A Singular Woman (2 page)

Had she lived, Dunham would have been sixty-six years old on January 20, 2009, when Barack Obama was sworn in as the forty-fourth president of the United States.

Dunham was a private person with depths not easily fathomed. In a conversation in the Oval Office in July 2010, President Obama described her to me as both naively idealistic and sophisticated and smart. She was deadly serious about her work, he said, yet had a sweetness and generosity of spirit that resulted occasionally in her being taken to the cleaners. She had an unusual openness, it seems, that was both intellectual and emotional. “At the foundation of her strength was her ability to be moved,” her daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng, once told me. Yet she was tough and funny. Moved to tears by the suffering of strangers, she could be steely in motivating her children. She wept in movie theaters but could detonate a wisecrack so finely targeted that no one in earshot ever forgot. She devoted years of her life to helping poor people, many of them women, get access to credit, but she mismanaged her own money, borrowed repeatedly from her banker mother, and fell deeply in debt. In big and small ways, she lived bravely. Yet she feared doctors, possibly to her detriment. She was afraid of riding the New York City subway system, and she never learned to drive. At the height of her career, colleagues remember Dunham as an almost regal presence—decked out in batik and silver, descending upon Javanese villages with an entourage of younger Indonesian bankers; formidably knowledgeable about Indonesian textiles, archaeology, the mystical symbolism of the wavy-bladed Javanese kris; bearing a black bag stuffed with field notebooks and a Thermos of black coffee; a connoisseur of delicacies such as tempeh and
sayur lodeh,
an eggplant stew; regaling her colleagues with humorous stories, joking about one day being reincarnated as an Indonesian blacksmith, and protesting slyly all the while that she was “just a girl from Kansas.”

There is little evidence in the papers she left behind and in the accounts of friends and colleagues that Dunham set out to change the world. She was admirably, movingly, sometimes exasperatingly, human. Her life was not simple, which may help explain why it has been misunderstood or misrepresented or was relegated to the shadows. It involved tensions and choices that will be recognizable to readers, especially women. It was an improvisation, marked by stumbles and leaps. “I am not such a harsh critic after all, having screwed up royally a few times myself,” she wrote cajolingly to a friend at age thirty, already divorced from her first husband, separated from her second, and on her way to becoming a single parent of two. She was resilient. As one friend of hers put it, Dunham kept “dislocating the center.” She lived by strong values, which she passed on to her children. She was idealistic and pragmatic. She was not a visionary or a saint; she believed that people's lives could be made better, and that it was important to try. Directly or indirectly, she accomplished more toward that end than most of us will. Then suddenly, in midstream, she was gone. “She had no regrets about any of her choices,” Maya told me. “She just wanted more time. More time to make mistakes, more time to do good things . . .”

Anyone writing about Dunham's life must address the question of what to call her. She was Stanley Ann Dunham at birth and Stanley as a child, but she dropped the Stanley upon graduating from high school. She was Ann Dunham, then Ann Obama, then Ann Soetoro until her second divorce. Then she kept her second husband's name but modernized the spelling to Sutoro. In the early 1980s, she was Ann Sutoro, Ann Dunham Sutoro, S. Ann Dunham Sutoro. In conversation, Indonesians who worked with her in the late 1980s and early 1990s referred to her as Ann Dunham, putting the emphasis on the second syllable of the surname. Toward the end of her life, she signed her dissertation S. Ann Dunham and official correspondence (Stanley) Ann Dunham. Beginning in the first chapter of this book, I've chosen to take her lead and use whatever name she was using at any given time.

During the presidential campaign, people who had known Dunham well were perplexed by what they felt were the caricatures of her that emerged. In a supermarket checkout line, one friend of Dunham's, Kadi Warner, wept at what seemed to her the injustice of a tabloid newspaper headline: “Obama Abandoned by His Own Mother!” Her friends were certain they could see her in Obama's intellect, his temperament, and his humor—not to mention his long chin, the toothiness of his smile, the angle of his ears. Yet he, who had already written a book centered on the ghost of his absent father, seemed to say more about his grandparents than he did about his mother. Some thought they could guess at some of the reasons. “He's running for election in America, not Indonesia,” a former colleague of Dunham's, Bruce Harker, told me two weeks before the election. “Americans spend what percent of our gross national product on foreign assistance? Do you really think he can get elected by saying, ‘My mother was more Indonesian than American'? He plays the hand he has to play: ‘I was raised by a single mother on food stamps; I was raised by my grandmother—like a lot of black folks.'

“To talk about his mother as a do-gooder foreign-assistance peacenik anthropologist in Indonesia?” he added, stopping to make sure that I understood he was being sarcastic.
“Where's Indonesia? Is that near India?
No way.”

This is not a book about President Obama, it is a book about his mother. But she shaped him, to a degree he seems increasingly to acknowledge. In the preface to the 2004 edition of
Dreams from My Father,
issued nine years after the first edition and nine years after Dunham's death, Obama folded in a revealing admission: Had he known his mother would not survive her illness, he might have written a different book—“less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life.” Two years later, in
The Audacity of Hope,
he returned to the subject. Only in retrospect, he wrote, did he understand how deeply her spirit “invisibly guided the path I would ultimately take.” If his ambitions were fueled by his feelings about his father, including resentment and a desire to earn his father's love, those same ambitions were channeled by his mother's faith in the goodness of people and in the value of every life. He took up the study of political philosophy in search of confirmation of her values, and became a community organizer to try to put those values to work. He dedicated that book, his second, “to the women who raised me”—his maternal grandmother, Tutu, “who's been a rock of stability throughout my life,” and his mother, “whose loving spirit sustains me still.”

