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

by Janny Scott

  Fortunately, Indonesians do not expect foreigners to be like them. “Indonesians are very generous and very kind as long as you’re not too arrogant,” des Tombes said. “They’re willing to put up with all our Western foibles. We are rather rough and abrasive, as far as they are concerned. We are less able to pick up on the subtext.” After all, Indonesians are accustomed to living in a diverse society in which cultural differences are common. “They’re already used to dealing with Bataks,” Ikranagara told me, referring to the ethnic group from the mountains of North Sumatra known for, among many other things, straightforwardness. “So they’re willing to accept Ann as a sort of Batak.”

  Ann had little trouble making close friends, including Indonesian and expatriate men. By the standards of Indonesian society, as well as expatriate society, that may have been unusual for a married woman. But Ann did not seem to care. There was Anton Hillman, an affable Indonesian of Chinese descent, who went on to host an English-language show on Indonesian television and work as an interpreter for the first lady, Ibu Tien Suharto. He is said to have met Ann at USAID and to have encouraged her to move on from her first job to the management school, where he worked part-time. Mohammad Mansur Medeiros, a reclusive and scholarly Subud member from Fall River, Massachusetts, and Harvard, whom Ann hired as a teacher, had immersed himself so deeply in Javanese culture, language, and religion that friends nicknamed him Mansur Java. When he died in 2007, friends recalled his preference for the company of ordinary Indonesians—street vendors and becak drivers—over that of other Subud members and expatriates. Samardal Manan, an anxious young teacher who went on to a career as a translator for Exxon Mobil, used to listen, awestruck and in silence, to Ann’s freewheeling conversations with Medeiros. “You would think they were in love, but they were not,” Manan said. “Ann was a person who got so close, happy, and cheerful when talking with a person who was equally fluent. They would move from one subject to another—students, corruption, politics, anthropology. She didn’t really worry about the impression it would have on others.”

  Manan was new to Jakarta when he met Ann at the binational organization where she was working in 1968. He was a nervous, dark-skinned young man from a traditional Muslim family, trying to be somebody in the big city. He lacked confidence in dealing with people whom he considered to be of higher status. He had studied English at a teachers’ college in Bukittinggi, funded by the Ford Foundation, where he had first encountered Peace Corps volunteers. “We Indonesians admired Americans, especially women,” Manan recalled. “We knew that Americans were very, very civilized people, very educated, very intelligent. There were a lot of things we could learn.” Ann was a magnet for people, including him, he said. Decades later, he remembered her, and conversations they had, in vivid detail. She encouraged him to be more confident, expressive, and outgoing. She told him that he worried too much. She staged a mock television interview show and interviewed him in front of their colleagues. They often talked about Indonesia. She told him she admired Indonesia’s Bataks for their frankness, pragmatism, and willingness to assume responsibility. She also made it clear that she hated corruption. “She said the only way to solve this problem was through education and making people aware that corruption was bad,” Manan said. “I believe she taught her students that, because she spoke her mind very freely.”

  Kay Ikranagara, one of Ann’s closest friends, was the daughter of a development economist from the University of California who had taught at the University of Indonesia in the late 1950s. She had lived in Jakarta as a teenager; studied anthropology and linguistics at Berkeley in the 1960s, where she had been jailed for political activism; then returned to Jakarta, where she met her husband, Ikranagara, then a freelance journalist and actor. She met Ann while teaching part-time at the management school and writing her dissertation in linguistics. They had a lot in common: Indonesian husbands, degrees in anthropology, babies born in the same month, opinions shaped by the 1960s. They were less conscious than others of the boundaries between cultures, Kay Ikranagara told me, and they rejected what they saw as the previous generation’s hypocrisy on the subject of race. “We had all the same attitudes,” she remembered. “When we met people who worked for the oil companies or the embassy, they belonged to a different culture than Ann and I. We felt they didn’t mix with Indonesians, they were part of an insular American culture.” Servants seemed to be the only Indonesians those Americans knew.

