So: Frank Marshall Davis-whom Obama met once or twice at the age of 10-was Obama’s “father figure”.
Wow. Who woulda thunk it ?
That's better.
It was MUCH more than "once or twice". From "Dreams From My Father", (page 45):
Gramps had a number of black male friends, mostly poker and bridge partners, and before I got old enough not to care about hurting his feelings, I would let him drag me along to some of their games. They were old, neatly dressed men with hoarse voices and clothes that smelled of cigars, the kind of men for whom everything has its place and who figure they’ve seen enough not to have to waste a lot of time talking about it. Whenever they saw me they would give me a jovial slap on the back and ask how my mother was doing; but once it was time to play, they wouldn’t say another word except to complain to their partner about a bid.Then later, on page 52, after the incident where his grandmom got scared by a black panhandler, where does he go? To Frank's house. Obama mentions him a number of other places in the book.There was one exception, a poet named Frank who lived in a dilapidated house in a run-down section of Waikiki. He had enjoyed some modest notoriety once, was a contemporary of Richard Wright and Langston Hughes during his years in Chicago-Gramps once showed me some of his work anthologized in a book of black poetry. But by the time I met Frank he must have been pushing eighty, with a big, dewlapped face and an ill-kempt gray Afro that made him look like an old, shaggy-maned lion. He would read us his poetry whenever we stopped by his house, sharing whiskey with Gramps out of an emptied jelly jar. As the night wore on, the two of them would solicit my help in composing dirty limericks. Eventually, the conversation would turn to laments about women. “They’ll drive you to drink, boy,” Frank would tell me soberly. “And if you let ’em, they’ll drive you into your grave.”
I was intrigued by old Frank, with his books and whiskey breath and the hint of hard-earned knowledge behind the hooded eyes. The visits to his house always left me feeling vaguely uncomfortable, though, as if I were witnessing some complicated, unspoken transaction between the two men, a transaction I couldn’t fully understand. The same thing I felt whenever Gramps took me downtown to one of his favorite bars, in Honolulu’s red-light district
Sounds like a long-term relationship starting in his childhood, where he considered Frank a trusted mentor on the subject of how to be black.
oh lord, here he goes stirring this pot again..