The climax of Barack Obama’s 1995 memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” occurs in rural Kenya when the author sits between the graves of his father and his grandfather and weeps. Obama, then in his late twenties, hardly knew his father and never met his grandfather, but in the course of writing the book he had learned their stories in devastating detail. Both were proud, ambitious men who travelled far from the Luo-speaking villages where they grew up—indeed, Obama’s grandmother still has her son’s Harvard diploma hanging in her house nearby. Their respective struggles in the world ended painfully, in bitter loneliness. Beside their graves, Obama, a middle-class American, both mourns and, for the first time, understands his African forebears.

People in Illinois seem largely unaware of Obama’s long, annealing trip into their midst, although they often remark on his unusual calm. Now forty-two and a state senator, Obama emerged, in March, from a raucous primary as the Democratic nominee for the United States Senate. In a seven-person field, he received a remarkable fifty-three per cent of the vote—he even won the “collar” counties around Chicago, communities that supposedly would never support a black candidate. And everyone recalls that, as the votes were being tallied at his headquarters on Election Night, he seemed to be the least agitated person in the place.

Obama’s Republican opponent in November will be Jack Ryan, a wealthy political neophyte. The seat they are competing for is now held by a Republican, Peter Fitzgerald, who is retiring. An Obama victory thus would move the Senate Democrats, at present outnumbered fifty-one to forty-eight, one seat closer to a majority. It also would make Obama only the third African-American to serve in the Senate since Reconstruction.

On a raw, rainy late-April day in Springfield, the state capital, Obama, who represents a district on Chicago’s South Side, ducked out of the statehouse for a meeting with labor leaders from southern Illinois at an A.F.L.-C.I.O. building down the street. “This is a kiss-and-make-up session,” he told me as we entered a ground-floor conference room—the state A.F.L.-C.I.O. had supported one of his opponents in the Democratic primary. Twenty-five white males, in windbreakers and golf shirts, sat around the room. They represented the building trades—the painters’ union, the carpenters.

Obama, lanky and dapper in a dark suit, his shoulders almost strangely relaxed, seemed to know most of the men there. He broke the ice with a joke at the expense of Ed Smith, a huge, tough-looking delegate from Cairo. Obama had met Smith’s mother on a recent downstate swing and had discovered that “she’s the one who really calls the shots there.” Smith laughed, and the other delegates said they wanted her phone number. Then Obama gave a short, blunt, pro-labor speech. The men eyed him carefully. Heads began nodding slowly, jaws set, as he drove his points home: “two hundred thousand jobs lost in Illinois under Bush; overtime rights under threat for eight million workers nationally; the right to organize being eroded.” Then he said, “I need your help,” and took questions.

The questions were terse, specific, well informed. They dealt with federal highway funding, non-union companies coming in from out of state on big contracts, the implications of the Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement. Obama listened closely, and his answers were fluent and dauntingly knowledgeable, but he kept his language colloquial. “It’s not enough just to vote right,” he said. “You gotta advocate. You gotta reframe the debate, use informal power. A lot of these bills coming up now are lose-lose for Democrats.”

“That’s right,” somebody said.

“I have a reputation as this abstract guy talking about civil rights,” Obama went on. “But anybody who knows my state legislative district knows I fight for our share of resources. And I will fight for Illinois highway dollars.”

He mostly told the union men what they wanted to hear. Then he said, “There’s nobody in this room who doesn’t believe in free trade,” which provoked a small recoil. These men were ardent protectionists. A little later, he said, with conviction, “I want India and China to succeed”—a sentiment not much heard in the outsourcing-battered heartland. He went on, however, to criticize Washington and Wall Street for not looking after American workers.

Later, I asked him if he wasn’t waving a red flag in front of labor by talking about free trade. “Look, those guys are all wearing Nike shoes and buying Pioneer stereos,” he said. “They don’t want the borders closed. They just don’t want their communities destroyed.”

Back at the statehouse, Obama, who is chairman of the Health and Human Services Committee, rushed from meeting to floor vote to committee room. Everybody seemed to want a word with him. Terry Link, the senate majority whip, complained about Obama’s successes in a long-running poker game. “I’m putting his kids through college,” Link said. Kirk Dillard, a leading Republican senator from the Chicago suburbs, looked chagrined when I asked him about Obama. “I knew from the day he walked into this chamber that he was destined for great things,” he said. “In Republican circles, we’ve always feared that Barack would become a rock star of American politics.” Still, Dillard was gracious. “Obama is an extraordinary man,” he said. “His intellect, his charisma. He’s to the left of me on gun control, abortion. But he can really work with Republicans.” Dillard and Obama have co-sponsored many bills. Though Dillard was unwilling to concede the general election to Obama, he described Illinois as “a major player in recognizing African-Americans. We are proudly the state that produced Abraham Lincoln.”

Obama was actually born in Hawaii. His father, also named Barack Obama, was a foreign student there. His mother, Ann, was white, and only eighteen when she married his father. She and her parents, originally from Kansas, had moved to Honolulu. When her husband left for Harvard, she and their toddler stayed behind—there was no money in his scholarship for them to go East—and the father ultimately returned alone to Kenya, where he worked as a government economist. Barack’s mother’s second marriage, to an Indonesian oil manager, occasioned a move to Jakarta, when Barack was six. He lived there for four years, and in his book he writes about his time in Indonesia as simultaneously lush and a harrowing exposure to tropical poverty—more harrowing, perhaps, for his mother than for the little boy who barely remembered any other life. Then Barack returned to Hawaii, where he was brought up largely by his grandparents. The family lived in a small apartment—Barack’s grandfather was a furniture salesman and, later, an unsuccessful insurance agent; his grandmother worked in a bank—but Barack managed to get into Punahou School, Hawaii’s top prep academy. His mother always said that he got his brains from his father, and he was raised on tales of his father’s brilliance. The great man wrote to them regularly, but, though he travelled around the world on official business for Kenya, he visited only once, when Barack was ten.

He was a black child, by American lights, but his mother and his grandparents—the only family he knew—were “white folks,” and his confusion was acute. In “Dreams from My Father,” Obama describes how, as a teen-ager, he tried marijuana and cocaine. (“I guess you’d have to say I wasn’t a politician when I wrote the book,” he told me. “I wanted to show how and why some kids, maybe especially young black men, flirt with danger and self-destruction.”) He went to Columbia University, and liked New York, but he found the city’s racial tension inescapable. It “flowed freely,” he wrote in his memoir—“not just out on the streets but in the stalls of Columbia’s bathrooms as well, where, no matter how many times the administration tried to paint them over, the walls remained scratched with blunt correspondence between niggers and kikes. It was as if all middle ground had collapsed.”