A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother

by Janny Scott

  He paused, looking at me evenly. Was he making himself clear?

  “All of this is just to tell you: Don’t trust memory.”

  It is impossible to reconstruct the earliest years of Stanley Ann Dunham and the stories of her parents, Stanley Armour Dunham and Madelyn Lee Payne, without trusting the memories of people who knew them. There is no authoritative history of the Dunham and Payne families and of the events that led them to the Flint Hills of Kansas in the first decades of the twentieth century. Genealogists have traced their ancestors back over two centuries to Indiana, Missouri, Virginia, Arkansas, the Oklahoma Territory, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Massachusetts. But the reliability of those family trees is uncertain. There are newspaper birth announcements, baptism records, high school annuals, military registration cards, marriage licenses, census records, city directories, newspaper articles, obituaries, death notices, funeral announcements. But the public record offers only a frame without color, texture, or emotion, like the vestigial adhesive corners left behind in old albums after the photographs have faded or fallen away. There is President Obama’s sweet and lyrical account of his grandparents’ story in his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, woven from tales he was told as a child, retold with the discretion a son and grandson might bring to their telling at a time when his mother and grandmother were still alive. There are a few distant relatives with memories like attics stuffed with family lore, and former classmates, in dwindling numbers, with fragmentary memories of coming of age in the Sunflower State during the Great Depression. At the time of the writing of this book, Stanley Ann’s parents were no longer living. Her mother, Madelyn, agreed in September 2008 to be interviewed—on the condition that the interview would occur after the presidential election. Stanley Ann’s father, Stanley, died of prostate cancer in 1992. All of their siblings were alive, however, and spoke in detail about what they remembered. Their help has made it possible to take a stab at the story of the family that produced, on a wintry day in Wichita in November 1942, Stanley Ann.

  There is something fresh and quintessentially American about the family tree that extends its branches through and around Stanley Ann’s son, President Obama. Yes, there was the white mother from Kansas and the black father from Kenya. Then there was the Javanese stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, with whom Mr. Obama lived for four years in Jakarta as a small child; there is President Obama’s African-American wife, Michelle, a descendant of slaves. There is his half-Indonesian half sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng; her Chinese-Canadian husband, Konrad Ng; and the president’s Kenyan and half-Kenyan half siblings scattered across the globe in places such as Nairobi and Beijing. The family that gathered in Washington, D.C., for the inauguration of the first black president of the United States in January 2009 seemed both uniquely American and at the same time brand-new. In its mixing of races, ethnicities, nationalities, and cultures, it seemed to embody at once the aspirations of the founding fathers to create a place of opportunity for all people, the country’s promise as a beacon for immigrants in an increasingly global culture, and progress in the ongoing struggle to move beyond the United States’ racial history.

  Less well known, but classically American in an older sense, is the family tree that spawned Stanley Ann Dunham. Her ancestors were farmers, teachers, abolitionists, Methodist ministers, Baptists, Civil War veterans, veterans of two world wars. They were long-lived people, many of whom lasted into their eighties and early nineties. They were named for patriots and poets: Ralph Waldo Emerson Dunham, Christopher Columbus Clark and George Washington Clark (brothers of Thomas Jefferson Clark and Francis Marion Clark). Going back several generations, they put their faith in education to an unusual degree. At a time when few Americans were educated beyond high school, both of Stanley Ann’s grandfathers on her paternal side went to college, according to her uncle, Ralph Dunham. For generations, members of both sides of the family have been teachers. There have long been rumors, unproven, of Cherokee blood. According to family lore, a great-great-grandfather of Madelyn Payne Dunham is said to have married an aunt of Wild Bill Hickok. Her grandfather is reputed to have shaken the hand of President Lincoln from his father’s shoulders and seen his brother shot by bushwhackers in southern Missouri a half-dozen years later. Her aunt, Ruth McCurry, a schoolteacher, is said to have taught Mickey Mantle in Commerce, Oklahoma. Ralph Dunham remembered, as a small child, spending the night in the home of William Allen White, the Sage of Emporia, after Dunham’s father, an employee of the El Dorado Garage, delivered to Mr. White his Pierce-Arrow. Charles Payne served in the 89th Infantry Division that liberated Ohrdruf, a sub-camp of Buchenwald and the first Nazi concentration camp liberated by U.S. troops in Germany in April 1945. The family has been around long enough, and was interested enough in history, to have accumulated a lot of stories. “You’re probably aware that we’re related to the Bushes, to Dick Cheney,” Ralph Dunham told me matter-of-factly. “Also, Mark Twain is a distant relative. If you want to go far enough back, we’re tied in with some royalty back up the line. And another thing: I’m a first cousin times removed of Jefferson Davis. You see, my great-grandfather Clark’s mother was a Davis, and she was a first cousin to Jefferson Davis. . . .” For all the efforts to make Barack Obama appear exotic, even alien, he can claim a heritage that could hardly be more American. There is even something American, in the best sense of the word, in the swift march of those generations over the last century and a half from small farms to medium-size towns to big cities and sprawling metropolitan areas and finally across oceans and vast cultural distances to places like Jakarta, Yogyakarta, and Kalimantan.

