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

by Janny Scott

  Barack Obama Sr. and the young Barack, Christmas 1971

  By that summer, Ann had landed a grant from the East-West Center to cover her university tuition and field research. Married students with children were exempt from the East-West Center requirement that students live together as a community in the center’s dorms, but the housing allowance was too low to permit students to live above the poverty level in Hawaii, said Benji Bennington, who had become an administrator at the center. So Ann found an apartment in a low-slung, cinder-block building reminiscent of a budget motel, with hot water heaters on the balconies and utility meters bolted to the outside wall. The apartment, on Poki Street, was a mile and a half from the university and a short walk from both the Dunhams’ apartment and Barry’s school. She furnished it with the help of a furniture pool run by the off-campus housing specialist for the East-West Center, who also helped many of the students qualify for food stamps. When Ann overheard Barry’s school friends commenting on the limited refrigerator inventory and his mother’s unimpressive housekeeping, he says, she would take him aside and let him know that as a single mother back in school, baking cookies was not at the top of her priority list. She was not, she made it clear, putting up with “any snotty attitudes” from him or anyone else.

  The status of Ann’s marriage was ambiguous, it seems. According to Obama’s account, Ann had separated from Lolo. But that was less clear to her friends. “She certainly considered herself married,” said Kadi Warner, who was also a graduate student in anthropology on an East-West Center grant when she met Ann in the early 1970s. “But she had a different sense, perhaps than he did, of what that meant.” Lolo, calling from Jakarta to speak with Maya, would be in tears. “Ann thought it was cute and amusing but nothing like, ‘I have to pick her up and go back,’” Warner said. “Her thing was, ‘You just have to do this to finish school, that’s how it is. This is what we have to do.’” Her attitude seemed to be that she and Lolo were married, they would see each other occasionally, and that was what adults did when they had other obligations. She intended to work, to make a living, and to at least contribute to, if not fully underwrite, the education of her children. She had returned to Hawaii because she knew she would need an advanced degree, her friend Kay Ikranagara told me. That required that she live apart from Lolo, at least for a time. “Clearly, Ann put her children’s education above all,” Ikranagara said.

  Ann was unlike the other graduate students in her department. She was older than most and, in effect, a single mother. It was unusual for women to go back to school, especially with young children, or to start a family while preparing to do fieldwork. “When I showed up wearing maternity clothes, my professor came up to me and said, ‘You’re kidding, right?’” said Warner, who became pregnant several years later. (She promised her professor, she told me, that she would not give birth in class.) Ann was not simply a mother, she was raising two biracial children with different fathers. “It struck me that she was doing something unusual and dangerous and difficult, raising multicultural children on her own,” said Jean Kennedy, another graduate student. Kennedy, who had grown up in what she described as a racially stratified university town in New Zealand, had become intrigued with Southeast Asia after a group of Indonesian, Malaysian, and Thai students arrived on the campus where she was an undergraduate. She had gotten interested in how people would “sort themselves,” as she put it, in the future. “Somebody like Ann, who was cutting across all of this with such strong-minded determination to cut the bullshit and get on with what needed to be done—I admired her,” Kennedy said. “I could barely make it as a graduate student, and could not even think about getting myself into these sorts of conflicts and responsibilities.”

  There was something almost matronly about her. By the time she reached her early thirties, Ann had been an adult for a long time. Other students went out drinking, lay on the beach, flirted, gossiped, threw parties, shied away from commitments, toyed with trendy academic ideas. They lived in what Kennedy called “capsules of theoretical, highfalutin nonsense, very far from the real world.” Ann kept her distance from the chitchat, both theoretical and social. She seemed to be looking for a way to pursue her interests—in anthropology, in Indonesia—while also making a living. Ben Finney, a professor who had grown up in Southern California and had written an ethno-history of surfing, was put off initially by what he took to be Ann’s well-bred manner. Her fastidious diction reminded him of WASPs he had encountered as a graduate student at Harvard. “We did things much more informally than she seemed to,” he said. “After I got to know her, I said, ‘Well, Ann is just this upright person. That’s her, no problem.’” She had an inquiring mind, and she was endlessly curious. She was absorbed by handicrafts, a topic that was not trendy but that interested Finney, too. He had done fieldwork in Tahiti, where, he said, traditional craft industries had all but disappeared, supplanted by the production of whatever tourists would buy. He had seen the strength of the handicraft sector of the Indonesian economy, where craftspeople still made textiles, tools, ceramics, and other items for everyday life. It was one of the reasons, he said, why anthropologists loved Indonesia: the persistence of a recognizably Indonesian way of life. But some had ruled out working there because of the difficulties inherent in getting the government’s permission. Ann, however, had already lived there and was going back. Between the fall of 1972 and the fall of 1974, she completed sixty-three credits and all the coursework required for her Ph.D. When I asked Alice Dewey, the chairman of Ann’s dissertation committee, what Ann was like as a student, she answered, “Ah! All business.”

