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

by Janny Scott

  It was clear to many that Ann believed Barry, in particular, was unusually gifted. She would boast about his brains, his achievements, how brave and bold he was. Felina Pramono sensed that Ann had plans for his future. Benji Bennington, from the East-West Center, told me, “Sometimes when she talked about Barack, she’d say, ‘Well, my son is so bright, he can do anything he ever wants in the world, even be president of the United States.’ I remember her saying that.” Samardal Manan remembered Ann saying something similar—that Barry could be, or perhaps wanted to be, the first black president.

  “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Lolo asked Barry one evening, according to Saman, the houseboy.

  “Oh, prime minister,” Barry answered.

  What mattered as much as anything to Ann, as a parent, was her children’s education—just as it had mattered to generations of her Kansas forebears. But that was not simple. Because they were living in Indonesia, she wanted her children to know the country, have Indonesian friends, and not grow up in an expatriate bubble. At the same time, she wanted them to have the opportunities she had, including the opportunity to attend a great university. For that, they needed to be academically prepared. Indonesian schools in the late 1960s and early 1970s were inadequate. There were not enough of them, the government controlled the curriculum, teachers were poorly trained. They were paid so little that many also worked second jobs, dividing their time, energy, and attention. Westerners sent their children to the Jakarta International School, which offered what many say was an excellent education. But the school was expensive and difficult to get into. At its founding, money had been raised by selling bonds to institutions such as the Ford Foundation. Slots went to the children of diplomats, executives of foreign firms, and employees of international organizations including Ford. Without a job in one of those institutions, few people could get a child in or afford the tuition. Furthermore, there were few if any Indonesian students in the school. There were not many educational options in Jakarta that would have provided what Ann was looking for. When Maya was about five, Ann enrolled her in a multinational bilingual playgroup run by the wife of an American minister in a large house in Kebayoran Baru. Kay Ikranagara enrolled her son, Inno, too. The teachers were Western as well as Indonesian. Maya and Inno were native speakers in both languages, speaking Indonesian with their fathers, English with their mothers, and both with their teachers. But that sort of school in Jakarta was hard to find.

  For Barry, Ann tried two Indonesian schools, one Catholic and one Muslim. Though she eventually sent him back to Hawaii, the experience of an Indonesian education cannot have failed to have left a mark. Michael Dove, who got to know Ann when they were both anthropologists working in Java in the 1980s, told me he discovered, as an American with allergies teaching in Java, that to sneeze was to exhibit an untoward lack of self-control. The Javanese, especially the Central Javanese, place an enormous emphasis on self-control, Dove said: “You demonstrate an inner strength by not betraying emotion, not speaking loudly, not moving jerkily.” Self-control is inculcated in part in Indonesian schools, Kay Ikranagara and her husband told me. And it is done through a culture of teasing. “People tease about skin color all the time,” Kay Ikranagara said. Having dark skin is a negative—as would have been plumpness and curly hair. If a child allows the teasing to bother him, he is teased more. If he ignores it, it stops. Kay Ikranagara’s husband, Ikranagara, who grew up in Bali, said he was teased mercilessly about being skinny. He learned to compensate by being clever. “Our ambassador said this was where Barack learned to be cool,” Kay Ikranagara told me. “If you get mad and react, you lose. If you learn to laugh and take it without any reaction, you win.”

  As Obama tells it, Ann’s attitude toward his future gradually shifted.

  She had always encouraged my rapid acculturation in Indonesia: It had made me relatively self-sufficient, undemanding on a tight budget, and extremely well mannered when compared with other American children. She had taught me to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often characterized Americans abroad. But she now had learned, just as Lolo had learned, the chasm that separated the life chances of an American from those of an Indonesian. She knew which side of the divide she wanted her child to be on. I was an American, she decided, and my true life lay elsewhere.