  As a small boy in Augusta, Kansas, Charles Payne, Stanley Ann’s uncle, knew both his grandfathers. His grandfather on his mother’s side, Thomas Creekmore McCurry, had a farm in Peru, Kansas, which was a town of about one hundred people near the southern edge of Chautauqua County on the Oklahoma line. His paternal grandfather had a farm in Olathe, the seat of Johnson County in northeastern Kansas. They worked the land the way it had traditionally been done—without plumbing, electricity, or tractors. Thomas C. McCurry prided himself on the straightness of the rows he cut with his horse-drawn plow, his daughter Leona McCurry Payne used to tell her children. He planted his potatoes, she used to say, “in the dark of the moon.” Each set of grandparents raised half a dozen children, more or less. Those children grew up, flocked to towns, found jobs, and did not grow their own food. Their children, in turn, went off to college, left Kansas behind, and ended up in pleasant metropolitan areas all across the United States. The four Paynes—Madelyn, Charles, Arlene, and Jon—had no more than one or two children each. Two of those children became anthropologists who did fieldwork in Indonesia. Richard Payne, the son of Charles Payne, and a younger first cousin of Stanley Ann’s, spent several years in the Indonesian part of Borneo, now called Kalimantan. On the final night of the Democratic National Convention in Denver in August 2008, Richard Payne and his father got a ride back to their hotel in a sport-utility vehicle with Maya Soetoro-Ng, President Obama’s half sister, and other family members. “Somehow Maya and Richard got to talking in Bahasa Indonesia,” Charles Payne recalled, referring to the Indonesian national language. “They carried on quite a conversation. When they were finished with that—showing off, of course—Maya said to Richard, ‘You have kind of a yokel accent.’ He said, ‘Yeah, I know.’”

  Kalimantan is a far cry from Kansas, the state where Stanley Ann’s story begins. But Kansas is a far cry from the stereotype that its name may conjure up. It is more complex, contradictory, and surprising—a place of extremes. Craig Miner, a historian and author of Kansas: The History of the Sunflower State, 1854–2000, has described it as a place of thousand-mile-diameter storms and aviator-dazzling summer clouds “triple the height of Pikes Peak.” It long held the title for having the largest hailstone on record. It has had the highest number of F5-intensity tornadoes of any state since 1880. At times, Miner has written, the night sky is bril
liantly clear: The Andromeda Galaxy, more than two million light-years away, appears as obvious as the moon. But the dust on the ground has been so thick that on occasion people have driven with their headlights on in broad daylight. The summer that Stanley Ann’s mother, Madelyn, was eleven, the temperature in Augusta, her hometown, hit 121 degrees Fahrenheit on July 18—the hottest on record. The varnish on the pews in the Methodist church softened, and parishioners’ clothes had to be yanked free. The all-time low is forty degrees below zero. Kansas is a place where prairie idealism has sometimes coexisted, Miner has written, with elements of anti-Semitism, anti-intellectualism, isolationism, and the Ku Klux Klan. On the issue of slavery, Kansans were bitterly split. The state entered the Union in 1861 after four years of small-scale but brutal guerrilla warfare, including massacres, raids, the destruction of printing presses, the ransacking of homes. The state’s motto is Ad astra per aspera: To the stars through difficulties. It is an idea that Stanley Ann’s forebears would have understood.