  But by the early 1970s, Lolo’s new job had plunged him deeply into that oil company culture. Foreign firms doing business in Indonesia were required to hire and train Indonesian partners. In many cases, the exercise struck some people as a sham: Companies would hire an Indonesian director, pay him well, and give him little or nothing to do. Trisulo, Lolo’s brother-in-law, told me he did not recall the exact nature of Lolo’s job with Union Oil. It may have been “government relations,” his son, Sonny Trisulo, said. Whatever it was, Lolo’s job included socializing with oil company executives and their wives. He joined the Indonesian Petroleum Club, a private watering hole in Central Jakarta for oil company people and their families, which offered swimming, tennis, dining, and rooms for receptions. Ann, as Lolo’s wife, was expected to socialize, too. Any failure to do so reflected badly on him. “It’s the society that asks it,” Kay Ikranagara said. “Your husband is supposed to show up at social functions with you at his side, dressed in a kain and kebaya,” a costume consisting of the traditional, tightly fitted, long-sleeved blouse and a length of unstitched cloth wound around the lower part of the body. “You’re supposed to sit with the women and talk about your children and your servants.”

  Ann begged off.

  “She didn’t understand these folks—the idea of living an expatriate life that was so completely divorced from the world around you, that involves hiding yourself away in these protective cells of existence,” Maya said. “That was peculiar to her, and she was bored by it.” Ann complained to her friend Bill Collier that all those middle-aged white Americans talked about inane things. Lolo, she told Collier, “was becoming more American all the time.” Occasionally, the young Obama would overhear Lolo and Ann arguing in their bedroom about Ann’s refusal to attend his oil company dinners, at which, he writes in Dreams from My Father, “American businessmen from Texas and Louisiana would slap Lolo’s back and boast about the palms they had greased to obtain the new offshore drilling rights, while their wives complained to my mother about the quality of Indonesian help. He would ask her how it would look for him to go alone, and remind her that these were her own people, and my mother’s voice would rise to almost a shout.

  “They are not my people.”

  The relationship between Ann and Lolo appears to have begun deteriorating even before Lolo took the oil company job. As Obama describes it, something had happened between them in the year they had been apart. Lolo had been full of life in Hawaii, regaling Ann with stories from his childhood and the struggle for independence, confiding his plans to return to his country and teach at the university. Now he barely spoke to her at all. Some nights, he would sleep with a pistol under his pillow; other nights, she would hear him “wandering through the house with a bottle of imported whiskey, nursing his secrets.” Ann’s loneliness was a constant, Obama writes, “like a shortness of breath.”

  Ann’s colleagues noticed. At times, she seemed downright unhappy. When one fellow teacher asked about her husband, she told him grimly, “I’m never asked. I’m told.” Trusti Jarwadi, one of the teachers Ann met in her first job, could see that something was wrong but feared violating Ann’s privacy by asking her questions. Reflecting on her marriage some years later, Ann told her Indonesian friend, Yang Suwan, somewhat bitterly, “Don’t you know that you don’t argue and you don’t discuss with a Javanese person? Because problems don’t exist with Javanese people. Time will solve problems.”

  Ann could not have known what she was getting into, said another close friend in the 1980s, Renske Heringa, a Dutch anthropolo
gist who herself had married a man who was half Indonesian. “She didn’t know, as little I knew, how Indonesian men change when suddenly their family is around,” she said. “And how Indonesian men like women to be easy and open abroad, but when you get to Indonesia, the parents are there, you have to behave. You have to be the little wife. . . . As a wife, you were not supposed to make yourself visible besides being beautiful. By the time I knew Ann, she was a hefty woman. She didn’t care about getting dressed, wearing jewelry, the way Indonesian women do. That was not her style. He expected her to do it. That is one reason she didn’t stick it out. She absolutely refused to. I understand why he couldn’t accept it.”

