The story goes that after a day of studying, Barack Senior had gone to join his wife’s father and some of his friends at a bar in Honolulu when a white man came up to the bartender and said—loud enough that everyone could hear—“I shouldn’t have to drink good liquor next to a nigger.”⁹⁴

The room fell silent. Rather than getting angry, Barack walked over to the man and started to explain, slowly and evenly, the concept of universal rights. The man at the bar soon felt bad—so bad, in fact, that not only did he apologize but he gave Barack a hundred dollars on the spot, which paid for drinks and pupus all night and for the rest of his month’s rent.

Obama says he didn’t believe this story until, years later, he got a phone call from a man who said he’d studied with his father in Hawaii and he told him the same anecdote. In his voice, says Obama, “I heard the same note that I’d heard from Gramps so many years before, that exact note of disbelief—and hope.”⁹⁵

Hope runs counter to belief, or in spite of it. Though it’s been raining for hours, I hope the sun will come out. Some part of me hopes to endure beyond the death of my body. Here, as religious faith would once have done, the system of rights provides the framework for conversion. The magic of universal rights—“the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,”⁹⁶ as the United Nations puts it—imbues Barack Senior with a semi-religious fervor. He, in turn, embodies those rights, filling them with purpose. The spirit of fraternity, which would otherwise seem abstract and ghostly, is transformed into flesh and blood.

Or, only momentarily. Obama is full of awe retelling this story, but it makes me think of Dixon, of all the energy put into arguing back which, though it may not take its toll in the present, surely will in the future.

In 1964, after graduating from Harvard, Barack Senior returned to Kenya and got a high-ranking job at the Ministry of Economic Planning and Development. By 1967, though, two American friends came to visit his comfortable government-owned cottage and, according to Remnick’s biography, found him chain-smoking and drinking quadruple shots of Vat 69 or Johnnie Walker. They thought Barack’s decline was “at least partly related to the disappointed belief that the best would rise to the top.”⁹⁷ Kenyan independence in 1963 had promised a new start: representative democracy; strong national industries; trade unions. But by the late ’60s the Kenya African National Union was drifting toward one-party rule, with cronyism and corruption on the rise. Barack, sidelined because of his outspokenness, was crushed.

Or, less charitably perhaps, he had spent his life up until then succeeding—whether academically, or at what Obama called “womanizing”⁹⁸—and, in post-colonial Kenya, he came up against forces he could neither master nor submit himself to. So he went out drinking and ranted against the government, ensuring his failure. In 1982, he had just been at an old colonial bar in Nairobi when he crashed into a gum tree and died. “I want to do things to the best of my ability,” he had said. “Even when death comes, I want to die thoroughly.”⁹⁹ He believed that reason might conquer history, that intellect and eloquence could overcome ignorance. But once the smoke cleared, what remained?