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

by Janny Scott

  Whatever happened happened fast. Classes began on September 26, two months before Ann’s eighteenth birthday. By early November, she was pregnant. She dropped out of school when the semester ended and married that winter so discreetly, reportedly on the island of Maui, that her son never unearthed a single trace of the event. “There’s no record of a real wedding, a cake, a ring, a giving away of the bride,” he writes. “No families were in attendance; it’s not even clear that people back in Kansas were fully informed. Just a small civil ceremony, a justice of the peace. The whole thing seems so fragile in retrospect, so haphazard. And perhaps that’s how my grandparents intended it to be, a trial that would pass, just a matter of time, so long as they maintained a stiff upper lip and didn’t do anything drastic.”

  If so, they got their wish.

  On August 4, 1961, at 7:24 p.m., at Kapi‘olani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu, Ann gave birth to Barack Hussein Obama Jr. Eleven months later, the elder Obama was gone. In June 1962, he received his undergraduate degree from the University of Hawai‘i and left for the East Coast. According to an article in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, he left in late June “for a tour of Mainland universities before entering Harvard in the fall.” The article, four paragraphs long, said he had been awarded a graduate faculty fellowship in economics and planned to return later to Africa to work in economic-development and international-trade planning and policy. In Dreams from My Father, Obama recalls coming upon that article, along with his birth certificate and vaccination forms, while he was in high school. “No mention is made of my mother or me, and I’m left to wonder whether the omission was intentional on my father’s part, in anticipation of his long departure,” he writes. “Perhaps the reporter failed to ask personal questions, intimidated by my father’s imperious manner; or perhaps it was an editorial decision, not part of the simple story that they were looking for. I wonder, too, whether the omission caused a fight between my parents.”

  Whatever fight there was may have happened earlier. Ann, it seems, left Hawaii well before Obama. Her friend Maxine Box, from Mercer Island, recalled seeing her in Seattle late in the summer of 1961—happy and proud of her baby, who was with her, but saying nothing about marriage, at least that Box could remember. In the spring quarter of 1962, as Obama was embarking on his final semester in Hawaii, Ann was enrolled at the University of Washington in Seattle, according to Bob Roseth, director of news and information for the university. Her high school friend John Hunt saw her once that spring with her baby, and Bill Byers remembered having dinner with her once in an apartment where she was living. She looked different: She had lost weight and grown her hair long, said Linda Hall Wylie, another high school classmate, who remembered running into her fleetingly on University Way. Her sudden motherhood startled her friends, and not simply because the father of her baby was black. She had had no serious boyfriend in high school that they knew of, and she had never shown any interest in babysitting, a growth industry for teenagers on Mercer Island. Precipitous marriage and maternity seemed to be the fate mostly of girls who had “gotten in trouble.” Few would have expected Stanley to hew to the standard female trajectory—from college and sorority life to a short stint in teaching or nursing, followed by departure from the workforce in order to marry and raise children. No one would have imagined this. Sometime after that spring quarter, Ann apparently gave up trying to make a go of it alone in Seattle. She returned to Honolulu, after which she may have seen only one friend from Mercer Island ever again. Her life had taken a hairpin turn, and there was no turning back. A yawning gulf had opened between her and her old friends. “The rest of us were leading the sorority/going on dates/going to the football games/totally different life,” Wylie said. “When you go away and your life changes so dramatically, no one else can understand it.”