  Had she lived to see the presidential election of 2008, Stanley Ann might have thought of it, too.

  There is a cast of mind that some say is distinctly Kansan. A month before Barack Obama sewed up the Democratic nomination, Craig Miner suggested to me that Obama’s “kind of high-minded idealism” was a descendant of the “practical idealism” promoted by William Allen White, the reform-minded newspaper editor and politician from Emporia. Historically, the people of Kansas have been idealistic, progressive, and pragmatic. They tried to do things that other people just talked about, and they believed in the possibility of change. “Of course, Kansans disagree violently about what ‘better’ is,” Miner said. “They tended to extremes on the left and right—all of those based on believing strongly that you can make things better. So we had the biggest circulating Socialist paper in the United States, published in Girard, Kansas. You think of Kansas as a Republican state, and largely it was, but it was the very liberal wing of the Republican party, the Theodore Roosevelt Republicans.” The state experimented early on with corporate regulation in the form of one of the early railroad regulatory commissions. The state Normal School at Emporia minted teachers, dispatching them like missionaries to small towns. Kansas may have been, for a time, the state with the highest percentage of residents able to read and write, Miner said. Even Prohibition, pursued longer and more vigorously in Kansas than elsewhere, came from an idealistic impulse to fix problems such as crime and domestic abuse by tackling the underlying problem of drunkenness. “The rest of the country said, ‘You can’t do that. People won’t change,’” Miner told me. “I sometimes say Kansans are not the people who say, ‘I’m okay, you’re okay.’ They say, ‘You’re not okay, I’m not okay, and I know how to fix it. I can make some of this better.’”

  Stanley Ann’s parents came from the Flint Hills, a two-hundred-mile-long band of grassland that is the largest unplowed vestige of the tallgrass prairie that once dominated North America’s midsection. Left behind when the inland seas disappeared, giving birth to the Great Plains, the hills were named by Zebulon Pike for the flintlike chert, a type of silica-containing quartz, in the soil, which makes it impossible to plow. The place is a rolling ocean of wildflowers and grasses—Indian grass, buffalo grass, eight-foot-tall Big Bluestem, “the redwood of grasses.” There are hundreds of wildflower species, one hundred and fifty bird species, ten million insects per acre. For at least eight thousand years, the region was occupied by Native Americans who hunted the abundant bison, elk, moose, and antelope. In the early nineteenth century, wagon trains came through, followed later by railroads. Settlers from the eastern United States put down roots around the trading post in Augusta, where Madelyn’s family would eventually settle, and along the Walnut River in El Dorado, where Stanley’s family came to live. The settlers tried planting corn, but it stripped the nutrients from the soil and died during repeated droughts. There were livestock epidemics and dust storms. In Augusta, on August 8, 1874, grasshoppers blanketed the ground, a foot deep in places. They ate clothes off clotheslines, mosquito netting out of windows, bark off trees, wooden handles of tools. Everything but the onions, it was said.

  The Flint Hills were tough to cultivate but they made ideal pasture. Cowboys drove cattle overland from Texas to Kansas for summer grazing, then on to railroad cattle towns for shipping to feedlots and eventual slaughter. As the railroads expanded, small towns became shipping points for cattle to be loaded on trains to Kansas City and Chicago. Cow towns such as Wichita, thirty miles west of El Dorado, flourished. In 1886, Butler County discovered kaffir corn, a tropical African variety of sorghum used to feed cattle and poultry, and ideally suited to the Kansas climate. Kaffir corn was drought- and heat-resistant, and thrived in dry warmth. As Butler County farmers turned increasingly to cattle raising, the price of kaffir corn soared. By 1911, nearly sixty thousand acres were planted with kaffir corn. To celebrate, the Knights of Mapira, a fraternal order, organized the first Kaffir Corn Carnival, a three-day celebration in downtown El Dorado that included parades, pageants, and contests. A triumphal arch made of kaffir corn and other crops spanned the first block of East Central Avenue. Twenty-nine townships in the county built booths decorated with animals, township maps, and the seal of Kansas, all out of kaffir corn. Men competed in fence-building, nail-driving, and hog-calling contests. Women did chicken calling, geese picking, butter churning. There was turtle racing and a float competition. In October 1926, the title of Miss El Dorado for that year’s carnival went to Stanley Ann’s great-aunt Doris Evelyn Armour, a 1923 graduate of El Dorado High School and a former student at Kansas State Teachers College in Emporia, whom the local newspaper described as “a genuinely beautiful girl, with dark brown bobbed hair, brown eyes and a delicate coloring that is entirely natural and most becoming.”

