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

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  One - Dreams from the Prairie

  Two - Coming of Age in Seattle

  Three - East-West

  Four - Initiation in Java

  Five - Trespassers Will Be Eaten

  Six - In the Field

  Seven - Community Organizing

  Eight - The Foundation

  Nine - “Surviving and Thriving Against All Odds”

  Ten - Manhattan Chill

  Eleven - Coming Home

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Bibliography

  A Note on Photos

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Copyright © 2011 by Janny Scott

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada

  Lyrics from “Bésame Mucho,” by Consuelo Velázquez, are used by permission of Promotora

  Hispano Americana de Música S.A. Administered by Peer International Corporation.

  All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Scott, Janny.

  A singular woman : the untold story of Barack Obama’s mother / Janny Scott.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-51390-3

  1. Dunham, S. Ann (Stanley Ann). 2. Mothers of presidents—United States—Biography. 3. Obama, Barack—Family. I. Title.

  E909.D86S

  973.932092—dc22

  [B]

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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  For Joe

  I think sometimes that had I known she would not survive her illness, I 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.

  —BARACK OBAMA, Dreams from My Father,

  preface to the 2004 edition

  Prologue

  I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas.

  —BARACK OBAMA, MARCH 18, 2008

  The photograph showed the son, but my eye gravitated toward the mother. That first glimpse was surprising—the stout, pale-skinned woman in sturdy sandals, standing squarely a half-step ahead of the lithe, darker-skinned figure to her left. His elastic-band body bespoke discipline, even asceticism. Her form was well padded, territory ceded long ago to the pleasures of appetite and the forces of anatomical destiny. He had the studied casualness of a catalog model, in khakis, at home in the viewfinder. She met the camera head-on, dressed in hand-loomed textile dyed the color of indigo, a silver earring half hidden in the cascading curtain of her dark hair. She carried her chin a few degrees higher than most. His right hand rested on her shoulder, lightly. The photograph, taken on a Manhattan rooftop in August 1987 and e-mailed to me twenty years later, was a revelation and a puzzle. The man was Barack Obama at age twenty-six, the community organizer from Chicago on a visit to New York. The woman was Stanley Ann Dunham, his mother. It was impossible not to be struck forcefully by the similarities, and the dissimilarities, between them. It was impossible not to question, in that moment, the stereotype to which she had been expediently reduced: the white woman from Kansas.

  The president’s mother has served as any of a number of useful oversimplifications. In the capsule version of Obama’s life story, she is the white mother from Kansas coupled alliteratively with the black father from Kenya. She is corn-fed, white-bread, whatever Kenya is not. In Dreams from My Father, the memoir that helped power Obama’s political ascent, she is the shy, small-town girl who falls head over heels for the brilliant, charismatic African who steals the show. In the next chapter, she is the naive idealist, the innocent abroad. In Obama’s presidential campaign, she was the struggling single mother, the food stamp recipient, the victim of a health-care system gone awry, pleading with her insurance company for coverage as her life slipped away. And in the fevered imaginings of supermarket tabloids and the Internet, she is the atheist, the Marxist, the flower child, the mother who “abandoned” her son or duped the state of Hawaii into issuing a birth certificate for her Kenyan-born baby, on the off chance that he might want to be president someday.

  The earthy figure in the photograph did not fit any of those.

  A few months after receiving the photo, I wrote an article for The New York Times about Dunham. It was one in a series of biographical articles on then Senator Obama that the Times published during the presidential campaign. It was long for a newspaper but short for a life, yet people who read it were seized by her story and, some said, moved to tears. As a result of the article, I was offered a chance to write a book on Dunham, and I spent two and a half years following her trail. I drove across the Flint Hills of Kansas to the former oil boomtowns where her parents grew up during the Depression. I spent many weeks in Hawaii, where she became pregnant at seventeen, married at eighteen, divorced and remarried at twenty-two. I traveled twice to Indonesia, where she brought her son, at six, and from whence she sent him back, alone, at age ten, to her parents in Hawaii. I visited dusty villages in Java where, as a young anthropologist, she did fieldwork for her Ph.D. dissertation on peasant blacksmithing. I met with bankers in glass towers in Jakarta where, nearly two decades before Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank shared the Nobel Peace Prize for their work with microcredit, Dunham worked on the largest self-sustaining commercial microfinance program in the world. I combed through tattered field notebooks, boxes of personal and professional papers, letters to friends, photo albums, the archives of the Ford Foundation in Midtown Manhattan, and the thousand-page thesis that took Dunham fifteen years to complete. I interviewed nearly two hundred colleagues, friends, professors, employers, acquaintances, and relatives, including her two children. Without their generosity, I could not have written this book.

  To describe Dunham as a white woman from Kansas is about as illuminating as describing her son as a politician who likes golf. Intentionally or not, the label obscures an extraordinary story�
��of a girl with a boy’s name who grew up in the years before the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the Vietnam War, and the Pill; who married an African at a time when nearly two dozen states still had laws against interracial marriage; who, at age twenty-four, moved to Jakarta with her son in the waning days of an anti-communist bloodbath in which hundreds of thousands of Indonesians are believed to have been slaughtered; who lived more than half of her adult life in a place barely known to most Americans, in an ancient and complex culture, in a country with the largest Muslim population in the world; who spent years working in villages where an unmarried, Western woman was a rarity; who immersed herself in the study of a sacred craft long practiced exclusively by men; who, as a working and mostly single mother, brought up two biracial children; who adored her children and believed her son in particular had the potential to be great; who raised him to be, as he has put it jokingly, a combination of Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, and Harry Belafonte, then died at fifty-two, never knowing who or what he would become.

  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.”

  One

  Dreams from the Prairie

  In 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.”