  Ann had also pieced together some of what had happened in Indonesia in 1965 and afterward from fragmentary information that people let slip. Men employed at the embassy told her stories that would never have appeared in Indonesian newspapers, according to Obama’s account in Dreams from My Father. Her new Indonesian friends talked to her about corruption in government agencies, police and military shakedowns, the power of the president’s entourage. When she asked Lolo about it, he would not talk. According to Obama, a cousin of Lolo’s finally explained to Ann the circumstances of Lolo’s unplanned return from Hawaii. He had arrived in Jakarta with no idea what fate awaited him. He was taken away for questioning and told he had been conscripted and would be sent to the jungles of New Guinea for a year. Students returning from Soviet bloc countries had been jailed or even vanished. According to Obama, Ann concluded that “power had taken Lolo and yanked him back into line just when he thought he’d escaped, making him feel its weight, letting him know that his life wasn’t his own.” In response, Lolo had made his peace with power, “learned the wisdom of forgetting; just as his brother-in-law had done, making millions as a high official in the national oil company.”

  Lolo had disappointed Ann—just as Stanley had disappointed Madelyn. If Lolo worked in “government relations” for the oil company, what did that entail? Where was the line between currying favor and corruption? Perhaps the nature of Lolo’s professional activities was ambiguous. But as long as there was any suggestion of anything questionable to Ann, it would be impossible for her to take a positive interest in his work. “She was upset,” Suwan recalled. “‘How could a bright person take such a position?’ She said, ‘Suwan, after he did that, my whole respect for him was gone.’” Carol Colfer, another anthropologist friend, said Ann came to the conclusion that Lolo would never understand her motivations and her values. In Indonesia, Colfer said, “to do business, there’s a lot of corruption. Even if he went in wholeheartedly not wanting to be corrupt, in that context I don’t think you could have kept a job like that if you weren’t willing to be corrupt.”

  There were other tensions, too.

  One morning in January 2009, I met Felina Pramono, Ann’s former assistant, in a conference room at the offices of the management school for which Ann had worked. A tiny, brisk woman, attired in a tailored turquoise jacket with black piping, she spoke impeccable English with a very proper British accent. A few minutes into the interview, a man in his late fifties entered the room and was introduced as Saman, a longtime employee of the school. Speaking in Bahasa Indonesia, with Pramono translating, he told me that he had worked as a houseboy for Lolo and Ann in the early 1970s, after which Ann had helped him get a job as a custodian at the school. One of seven children from a family of farmers, Saman had moved to Jakarta as a teenager to find work. When he worked for Ann and Lolo, his duties included gardening; taking care of a pet turtle, dog, rabbit, and bird; and taking Barry to school by bicycle or becak. Ann and Lolo paid Saman well and treated all four members of the household staff equally. Saman remembered Lolo as stern and Ann as kindhearted. When he accidentally knocked over an aquarium that Lolo used for freshwater fish, Lolo insisted that Saman pay the four-thousand-rupiah cost, or two months’ pay, to replace it. If Ann had known, Saman thought, she might have objected to the punishment. “She wouldn’t have the heart,” Pramono explained, translating for Saman. “Her social sense, her sense of helping others, was so high, she would never have allowed that.”

  At times, Ann’s lack of concern for appearances added to the trouble between her and Lolo. She would finish teaching at nine in the evening and sometimes not return home until midnight, Saman said. (“After four hours of teaching, Ann still had an appetite for more social interaction,” Leonard Kibble, a fellow teacher, told me.) As far as Saman could tell, she seemed barely to sleep. She would stay up, typing and correcting Barry’s homework, then be up before dawn. On one occasion, Saman said, “She got home late with a student, but the student didn’t see her home properly. So he dropped her near the house, and Soetoro got very mad because of that.” An argument ensued, which Saman overheard. “He said, ‘I’ve warned you many times. Why are you still doing this?’” Saman recalled. Lolo summoned a witness from the neighborhood. Whether Lolo’s worry was infidelity or simply what others might think is unclear from Saman’s story. After the argument, he said, Ann appeared in the house with a towel pressed to her face and blood running from her nose. It is difficult to know what to make of the nearly forty-year-old recollection. The confrontation occurred within earshot, Saman said, but out of his sight. No one else I interviewed suggested there was ever violence between Ann and Lolo, a man many people described as patient and sweet-tempered. But Saman’s story suggests, if nothing else, the rising tension in the marriage.

