Feeling Like Barack Obama's Cultural Cousin

I am starting to feel like Barack Obama's cultural cousin.

When he left the campaign trail to visit his grandmother, who was a key figure in his rearing, I kept thinking about Susie Grant, my grandmother, in whose house I grew up. Today, news comes that Obama has a half-aunt on his father's side, found in circumstances about which he knew nothing, and that development is similar to the half-brothers I never knew, then met twice, and may never see again.

Susie was my mother's mother. She was born in northern Alabama and came with her family to West Texas at the turn of the 20th century, about 1900. There she met and married Roy Grant, who grew up in Pulaski, Tennessee, just across the state line from Susie's home. They grew up 40 miles apart and had to travel clear to Haskell County, Texas, before they would meet.

Susie and Roy had six kids, including my mother, June, who was next-to-youngest. Roy died suddenly in 1929, and Susie raised the six on her own. She was gentle, pious, and remains the toughest individual I ever knew. Was she a racist? I don't want to believe that, but every time she saw a black man on television – one of the few places we saw black people in 1950s Abilene, Texas – she made a face. I suppose it is possible I was reared by a racist, and the people I vote for are just going to have to live with that.

World War II came, and a huge Army training base, Camp Barkeley, was opened a few miles south of Abilene. My father, Don Wayman of Colorado, was sent there to train. He was a wonderful singer, a tenor from the old school, and my mother always said she heard him (at the downtown USO) before she saw him. They were married at Camp Barkeley on Easter Sunday, 1942. I was born on March 6, 1943, by which time my mother and father were divorcing.

My mother and I, and two of her sisters, lived with Susie. They told me my father was dead. There were no photos of him, no letters, no notes, no insignia, no nothing. The only evidence I had of him was me.

In 1989, following an inner pulse, I took steps to find him, and I did. I saw him for the first time on July 27, 1989, in the driveway of his home in Greeley, Colorado. He was happy to see me. He said that on the day after I was born, he snuck into the hospital nursery in Abilene and held me in his arms for 15 minutes. He said my family, particularly Susie, didn't like him. He left Abilene, returned to Greeley, married, taught school, and with his wife Shirley had four sons, my half-brothers. It is an interesting feeling, at age 46, to learn you have four brothers. Circumstances: two of them were in lifelong schizophrenia battles, and a third was gay. In some circles, my political stock must be seriously dwindling.

The weekend was interesting and fundamentally informative on both sides. Don Lee, my dad's oldest son – other than me – said to me: "I'm not the oldest brother anymore." "Sure you are," I said. "I wouldn't know the first thing about being the oldest brother." That is as true on this day as it was on that one.

My father and I remained in touch, but he bonded more with my wife, now my ex, and with my children, than he did with me. That was fine. In our short years of contact, he resolved a lifelong fear of mine, and he told me I removed a weight from his days that he felt was lengthening his life. I went to Greeley twice more, once with my children and the third time at his death. That was in 2002. His sons and I have had no contact since.

Obama and I, and who knows how many others, were spun out of a swirl, created by a century of change, and motion, and mobility of events and of people. Our histories are unconventional. Make of them what you will.