  Ann’s application had caught the attention of Dewey, a professor of anthropology who had gone to Java herself in the early 1950s as a twenty-three-year-old graduate student on a field team from Harvard. Settling in a town in east Central Java that they called Modjokuto, the members of the team did pioneering work on subjects ranging from the Javanese family to the rural economy. Their work became the basis of a series of seminal books, the best known of which was The Religion of Java by Clifford Geertz, who went on to become the most celebrated anthropologist of his generation. Dewey studied peasant markets, which are run by women in Java. She lived for more than a year in a rural village north of Modjokuto, bicycling every morning into the main Modjokuto market, spending afternoons visiting the homes of the market people, and passing the evenings on visits to her neighbors. Her most important market informants were two middle-aged half sisters, one of whom sold coffee and hot snacks “and provided me not only with information about her own business affairs but also with the current gossip of the marketplace, of which she had extensive knowledge because coffee stands are important social centers,” Dewey wrote later. “Her half sister, who dealt first in dried corn and later in onions, was the most important informant for my study of wholesaling. She, her husband, a married daughter, and a son, married while I was there, were all experienced traders; between them, with great patience, they managed to teach me the workings of the market.” Dewey’s 1962 book Peasant Marketing in Java covered, among other things, bargaining, the division of labor, trade discounts, loans and interest rates, moneylenders, pooled savings plans, traders’ rights and privileges, interpersonal relationships in the marketplace, small-scale cash crops, mountain crops, prepared-food vendors, and door-to-door peddlers. It also touched on the role of craftsmen, including metalworkers, leatherworkers, tailors, and bicycle repairmen. The book was, Jean Kennedy told me, not fashionable but brilliant—“a piece of pioneering work that seemed to have been bypassed.” Koentjaraningrat, an Indonesian anthropologist and the author of Javanese Culture, a sweeping survey of scholarly work on the subject, called Dewey’s book “the best and most comprehensive study on the Javanese market system.”

  Dewey, hired by the University of Hawai‘i in 1962, had arrived on campus shortly after the elder Obama graduated and headed for Harvard. Over the years, she would become a mentor and friend to generations of graduate students, serving o
n countless doctoral committees and dispatching dozens of young anthropologists into the field, armed with what she considered to be four essentials: a flashlight, a penknife, heavy string, and a few mystery stories. (Dewey, who received The Complete Sherlock Holmes for her thirteenth birthday, once explained to me in some detail the uses of the first three. Then she added, “The reason for the mystery stories is self-evident.”) The year Ann applied to the anthropology department to do graduate work, Dewey was on the committee that reviewed applications. “She obviously knew her way around Indonesia,” Dewey told me. Ann spoke Indonesian fluently, she was knowledgeable about all things Indonesian, and her interest in handicrafts intersected with Dewey’s interest in markets.

  “I said, ‘I want this one,’” Dewey recalled.

