As the sun sank over the Pacific Ocean behind him, Frank Marshall Davis looked up from his rickety front porch and saw his friend Stanley Dunham approaching. The grizzled old black man could see that Dunham was at last bringing along his grandson, whom he had been waiting to meet - a caramel-skinned boy of nine called Barry Obama. It was the autumn of 1970.
Last week, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois became the first black man to accept the Democratic nomination to become president of the United States. Central to his appeal is his message of racial reconciliation, drawn largely from his own remarkable life story. His quest to come to terms with his identity as an African American essentially began with Davis that day in Honolulu nearly 38 years ago. The journey would take him to Los Angeles, New York, Boston and Chicago and could well end triumphantly in the White House in January.
Hawaii imbued Obama with the laid-back calm that has underpinned his political career. It insulated him from the racial tensions of inner cities on the American mainland. The ambition would develop at Harvard Law School and the deceptive toughness in Chicago. Frank Marshall Davis had been a noted poet, journalist and radical activist who had once been investigated by the congressional House Un-American Activities Committee. In 1956 he exercised his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent rather than risk incriminating himself when asked whether he was a Communist. By 1970 Davis, then 65, was living in obscurity but he was a familiar sight on Kuhio Avenue, just off Honolulu's teeming Waikiki Beach. Clad in a faded Aloha shirt and cut-off jeans tied with a length of rope, he would read, watch the world pass by and hold court with whoever wanted to stop.
Dunham was one of many frequent visitors to Davis's house. Both men loved jazz and Davis would put on 78s by Jelly Roll Morton and Billie Holiday before settling into a game of Scrabble or bridge. Dawna Weatherly-Williams, then 22, from California, had recently moved to Hawaii with her black husband. She had struck up a friendship with Davis - whom she refers to as "Daddy" - and was chatting with him that late autumn afternoon as Dunham and Barry approached.
"Daddy had a deep, rich baritone voice, almost bass," she told me. "He sounded like Barry White without any of the gimmicks. He had a marvellous warm belly-laugh. He looked so imposing, just slightly bent at the shoulders, almost aristocratic." Although Dunham was white, he and Davis were in many ways kindred spirits. Both were originally from Kansas. At the age of five, Davis had survived an attempted lynching. Dunham, eight years Davis's junior, insisted that the racism he had witnessed on the mainland was one of the reasons he had headed west. Both men had eventually arrived in Hawaii in search of a happiness and success.
The grandson Dunham brought along to meet Davis represented something else that they shared. The boy was the product of an unlikely union between Dunham's only daughter, Ann, and Barack Obama Sr, a brilliant and charismatic Kenyan economics student by whom she had become pregnant at the age of 18. Within three years of their hastily arranged wedding (Barack was born less than six months later) the couple parted when Obama Sr - who, it emerged, already had a wife and two children back in Kenya - chose a scholarship to Harvard over his new family.
Obama visited El Dorado, Kansas, the oil boom town where his grandfather was born, at the height of his Democratic primary battle with Hillary Clinton. He told me and other reporters crammed into the aisle of his "O-Force One" campaign plane that he was returning to "the roots of my life that connect to the broader story of the country". The candidate's ability to move easily in both black and white milieus has been a central part of his magnetism. In Chicago, where Davis made his name, Obama married a strong black woman called Michelle Robinson, a descendant of slaves whose family had lived through the civil rights era. Unlike the two generations that had preceded and nurtured him, Obama chose to make a permanent home.
