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

by Janny Scott

  Ann returned repeatedly to Kajar over the next year, sometimes for many weeks at a time. John Raintree, an anthropologist who worked with Ann several years later, told me that “the predominant anthropological method is to put yourself in the village context. You are the outsider, the childlike neophyte. You let them socialize you into their worldview.” Ann had hired two research assistants—a jovial, strapping young economics student named Djaka Waluja and his wife, Sumarni, a graduate student and an assistant at the Population Studies Center at Gadjah Mada. In January 2009, I met them in an office at Dr. Sardjito Hospital in Yogyakarta, where Sumarni, a lecturer in medicine at Gadjah Mada, was working. Djaka told me that he and Ann spent four months in the district of Gunung Kidul, living at least part of the time in the house of an Indonesian government fieldworker assigned to Kajar. Ann and Djaka would set out for the field every morning at five a.m. Dressed in a long skirt and loaded down with a shoulder bag stuffed with notebooks, books, and a camera, Ann would ride behind Djaka on the back of Sumarni’s small, not entirely reliable Yamaha motorcycle. When I asked why Djaka Waluja, rather than Sumarni, accompanied Ann to Kajar, he said, “Gunung Kidul was far away, Ann was a big woman. To get to Gunung Kidul, uphill, you can imagine.” His greater weight, he suggested, was needed for balance and control. Ann took to calling the motorcycle Poniyem, making a bilingual pun out of a name that sounds like the English word “pony” but also happens to be given to Javanese girls born on the third day (Pon) of the five-day Javanese week. “Ayo, Poniyem!” she would cry out as the motorcycle lumbered toward a hill, while she pretended to swat its imaginary rump. (The meaning of that expression falls somewhere between “C’mon, Poniyem!” and “Hi-Yo, Silver!”) She and Waluja would conduct interviews from dawn until seven p.m., then stay up until midnight, transcribing their data into English in one of the hard-backed, pale green composition books Ann used as field notebooks. “Kajar is certainly an interesting village from several points of view, not the least of which is political,” she wrote to Dewey. “I can envision a little article someday with a model of the balance of power there and the shifts affected by various styles of tinkering from outside.” According to Waluja, he and Ann slept four hours a night, on average. He returned to Yogyakarta on weekends, he said; she returned less often. When I asked him if he found the schedule demanding, he told me he made a habit of drinking a liquid multivitamin supplement “to keep my strength up and my eyes open.”

  Ann was ambitious. That was how Waluja and Sumarni put it, at least when they expressed the idea in English. “She would often tell us, ‘I want this, that, this. I have to get that,’” Waluja told me. She liked to put her plans in writing, often in the form of a diagram with multiple steps, as though it were proof that she intended to deliver. The working conditions were rough, but she never complained, even walking long distances in heat or rain. “She just exhaled loudly,” said Waluja, whom Ann took to calling Joko. Then she would say, “It’s nothing compared to hell, Joko.” In the village of Pocung, the river that ran through the bottomland would overflow, preventing her from reaching the home of a craftsman she was observing. She would overhaul the day’s schedule on the spot. She adapted easily to the customs of her informants. In a culture in which tea and snacks materialize at almost every encounter, Ann accepted whatever was offered rather than risk appearing rude by declining. “Speaking of cash crops, we arrived in Kajar just at the time of the peanut harvest,” she wrote to Dewey in July 1978. “This meant that at every house we surveyed we were given large glasses of sticky sweet tea, refilled at least 3 times despite all of my ‘sampuns,’ and big plates of peanuts in the shell to consume. Considering some days we visited 5 or 6 households, I don’t think either Joko or I will be able to look a peanut in the face again (yes, peanuts do have faces—smirky, nasty little faces, in fact). At any rate you can be sure that before moving on to the next village we are checking out very carefully what they have just harvested.” (Sampun is a Javanese expression, roughly equivalent in this context to the American expression “I’m full.”)

