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

by Janny Scott

  Stanley Ann, often the only girl in the group, shared the boys’ highbrow pretensions and what Byers described as their us-against-them outlook toward “the dominant culture, the not-very-thoughtful people doing not-very-thoughtful things.” He said, “I think it was a big issue for her—these kinds of people that she disliked. My feeling is she did feel ostracized—that she felt that she could never have been one of them even if she had wanted to be one of them, that type of feeling.” Unconventional in many ways, she also had a conservative streak. Once, Byers drove her out to Bellevue to meet some friends he had made who were in the process of becoming, in effect, early hippies. Their style of living fascinated Byers. Stanley Ann looked the scene over. “You know, I couldn’t live in that place,” she told him later. “It’s filthy.” Which was true, Byers remembered later. “Somewhere, fundamentally, she had a fairly rock-solid, realistic, even conservative outlook,” he said. “She knew where the line was, it seemed. She was right about those people. By their lights, they were living free of all these restraints. But of course, that meant free of . . .”

  He paused.

  “. . . hygiene.”

  By senior year, Stanley Ann’s friendship with Kathy Powell had cooled. Kathy had met Jim Sullivan, a fraternity man from the University of Washington, at the Pancake Corral. Because he was five years older than she was, she had lied to him about her age. Now she was wearing his fraternity pin. In Stanley Ann’s eyes, Kathy Sullivan told me, she had sold out. Stanley Ann defined herself by her intellect, Sullivan said. If she had any romantic interest in boys, she did not let on. In the spring of 1959, Jim Sullivan suggested to Kathy that he fix up some of his fraternity brothers with her friends. When Kathy suggested including Stanley Ann, Jim dropped her from the list in favor of a girl thought to be the most beautiful in the school. “She wasn’t a radiant beauty by any means,” Byers said of Stanley Ann. “But, probably more to the point, she was very intellectual, and she could cut people down. She didn’t suffer fools gladly.” She would have needed some coaching, Kathy felt, not to be supercilious and disdainful to Jim’s fraternity friends.

  In early 2009, I heard the name Allen Yonge. If Stanley Ann had ever had a boyfriend in high school, I was told, it could have been Allen. He was a year or two older than she was and lived in Bellevue, though no one seemed to remember how they had met. For a time, friends of theirs said, he developed a crush on Stanley Ann. She seemed willing, sort of, to give it a try. I found an address for Mr. Yonge and sent him a letter asking if he would speak with me. In early March, I received an e-mail from his wife, Penelope Yonge. Her husband was astounded to get my letter, she said: “Allen is enthusiastic about Obama, but he had never connected his Mercer Island friend Stanley with the president, so this came as quite a surprise.” However, he was recovering from an accident and not in a condition to talk. He would get back to me, she said, when he was in better shape. Several months later, I wrote to her to say I was still interested whenever her husband felt up to speaking. She e-mailed back two days later to tell me that he had died. “He had been looking forward to talking to you about Stanley,” she said. “He remembered her with great affection and admiration—he called her ‘brainy’ and ‘intellectual’ and ‘adventurous’ and ‘a whole lot of fun’ (descriptions that aren’t usually used together, at least not in high school).”

  Stanley Ann was, indeed, adventurous. In the summer of 1959, Steve McCord proposed an unusual late-night outing. At a time when homosexuality was kept well hidden, he had developed a crush on a younger boy and had confided in Stanley Ann. He suggested they sneak out late one night, walk to the boy’s house at the far end of the island, and watch him through his window while he slept. Stanley Ann was game, McCord recalled when he told me the story; she was a person who was just “up for adventure.” (And if she ever felt inner turmoil about a decision, Byers told me, she did not let on: “When she decided to do something, she decided to do it.”) So on a warm, breezy night and at the appointed hour, she climbed out her bedroom window onto the moonlit lawn of the Shorewood complex. McCord was waiting, and they set off, heading south. They walked several miles to the house, found the window, executed their mission undetected, then walked several miles home—only to be confronted by Big Stan, stationed in the bedroom window, arms akimbo, awaiting their return. His reaction was stern but not explosive, as McCord recalled it: “It was, ‘Young lady, you get in here. And you, go home!’” The episode blew over, it seems, without dire consequences for Stanley Ann. But it proved to be a precursor to a far more daring adventure a few months later—a spontaneous breakout that shattered the written and unwritten codes of conduct that kept Mercer Island teenagers on the straight and narrow. It was an act of rebellion that Stanley Ann’s father would be unlikely to forget.