That would have pleased her. Dunham, for whom a letter in Jakarta from her son in the United States could raise her spirits for a full day, surely wondered about her place in his life. On rare occasions, she indicated as much—painfully, wistfully—to close friends. But she would not have been inclined to overstate her case. As she told him, with a dry humor that seems downright Kansan, “If nothing else, I gave you an interesting life.”

I
n the late winter of 2009, Charles Payne reluctantly agreed to allow me to visit him in Chicago. He was eighty-four years old, the eldest of the three siblings of Madelyn Payne Dunham, the indomitable grandmother who famously helped raise Barack Obama and went on to live long enough to follow his two-year presidential campaign from her Honolulu apartment before expiring at age eighty-six, two days before the election. Her brother, a pioneer in the computerization of library data who had retired in 1995 as assistant director of the library at the University of Chicago, had chosen to ignore both a letter I had FedExed to his home and a message on his phone. When he slipped up one morning and answered the phone when I called, he said he had made a vow to himself not to talk to people like me. On the handful of occasions when he had made an exception, he said, he had gotten in trouble. We talked for ten minutes, circling each other. Then he said I could come, assuring me that the visit would probably not be worth my time. So, on a cold February morning when the wind barreled off Lake Michigan and snow lined the embankments along the rail line from O'Hare Airport, I was met at the door to Mr. Payne's apartment on Lake Shore Drive by a slim, silver-haired, youthful-looking octogenarian (who had recently solved the problem of creeping weight gain, he later informed me, by eliminating lunch from his life). He had a pleasant but skeptical look on his face. It was the look of someone too civil by temperament and training to tell a nosy visitor to take a hike.

We sat across from each other at a round table in his spotless and clutter-free kitchen. The apartment was unique in the building, thought to have been custom-designed by the architect as a jewel box and a nest for himself; men who had come to restore the living room mantelpiece had once told Mr. Payne it appeared to be European and hundreds of years old. Mr. Payne began with a cautionary tale. In 2000, he said, he had thrown himself a seventy-fifth birthday party at the urging of his son, and had invited his three siblings. It was the millennium, after all; they had last all been together at their mother's funeral, thirty-two years before. Madelyn, the retired bank vice president, arrived from Honolulu; Arlene, the retired university researcher in education and statistics, arrived from Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Jon, the former city planning director, arrived from Littleton, Colorado. Mr. Obama, then the Illinois state senator from the Thirteenth District, came with his wife, Michelle, and their daughter, Malia. “What I was struck by was that after all these years, the memories of our childhood were very different—memories of the same incident,” Mr. Payne told me. “Madelyn would remember one thing; Arlene would remember another thing. And neither one of them was correct, according to the way I remembered it.” He had noticed the same thing some years earlier while reading an oral history of the work of a Library of Congress task force that developed the first machine-readable standard for bibliographic data—a task force on which he had served. “I was just struck by how totally distorted people's memories of that were,” he said. “And what I was particularly amused by was that each of them that I listened to turned out to be, more or less, the hero of the story: They innovated this, it was their idea to do this and that, they were the leader in so and so.”

He paused, looking at me evenly. Was he making himself clear?

“All of this is just to tell you: Don't trust memory.”

It is impossible to reconstruct the earliest years of Stanley Ann Dunham and the stories of her parents, Stanley Armour Dunham and Madelyn Lee Payne, without trusting the memories of people who knew them. There is no authoritative history of the Dunham and Payne families and of the events that led them to the Flint Hills of Kansas in the first decades of the twentieth century. Genealogists have traced their ancestors back over two centuries to Indiana, Missouri, Virginia, Arkansas, the Oklahoma Territory, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Massachusetts. But the reliability of those family trees is uncertain. There are newspaper birth announcements, baptism records, high school annuals, military registration cards, marriage licenses, census records, city directories, newspaper articles, obituaries, death notices, funeral announcements. But the public record offers only a frame without color, texture, or emotion, like the vestigial adhesive corners left behind in old albums after the photographs have faded or fallen away. There is President Obama's sweet and lyrical account of his grandparents' story in his 1995 memoir,
Dreams from My Father,
woven from tales he was told as a child, retold with the discretion a son and grandson might bring to their telling at a time when his mother and grandmother were still alive. There are a few distant relatives with memories like attics stuffed with family lore, and former classmates, in dwindling numbers, with fragmentary memories of coming of age in the Sunflower State during the Great Depression. At the time of the writing of this book, Stanley Ann's parents were no longer living. Her mother, Madelyn, agreed in September 2008 to be interviewed—on the condition that the interview would occur after the presidential election. Stanley Ann's father, Stanley, died of prostate cancer in 1992. All of their siblings were alive, however, and spoke in detail about what they remembered. Their help has made it possible to take a stab at the story of the family that produced, on a wintry day in Wichita in November 1942, Stanley Ann.

There is something fresh and quintessentially American about the family tree that extends its branches through and around Stanley Ann's son, President Obama. Yes, there was the white mother from Kansas and the black father from Kenya. Then there was the Javanese stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, with whom Mr. Obama lived for four years in Jakarta as a small child; there is President Obama's African-American wife, Michelle, a descendant of slaves. There is his half-Indonesian half sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng; her Chinese-Canadian husband, Konrad Ng; and the president's Kenyan and half-Kenyan half siblings scattered across the globe in places such as Nairobi and Beijing. The family that gathered in Washington, D.C., for the inauguration of the first black president of the United States in January 2009 seemed both uniquely American and at the same time brand-new. In its mixing of races, ethnicities, nationalities, and cultures, it seemed to embody at once the aspirations of the founding fathers to create a place of opportunity for all people, the country's promise as a beacon for immigrants in an increasingly global culture, and progress in the ongoing struggle to move beyond the United States' racial history.