt with Freudian psychoanalysis, worked as a clinical psychologist at two state hospitals and taught psychology at California State University’s Sonoma County campus. Born in Groningen, the Netherlands, in 1931, Bernd was not yet nine when the Nazis occupied Holland in May 1940. Three years later he watched “hundreds of our Jewish neighbors being herded like cattle to the train station” in the middle of the night, and he would always “vividly remember the German soldiers as they loudly goose-stepped” through town. Bernd’s father, Hendrik, played a major role in an underground network that sheltered dozens of Jewish children from the Nazis. One young girl, Greetje de Haas, lived with Hendrik, his wife Geesje, and their two sons for three years. The Jagers’ courageous involvement was posthumously recognized when Israel’s Yad Vashem honored them with inclusion on the Wall of Honor in the Garden of the Righteous in Jerusalem.
After World War II, Bernd studied at the Royal Institute for Tropical Agriculture outside Amsterdam before spending two years working under Albert Schweitzer at Lambaréné, in what was then French Equatorial Africa. He fell in love with an African woman whom he sought to marry, but that came to naught. From there Bernd came to the U.S., and during a year’s study at Berea College in Kentucky, he met and married Shinko Sakata, a Japanese woman six years his junior. Together they moved to Groningen, where Bernd earned an M.A. before they returned to the U.S., eventually settling into a handsomely situated three-bedroom home in Santa Rosa, ten miles north of Cal State’s Rohnert Park campus. Five years after Sheila’s birth, a younger brother named David joined the family, and in time Shinko Jager became a well-known Sonoma County potter. Bernd’s closest friend, Michael Dees, who also worked at one of the hospitals, witnessed all of Sheila’s childhood. “I’ve known her since she was one,” he recounted years later. Bernd and Shinko “had strict parameters with her,” he recalled, and “did a very good job raising Sheila.” Mike would remain close to her even half a century later: “She’s like a daughter to me.”
Barack quickly became deeply taken with the bright, beautiful, and intense half-Dutch, half-Japanese Sheila. She wore her dark hair in a short pageboy-style cut, and as Barack would later write, she had “specks of green in her eyes.” Three or four times in June and early July, they went on double dates with Asif and Tammy. Hanging out with a trio of anthropologists was no problem for the son of Ann Dunham, Asif recalled, because Barack “knew the idiom, he knew the concerns, and he was right at home.” Asif encouraged Barack’s interest in Sheila, joshingly telling him from recent experience that asking “Can I kiss you now?” was a surefire way to pose the question. As Asif remembered it, Barack soon let him know it had worked. Barack and Sheila—“two mixed-race kids,” she would later say—were together almost every day in the two or three weeks