  Ann’s efforts to prepare Barry for his return to school in Hawaii are the subject of an oft repeated story told in Dreams from My Father and recounted occasionally in President Obama’s speeches. The story concerns what Obama describes as a common practice in the Jakarta household (a practice which Saman, the houseboy, said he did not remember). Five days a week, Obama writes, Ann would enter his bedroom in Jakarta at four a.m., force-feed him breakfast, and teach him English lessons for three hours before he left for school. When he resisted, Ann would tell him: “This is no picnic for me either, buster.”

  In early 1971, Ann told Barry, then age nine, that he would be returning to Hawaii. He would live with his grandparents in Honolulu and attend Punahou Academy, a respected prep school within walking distance of the Dunhams’ apartment. His application had been considered, Obama says, only through the intervention of an alumnus who was Stanley’s boss. “It was time for me to attend an American school, she had said,” he writes. “I’d run through all the lessons of my correspondence course. She said that she and Maya would be joining me in Hawaii very soon—a year, tops—and that she’d try to make it there for Christmas.” Madelyn’s brother Charles Payne told me he suspected that Madelyn played a part in the decision. “Madelyn always had a great concern about Barack getting a good education,” he said. “I think that was her defense against his racial mixture—that education was the solution to whatever problems that would bring.”

  Ann, too, may have doubted the wisdom of her decision to take Barry to Indonesia at the moment she did. Yang Suwan, her Indonesian friend, remembered Ann once saying as much: “She said if she had known before, she wouldn’t have come and brought Barack.” And in The Audacity of Hope, Obama writes, “In later years my mother would insist that had she known what had transpired in the preceding months, we never would have made the trip.”

  Now she was dispatching him, alone, on a trip halfway around the globe. As he later described his send-off in Dreams from My Father, an Indonesian copilot who was a friend of Ann’s escorted him to the plane “as she and Lolo and my new sister, Maya, stood by at the gate.”

  Ann’s decision to marry Lolo had required that she uproot Barry, at age six, and transplant him to Jakarta. Now she was uprooting him again, at barely ten, and sending him back. She would follow him to Hawaii only to leave him again, less than three years later. When we spoke, Obama recalled those serial displacements. He was less aware at that time, he said, of the toll they took than he would become many years later.

  “I think that was harder on a ten-year-old boy than he’d care to admit at the time,” Obama said, folded into a chair in the Oval Office and speaking about his mother with a mix of affection and critical distance. “When we were separated again during high school, at that point I was old enough to say, ‘This is my choice, my decision.’ But being a parent now and looking back at that, I could see—you know what?—that would be hard on a kid.”

  With Lolo, Maya, and Barack, 1970

  The years in Jakarta had marked them all. For Ann, who would return repeatedly as an anthropologist and as a development consultant over the next twenty-five years, the experience had given her powerful insight into the lives of ordinary Indonesians that few Western advisers would ever be in a position to acquire. She would never adopt what Yang Suwan thought of as typical expatriate attitudes—acquisitiveness, arrogance, and an insistence on having the last word. She would never become one of those infatuated “Java junkies” or “Java freaks.” She had lived through a dark period in the country’s history. She had lived like an Indonesian woman, worrying at times about how to feed, protect, and educate her children. As Yang put it, “She kn
ew how to solve problems that other expatriates don’t know exist.”

  Barry, too, had been shaped in ways that would remain with him, for better or for worse. One colleague of Ann’s in Indonesia in the late 1970s, John Raintree, who raised his two children abroad, said Ann, by the choices she made, gave Barry not one but two important experiences: First, she gave him an extraordinary adventure and the chance to be broadened and strengthened by living overseas; then, by enabling him to return to the United States and live out his teenage years there, she allowed him to begin to develop his identity as an American.

