Since Barack Obama’s father leaves him and his mother Ann when Barack is only two years old, Barack grows up with stories and the occasional letter, not the man himself. And later, as Barack connects with his far-flung half siblings, they bond through telling stories primarily about their late father, whom they refer to as the Old Man. With this, the memoir situates storytelling as one of its central concerns. Ultimately, it suggests that while storytelling is a passable way to learn about someone in that person’s absence, the sharing stories and family lore serves a much broader purpose. Telling stories is a way to connect with others in the present, but it can also function as a way to either make sense of how one’s past experiences influence one’s present—or, as a way of editing the truth of one’s history to create a more flattering picture of the past.
For much of the memoir, Barack approaches stories as though they’re a simple way to explain, illuminate, and describe facts in a straightforward manner. He spends much of his life grappling with the various stories he hears about his father, in the hope that he’ll be able to make sense of who he is by putting together his father’s story. This reflects the idea that by plumbing history and by creating a simple chain of cause and effect, a person can trace the development of themselves and those close to him. However, as Barack gets older and more skeptical, he also has to contend with the fact that many stories about his father seem too wild to be true. Because of this, he abandons some of the more sensational stories—such as the one about his father lecturing a racist white man in a bar so eloquently that the man offered his father $100 in apology. He deems these as nice ideas but ultimately fictitious, sprung from the minds of admiring relatives. But in the case of this story, Barack reveals that years later, he received an unexpected phone call from an old friend of his father’s, who confirms the truth of the story totally unprompted. With this, Barack has to face the undeniable proof that reason, logic, and his own expectations of what’s possible don’t always apply to the stories he hears—at least when they concern the Old Man.
But even in light of having some of the more fantastical accounts of the Old Man’s exploits confirmed, Barack still has to contend with questions of truth—in particular, what people omit from their stories and why. Throughout his journey, Barack receives information that either adds more nuance or contradicts a story he once believed was true. In telling the story of his maternal grandparents, Gramps and Toot—part of Barack’s project of figuring out who he is and where he came from—he focuses on situating their eventual move to Hawaii in the historical context of the 1950s and 60s. He explains that they were very progressive when it came to their thoughts on race, something that caused issues with their white peers and bosses in Kansas and Texas but, according to Gramps, ceased to be an issue in Hawaii. But through Barack’s relationship with Frank, an elderly Black man who’s an old friend of Gramps’s, Barack learns that Gramps’s account of his early life leaves certain things out. For instance, Frank explains, Gramps and Toot employed Black women in their home in Kansas and thought of them as family, which Frank implies demonstrates a misunderstanding of the power dynamics inherent in hiring domestic help. Frank suggests that it’s impossible to truly consider those women family, and by omitting that he ever hired those women in the first place, Gramps makes it seem as though he’s always understood that. In short, while Gramps was never overtly racist, he still seeks to omit parts of his story that point to his own complicity within racist systems. With this, Barack comes to the understanding that storytelling can serve many purposes—and those purposes don’t always include telling the unvarnished truth. Rather, the memoir proposes that storytelling is a highly personal endeavor that reveals as much about the speaker as it does about the subject of the story.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Storytelling and Truth ThemeTracker
Storytelling and Truth Quotes in Dreams from My Father
According to her, racism wasn’t even in their vocabulary back then. “Your grandfather and I just figured we should treat people decently, Bar. That’s all.”
She’s wise that way, my grandmother, suspicious of overwrought sentiments or overblown claims, content with common sense. Which is why I tend to trust her account of events; it corresponds to what I know about my grandfather, his tendency to rewrite his history to conform with the image he wished for himself.
In the end I suppose that’s what all the stories of my father were really about. They said less about the man himself than about the changes that had taken place in the people around him, the halting process by which my grandparents’ racial attitudes had changed. The stories gave voice to a spirit that would grip the nation for that fleeting period between Kennedy’s election and the passage of the Voting Rights Act: the seeming triumph of universalism over parochialism and narrow-mindedness, a bright new world where differences of race or culture would instruct and amuse and perhaps even ennoble.
At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap. Following this maddening logic, the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness, of your own defeat.
“I don’t suppose he would have. Stan doesn’t like to talk about that part of Kansas much. Makes him uncomfortable. He told me once about a black girl they hired to look after your mother. A preacher’s daughter, I think it was. Told me how she became a regular part of the family. That’s how he remembers it, you understand—this girl coming in to look after somebody else’s children, her mother coming to do somebody else’s laundry. A regular part of the family.”
Except now I was hearing the same thing from black people I respected, people with more excuses for bitterness than I might ever claim for myself. Who told you that being honest was a white thing? they asked me. Who sold you this bill of goods, that your situation exempted you from being thoughtful or diligent or kind, or that morality had a color?
Such images became a form of prayer for me, bolstering my spirits, channeling my emotions in a way that words never could. They told me [...] that I wasn’t alone in my particular struggles, and that communities had never been a given in this country, at least not for blacks. Communities had to be created, fought for, tended like gardens. They expanded or contracted with the dreams of men—and in the civil rights movement those dreams had been large.
That’s what the leadership was teaching me, day by day: that the self-interest I was supposed to be looking for extended well beyond the immediacy of issues, that beneath the small talk and sketchy biographies and received opinions people carried within them some central explanation of themselves. Stories full of terror and wonder, studded with events that still haunted or inspired them. Sacred stories.
And it was this realization, I think, that finally allowed me to share more of myself with the people I was working with [...]
All my life, I had carried a single image of my father, one that I had sometimes rebelled against but had never questioned, one that I had later tried to take as my own. The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader—my father had been all those things. All those things and more, because except for that one brief visit in Hawaii, he had never been present to foil the image, because I hadn’t seen what perhaps most men see at some point in their lives: their father’s body shrinking, their father’s best hopes dashed, their father’s face lined with grief and regret.
I wondered how much difference those posters would make to the boy we had just left in Asante’s office. Probably not as much as Asante himself, I thought. A man willing to listen. A hand placed on a young man’s shoulders.
That was one of the lessons I’d learned these past two and a half years, wasn’t it?—that most black folks weren’t like the father of my dreams, the man in my mother’s stories, full of high-blown ideals and quick to pass judgment. They were more like my stepfather, Lolo, practical people who knew life was too hard to judge each other’s choices, too messy to live according to abstract ideals.
Auma shook her head. “Can you imagine, Barack?” She said, looking at me. “I swear, sometimes I think that the problems in this family all started with him. He is the only person whose opinion I think the Old Man really worried about. The only person he feared.”
I knew that, as I had been listening to the story of our grandfather’s youth, I, too, had felt betrayed. My image of Onyango, faint as it was, had always been of an autocratic man—a cruel man, perhaps. But I had also imagined him an independent man, a man of his people, opposed to white rule. [...] What Granny had told us scrambled that image completely, causing ugly words to flash across my mind. Uncle Tom. Collaborator. House nigger.