  The news of Ann’s pregnancy, sudden marriage, and separation was closely held within the extended Dunham and Payne families—not unlike the news of Madelyn and Stanley’s elopement twenty years earlier. Ralph Dunham, Ann’s uncle, told me that he heard nothing about her pregnancy and marriage until after Barack was born. “They might have been worried about family reaction,” he said. “It would have upset my grandmother and my aunt, I think.” (He remembered once mentioning to his grandmother, who had raised him and Ann’s father, that he had invited an African-American friend, who was a university professor, to his house for dinner. To which, he said, she replied, “You mean to say, you actually sat down and ate a meal with a black person?”) Madelyn’s brother Charles learned of Ann’s marriage before he learned of her pregnancy, which he said he was told of only after she gave birth. When I asked him about his parents’ reaction to the news, he said, “They tended to be closed about things. If they were unhappy, I wouldn’t expect them to voice anything. Just keep quiet. I heard nothing.” Jon Payne, Madelyn’s youngest brother, who had spent six months on the Dunhams’ living room couch on Mercer Island three years earlier, said he heard the news a full three or four years late. He was back in Kansas on a visit, throwing darts in his parents’ garage, when his brother happened to mention “Ann’s son.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Ann’s son’?” Jon asked.

  “Yeah,” he remembered Charles saying. “Didn’t you know Ann had a baby?”

  “No.”

  “You probably haven’t heard it from our parents, have you? He’s black.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yeah. Somebody she met at the university.”

  Only Arlene Payne remembered receiving a call from Madelyn. It may have come after the wedding. When I asked her how Madelyn seemed to be feeling about what had happened, Arlene said drily, “A little distraught.”

  Distraught because Ann was seventeen years old? I asked. Or because she knew that motherhood might derail Ann’s education? Or because Ann’s new husband was black? Or because he was African, with plans to return home?

  “I think that’s probably quite enough.”

  Madelyn and Stanley’s views about race were not extreme. In Dreams from My Father, Obama says they had given little thought to black people until they were living in Texas when Stanley Ann was eleven or twelve. There, fellow furniture salesmen advised Stanley early on that “the coloreds” should be permitted to inspect the merchandise in the store only after hours and that they would have to arrange for their own delivery. At the bank where Madelyn worked, a white secretary reprimanded her hotly for speaking respectfully to a black janitor she had befriended. Stanley Ann, too, had encountered race hatred for the first time, according to Obama. Madelyn found her and an African-American girl cowering in terror on the ground in the yard of the Dunhams’ house, where they had been reading, while a group of white children taunted them. When Stanley reported the incident to the school principal and some of the children’s parents, according to Obama’s account, he was told, “White girls don’t play with coloreds in this town.”

  Stanley would maintain later that the family left Texas in part because of their discomfort with that kind of racism, Obama writes, though Madelyn said they left because Stanley was not doing well at work and had a better opportunity in Seattle. Obama writes that he cannot dismiss his grandfather’s account as “a convenient bit of puffery, another act of white revisionism.” After Texas, he says of Stanley, “the condition of the black race, their pain, their wounds, would in his mind become merged with his own: the absent father and the hint of scandal, a mother who had gone away, the cruelty of other children, the realization that he was no fair-haired boy—that he looked like a ‘wop.’” In Stanley’s mind, racism was mixed in with the attitudes responsible for much of the unhappiness of his early life, “part of convention and respectability and status, the smirks and the whispers and gossip that had kept him on the outside looking in.”

  Perhaps for those reasons, the reaction of Stanley and Madelyn to the African man Ann brought home was less hostile than stereotypes about the period and the place they came from might suggest. In h
is book, the younger Obama only imagines their reaction, preferring constructions like “would have” and “might have.” Whatever he knows for a fact, he does not say. “The poor kid’s probably lonely, Gramps would have thought, so far from home,” Obama writes. “Better take a look at him, Toot would have said to herself.” He imagines Stanley being struck by the dinner guest’s resemblance to Nat King Cole, and Madelyn holding her tongue when she glimpses Ann reaching over to squeeze Obama’s hand. The younger Obama suggests, too, the conversation his grandparents might have had later, how they would have marveled at the man’s intelligence and dignified bearing—“and how about that accent!”

  Madelyn and Stanley were, it seems, somewhat awed by Obama. Arlene Payne, who would spend time with the three of them over Christmas in Honolulu some years later, said, “I had the sense then, as I had had earlier, that both Madelyn and Stanley were impressed with him in some way. They were very respectful to him and all this, but they liked to listen to what he had to say.” They seemed to have felt that way about him earlier, too. “I was there when he was there, and I felt that they really accepted him,” she said. On the other hand, David Mendell, who interviewed Madelyn for his 2007 biography, Obama: From Promise to Power, found her at that time skeptical of the elder Obama. “I am a little dubious of the things that people from foreign countries tell me,” Mendell quoted her as saying.

