Asif Agha. Eunhee Kim Yi. Arjun Guneratne. Their names alone, just like Sheila Miyoshi Jager, highlighted their international and ethnic diversity. Tania Forte was Egyptian, Jewish, and had grown up in France. Chin See Ming was born and raised in Malaysia before graduating with honors from Rice University in Houston. It was a “very, very cosmopolitan” group, Ming recalled, and when Sheila one day introduced Ming to Barack, I “just assumed he was a graduate student.”
For Sheila and her classmates, the first two years of the graduate anthropology program were “like boot camp,” Ming explained. Everyone had to take a double-credit introductory course called Sociocultural Systems, taught by Marshall Sahlins, a prominent anthropologist but “not a warm and cuddly person” and indeed “a very, very scary man” to some. Sheila coped far better with Sahlins than most of her classmates, and in her dissertation she wrote that “my greatest intellectual debt” was to Sahlins. “There was a very strong esprit de corps among the grad students” and “people worked very hard,” Ming recalled. “You were never off,” and everyone knew that student attrition would reach 50 percent.
Asif knew Sheila as “a very wonderful, wonderful person,” someone who was “passionate” about her work as well as her relationship with Barack. One evening the three of them accompanied Asif’s girlfriend Tammy Hamlish to a talk that her aunt Florence Hamlish Levinsohn, an outspoken local writer, was giving. Three years earlier Levinsohn had published a “patchy, parochial, frankly admiring” biography of her university classmate Harold Washington just after his election as mayor. Tammy had wanted Asif to meet Aunt Florence, but the evening quickly devolved into an unmitigated disaster. Asif remembered that he “started giggling at what the lady was saying, and Barry and I made eye contact, and that was fatal, because then for the next ten minutes we kept uncontrollably giggling and couldn’t control it and almost falling off our chairs because what the lady was saying was just absurd. And neither of us could control it, and because we were sitting next to each other and kept making eye contact, we’re triggering each other over and over and over. Tammy meanwhile is turning red,” and Levinsohn took note of their behavior too. She “was most upset” and “Tammy was mortified,” Asif recalled.
Apart from that embarrassing scene, Barack and Sheila were familiar faces at anthropology graduate students’ occasional parties. Sheila Quinlan, a Reed College graduate who was a year ahead of Sheila, remembered how “everyone thought they were a very sincere couple.” Barack was “quiet,” “friendly,” and “a sweet boy.” Indeed, as Chin See Ming put it, Barack “fit into the scene,” just as he likewise had learned to do in Roseland and even down in the Gardens. Jerry Kellman watched as Obama comfortably embraced his dual lives. “He found a way to be part of the black community and live beyond the black community,” Kellman explained. “He discovered he could live in both worlds.”35
But in December 1986, and for almost two years thereafter, the looming and overarching question was whether Barack Obama could live in both worlds with Sheila Miyoshi Jager as his wife. Five months earlier, before asking Sheila to live with him, he had inquisitively questioned Arnie Graf about the long-term dynamics of interracial marriage and raising half-black, half-white children. And although most passersby and even most anthropology students would not see them in such a way, Sheila knew that “Barack is as much white as I am.” With her half-Japanese ancestry paralleling his half-Kenyan, she and Barack were equally white—one half apiece.
“Marriage was THE vital issue between us and we talked about it all the time,” Sheila explained more than two decades later. Barack “kept work matters and his private life separate,” so their marriage conversations, while known to Asif, were not something Kellman, Kruglik, Tom Kaminski, or Cathy Askew ever heard about from someone so “very private” as Obama. In their time alone together, Sheila saw someone whom no one in DCP ever did, someone with a “deep seated need to be loved and admired.” In their evenings at the spacious apartment on South Harper, Barack read literature, not history, while Sheila had more than enough course readings to occupy her time. And, of course, there was another dimension as well. Barack “is a very sexual/sensual person, and sex was a big part of our relationship,” Sheila later acknowledged.
Everything had come together fast. In “the winter of ’86, when we visited my parents, he asked me to marry him,” Sheila recounted. Mike Dees, her father’s closest friend and Sheila’s virtual uncle, had been told by Bernd in advance that Barack was a prospective son-in-law. “He and Sheila … were going to get married,” Dees explained. “They were coming out, they wanted to get married, and so they called me to come up and look the guy over and see what I think.”
One day right after Christmas Mike drove up to Santa Rosa, and “I ended up with Barack for an afternoon,” he recalled. “We just visited.” Barack was clearly a “very bright guy,” and, complexion aside, came across like “a white, middle-class kid.” Then, after dinner, Bernd and Mike had “a big political thing with Barack” while Sheila and her mother Shinko were occupied elsewhere. The two older men and Barack found themselves on “completely opposite sides of the fence,” Mike explained, because “we’re both conservative Republicans.” Barack “kind of thought he was going to lecture to us” about politics and ideology, “and we kind of shot him down.” It got “really heated” and “went on for quite a while.” Barack seemed “very taken aback by it,” Mike recalled. “Barack kind of thought he was going to sit down and get anointed. He’s very self-centered, and he ended up getting beat up.”
Although Barack “didn’t do very well,” to Mike “it was just a political argument. I think to the father and Barack it was more than that,” indeed, much more. “For Barack it was a big deal, for Bernd it was a big deal,” because Barack “was going to be the chosen one that night, and it didn’t work out” that way. It was readily apparent that the older man was sitting in judgment on the younger, perhaps not so differently from the time twenty-five years earlier when Stan Dunham had first met Barack Obama Sr. But here the verdict was negative, not positive. “I don’t know whether his color entered into the picture or not,” Dees said about Bernd’s attitude toward Barack.
By the end of the evening, and again the next morning, Bernd made his view of Barack and his marriage proposal crystal clear. “Bernd was against it,” because he felt that Barack was unworthy of his daughter’s hand. Sheila remembers that “my father was concerned over his ‘lack of prospects’ and wondered whether, as a community organizer, he could even support me, something that deeply offended Barack. My mom liked Barack a lot, but simply said I was too young” to get married. “I went along with their judgment, basically saying ‘Not yet,’ ” she recalled. The unsettling holiday visit concluded, and “they ended up going back without getting married,” Mike Dees affirmed.
Barack and Sheila would revisit that decision again and again over the twenty months that lay ahead.36
During the first week of January 1987, Gamaliel held a three-day retreat for its seventeen organizers, plus Ken Rolling from Woods, at a Holiday Inn in south suburban Matteson. More important, Obama was now meeting for at least an hour a week, one on one, with Greg Galluzzo to talk about his Developing Communities Project work. Greg’s