  In Indonesia, June 1972

  A few weeks before the presidential election in 2008, I traveled to New Haven, Connecticut, to meet Michael Dove, a professor of anthropology at Yale and a longtime friend of Ann’s. Dove had spent his mid-twenties in Kalimantan, his thirties in Java and Pakistan, his forties in Hawaii—and had known Ann in almost all of those places. Expatriate life has its advantages, he told me: It’s exciting, there is boundless hope, you leave things behind. You are in limbo overseas. “I didn’t know how many family problems I had until I came back from Asia,” he said. Your American values are thrown into relief, he suggested. You think about them in new ways. Dove had been thinking about the suggestion that Lolo had become more American and Ann more Javanese. “I think it’s more complicated than that,” he said. “By becoming more Javanese, she was getting more insights into what it meant to be an American, both the good and the bad. Because, of course, we never become Javanese. That lies beyond us.”

  Five

  Trespassers Will Be Eaten

  In the summer of 1973, Ann touched down on the U.S. mainland for the first time in eleven years. She was thirty years old, finishing her first year as a graduate student at the University of Hawai‘i, divorced from one husband, separated from another, a single parent of two on a five-week cross-country road trip with her children and her mother. “Pretty exhausting,” she wrote to a friend, “especially since we travelled by bus most of the way.” Stopping first in Seattle, Ann visited Jackie Farner, the only high school classmate with whom she had stayed in contact. Like Ann, Jackie had made some unorthodox life choices—moving to rural Alaska to teach, living in a log cabin, marrying an Aleut. On a day trip into the Cascades, Barry and Maya saw snow for the first time. Then they headed down the West Coast through California, across the desert into Arizona, and over to the Grand Canyon, then east to Kansas City and Chicago, doubling back finally through Yellowstone National Park and San Francisco en route home to Honolulu. “Actually, I was surprised how little change we saw,” Ann wrote. “More bluejeans, campers and mustaches, but the countryside around Seattle looks about the same.” In Kansas City, they bunked in the basement recreation room of Arlene Payne, Madelyn’s sister, who was teaching at the University of Missouri. Jon Payne arrived from Colorado, not having seen Ann since his months on the Dunhams’ couch on Mercer Island sixteen years earlier. They all spent a few days talking and playing darts, Jon venturing out into the sweltering heat to take Barry and Maya to a baseball game. Jon was struck by Ann’s evident happiness, her pride in her children, the confidence she had acquired. She was, in some ways, a different person than the one he remembered. Having weathered the turbulence of the intervening years—pregnancy at seventeen, raising biracial children, her years in Jakarta—she seemed to have come into her own.

  Back in Honolulu in early August, Ann wrote a long letter to Bill Byers, the wheelman on the fateful, Cadillac-convertible flight to the San Francisco Bay Area. She had telephoned him during the bus trip but had found him at the end of a marriage, facing the death of his father and in no mood for conversation. Her letter was humorous, unself-conscious, earthy, self-mocking, mordant, gently teasing, and emotionally direct. “If you could find it in your CRABBY heart to scrawl me a note I would be overjoyed!” she wrote. “Surely, out of the last twelve years, you could sift a couple of tarnished badges to flash at me. I am not such a harsh critic after all, having screwed up royally a few times myself.” She enclosed two photographs, one of her children and one of herself, dressed in a black dashiki with bright orange trim and a pair of oversized sunglasses, her brown hair thick and loose, swept over one shoulder. “Would like one of you if you have a spare,” she scribbled in a postscript, soliciting a photo in return. “Doesn’t matter if you’re bald and fat or skinny and hairy. I’ve gained about 15 pounds in the rear since coming back from Asia too.”