  Butler County had another resource, even better than kaffir corn and far more unsettling. A few years before the births of Stanley Dunham and Madelyn Payne, a massive oil strike upended the economy of the region almost overnight. In the porous stone along the eastern edge of the Nemaha Ridge in southeastern Kansas, there were pools of oil and natural gas. On October 7, 1915, the Wichita Natural Gas Company struck oil on land owned by John Stapleton about five miles northwest of El Dorado. It was one of the largest oil strikes of the time. Oil companies and entrepreneurs thundered in. In 1918, the year Stanley was born, the El Dorado field produced 29 million barrels, a figure that Craig Miner says was more than nine times the total output for Kansas three years earlier. El Dorado was the largest-producing single field in the United States. It was wartime, too, so oil prices were high. There were more strikes near Towanda and Augusta. Derricks and tank farms sprung up. Soon there were eight refineries in towns such as El Dorado, Augusta, Wichita, and Potwin. The population of El Dorado and the surrounding township soared to 14,459 in 1920 from 3,262 in 1915, more than quadrupling in five years. Hundreds of one-room shacks and tents were thrown up, as El Dorado home owners leased their backyards and gardens, and built houses in vacant lots to rent out. Oil companies rolled out instant towns, with names such as Oil Hill and Midian, replete with tennis courts, swimming pools, baseball teams, and horseshoe pits. Oil-field lease houses—with walls made of compressed wood pulp, no indoor plumbing or electricity, and heat from a single stove—rented for an average of seven dollars a month. Oil-field employees worked twelve-hour shifts around the clock. Drugstores stayed open late into the night. Then the storm passed. In 1925, the year Madelyn turned three and her family moved from Peru to Augusta, the boom peaked. By the 1930s, the oil companies had turned their attention elsewhere. The population of Butler County dwindled. Left in the boom’s wake was the memory of a bonanza that had barreled through town like a westbound train.

  In December 2008, I visited Ralph Dunham, the brother of Stanley Dunham and uncle of Stanley Ann, in a retirement community in Springfield, Virginia, where he was living with his wife, Betty. Stanley Dunham had been dead for sixteen years, so I had turned to Ralph,
his only sibling, for help. Ralph, whose full name is Ralph Waldo Emerson Dunham, told me that his grandfather, who had studied at Kansas State University to become a pharmacist, had been an admirer of Emerson. So he named his son Ralph Waldo Emerson Dunham, who in turn passed the name on to his eldest son. Ralph told me that his mother admired Henry Morton Stanley, the journalist and explorer who found David Livingstone beside Lake Tanganyika in 1871. So she named her second son Stanley. Ralph, a year and a half older than Stanley, was the more studious and less flamboyant of the two Dunham brothers. He graduated from El Dorado High School in 1934, intending to become a teacher. He majored in math at Kansas State Teachers College in Emporia and got a Ph.D. in educational psychology from UC Berkeley in 1950. He taught in colleges in the South, then worked for the U.S. Naval Personnel Research Activity, doing training and qualifications for the Polaris program, then the Federal Aviation Agency, then the Office of Education, which later became the Department of Education. He served as a lieutenant in the Army during World War II and was in Normandy and the Rhineland after D-Day, remained in the Reserve afterward, and retired as a lieutenant colonel. While being trained in rapid fire with an Enfield, he stunned the sergeant by firing his two clips of ammunition in about thirty-five seconds and hitting the bull’s-eye every time. At age seven, he had learned from his father how to fire a single-shot, bolt-action .22 rifle.