  Fifty years later, no one seemed to agree on exactly when the escapade went down. Bill Byers thought it took place during the fall, but John Hunt initially remembered the time of year as spring. Either way, it was nighttime and they were driving home to Mercer Island, maybe from a coffeehouse in Seattle, with Stanley Ann. They were in Hunt’s parents’ car, and Hunt was at the wheel. The conversation turned negative—one of those “This really sucks, school is irrelevant, why bother to go home?” conversations of adolescence, as Hunt described it. Suddenly, someone suggested not going home: They could keep on driving. They could drive to San Francisco. Hunt balked, stunned by the suggestion. He might have expected it of Bill, he said later, but he had no idea that Stanley Ann “had got to the point of just wanting to go chuck it.” They began to argue. The argument turned acrimonious and tearful. Hunt tried to talk the others out of it, he told me, visibly anguished by the memory a half-century later. They begged him to join them. But the lark struck him as pointless: They would get in trouble for cutting school; they would be runaways; if the other two went without him, he would have to lie to cover their tracks. “He was certainly torn,” Byers remembered. “But he was a sensible person, basically. He would never do a thing like that—which was totally irresponsible and totally crazy and downright dangerous and not even practical.” As for Stanley Ann, he said, “She was all for it. Otherwise, it would never have happened. I guarantee it. She would have said, ‘No. Take me home.’ She didn’t.” So it was settled. Hunt dropped off the other two at the Byerses’ garage, where Byers parked the metallic-green 1949 Cadillac convertible that his father no longer used. The garage was beside the road, uphill from and out of earshot of the house. “Please don’t do this,” Hunt pleaded. “You’re going to ruin things for everybody.”

  Byers and Stanley Ann headed south in the Cadillac. They had only the money in their pockets and the clothes they were wearing. When Byers and I spoke, his memory of details of the trip was spotty. He said he had forgotten most of what happened, including the route they drove, how long they were away, what they talked about in the car. But, he made clear, it was a road trip. It was neither romantic nor an elopement. He remembered a few episodes in some detail. They picked up a mild-mannered drifter who did them the favor of extracting the car radio from the dashboard to sell it to a gas station attendant when cash ran short. Byers remembered pulling off the road to sleep—the two men in the front seat, Stanley Ann in back—and being awakened in the night by the sound of whimpering. The hitchhiker had swiveled around in his seat and was groping in Stanley Ann’s direction, “softly asking her to ‘be nice’ to him, while she shrank as far away from him as she could,” Byers told me. Byers barked at the man, who swung forward and mumbled an apology. “I do not remember feeling frightened. I think I was just angry,” Byers told me. “I am most certainly not a brave person. I guess I was naive enough to not consider the possibility of having a rapist or homicidal maniac on our hands.” As for Stanley Ann, faced with the unwanted advances of a stranger, she was visibly afraid. It was the only time, Byers told me, that he could remember seeing her in a situation out of her control and feeling frightened.

  Later, they unloaded that hitchhiker
and picked up another—a homeless boy who regaled Byers with stories about male prostitution and other survival strategies for young people in the city. They rolled into the Bay Area and found their way to the home of Raleigh Roark’s half sister, who had left Seattle and was living not far from the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. Byers, Stanley Ann, and the young hitchhiker arrived and settled in.

  Meanwhile, back in Seattle, Hunt had barely gone to bed that night—or perhaps woken up in the morning—before the telephone rang. Byers’s parents were calling. “My story was, ‘Gee, I don’t know. I dropped them off at Bill’s. I thought Bill was going to take her home,’” he told me. Back in Kansas, too, the telephone rang in the home of Leona and R. C. Payne, Charles Payne remembered. Thinking Stanley Ann and Byers might have headed for Kansas, Madelyn was calling her mother. The two teenagers were reported missing. Hunt, who was not in the habit of lying to his parents about things that mattered, received a visit from a member of the county sheriff’s office. Gradually, fragments of the story spilled out. They had all talked about going off on a lark, driving someplace. They had said, “Wouldn’t it be fun to drive to San Francisco?” Perhaps Byers’s parents remembered Byers having talked about Roark’s half sister in the San Francisco Bay Area. Someone called the police in the Berkeley area and in the surrounding county. Officers turned up at the house. The young hitchhiker tried, unsuccessfully, to bolt through an open window. The three runaways were taken into custody and put briefly in juvenile detention, segregated by gender. Stanley Dunham arrived by plane from Seattle and somehow managed to retrieve the car, which had been impounded. Then he drove Byers and Stanley Ann home. As Bill described it, Stanley Dunham seemed to suspect, wrongly, that Bill and Stanley Ann had eloped. Byers told me, “I remember him going off on this strange monologue, saying, ‘Sex isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, you know?’”