  In Hawaii, 1973

  She recounted the bus-tour itinerary, then described, with caustic amusement, a chance encounter in downtown Honolulu with a certain “rather dull, round-faced boy,” a mutual acquaintance who had gone on to some success in retail. “Fingers aglitter with diamonds and rubies, he offered me a ride in his limousine and gave me an invitation to a fashion show he was staging that afternoon,” she wrote in fluid, loopy script. “I didn’t especially appreciate it since I was dressed in the baggiest most non-descript dress I own, pigtail and rubber slippers and looking very scroungy that day (I believe his exact words when he saw me were: ‘Well, well, just look at you!’) I could have clobbered him, but it wasn’t worth it (is anything?)” Recapitulating the recent events of her rather eventful life, she brushed past her second marriage. “I remarried, to an Indonesian geographer,” she wrote, then dropped the subject abruptly. She ventured a guess at her future: “Just recently I got an East-West Center grant which will carry me, albeit meagerly, through my Ph.D. plus field work, that is till the end of ’75. After that, I shall be most content to spend the rest of my life, I suppose, exploring obscure topics and obscure corners of the world. Probably a useless sort of life and not very socially relevant, especially since I hate applied anthropology (neo-colonialism in bad disguise—I had a lot of bad experiences with it in Asia). I do hope to spend most of my time for the next few years in the islands, since my son Barry is doing very well in school here and I hate to take him abroad again till he graduates, which won’t be for another 6 years.”

  She had kept her earlier commitment. The year Barry returned to Honolulu and entered fifth grade at Punahou, Ann traveled nearly seven thousand miles to spend Christmas with him and her parents, leaving Lolo and Maya in Indonesia. Before she arrived, Barry was told by his grandmother that his mother had lined up an unexpected gift: Seven years after his parents had divorced, his father was coming to visit. Obama Sr. was living in Kenya, where he had moved with his third wife, an American he had met while he was at Harvard and with whom he had produced two more children. When Ann arrived, she plied Barry with information about Kenyan history—none of which he retained, according to his account. She assured him that his father knew all about him from her letters. “‘You two will become great friends,’ she decided,” Obama writes in his memoir, leaving the verb dangling dubiously off the end of the sentence. Ann had worked to keep alive the connection between Obama and his son. Her friend Kadi Warner told me, “She really was committed for him to have some presence in Barry’s life. She knew it was up to her to maintain it.”

  Obama’s account of his father’s Christmas visit is poignant. He notices the effect of his father’s presence on his mother and grandparents—his grandfather “more vigorous and thoughtful,” his mother “more bashful.” As the weeks lurch along, tension builds—“my mother’s mouth pinched, her eyes avoiding her parents, as we ate dinner.” After his father scolds him for wasting his time watching a cartoon special of How the Grinch Stole Christmas! an argument breaks out between his parents and grandparents. Ann seems to mediate at first, then sides with Obama against her parents. “I listened to my mother tell her parents that nothing ever changed with them,” the younger Obama writes. Dispatched by his grandmother the next day to collect any dirty laundry from the apartment where his father is staying, he finds his father shirtless and his mother ironing. She appears to have been crying. He delivers his message and declines an invitation to stay. Back upstairs at his grandparents’ apartment, Ann appears in his room. “You shouldn’
t be mad at your father, Bar,” she tells him. “He loves you very much. He’s just a little stubborn sometimes.”

  When he refuses to look up, she adds, “I know all this stuff is confusing for you. For me, too.”

  With Barack Obama Sr., Christmas 1971

  Ann returned to Indonesia in early 1972, after the Christmas visit, and negotiated a leave of absence from her job in Jakarta in order to enter graduate school at the University of Hawai‘i. She even managed to line up some financial support through a foundation grant to the management school where she had been working. Taking Maya with her—and for a time, Lolo—she returned to Hawaii and found her way that fall into the master’s-degree program in anthropology, the field that had been her undergraduate major. In an application to the East-West Center in December 1972, she described her academic specialization as economic anthropology and culture change. “But I’m more interested in the human and psychological factors that accompany change than purely technological factors,” she wrote. She said she was planning “a possible joint project” with Lolo, who was involved in a population-studies program under the department of geography. But Lolo did not stay long. He remained enrolled only for the spring semester of 1973, according to university records. By the time of the cross-country bus trip in July, he was gone.