A Singular Woman (45 page)

“She was reminding me that it was okay to want to do things differently,” Maya told me. “Which was, I thought, very enlightened.”

In 2002, Maya met her future husband at the East-West Center. Konrad Ng, a Chinese-Canadian graduate student in political science, shared an office at the center with Maya's martial-arts instructor. Maya, who had moved back to Honolulu several years earlier to help her grandmother, was teaching at a charter school and at the university while working toward a Ph.D. The following year, Maya and Konrad Ng married. After the birth of their first child, Maya dispatched her own dissertation—writing between the hours of ten p.m. and two a.m., she told me—and received her Ph.D. She began teaching history and doing curriculum development at a girls' school, where she developed a class in peace education. She started writing books, including one for children,
Ladder to the Moon,
in which Ann appears one night to Maya's elder daughter, Suhaila, and takes her up a golden ladder to the moon.

“What was Grandma Annie like?” Suhaila asks her mother in the story.

“She was like the moon,” her mother replies. “Full, soft, and curious.”

Barack, meanwhile, was elected to the Illinois State Senate in November 1996, one year after his mother's death. The original edition of
Dreams from My Father,
which was published in 1995 and sold approximately nine thousand copies in hardcover, came out in paperback the following year and went out of print. Obama ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2000, then won the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate in March 2004. Four months later, he gave the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in Boston—the speech that laid out, for millions of Americans for the first time, his father and mother's story and made him into a national political sensation almost overnight.

The news traveled swiftly among people who had once known Ann.

“Did you watch the Democratic convention?” a former student of Alice Dewey's wrote in an e-mail to Nancy Cooper, an anthropologist and former Dewey student herself.

“Yes, I did,” Cooper answered.

“Did you see that guy who gave the keynote speech?”

“Yes.”

“You know who that is?”

“No, I don't.”

“It's Barry. Ann's Barry.”

Ann's friend from Mercer Island, John Hunt, had happened on the connection years earlier in the frequent-flyer lounge at Los Angeles International Airport on the day the
Los Angeles Times
published its two-thousand-word profile of the first black president of the
Harvard Law Review.
In Yogyakarta, Djaka Waluja and Sumarni, Ann's former field assistants, had no idea what had become of Barry until a photograph of him with Ann, Lolo, and Maya turned up on Indonesian television in a report on Obama during the presidential campaign in 2008. When Linda Wylie, another Mercer Island classmate of Ann's, had the connection pointed out by a friend after the 2004 convention speech, she went looking for a copy of Obama's book. The resemblance between Obama and his mother seemed unmistakable.

“The minute I saw the picture, I felt like crying,” Wylie said.

Beyond the physical resemblance, people who had known Ann well were certain they recognized the imprint of her values, her confidence, her intelligence, on her son. There were even traces of her dry humor. Many remembered her pride in him and wished she could have seen his success. Some wondered what she would have made of his choice to go into politics. Nancy Cooper remembered, sometime later, an exchange between herself and Ann during the 1988 presidential election campaign. The Reverend Jesse Jackson, running for the Democratic nomination, had given a speech at the University of Hawai‘i—a speech that Cooper had attended. When she and Ann talked about it, Cooper was struck by Ann's excitement about Jackson and his multiracial Rainbow Coalition. Ann seemed, Cooper told me, “to have some sort of insider knowledge.” When Cooper asked her about it, Ann told Cooper, for the first time, that her son's father was African. “Then, for me, it was as if a light went on,” Cooper told me. “Up till that point, everything I knew about her was associated with Java. . . . In that moment, she was just really enthusiastic about Jackson's campaign. It was almost as if she knew Jesse Jackson.”

Two months after Obama's 2004 speech in Boston, the Crown Publishing Group reissued
Dreams from My Father,
and it became an instant bestseller. The editor of the new edition had asked Obama to write a short preface, bringing his story up to date. In it, Obama briskly summarized what had happened in his life and in the world in the years since the book had first appeared in the summer of 1995, while Ann was dying. He ended the preface on the memory of his mother, “the single constant in my life.”

When we met in July 2010, Obama was eighteen months into his term as president. It had been a scorching summer. The administration had been taken up with the war in Afghanistan, the biggest oil spill in history, an economic recovery that felt fitful at best. That morning, however, Obama had signed into law a major overhaul of the financial regulatory system, the product of a series of reforms he had proposed thirteen months earlier. By the time he settled into a chair in the Oval Office that afternoon, he seemed downright buoyant. He spoke about his mother with fondness, humor, and a degree of candor that I had not expected. There was also in his tone at times a hint of gentle forbearance. Perhaps it was the tone of someone whose patience had been tested, by a person he loved, to the point where he had stepped back to a safer distance. Or perhaps it was the knowingness of a grown child seeing his parent as irredeemably human.

“She was a very strong person in her own way,” Obama said, when I asked about Ann's limitations as a mother. “Resilient, able to bounce back from setbacks, persistent—the fact that she ended up finishing her dissertation. But despite all those strengths, she was not a well-organized person. And that disorganization, you know, spilled over. Had it not been for my grandparents, I think, providing some sort of safety net financially, being able to take me and my sister on at certain spots, I think my mother would have had to make some different decisions. And I think that sometimes she took for granted that, ‘Well, it'll all work out and it'll be fine.' But the fact is, it might not always have been fine, had it not been for my grandmother, who was a much more orderly and much more conservative—I don't mean politically but conservative in terms of how you structure your life—a much more conventional person. Had she not been there to provide that floor, I think our young lives could have been much more chaotic than they were.”