For Davis and Obama, Hawaii provided a breathing space at the end and the start, respectively, of their adult lives. The fact that Hawaii, which became the 50th and newest American state in 1959, had never banned interracial marriage - unlike 16 other states - was one of the things that drew Davis to the island paradise in 1948. He had just married a white Chicago socialite; only in what he was to describe as a "rainbow land of beautiful colour mixtures" would their union be considered unremarkable. Sitting on a wooden bench in Honolulu's Makiki District Park this summer, Weatherly-Williams chain-smoked as she recalled Davis meeting Obama for the first time that day in 1970. "Daddy had his feet propped up and he saw them and called out, 'Hey, Stan! Oh, is this him?' "Stan had been promising to bring Barry by because we all had that in common - Frank's kids were half white, Stan's grandson was half black and my son was half black," she said. Dunham and his grandson were on their way home from Punahou, the private school that Obama was to describe in his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father as an "incubator for island elites". He had just taken entrance tests in English and mathematics. "Barry was well-dressed, in a blazer I think," Weatherly-Williams said. "He was tired and he was hungry." Obama had spent the previous three years in Indonesia with his mother, an anthropologist who specialised in rural development, and her second husband, Lolo Soetoro. He had returned to Hawaii shortly after his mother gave birth to her second child, Maya, in 1970, and was living with his white grandparents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, whom he knew as Gramps and Toot, or Tutu (Hawaiian for grandma). Ann returned to Hawaii in 1972 after her marriage broke up; when she resumed her field work in 1974, Obama moved back in with his grandparents. For Dunham (who had so wanted his daughter to be a boy that he had named her Stanley Ann), Barry was the son he never had. Ann Dunham believed her son could do anything, while his absent father, via letters, made clear that greatness was expected of him. Obama remarked to his biographer David Mendell, the author of Obama: from Promise to Power (2008), that "there was no shortage of self-esteem".
Obama stood out at Punahou. Most fellow pupils were white, and although there were significant numbers of Oriental, Polynesian, Samoan and native Hawaiian children, there was only a tiny handful of African Americans. In his memoir, Obama recalled an initial "sense that I didn't belong" that continued to grow. A visit from his father when he was 10 - the first time he had seen him since he was two and the last before Barack Sr was killed in car crash in Kenya in 1982 - served only to unsettle him further. A talk by his father to his Punahou class shattered the myth Obama had carefully created that he was a young African prince whose name meant "Burning Spear". On one level, Punahou was an idyllic setting for any child. His grandfather saw that entry to Punahou would give Obama a leg-up in society. After school, his grandmother would watch him from their cramped 10th-floor apartment as he practised basketball until dark. The courts are still there but the hoops have been ripped down by vandals. Dunham, widowed for 16 years, lives alone in the apartment. Near the courts, the Baskin-Robbins ice-cream store where Obama worked is still doing business. The Dunhams were of modest means. Madelyn, a bank manager, being the main breadwinner. They scrimped and saved to help pay the Punahou fees. At Punahou, Obama was pitched in with the offspring of the wealthy but could see how his grandparents struggled. The ease with which he mixes with people at either end of the social spectrum reflects this. As I strolled through Punahou's immaculate grounds earlier this summer, it was still easy to see what made Stanley Dunham's chest swell with pride when, nearly three decades ago, he declared it to be "heaven". Pathways meander around monkey pods, banyan trees and a lily pond, and lead to an outdoor swimming-pool, science centre, theatre, video/audio production centre, chapel and an international centre designed to "support a global perspective". Founded in 1841 to educate the offspring of white missionaries, the school manages to exude serenity, seriousness and easy self-confidence - much like the adult Obama himself. Its alumni include Steve Case, the founder of AOL, and Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, as well as Hiram Bingham III, an explorer who was a US senator in the 1920s and Thirties and who rediscovered Machu Picchu. In the old school yearbooks, the young Obama is always grinning. There's Barry holding a "strike" sign as part of a mock protest against history class. Later on, he looks composed and self-assured. There he is wearing a white Saturday Night Fever outfit with a carefully tended afro. The basketball team photos show that the puppy fat fell off and his physique was transformed into a lean, athletic frame. His is the only black face in many of the photos but he appears to be completely at ease. "He was a happy-go-lucky guy," Kelli Furushima told me outside the Chowder House restaurant near