  On one occasion, in a village called Jambangan in Ngawi, a town in East Java on the Central Java border, Ann was invited to watch a tayub, a dance performed by young women at which men in the audience may join in. It was rare for an outsider to be present, Sumarni told me, and men in the audience turned out to be drunk. When the men began shoving money down the dancers’ strapless tops, Sumarni said, she watched Ann closely. “She laughed,” Sumarni said. “Uncomfortably.”

  With her interview subjects, she could be tender. “She was always touching,” Sumarni said. Before beginning an interview, she might put her arm around a farmer’s shoulders and ask if he had eaten recently. If the answer was no, she sometimes would say sorrowfully, almost to herself, as though trying to come to grips with the fact, “He said he didn’t have anything to eat.” Occasionally, Waluja and Sumarni noticed her turn away and wipe tears from her face. Once, she was visibly upset by the sight of an elderly woman in the village of Kasongan who, despite her age, was forced by her circumstances to work. “I wondered if she was too sensitive,” Waluja told me.

  Ann was nothing if not methodical. She accumulated lists—of raw materials, of people to contact, of nineteen steps in making agricultural tools. “Steps in Surveying New Village,” she wrote in pencil inside the back cover of one notebook; twelve instructions followed, covering everything from how to secure government clearances to the need to summarize all data in charts. “Photos needed from Kajar,” she once wrote, going on to list forty-three. To say the questionnaires she administered to villagers and village officials were comprehensive would be an understatement. Geography, demography, technology, labor investment, purchasing, output, distribution, capital, returns, cash expenditure patterns, assistance from outside agencies, history, land tenure, agricultural yields, trading: Those were a few of her areas of interest. Her notes from a single day of fieldwork in Kajar might include the price and sources of scrap iron; rates of pay for bellows workers, hammerers, and the smith; an accounting of one smith’s expenditures and revenues; types of charcoal used; an inventory of fifteen blacksmithing tools; discussions of marketing practices, the function of the cooperative, cooperative dues, the availability of credit, seasonal shifts in labor supply; and observations on child labor, women’s roles, diet, and land use. “Difficult person to interview,” she reported in her notebook after a routine interview in Pocung. “Interview cut after 3 or 4 hours with poor results.” Her six pages of notes on a conversation with Garrett Solyom about field photography covered shutter speeds, film speeds, filters, lens paper, liquid lens cleaner, processing, storage of negatives, and a lot more. “The smaller the F stop, the wider the aperture,” Ann noted. “Need a fast lens.” Solyom, who had bought his photographic equipment with a gift of one thousand dollars from Dewey, had learned his technique from his father, a game biologist. “Look with your entire being,” his father had told him. “Sit still. Things will begin to happen because you’re not there.” The advice that Ann chose to write down had a practical cast. “Ask yourself before each photo: What am I trying to show in this photo?” she wrote. “Don’t decapitate people.”

  Yes, don’t decapitate. Ann’s descriptions of her informants were precise, affectionate, and not without humor. “Pak Atmo is a small, shrewd, comical man, fond of a good joke,” she wrote in her notes, describing the head of the biggest hamlet in Kajar. One man was “shy, vague, pleasant”—and utterly without business sense. Another struck her as “open, good-hearted, modest and sexy.” After interviewing one man, she scribbled parenthetically, “Wife a bit of twit.” After a visit from a team of German engineers: “Much nonsense talked.” She regaled Dewey with details of one Pak Harjo Bodong: “Roughly translated, ‘Father Harjo with the Long Belly Button,’ though I never had the courage to really ask why,” Ann wrote in a letter. “Pak Harjo Bodong used to be the most famous dalang in the Wonosari area. He also used to be a famous thief and was in jail four ti
mes when he was young. Now he is . . . a pillar of the community and lives there with his twelfth wife (he is her tenth husband). They are both in their seventies and quite a sketch. We enjoyed many evenings at their house hearing stories about the old days, and I got a free course in the wayang to boot!”