  Dewey was charmingly unconventional herself. A granddaughter of John Dewey, the American philosopher and educator, and a descendant of Horace Greeley, the crusading newspaper editor, Alice Greeley Dewey had grown up in Huntington, Long Island, with a certain amount of parental license to be fearless. In games of cowboys and Indians, her sympathies did not incline toward the cowboys. As a high school student, she worked in what is now the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where James D. Watson would deliver his first public lecture on his discovery, with Francis Crick, of the double-helix structure of DNA. At Radcliffe College, she was lured into cultural anthropology by the enticing prospect of field research. Fieldwork, she once told me, comes as close as any experience to being somebody else: “Because they don’t know who you are.” She wanted to go to China, where her grandfather had lived, but Mao Zedong had proclaimed the People’s Republic of China two years earlier, and the United States and China were fighting on opposite sides in the Korean War. So when her professor suggested Java, Dewey jumped at the chance. Arriving in Indonesia in 1952, she and the other members of the field team were introduced to a cousin of the sultan of Yogyakarta, and his wife, who was affiliated with the junior court. The couple took the students under their wing, getting them in to performances of shadow-puppet theater, gamelan music, and Javanese dance at the palace. Men in batik and turbans wandered barefoot through the lantern-lit halls, speaking high Javanese. “If I had walked into the court of King Arthur, I couldn’t have been in more of a fairyland,” Dewey remembered. She became captivated by Java, returning again and again over many decades. In 1989, at the investiture of Sultan Hamengku Buwono X in Yogyakarta, Dewey was in attendance.

  Generous and tolerant, Dewey had a reputation for accepting the world on its own terms. “She felt that things work the way they do because they make sense that way, and that people are ultimately rational,” said John Raintree, a former student of Dewey’s. “If you don’t understand why somebody is saying or doing something the way they are, then you don’t understand their point of view. This is the article of faith for those of us who’ve worked in development—trying to explain that. Alice communicated that to her students.”

  In 1970, two years before Ann resurfaced on the University of Hawai‘i campus, Dewey acquired a handsome old house in Mānoa, a short bicycle commute away from the campus. One of the attractions, as she told me, was a tree in the garden that produced avocados the size of footballs. The house also had four bedrooms, solving Dewey’s dilemma, being a globetrotting anthropologist with a fondness for big dogs. Dewey recruited graduate students as housemates, along with, at various times, two German shepherd mixes, a Newfoundland, a gray cat, a Great Dane that matched the cat, and a kitten that matched the Newfoundland. There were also zebra finches, Java ricebirds, a waxbill, and other birds. By the time I saw the place in 2008, the house had settled into a state of advanced dilapidation. A botanical census of the garden would have included jacaranda, breadfruit, miniature mangosteen, lychee, Surinam cherry, rose apple, macadamia nut, cashew nut, yellow shower, tangerine, lemon, banana. Avocado pits, lobbed out a side door, had given birth to an avocado grove. An abandoned car had been reborn as a planter. “Trespassers will be eaten,” read one of several plaques by the door. Jean Kennedy recalled arriving at the house for the first time in 1970 and finding every door wide open. Making her way to the kitchen, she called out and waited for a response.

  “This highly distinctive voice yelled back, ‘Put the kettle on and make tea.’” Kennedy told me. “There was a profusion of tea, I made the right one, I think it was lapsang souchong. That day, Alice said, ‘Why don’t you move in?’ The basis for her household was very clear: She liked to live with people, she didn’t want to be a landlady, she didn’t charge us rent. She liked to be fed, she liked to have company, she liked to have a household that ticked over. There was always going to be someone who was there, so she could have dogs and not be worrying about traveling. It seemed to me on the one hand quite eccentric and on the other hand utterly sensible.”

  Ann became a regular visitor and occasional short-term denizen of Dewey’s house in Mānoa. At any time, there were five or six people in residence and others dropping by to talk to Dewey or stay for dinner. An anthropologist in transit might be camped on a mattress on the floor. In several periods during the 1970s, Ann and Maya—and even, on one occasion, Lolo—occupied a second-floor bedroom overlooking a breadfruit tree at the northwest corner of the house. Kadi Warner recalled long discussions between Dewey and Ann on, say, the impact on Java of the introduction of Bahasa Indonesia, the national language, gradually supplanting the more status-attuned language, Javanese. For a book of anecdotes put together on the occasion of Dewey’s retirement in October 2007, Maya reminisced in writing about “the wonderful labyrinth” of the house, with the secret staircases and “oversized flora” she knew as a child. She remembered being awakened by the cat, Kretek (the Indonesian word for clove cigarettes), sitting on her chest. Dewey introduced her, Maya wrote, to Alfred Hitchcock and good British mysteries. There were long meals followed by Javanese coffee, clove cigarettes, and fine storytelling.