Waikiki Beach that Obama frequents on his annual holiday in Hawaii, during which he always takes time to play Scrabble with his sister Maya. "I was one of the cheerleaders that would watch the guys play ball after school," Furushima said. "I never really saw him with a steady girlfriend but a lot of girls liked him because he was fun and athletic and tall and dark and handsome in a really cute way." But Obama's memoir records a string of racial slights at Punahou, some minor and unintended, others more serious: a little red-headed girl who asked to touch his hair and was disappointed when he said no; a ruddy-faced boy who asked if his father was a cannibal; a 12-year-old boy whom he rewarded with a bloody nose after he called him a coon; a tennis pro who warned him his colour might rub off if he touched the match schedule; a basketball coach who complained that the team had lost to a "bunch of niggers". Mark Heflin played on the Punahou basketball team with Obama (nicknamed Barry O'Bomber on account of his impressive double-pump drop shot). He said, "Whites are a minority in Hawaii so I was in a minority, though not as small a one as him. Barry had a good style. He was charismatic even back then, and he seemed to flow between lots of groups. But you never really know what's going on in a person's mind." His friend was academically gifted, though at that stage of his life he didn't work hard enough to truly excel. Basketball was another route into black culture for Obama. This was the era of Julius Erving - better know as Doctor J - a dazzling star who played the game with ferocity and grace, and whose signature was the Tomahawk dunk. In his memoir, Obama remarked that half his white basketball friends "wanted to be black themselves - or at least Doctor J". Unfortunately for Obama, the Punahou coach, Chris McLachlin, was a traditionalist who emphasised the fundamentals of the game, rather than Obama's flamboyant "street" style. Obama, who protested that this was a "white" method of play, was kept on the bench by McLachlin much of the time. "He was on a real stacked team, one of the best teams I have ever had," McLachlin, currently recovering from a stroke, told me as we sat in his living room, a stone's throw from Punahou. "He would have started on any other team in the state. He was that good. Played forward. He was a smasher, driver, post-up, rebounder kind of guy. Also very good at one-on-one moves, very creative. He just loved the game, would play it 24/7 if he could. One of only a handful of kids I've ever coached in 38 years who would dribble his basketball around with him during school. First to arrive at practice, last one to leave." There was a hint of regret in McLachlin's reminiscences. "The older I got the wiser I got," he said. "At the time, I was very much a proponent of more organised, structured systems. If he'd been with me later, he would have found a lot more playing time because later in my career I think I did a better job of finding a niche for those guys who liked to be more creative on the floor." Those close to Obama say that the clash still rankles him. But McLachlin recounted how the two men appeared to put the issue behind them in 2004 when Obama visited the school: "'Hey, Coach Mac! Is that you?' he called out. I said, 'Yeah, how you doing, Barry?' And he says, 'You know? I really wasn't as good as I thought I was, was I?' For me, it lifted a little bit of guilt from my shoulders for not having played him as much as I probably should have." Obama has continued to play basketball regularly. His wife's brother was a college basketball star, and during the 2008 campaign it has been a ritual each voting day for Obama to shoot hoops with a close group of aides. During a visit to troops in Kuwait in July, the cameras rolled as he sank a three-point shot that Coach Mac would have been proud of.
Again and again at high-pressure moments, Obama has shown the same confidence and poise as he does on the basketball court. On the first day of his campaign in Waterloo, Iowa, I watched him stand in a corridor outside a high school gym. He took deep breaths and focused on the speech he was about to give. "Hey, let's go," he said as the gym doors swung open and he bounded in. Obama found he could meet other blacks by playing at the Hawaii university courts where, he would write in his memoir, "a handful of black men, mostly gym-rats and has-beens, would teach me an attitude that didn't just have to do with the sport". At the same time, Obama was also going around with his non-black friends from Punahou, several of them from the basketball team and sometimes accompanied by his grandfather. "Gramps was my buddy," said Joe Hansen, who was one of the five or six friends who would "pile into the apartment and just hang out and watch basketball or do whatever" at weekends. "He was never that authority guy, you know: 'Don't do that, don't do this' type of thing. He was more like one of the guys, easygoing, and he kind of ran around with us. Tutu was much quieter. I'd say she was the disciplinarian." Obama was to write that he "learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds", but occasionally the two would collide. Hansen recalls going to a Crusaders concert with Obama and being almost the only white person there. In his memoir, Obama used pseudonyms, merged characters and changed details, partly as a literary device, and perhaps because when it was published in 1995 he already had his eye on a political career. He writes of taking two white friends, "Jeff and Scott", to a black party and recalls their asking to leave early because they felt uncomfortable: "In the car, Jeff put an arm on my shoulder, looking at once contrite and relieved. 