  With her children, Ann made a point of being more physically affectionate than her mother had been with her, she told one friend. She was cuddly and would say “I love you,” according to Maya, a hundred times a day. “She loved to take children—any child—and sit them in her lap and tickle them or play games with them and examine their hands, tracing out the miracle of bone and tendon and skin and delighting at the truths to be found there,” her son would write many years later. She was playful—making pottery, weaving decorations, doing art projects that stretched across the room. “I think that we benefited a great deal from her focus when we were with her, when she was beside us,” Maya told me. “So that made the absences hurt a little less.” She was not firm about bedtimes, said Kadi Warner, who, with her then husband, John Raintree, lived with Ann for several months when Maya was nine, but she insisted that her children get up in the morning. She preferred humor to harping. Where her children were involved, she was easily moved to tears, even occasionally when speaking about them to friends. She took her role seriously, while acknowledging, sometimes jokingly, the limits of her influence. As she told an Indonesian friend, Julia Suryakusuma, “One of the areas where I failed as a mother was that I couldn’t get my children to floss their teeth.” At the same time, Ann was exacting about the things she believed mattered most. Those included such things as honesty, hard work, and fulfilling one’s duty to others. Richard Hook, who worked with Ann in Jakarta in the late 1980s and early 1990s, said she told him that she had worked to instill ideas about public service in her son. Because of his intelligence and education, she wanted Barry to have a sense of obligation to give something back. She wanted him to start off, Hook said, with the attitudes and values she had taken years to learn.

  “If you want to grow into a human being,” Obama remembers her saying, “you’re going to need some values.”

  Honesty—Lolo should not have hidden the refrigerator in the storage room when the tax officials came, even if everyone else, including the tax officials, expected such things. Fairness—the parents of wealthier students should not give television sets to the teachers during Ramadan, and their children could take no pride in the higher marks they might have received. Straight talk—if you didn’t like the shirt I bought you for your birthday, you should have just said so instead of keeping it wadded up at the bottom of your closet. Independent judgment—just because the other children tease the poor boy about his haircut doesn’t mean you have to do it too.

  If some of Ann’s values sound midwestern, as Obama suggests, so
me were also Javanese. In a detailed survey of scholarly studies of Javanese society and culture, an anthropologist at the University of Indonesia, named Koentjaraningrat, included, in a list of ideal human virtues, “keeping good relations with others, helping as much as possible, sharing with neighbors, trying to understand others, and placing oneself in the situation of others.”

  When necessary, Ann was, according to two accounts, not unwilling to reinforce her message. Don Johnston, who worked with her in the early 1990s, sometimes traveling with her in Indonesia and living in the same house, suggested to me that President Obama’s work ethic reflected Ann’s standards. “She talked about disciplining Barry, including spanking him for things where he richly deserved a spanking, according to her,” Johnston recalled. Saman, speaking in Indonesian with Felina Pramono interpreting, said that when Barry failed to finish homework sent from Hawaii by his grandmother, Ann “would call him into his room and would spank him with his father’s military belt.” But when I later asked President Obama, through a spokeswoman, whether his mother ever resorted to physical discipline to reinforce a point, he said she never did.

  One evening in the house in Matraman, Saman said, he and Barry were preparing to go to sleep. They often slept in the same place—sometimes in the bunk bed in Barry’s room, sometimes on the dining room floor or in the garden. On this occasion, Barry, who was eight or nine at the time, had asked Saman to turn out the light. When Saman did not do it, he said, Barry hit him in the chest. When he did not react, Barry hit him harder, and Saman struck him back. Barry began to cry loudly, attracting Ann’s attention. According to Saman, Ann did not respond. She seemed to realize that Barry had been in the wrong. Otherwise, Saman would not have struck him.

  “We were not permitted to be rude, we were not permitted to be mean, we were not permitted to be arrogant,” Maya told me. “We had to have a certain humility and broad-mindedness. We had to study. If we said something unkind about someone, she would try to talk about their point of view. Or, ‘How would you feel?’ Barack has famously mentioned that she said to him, always, ‘Well, how would you feel if X, Y, and Z? How would that make you feel?’ Sort of compelling us ever towards empathy and those kinds of things, and not allowing us to be selfish. That was constant, steady, daily.”