  “I remember feeling quite proud when one day Alice said that I was the most tolerable child she knew,” Maya wrote.

  Ann loved to talk. If she got interested in a topic, she seemed able to remember everything she had ever heard about it. “She could remember conversations almost verbatim,” said Benji Bennington, who shared Ann’s interest in Indonesia and the arts. “If you were reading, say, about a particular textile technique and talking to Ann, she seemed almost to be playing back a mental tape recording of some conversation she’d had with the source of the information.” Garrett Solyom, who met her when they were graduate students, found that once he started talking with Ann, everything else seemed to disappear. “There was a certain amount of fencing,” he said. “She was smart. We have all these stupid words in English that don’t say anything. Well, she would stick you. She would say, ‘I wouldn’t put it that way.’ Or, ‘No, I don’t think so. Wouldn’t it be this?’ There would be a flash of the eye; and then you realized it was a flash of the brain.” In a box of Ann’s papers, I happened on a comment in her handwriting in the margin of an unpublished article by Solyom and his wife, Bronwen, that they had given her to read. “I guess we’ll avoid our usual argument on what is iron versus low-grade steel carburized by forging in the presence of charcoal,” she wrote. “It’s really a continuum.”

  The Solyoms had lived in Indonesia in the late 1960s and had returned to the United States, as Bronwen Solyom put it in a talk at the University of Hawai‘i in 2008, “fired up for one reason or another about Indonesia.” Like Ann, they had arrived at the university as graduate students in the early 1970s, a time when, in the waning days of the Vietnam War, programs in Southeast Asian studies were blossoming. They were captivated by traditional Javanese art, ancient patterns on textiles, the origins of rituals they had witnessed. They were especially interested in “the making of things,” Bronwen Solyom said—batik, shadow puppets, and the asymmetrical, often wavy-bladed, ceremonial dagger known as the kris, or keris, seen as both magical and sacred. Over the course of a twenty-year friendship, their interests an
d Ann’s intersected and overlapped. The Solyoms focused on the object, its aesthetics and iconography, and its meaning in a ceremonial context; they studied the kris as a high art form, a court art, in its most refined form. Ann came to focus on the lives of craftspeople in the present day. When she studied blacksmiths, she immersed herself in everything from the making to the marketing of everyday agricultural tools. Her interest was function.

  I once asked Maya if she could identify the source of her mother’s interest in handicrafts. Using a phrase that stuck with me, she said her mother had always been “fascinated with life’s gorgeous minutiae.” When Ann was young, she had owned a loom and had woven wall hangings as a hobby. After moving to Indonesia, she began collecting batik and other textiles, handcrafted silver jewelry, rice-paddy hats, and woven baskets. In a foreword to the version of Ann’s dissertation that was published in 2009 by Duke University Press, Maya wrote that her mother “was interested in the place where vision meets execution, and where the poetic and the prosaic share space. She loved the way something beautiful could speak about the spirit of both the maker and the owner; the skill and soul of the blacksmith are revealed in the keris, but so too is the desire and perspective of the buyer.”

  Ann had landed in Indonesia when the country was on the cusp of a renaissance in the traditional arts—a rebirth that resulted from scarcity. “Artistically, the 1960s were the best time for traditional arts, because people were so poor,” Garrett Solyom told me. Renske Heringa, who lived in Indonesia in the same period, said, “We didn’t have books, we couldn’t buy clothes, we all went around in batik because that was all there was. There was nothing—but suddenly people became aware that they had something that nobody else had.” Indonesians who traveled abroad noticed that Indonesian handicrafts were treasured elsewhere. With the growth of tourism in Indonesia in the 1970s, the market for handicrafts grew. At the same time, opportunities for women to earn a living in agriculture were shrinking. With the introduction of mechanical rice hullers, for example, fewer women could expect to make a living by hand-pounding rice. Many turned to small industries, including handicrafts, and petty trade. The government even adopted policies intended to encourage rural craft industries as a source of income for the poor. Ann had lived through that period.