  There is a temptation to see in the midnight road trip a foreshadowing of events yet to come in Stanley Ann’s life. It certainly suggests a willingness to take a risk, an aptitude that flows, like a leitmotif, through the history of the Dunhams and the Paynes. Madelyn, as a teenager, had defied her parents and married in secret. Stanley, at a young age, had struck out for the coast. They may have appeared conventional from the outside, but there was a restlessness about them—the restlessness that had propelled Americans westward and that would eventually take the Dunhams as far west as they could go. Perhaps it is a leap to connect that impulse to a late-night lark in the young life of one high school senior. But the truth is, Stanley Ann would keep traveling for the rest of her life.

  When she resurfaced in school, she did not want to talk about what had happened, Hunt remembered. People would not understand, he said, and she could not explain. Such an escapade was unheard of. Kathy Sullivan told me she remembered thinking, “My God, that’s worse than getting pregnant.” Perhaps Stanley Ann had intended, as Charles Payne put it, “to shake up her father.” No one seemed to remember if she was punished. But as senior year wound down, it became apparent that the Dunhams were moving on. Stanley’s work selling furniture in Seattle had dried up. Hawaii, in its newness, was courting transplants. The mayor of Honolulu and a delegation of Hawaii businessmen had been at the Seattle Chamber of Commerce in October, talking up business opportunities. Madelyn would have been happy to stay put, her brother Charles remembered. Her career in banking was flourishing. Stanley Ann had no interest in moving, either. Some said she wanted to attend the University of Washington, where many of her closest friends were headed. Or she may have wanted to go east to the University of Chicago. Arlene Payne, who was at the university, getting a Ph.D. in education, remembered Stanley Ann staying with her that year, apparently scouting for schools. In Dreams from My Father, Obama writes that his mother was offered early admission to the University of Chicago, but “my grandfather forbade her to go, deciding that she was still too young to be living on her own.” Whatever the case, sometime shortly after graduation in 1960, Stanley Ann vanished. “She was upset that she had to move,” Maxine Box remembered. “She didn’t really have any choice.”

  Her friends—the first set of close friends she had ever had—moved on, too. Kathy Powell, who had become pregnant in her senior year, had married Jim Sullivan and finished the school year at Edison Technical High School in Seattle. Steve McCord was in San Francisco, studying art. Bill Byers dropped out of the University of Washington and enrolled for a time in a college in Mexico where he had been told that William Burroughs had had a wild time. Later, he returned to Seattle, got a degree in electrical engineering, and went to work for Boeing. Chip Wall joined the Peace Corps after graduating from the University of Washington. He spent two years in India, helping set up chicken-farming cooperatives in a village on the Ganges in Bihar and working in Hyderabad. Upon returning home, he was drafted and sent to Vietnam. Marilyn McMeekin went to Korea with the Peace Corps, Iona Stenhouse to Sierra Leone. The valedictorian of the class of 1959, the class ahead of theirs, became an anthropologist working in French Polynesia. In the context of Mercer Island, where the idea of conformity was at least in some circles out of fashion, Stanley Ann might almost be seen in retrospect as part of a trend.

  Apart from a few fleeting encounters, few of her friends ever saw or heard from her again. “People said she went to Africa and married a black king,” Kathy Sullivan remembered. “We all thought that for years and years.”

  Three

  East-West

  There are ways in which Hawaii’s capital city brings to mind the sun-bleached seediness of Southern California beach towns. But a short drive outside of Honolulu, the fiftieth state feels like another planet. Leaving the city behind, the Pali Highway cuts northeast through the remnants of the Ko‘olau volcano, heading toward the windward coast of the island of O‘ahu. The road climbs several thousand feet toward Pali Pass, disappears briefly into a tunnel, then plunges toward the beach town of Kailua. Jagged volcanic ridges parade against the sky like dinosaurs’ backbones, slopes diving away from the ridgeline in dark, rippling curtains. Smudgy, gray-bottomed clouds congregate upwind of the mountains, sunlight mottling the hillsides in luminous green. In the front yard of a house on a quiet street in Kailua, I met Marilyn McMeekin Bauer, Stanley Ann’s high school classmate. Bauer moved to Hawaii in 1968, straight from two years in the Peace Corps in Korea and eight years after Stanley Ann’s arrival. Looking back, she said, she could not imagine what it was like for Stanley Ann to be airlifted at age seventeen straight from the monochrome insularity of Mercer Island onto the campus of the University of Hawai‘i. It must have been, she said, a shock.