  Pak Sastrosuyono, the head of the blacksmithing cooperative and Kajar’s leading entrepreneur, became one of her most important informants—a man of average build with “an intelligent-looking face and a habitual expression that could be described as slightly worried or puzzled-looking,” she wrote in her dissertation. “Although one hears many stories about Pak Sastro from other villagers, some of them bordering on the fantastic, he seldom talks about himself or his accomplishments. When he does, he tends to downplay those accomplishments. If asked to discuss the extent of his property, his wealth, his financial contributions to village ceremonies or improvement projects, etc., he always gives underestimates. In part, this can be attributed to Javanese culture, which places a high value on personal modesty and abhors bragging. In part, however, it is probably due to a realistic assessment of his situation in the village. He is both highly respected, and resented to a considerable degree.”

  She went on to describe what struck her as a particularly telling moment.

  One scene of Pak Sastro and his wife stands out in the author’s memory and expresses the poignancy of his relations with the other villagers. While returning from household interviews one evening in 1978, the author passed by Pak Sastro’s house. He had just purchased the first television set in the village, and was able to pick up programs broadcast from Jogjakarta. Since the village electrification program had not yet begun, the first sets used in rural areas were battery-operated. Pak Sastro and Bu Sastro had tried to watch the set in their own home, but hundreds of other villagers crowded uninvited into their house in order to get a glimpse of this strange new phenomena. Finally, in exasperation, Pak Sastro was forced to place the set in the window of his house, facing outward toward the house-yard. As a sign of their superior status, and the fact that the set did in fact belong to them, Pak Sastro and Bu Sastro were allowed to sit on two chairs placed in the yard in front of the set. The rest of the village stood up to watch, crowded around behind them in the yard.

  Kajar’s charms and mysteries, natural and supernatural, fascinated Ann. There were three sacred springs in the village. One, shaded by a large and sacred banyan tree, was to be avoided at night because the Javanese believe that ghosts and spirits live in banyan trees. At the base of another was a flat stone on which one could see coloration in the shape of the wavy-bladed Javanese dagger, the kris, or keris, in Indonesian. “Villagers consider this image of a keris as proof that the men of Kajar are fated to be smiths, and that men from neighboring villages do not share this fate,” Ann wrote in her dissertation. Blacksmithing was considered sacred; so were the forge, the hearth, and the nail-shaped anvil, which resembled a lingam, the stylized phallus worshipped in Hinduism as a symbol of the god Shiva. Smiths were revered, and old smiths were believed to have special powers. Before opening a new forge, a smith would prepare an offering of molded rice, fruit, and flowers to be burned along with incense in the smithy. There were offerings to the anvils on the first day of the Javanese week. Every year, on the first day of the first Javanese month, all the smiths would dress formally in sarongs, high-necked jackets, and small folded batik turbans. Walking in single file and each carrying a tray laden with food offerings, they would circle the village and climb one of the limestone hills behind it to the graves of the two original smiths. There, they would make their offerings and meditate or pray. “Whenever villagers have a problem such as illness or sterility, or when they are looking to improve their luck, they bring offerings of rice, flowers, etc. to those graves,” Ann wrote. When she developed an eye infection on one occasion, she was advised to rinse her eyes in the waters of the sacred spring. When the infection persisted, villagers suggested a pilgrimage to the top of the limestone hill and offerings to the smiths’ graves.

  In June 1978, Ann learned of an elderly kris smith living in Kajar. In Javanese tradition, the kris is an object of extraordinary importance and power—a weapon, an heirloom, a mark of rank, a male symbol, an item of male ceremonial dress, an art form, a sacred object with protective powers and a life of its own. “There are numerous stories of kerises rattling about in their cases, wanting to get out, or of kerises flashing about in mid-air, independently attacking their owner’s enemies,” Ann wrote in the early 1980s. According to the Solyoms, who have written extensively on the kris, a man might go so far as to trade his car or his house for a kris that he senses is right for him—one that makes him feel spiritually complete and personally content. The makers of krises were believed to be descended from the gods. Like wizards or magicians in Western cultures, master kris smiths possessed special knowledge. Their craft was passed on only within families, and was seen as dangerous; it demanded, as the Solyoms put it, “the release and control of threatening powers that could go astray if not treated properly.” By the late 1970s, there were said to be no master smiths left in Java, just a few village smiths carrying on the tradition of their fathers. On June 19, 1978, Ann wrote in her notes that she had learned that there was one kris smith left in Kajar. (She later learned there were two.) “He still has the magical power to make pamor kerises,” she wrote, referring to the light-on-dark damascened patterns on a kris blade, made of layers upon layers of iron and meteoritic nickel sandwiched together. “He has not been able, however, to pass the tradition on to anyone and he is old now.”

