DCP’s work in West Pullman had attracted some new members, including Loretta’s friend Rosa Thomas and a young housewife, Carolyn Wortham, but Barack’s grand plans for a half-million-dollar-a-year CEN depended on support from Emil Jones and the Illinois state legislature, which would be struggling with the state budget through June. Barack organized a lobbying trip to Springfield and took some of DCP’s most devoted members—Dan Lee, Cathy Askew, and Ernie Powell, Loretta and her friend Rosa Thomas, several other ladies, Ellis Jordan, as well as Loretta’s young daughter and both of Cathy’s. Emil Jones was a gracious host, posing with the whole group for a photo in his office. Dan Lee’s dark jacket and white pocket square matched his mod eyeglass frames all too well, Loretta looked lovely in a stylish white dress, and Ernie Powell personified strong workingman dignity with a well-knotted tie below one of Illinois’s more impressive mustaches. Barack wore a blue blazer, a white shirt, and no tie, but he closed his eyes when the camera clicked. Barack’s dream of obtaining a $500,000 state appropriation remained just that, although Jones arranged for the Illinois State Board of Education to give DCP a $25,000 planning grant that gave Barack enough to get a semblance of CEN started in early 1988.51
Back in Chicago, Obama continued his almost weekly discussions with Greg Galluzzo, who told numerous organizing colleagues that Barack was “really special.” But even though Greg spent more time with him than any other person in Barack’s workday world, he knew almost nothing of Barack’s home life, and he met Sheila Jager only once in passing.
The young couple’s first nine months of living together had melded two intensely busy lives into an increasingly cloistered relationship where Sheila saw almost no one from Barack’s day job, and Asif was their only regular contact in Hyde Park’s graduate student community. Barack’s heavy smoking was a regular topic of comment within DCP, and Reformation Lutheran pastor Tyrone Partee nicknamed him “Smokestack.” Sheila said that at home, “he actually introduced me to smoking, so we smoked like chimneys together.” She wanted a cat, and after Barack relented, “Max” joined their household and became a less-than-fully-welcome presence in Obama’s life. “He drove Barack crazy because the cat would always pee” in their one large houseplant.
Sheila recalls the early months of 1987 as a time when she witnessed a profound self-transformation in Barack. “He was actually quite ordinary when I met him, although I always felt there was something quite special about him even during our earliest months, but he became someone quite extraordinary … and so very ambitious, and this happened over the course of a few months. I remember very clearly when this transformation happened, and I remember very specifically that by 1987, about a year into our relationship, he already had his sights on becoming president.”
This change in Barack encompassed two interwoven themes: a belief that he had a “calling,” coupled with a heightened awareness that to pursue it he had to fully identify as African American. The “ ‘calling’ had more to do with developing a sense of purpose in the world,” Sheila later explained, and even two years earlier, Genevieve Cook had sensed an incipient presence of the same thing. She remembered thinking that “all along he had some notion of testing his own mettle and potential for greatness, and that it was as much about that personal journey as it was finding the best way to effect the maximum positive social change. Those two aspirations, the personal and the heroic,” were “melded from very early on.” Yet by early summer 1987, Barack’s understanding of his “calling” was as “something he felt he really had no control over; it was his destiny,” Sheila explained. “He always said this was destiny.”
By then, Barack had gotten to know Al Raby and John McKnight, whose political roots lay in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, and he had a relationship with Jeremiah Wright, whose theology sprang from that same soil. Barack had also developed an acquaintance with Emil Jones, a savvy politician, and he had witnessed at close range the charm and aura Harold Washington possessed even in a nondescript storefront. But as Sheila experienced and reflected upon what occurred, she realized the stimulus for Barack’s transformation lay not in one or another precinct of black Chicago, but in the disparaging evaluation he had received from her father back at Christmas. “After that visit, and over the course of spring ’87, he changed—brooding, quiet, distant—and it was only then, as I recall, that he began to talk about going into politics and race became a big issue between us.” Once “we got back from California,” Barack “became very introspective and quiet,” Sheila recalled. “I remember very specifically that it was then he began to talk about entering politics and his presidential ambitions and conflicts about our worlds being too far apart.”
Meanwhile, “the marriage discussion dragged on and on,” but it was affected by what Sheila describes as Barack’s “torment over this central issue of his life,” the question of his own “race and identity.” The “resolution of his ‘black’ identity was directly linked to his decision to pursue a political career,” and to the crystallization of the “drive and desire to become the most powerful person in the world.”
Eight years later, Obama would say that through organizing “I think I really grew into myself in terms of my identity,” and that his community work “represented the best of my legacy as an African American.” It had allowed him to feel that his “own life would be vindicated in some fashion,” and his immersion in black Chicago gave him “a sense of self-understanding and empowerment and connection.” Obama’s daily experiences on the Far South Side had reshaped him. “I came home in Chicago. I began to see my identity and my individual struggles were one with the struggles that folks face in Chicago. My identity problems began to mesh once I started working on behalf of something larger than myself.” He also explained that organizing had “rooted me in a specific community of African Americans whose values and stories I soaked up and found an affinity with.” And most specifically, “by the second year,” he told one interviewer, “I just really felt deeply connected to those people that I was working with.”
Sheila was convinced that “something fundamentally changed” inside Barack during the first half of 1987 that had transformed him into a “powerfully ambitious person” right before her eyes. “We lived so cut off from everyone else” that no one else was privy to her perspective, and Barack’s ability to “compartmentalize his work and home life, to the extent that the two worlds were never brought together physically” or in any social setting, meant that their increasingly stressed and intense relationship existed as “an island unto ourselves.”
In later years, Obama once said that his experiences in Chicago had “converged to give me a sense of strength.” At an expressly religious event, he cited Roseland as where “I first heard God’s spirit beckon me. It was there that I felt called to a higher purpose.” Sheila caviled at that, saying she “would not call him religious. Perhaps spiritual is a better description” of the man she lived with. “Barack was definitely not religious in the conventional sense. He talked about God in the abstract, but it was mostly in terms of his destiny and/or some spiritual force.”
Early in the summer, Barack’s older brother Roy visited Chicago and met Sheila briefly, but Barack went alone to the Chicago home of his maternal uncle Charles Payne for his nephew Richard’s high school graduation. His sister Maya had just completed her junior year at Punahou, and she wanted to visit a number of mainland colleges before submitting her applications. Ann Dunham was attending the Southeast Asian Summer Studies Institute being held at Northern Illinois University, west of Chicago in DeKalb, so she and Maya arrived in Chicago before Sheila left to see her parents in California and make a brief