  It is not known what options other than marriage Ann might have considered once she learned she was pregnant. Abortion was illegal but not impossible, especially for people with connections in the medical community. Had they wanted it, the Dunhams might conceivably have had access to that world. Thomas Farner, whose parents were bridge partners of the Dunhams on Mercer Island, said his parents sent his sister, Jackie, a high school classmate of Stanley Ann’s who died in 2007, to Honolulu to stay with the Dunhams not long after she and Stanley Ann graduated from high school. The reason for the trip, Farner said, was to enable his sister to have an abortion. Their father, a physician, must have arranged it, Farner said. The Farners’ older sister, Judy Ware, who was not living at home at that time, told me she believed her brother’s account was accurate. Ann’s graduate-school friend, Kadi Warner, recalling conversations she had with Ann many years later, said Ann married Obama because she was pregnant. “She was a nice, middle-class girl,” Warner said. “And she loved him.” The decision appears not to have been forced on her by her parents. In Dreams from My Father, Obama writes that Ann told him, in his early twenties, that his grandparents “‘weren’t happy with the idea. But they said okay—they probably couldn’t have stopped us anyway, and they eventually came around to the idea that it was the right thing to do.’” When I asked Arlene about the decision, she said, “I think you have to understand that Ann was an independent soul, and she would make her own decisions about this kind of thing. What Madelyn wanted, I don’t really know. I think that it was Ann’s decision, and I think Madelyn thought she would have to let her do what she wanted.”

  Madelyn, after all, had done what she wanted at Ann’s age.

  It was Obama’s father in Kenya who vociferously opposed the marriage, according to the younger Obama’s telling. He wrote to Stanley Dunham, saying “he didn’t want the Obama blood sullied by a white woman,” as Obama quotes Ann as having told him. “And then there was a problem with your father’s first wife. . . . He had told me they were separated, but it was a village wedding, so there was no legal document that could show a divorce.” Nevertheless, they intended to return to Kenya when the elder Obama finished his studies, the younger Obama writes. “But your grandfather Hussein was still writing to your father, threatening to have his student visa revoked,” he quotes his mother as saying. “By this time Toot had become hysterical—she had read about the Mau-Mau rebellion in Kenya a few years earlier, which the Western press really played up—and she was sure that I would have my head chopped off and you would be taken away.”

  Things changed abruptly. Obama, a member of the Luo ethnic group, was from a culture that traditionally allowed for polygamous marriages. He had not only a pregnant wife but a child back home. “The way the story was put to me, she found out he had this family in Africa, so she divorced him because of bigamy,” Arlene Payne said. “What all else was involved, I have no idea.” According to Warner, Ann “realized very early on that she was in over her head with this guy.” Warner said, “His attitude changed when she got married. She became his wife, and he became very critical.” One evening, Warner remembered Ann telling her, Ann had cooked dinner for Obama. She put the food on a plate and put the plate in front of him at the table. “You expect me to eat this?” he barked. Then he grabbed the plate of food and hurled it against the wall.

  “She said then she knew,” Warner said.

  By the spring of 1963, Ann had returned to Honolulu from Seattle and had reenrolled as an undergraduate at the University of Hawai‘i. She was twenty years old, a single mother of a biracial child, living with her parents. Stanley and Madelyn had bounced through four addresses in their first four years in Honolulu, settling, after Ann’s return, in a low-slung bungalow-style house on University Avenue a short walk from campus. Stanley, listed in the Honolulu city directory until 1968 as manager of a business called Pratt Furniture, had acquired an interest in a chain of furniture stores, according to his brother, Ralph. Madelyn, who Arlene Payne said had gone to night school in Washington in order to get ahead in banking, had begun her uphill climb from loan interviewer to vice president at the Bank of Hawaii. Within a decade, she would be one of the bank’s first female vice presidents and the formidable “grande dame of escrow,” as a younger colleague would remember her when her grandson made her famous decades later. Maxine Box, Ann’s friend from Mercer Island whose parents would visit the Dunhams in Honolulu several years later, said, “I pat her mom and dad on the back. The turmoil in that family must have been incredible.”