  Hawaii in the summer of 1960 bore little resemblance to El Dorado, Ponca City, or any other place the Dunham family had roosted. As a state, it was an infant, admitted to the union on August 21, 1959. The population of the entire archipelago, 2,400 miles out in the Pacific, was fewer than 650,000. Whites made up less than a third of the population and were outnumbered by Japanese-Americans. Nearly one in five people was Hawaiian or part Hawaiian. There were Filipinos, Koreans, Chinese, and nearly 13,000 “other,” though less than one-tenth of one percent of the population was classified as Negro. The place prided itself on tolerance. Despite the occasional real estate listing insisting on “no haoles,” or white people, or calls for “Americans of Japanese ancestry only,” residents saw Hawaii as a laboratory for assimilation and a model of harmonious coexistence. Steeped in its vision of pluralism, the state seemed poised at a moment of infinite possibility.

  Hawaii was on the verge of economic liftoff, too. Jet travel had sliced hours off the time required to cross the Pacific. Visitor expenditures had risen fivefold between 1950 and 1960, outstripping the value of sugar and pineapple production for the first time. The total value of mortgages had quadrupled, and bank branches had more than doubled in number. By 1967, Honolulu would rank fifth in the country in the value of building permits issued, trailing only New York, Los Angeles, Houston, and Chicago. Paradise of the P
acific—a glossy magazine featuring articles on outrigger canoe racing, the muumuu, and Duke Kahanamoku, the Olympic swimming champion who popularized surfing—was thick with ads for real estate companies, banks, moving and storage services, decorators, flooring. For a footsore furniture salesman with an industrious banker wife and a college-age daughter, Hawaii had promise. With tuition at the University of Hawai‘i at eighty-five dollars per semester, enrollment in the fall of 1960 jumped by thirteen percent. For the first time, the number of incoming freshman topped two thousand, Stanley Ann Dunham among them. Arriving on campus in September 1960, she swiftly jettisoned her first name. From then on, Stanley was Ann.

  At first glance, the University of Hawai‘i in 1960 might have seemed an unlikely fit for a brainy nonconformist with a wry sense of humor and a taste for cool jazz. It was a quiet provincial land-grant college nestled in the tropical lushness of the Mānoa Valley, east of downtown Honolulu and at the base of the Ko‘olau Range. The valley was known for its rainbows, produced when the trade winds coming across the windward shore of O‘ahu hit the mountains, sprinkling the valley on the far side in showers. The student newspaper, Ka Leo O Hawai‘i, occupied itself with documenting every beauty contest, sorority pledge week, and race for homecoming queen. Its monthly calendar featured a spread of a comely coed, dressed in something tropical but demure. (“A water sports enthusiast, she likes swimming, surfing and water skiing. Another one of her interests is that of hula dancing.”) In the home economics department, the course offerings included “Aesthetics of Clothing and Personal Appearance.” The annual, student-sponsored Ka Palapala Beauty Pageant of Nations, with its bathing-suit rally and formal-dress competition, selected seven finalists, one for each of seven ethnic groups. “The University of Hawai‘i used to be a good party school,” Pake Zane, a Chinese-American born on Maui and an undergraduate in the late 1950s, told me. “We had our share of demonstrations, but it was basically much more conservative. People would say, ‘Don’t go make trouble.’ It’s a kind of Oriental attitude—that you don’t want to bring shame on your family.” There were exceptions to that rule, of course. When James Meredith was barred from entering the University of Mississippi in September 1962 on the basis of his race, five hundred students and faculty members on the Mānoa campus held a rally to protest his treatment, and the political-affairs club fired off a resolution to the University of Mississippi. “We, students in the newest state of the Union—a state dedicated to the principle of racial equality—are distressed by the ungoverned passion and hate that is sweeping Mississippi over the admission of a Negro to its state university,” the resolution began.