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Some says "Frank" was like a father to Barack, or some such words.
In the attempt to find out what the evidence of this is:
This is what I've found so far from Dreams from my Father, scanning for Franks name.
pg76 - (Frank is introduced)
"Gramps had a number of black male friends, mostly poker and bridge partners... i would let him drag me along to some of these games."...
(They didn't talk much to Barry)
"There was one exception, a poet named Frank who lived in a dilapidated house in a run-down section of Waikiki. He must have enjoyed some modest notoriety once,...But by the time he met Frank he must have been pushing eighty...
He would read us poetry whenever we stopped by his house, sharing whiskey with Gramps out of an empty jelly jar. As the night wore on, the two of them would solicit my help composing dirty limericks. Eventually the conversation would turn towards laments about women."
"They'll drive you to drink, boy", Frank would tell me.... 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..."
(like whenever Gramps took him to a bar in the red light district. "Don't tell your grandmother")
pg88 - A black man had asked his grandmother for money "He was very aggressive, Barry. Very aggressive. I gave him a dollar and he kept asking. If the bus had not come, I think he might have hit me over the head."
Barry wonders why Gramps doesn't want to drive her to work. Gramps says "...It is a big deal. She's been bothered by men before. You know why she's so scared this time? I'll tell you why.." (because he was black) "And I just don't think it's right"
Barry - "The words were like a fist in my stomach..". Pg89 "Never had they given me reason to doubt their love...."
Barry that night drives to Waikiki, visits Frank. He told Frank the story I summarized above.
Frank says he and Stanley (Gramps) grew up about 50 miles apart. They didn't know each other.
Frank: "What I'm trying to tell you is, your grandma' right to be scared. She's at least as right as Stanley is. She understands that black people have a reason to hate. That's just how it is. For your sake, I wish it were otherwise. But it's not . So you might as well get used to it."
Barry's thoughts: "The earth shook under my feet, ready to crack at any moment. I stopped, trying to steady myself, and knew for the first time I was utterly alone."
pg 97 - "What had Frank called college? An advanced degree in compromise. I thought back to the last time I had seen the old poet....
(page long narrative with his previous conversations with Frank on the value of college)
pg 98 - "It made me smile, thinking back on Frank and his old Black Panther dashiki self. In some ways he was incurable as my mother, as certain in his faith, living in the same sixties time warp that Hawaii had created."