  Whatever turmoil there had been, Madelyn and Stanley made their peace with Ann’s choices, and they embraced new parental and grandparental roles. “All I know is from at least the day Barack was born, there was total acceptance,” Charles Payne said. “He was their baby, and they loved him from day one.” Stanley, having seen little of his own father after the age of eight, cannot have forgotten how it felt to be fatherless. He must have also remembered the haven he and his brother had found in their grandparents’ multigenerational home. Madelyn, having been pregnant herself at nineteen, may have found it easier than some mothers would have to see her daughter as a new mother at roughly the same age. Madelyn, who was only thirty-eight when her grandson was born, “wasn’t particularly grandmotherly, mind you,” Maya Soetoro-Ng told me. So she adopted the name Tutu, an affectionate term used in Hawaii for grandmother—more palatable than, say, Granny. Over time, Tutu evolved into Toot. Just as her mother had taken in Madelyn and her infant daughter while Stanley was in the Army, Madelyn and Stanley now took in Ann and her son. And just as Leona Payne had made it possible for Madelyn to work at Boeing, Madelyn and Stanley made it possible for Ann to return to school. Madelyn had no intention of letting Ann’s changed circumstances derail her education.

  Stanley and Barack

  “You have to understand that Ann’s mother very much regretted her choices,” Arlene Payne told me. “She would never have let Ann go that way. She had ambitions. She wanted to get on in the world. She realized what a mistake she had made in not going to college. She expressed that to me a number of times, so I think she would never have allowed Ann to not go to college.”

  They were opposites in many ways, Madelyn and Ann. In temperament, Ann took after her father, Maya said. They were “people of appetites”—not content with small portions or small vistas, not willing “to walk in the same circle.” They were gregarious and loquacious. They loved food, words, stories, books, objects, conversation. Madelyn, by contrast, was practical and down to earth. “My mother’s favorite color is beige,” Ann would joke to colleagues years later.
Madelyn was sensible and unsentimental—not a “softie,” the term Maya applied to Ann. Maya described her grandmother’s dictum as: Buckle down, don’t complain, don’t air your dirty laundry in public, don’t be so restless. “Work hard, care for your family, raise your kids right, and provide for them,” Maya added. “Make sure they have better lives than you. And that’s about it.” Madelyn pushed boundaries in her professional life, but she did it by following the rules. “It wasn’t that she was doing it differently, necessarily,” Maya said. “She was very much one of the boys in the bank. She wore high heels and women’s suits, and she was very ladylike, but she was very aware of bank decorum and the rules of engagement. She just, I think, was incredibly smart and worked really hard. She did whatever was necessary.”

  By way of illustration of the differences between her mother and her grandmother, Maya imagined the way they might comport themselves on the same hypothetical path. Ann would pause to pick berries and seeds, study them curiously, find another path, veer off, stop, climb a tree, listen to the bamboo whistling in the wind. Madelyn would start at the beginning, march forward, sure-footed, chest up, head up, until she reached the end.

  Did Madelyn counsel Ann to be more prudent? I asked.

  “Probably with both of her marriages,” Maya said.

  “Mom said that Tutu worried about her and wished that she could take the easier path,” Maya continued. “What was meant by that was obviously that here was someone from a different country, who had different cultural expectations, of a different race—in a country that had miscegenation laws in place. This was not the easy path, this was not the direct path. I think Tutu, according to Mom, expressed some concern. It was given more in a sigh than a scream. It was just sort of like, ‘What are we going to do?’” She added, “Tutu wished she would be more sensible and get a house and learn to drive and sit still.”