In his memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” Barack Obama converses about different time periods throughout his life and its effects on him that led him to become the person he is today. In the first chapter, we learn about his childhood and his life in Hawaii with his mother and grandparents while also learning about the impact of his father leaving him when he was only two years old. Continuing on from that, his father is a major focus in this chapter as the audience learns about him the same way Obama did, through secondhand stories and recollections from different people that knew his father. It’s through these stories that we find his father wasn’t some sort of no-good deadbeat but instead an intellectual man with a history of outstanding achievements such as receiving numerous scholarships and honors, as well as being the first African-American student at the University of Hawaii. However with all these merits going for him, he simply couldn’t live up to becoming the father Obama needed which ties into the one of the main messages that was presented in this chapter; to never judge a book by its cover. It’s cliche but extremely true in this case and it’s a takeaway all the readers should understand.

“By the time I was a teenager, I’d grown skeptical of this story’s veracity and had set it aside with the rest. Until I received a phone call, many years later, from a Japanese-American man who said he had been my father’s classmate in Hawaii and now taught at a midwestern university. He was very gracious, a bit embarrassed by his own impulsiveness; he explained that he had seen an interview of me in his local paper and that the sight of my father’s name had brought back a rush of memories. Then, during the course of our conversation, he repeated the same story that my grandfather had told, about the white man who had tried to purchase my father’s forgiveness. ‘I’ll never forget that,’ the man said to me over the phone; and in his voice I heard the same note that I’d heard from Gramps so many years before, that note of disbelief-and hope.”

I found this passage and the previous one before it to stick out to me not only because of how much it details his father’s character, but also how it must’ve felt for Obama to learn about him through these stories. I’ll admit, hearing how his father was able to calmly disarm a racist man’s tirade towards him and have him pay $100 on the spot as a form of apology is jaw dropping. However, the more I thought about it, I wondered how Obama felt about all these stories. Of course they’re great to listen to and it allows him to imagine how his father was but did he ever feel sad or resented him for the fact he couldn’t tell him these stories himself. I feel like it would’ve been nice to read his thoughts about this, if he had any, because something like that has a very powerful impact in a person’s life.