Disorganized, I observed, could mean almost anything—from a messy house to a messy life.

“All of the above,” he said.

As a child, the president went on to say, he did not care that his mother was uninterested in housekeeping or cooking or traditional homemaker activities. In fact, she used to joke about that. But in her handling of financial matters, he said, she put herself in vulnerable positions and was “always at the margins.” He ascribed the struggle over her insurance at the end of her life to “the fact that she'd never make a decision about a job based on did it provide health insurance benefits that were stable and secure, or a pension, or savings or things like that.” Her neglect of those details was a source of tension between her and her parents, “because they always felt they had to kind of come in and provide assistance to smooth over some of her choices.”

But he did not, he said, hold his mother's choices against her. Part of being an adult is seeing your parents in the round, “as people who have their own strengths, weaknesses, quirks, longings.” He did not believe, he said, that parents served their children well by being unhappy. If his mother had cramped her spirit, it would not have given him a happier childhood. As it was, she gave him the single most important gift a parent can give—“a sense of unconditional love that was big enough that, with all the surface disturbances of our lives, it sustained me, entirely.” People wonder about his calm and even-keeled manner, the president observed. He credited the temperament he was born with and the fact that “from a very early age, I always felt I was loved and that my mother thought I was special.”

Looking back, he said, many of his life choices were informed by her example. His decision to go into public service, he said, grew out of values she instilled—“a sense that the greatest thing you can do in the world is to help somebody else, be kind, think about issues like poverty and how can you give people a greater opportunity ? . . . So I have no doubt that a lot of my career choices are rooted in her and what she thought was important.” On the other hand, his decision to settle in Chicago, to marry a woman with roots in the city, and to place a premium on giving stability to his children was in part a reaction to “the constant motion that was my childhood. And some of it wasn't necessarily a rejection of her, it was just an observation about me and how I fit in, or didn't fit in, in certain environments.

“My mother lived a classic expatriate life, and there are aspects of that life that are very appealing,” Obama said, going on to characterize his mother's life in a way that seemed perhaps to understate the depth and seriousness of her commitment to Indonesia. “Both my sister and I, I think, to one degree or another, wrestle with the fact that it's fun to just take off and live in a new culture and meet interesting people and learn new languages and eat strange foods. You know, it's a life full of adventure. So the appeal of that is very powerful to me. Now, the flip side of that is that you're always a little bit of an outsider, you're always a little bit of an observer. There's an element of you're not fully committed to this place and this thing. It's not so much, I think, me rejecting what she did; I understood the appeal of it, and I still do. But it was a conscious choice, I think, on my part, that the idea of being a citizen of the world, but without any real anchor, had both its benefits but also its own limits.

“Either way, you were giving something up. And I chose to give up this other thing—partly because I'd gotten what my mother had provided when I was young, which was a lot of adventure and a great view of the world.”

Was there a moment during the campaign or the election, I wondered, when his mind turned to his mother—the person who had given him the values, the self-confidence, and the life story that became the foundation of his extraordinary political rise?

“I'm sure there were a number of moments,” he said. “But there was one. . . .”

It was January 3, 2008, the night of the Iowa caucuses, the first major step in the nominating process for the presidency.

“We had been thirty points down in the national polls,” he said. “Everybody was doubting that we could pull something off. And our whole theory in the Iowa caucuses was that we could create this whole new group of caucus-goers—people who hadn't been involved in politics before, people who had become cynical and disaffected about politics. There were doubts, obviously, that an African-American candidate would get the votes in an overwhelmingly white state. And so, caucus night, you go to this caucus site and you see just these people sort of streaming in. And they're all kinds of folks, right? Young, old, black, white, Hispanic—this is Des Moines.”

Obama began to chuckle at the memory of that night, his face breaking into a broad smile.

“There was one guy who looked like Gandalf,” he continued. “He had a staff. He had installed a little video monitor—I still don't know how he did this—that looped one of my TV commercials on this thing. You know, had a long white beard and stuff? But the mood and the atmosphere was one of hope and this sense that we can overcome a lot of the old baggage. So it was a wonderful moment. At that point, we figured we were going to win that night.

“But I remember driving away from that caucus and thinking not, ‘Wouldn't my mother be proud of me,' but rather, ‘Wouldn't she have enjoyed
being in
this caucus.' It would have just felt like she was right at home. It was imbued with her spirit in a way that was very touching to me. I teared up at that point, in a way that I didn't in most of the campaign. Because it just seemed to somehow capture something that she had given to me as a young person—and here it was manifest in a really big way. It seemed to vindicate what she had believed in and who she was.”

Could he say what it was about that evening that seemed so consistent with her spirit? I asked.

“It was a sense that beneath our surface differences, we're all the same, and that there's more good than bad in each of us. And that, you know, we can reach across the void and touch each other and believe in each other and work together.

“That's precisely the naiveté and idealism that was part of her,” he added. “And that's, I suppose, the naive idealism in me.”

I
began working on this book in the late spring of 2008, before Barack Obama was the Democratic presidential nominee. At a time when it might not have seemed reasonable to do so, many people trusted me and gave me the benefit of the doubt. In the text and the endnotes, I've credited the nearly two hundred people who took the time to help me understand my subject. To some of them, I owe an extra debt of gratitude for additional acts of generosity and kindness; there are other people, too, who helped me in different ways. I wish to thank them here.