'You know, man, that really taught me something. I mean, I can see how it must be tough for you? being the only black guy and all.' I snorted. 'Yeah. Right.' A part of me wanted to punch him right there." The elegantly styled memoir has been a main plank of Obama's candidacy - a carefully constructed narrative that is guarded assiduously by his campaign staff. One of Obama's closest friends told me that he could not be interviewed because he and others had been instructed to stop talking to the press. Obama also wrote of becoming involved with drugs: "Junkie. Pothead. That's where I'd been headed: the final, fatal role of the young, would-be black man." His 1979 yearbook entry depicts a pack of Zig-Zag cigarette papers and a matchbook and offers thanks to "Tut, Gramps, Choom Gang" - choom being Hawaiian slang for marijuana. But former Punahou pupils doubt that Obama was ever seriously involved in drugs. "He was so not a druggie," Bernice Glenn Bowers laughed. "He couldn't have maintained his studies, his sports. There's no way he could be what he was on the court and be a druggie. It was kind of funny that he actually said that." Jerry Kellman, who hired Obama as a community organiser in Chicago in 1985, said that "he always exaggerated his straying from the track". Obama's grandfather had identified Frank Marshall Davis as someone who could help the boy solve the puzzle of how he, brought up by white people, could relate to a future as a black man. In his memoir, Obama portrays Davis - he never identifies him by his full name - as living "his old Black Power, dashiki self". His visits to Davis were irregular, but he nevertheless gravitated there at moments of doubt: when he was departing for university; when his grandmother, to her husband's dismay, expressed a fear that a black youth might mug her. Frank's verdict was: "Your grandma's right to be scared. She's at least as right as Stanley is. She understands that black people have a reason to hate." An American university, he told Barry, who was about to go to the small liberal arts college Occidental College in Los Angeles (where he began to call himself Barack), was a place where the price of admission was "leaving your race at the door" in order to become a "well-trained, well-paid nigger" but "a nigger just the same". Obama seems to have taken most of this with a pinch of salt. Obama apparently picked up a love of jazz - which he passed on to Punahou classmates - from Davis and his grandfather. He also read black writers such as Langston Hughes and Richard Wright.
In late January, on his campaign plane as we flew from Kansas after the El Dorado visit, I asked the senator about the wanderlust in his family that he had chosen to reject. "Part of me settling in Chicago and marrying Michelle was a conscious decision to root myself," he told me. "There's a glamour, there's a romance to that kind of life and there's a part of that still in me. But there's a curse to it as well. You need a frame for the canvas, because too much freedom's not freedom."
Weatherly-Williams recalled how she had watched the 1974 film The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, in which an old lady and former slave describes how blacks searching for the person who would lead their people to freedom and equality would hold up babies and ask, "Is you the one?" She wept as she told me, "I used to hold up my own son and whisper that to him. But now I know it wasn't my son who was the one - though he's leading a happy life - but Barack."
In 2007 the talk show queen Oprah Winfrey would allude to Miss Jane Pittman and hail Obama as "the one", later prompting the Republican candidate John McCain's campaign to accuse him of hubris and even mock him for having a messiah complex. A McCain internet ad this month intoned, "It shall be known that in 2008 the world will be blessed. They will call him 'The One'."
Weatherly-Williams pointed towards the horizon to the north, where Stanley Dunham, who had been a US Army sergeant in the Second World War, was buried in the Punchbowl National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, which overlooks Pearl Harbour, in 1992. Then she gazed to the south, towards St Louis Heights, from which Davis's ashes had been spread five years earlier. The house on Kuhio Avenue has long since been razed and is now occupied by a multi-storey car-park.
"I can still see it there, like a ghost," she said. "Stan felt a similar way about Barry being the one and that's why it would be so darn cool for him to see what's happening now. Look what you produced, Stan. I think he and Frank are up there now, cracking jokes and toasting Barack."
* Research by Guillaume Simard-Morissette
© Toby Harnden / The Daily Telegraph / 2008