  In early July, she and Waluja interviewed the kris smith, Pak Martodinomo, one of two surviving sons-in-law of Kasan Ikhsan, one of the two original smiths in Kajar. He was about eighty years old, Ann estimated. In his prime, he had received seven or eight commissions a year. Now he rarely received one. “People don’t attach importance to kerises any more,” Ann wrote in her notes. “A change in the times.” Martodinomo’s father-in-law had been an expert in a type of Javanese mysticism known as ilmu kebatinan, which Ann described later as a set of practices, Hindu and Buddhist in origin, intended to increase a person’s spiritual power and insight into the meaning of life. Ann listed the steps required before starting a kris: Fast for three days; hold a private selamatan with barbecued chicken, coconut rice, and boiled rice to protect the kris during forging; hold a personal selamatan to protect the smith from bad spirits. Work on a kris was to commence at the beginning of the Javanese month called Suro, continue intermittently throughout the year, and end the following Suro. A smith could kill no animals during Suro and was required to fast Mondays and Thursdays. “Get acquainted with the spirit of the iron to be used,” Ann wrote. “If you don’t get acquainted, can have an accident while working e.g. be blinded, paralyzed, very sick, insane or even die suddenly.”

  Ann appears to have had little difficulty convincing her subjects to talk. In small script at the bottom of one page of field notes, she noted, “None of the people interviewed so far are comfortable in Indonesian.” For that reason, Djaka told me, he and Ann conducted all of the interviews together. She would discuss with him, in Bahasa Indonesia, the questions she wanted to ask; he would then ask them in Javanese and record the responses in his book. In the evenings, he would translate the answers into Indonesian for Ann, who in turn would translate them into English in her notes. When I asked why he thought the villagers were as forthcoming as they were, he first said, “Because I asked them in Javanese.” In addition, he said, “If a foreigner asks questions, they want to answer. They’re happy to be asked, and they’re delighted to answer.” Furthermore, he added, they came to think of Ann as a good woman.

  During a visit to Kajar in July 2009, I met two women, Suparmi and Mintartini, who, like many Indonesians, did not use surnames. They identified themselves as daughters of Pak Sastrosuyono, head of the blacksmiths’ cooperative when Ann first arrived in the village. They told me that they remembered seeing Ann in Kajar
when they were children, and they recalled the pleasure she seemed to take in talking with villagers. “People would shout, ‘There’s a londo here!’” one of the women told me, using a Javanese word for Dutchman that is often used for any European, Westerner, or Caucasian. “Everybody came. She was like a celebrity here. They really liked it. Some people couldn’t answer the questions, but they were happy that she was here.” In the acknowledgments in her dissertation, Ann described the Indonesian villagers she encountered as “invariably friendly, pleasant and willing to patiently answer many questions concerning their enterprises and personal finances, even when dozens of neighbors and village children are crowded in the doorway or looking in the windows. I do not recall ever being treated rudely by an Indonesian villager, or ever having had an unpleasant fieldwork experience while in Indonesia.” On one occasion, the headman of the largest hamlet in Kajar announced at a village meeting that he had “adopted” Ann and Djaka Waluja as his children. He renamed Ann, Sri Lestari. “I gather it means ‘Forever Beautiful,’ and wasn’t that gallant of him,” Ann wrote to Dewey. “Thank God for nice comfortable middle-aged men who don’t give you any complexes. Amien!”