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

by Janny Scott

  Interviewing bank customers, with colleagues, about 1989

  On a field visit to village banks in the district of Sleman in 1988, Ann proposed a short detour to the village of Jitar, the home of a respected kris smith whom she knew. According to Ann’s account, she was traveling with three carloads of bank colleagues and local government officials. At the smith’s house, he invited the group inside for tea. Members of the group, laughing loudly and making raucous jokes minutes before, fell silent, sat formally, and then addressed the smith, Pak Djeno, with deep respect and deference. When Ann said she wanted to buy a small kris, the smith brought out four blades. “A deadly hush came over the room, and even whispering ceased,” Ann wrote later. For days afterward, her colleagues discussed the encounter. “The very fact that I had known a keris smith and had purchased a keris also caused a change in their behavior toward me. They began to show me some of the deference they had shown to Pak Djeno, speaking with greater respect and formality. Somehow, a little of his magical power had managed to rub off on me.”

  Ann combined the discipline of a workaholic with a personal warmth that her Indonesian colleagues and subordinates described to me as maternal. She was not a practitioner of “rubber time”: If she had an appointment, she was never late. In the field, she might start work at nine a.m. and not wrap up until thirteen hours later. She would stay with an interview long after colleagues were ready to move on. She traveled with a Thermos and took her coffee black, no sugar. “Coffee is my blood,” she said; if she ever got sick, she said, she wanted intravenous coffee. She rarely seemed to get enough sleep. She tested survey questions on herself first, to feel what a respondent might feel. She would never risk insulting her host by declining food. When the manager of a bank branch in South Sulawesi threw her a surprise birthday party, including karaoke, she launched gamely into “You Are My Sunshine.” In the town of Garut, she turned her attention to a girl of no more than seventeen who was serving dinner to members of the team at their hotel. Ann asked her about her family, her marriage, her education. How much was she paid? Was it enough? Then, when dinner was over, she slipped the girl money.

  On occasion, a misunderstanding across some cultural divide left Ann rattled. On a visit to a village in Sulawesi in 1988, an irate local official pursued Ann and her group, shouting furiously in a local language that none of them understood. He appeared to believe the group had failed to obtain his permission to enter the area. The confrontation subsided after some local residents intervened in the group’s defense. But late that night, Ann remained upset and was unable to sleep. She asked a bank colleague, Tomy Sugianto, to accompany her on a walk around the outside of the hotel where they were staying. The hour was about one a.m., Sugianto told me. Ann, visibly exhausted, was on the verge of tears. She seemed haunted by the memory of the local official’s fury and whatever misunderstanding had provoked it. She felt wrongly accused. “She only wanted to know why the man was so angry,” Sugianto remembered, “and what we did wrong.”

  To her younger colleagues, she was Bu Ann—Bu being an affectionate abbreviation of the honorific Ibu, a term of respect for mothers, older women, and women of higher status. She treated them, they felt, as family. If she went out to lunch in Jakarta, she would order an extra meal for her driver, Sabaruddin, and his family. She helped pay for his five-year-old daughter’s surgery and for repairs to the roof and the doors on his house. In the town of Tasik Malaya, she pointed out to her team that the village chief, a successful businessman, had started out as a peddler—evidence that anything was possible. To her young research assistants, she emphasized accuracy, rigor, patience, fairness, and not judging by appearances. “Don’t conclude before you understand,” Retno Wijayanti recalled Ann saying. “After you understand, don’t judge.”

  She even tried her hand at matchmaking. In the fall of 1989, the bank hired a willowy twenty-four-year-old woman named Widayanti from Malang in East Java, who was soon assigned to help Ann and Don Johnston with a survey of potential microfinance customers. Ann quickly discovered that Widayanti was a Pentecostal Christian. Johnston, the son of a church musician in Little Rock, was a Southern Baptist. Widayanti began to notice that whenever she asked Ann a question about the survey, Ann would say, “Oh, just ask Don.” Did Widayanti know that Don had once been a Sunday school teacher? Ann asked her. To Johnston, Ann talked up Widayanti’s intelligence, her command of English, her honesty and strong principles. To Flora Sugondo, the office manager, Ann confided that she wanted to match up Johnston and Widayanti.

  With Tomy Sugianto (left) and Slamet Riyadi (right), from Bank Rakyat Indonesia, in Tana Toraja, South Sulawesi, 1989

  In October 1993, Ann was a guest in Malang at their wedding.

  That Ibu quality was useful, Julia Suryakusuma told me. “Ann was a very intellectual person, but she didn’t come across as being that,” she said. “That whole Ibu quality took away the threat of being a pioneer, a professional, efficient. It took away the edge.” Occasionally, however, Ann found the role of surrogate mother tiring. “I get so tired of having to mother people myself—for example, all my research assistants at BRI—that I actually enjoy being on the receiving end of a little mothering once in a while,” she confessed to Suryakusuma in a letter.

  Not long after Ann returned to Indonesia in 1988, Suryakusuma’s husband, Ami Priyono, asked a young Indonesian journalist, whom he knew, to see if he might help out a friend of Priyono’s. A few days later, a secretary in the Bank Rakyat Indonesia office called the journalist, I. Made Suarjana, a reporter in Yogyakarta for Tempo, an independent newsweekly, and set up an appointment for him to meet Ann at the Airlangga Guest House in Yogyakarta, where she would be staying on a trip for the bank. Arriving at the hotel, Suarjana was startled to find that the person he was meeting was Caucasian and a woman. From the name, Sutoro, he had expected an Indonesian man. They got along immediately. Soon, he was driving Ann to Kajar, to update her dissertation research in her spare time. Occasionally, she would ask him to visit other villages for her in her absence. They dined together on her visits to Yogyakarta, eating tempeh and sayur lodeh, an eggplant stew that she loved. They went to batik exhibitions and visited the ninth-century Hindu temples at Prambanan, northeast of Yogyakarta. For Ann’s birthday, she asked Suarjana to go with her to Candi Sukuh, a fifteenth-century temple on the steep, pine-blanketed slopes of Gunung Lawu, three thousand feet above sea level on the border of Central and East Java. The temple, which Ann had known of for years but had never visited, was known for, among other things, its humorous, wayang-style carvings, stone penises, and other indications that it may have been the site of a fertility cult. The temple reliefs also included a scene of a smithy with the same double-piston bellows still used in Kajar. To drive to the temple, Ann arranged to rent a car. When it arrived, she and Suarjana were amused to discover that it was a white Mercedes—the car of choice for government officials and newlyweds.

  Suarjana was twenty-eight the year he met Ann—one year older than Barry. Ann was turning forty-six. For an Indonesian man, he was tall, nearly six feet, with a taut, high-cheekboned face that reminded Ann of Mike Tyson, the heavyweight boxing champion. He was the fifth of seven children of a Balinese poet, journalist, and politician, Made Sanggra, who had been a nationalist fighter against the Dutch. (The name is pronounced mah-day.) Suarjana had grown up in Sukowati, a crafts center in Bali, where his mother had a business buying and selling Balinese clothing. The family was Hindu. As a child, Suarjana had learned Balinese dancing, music, and woodcarving. He had studied Indonesian language and literature at university, married in his early twenties, and become a father three years before he met Ann. His relationship with Ann, he told me, was “a romantic-intellectual relationship,” the exact nature of which, he said, would remain between them. The connection was deep, he said, and rooted in shared interests. There was no limit to what they could talk about, no difference that could not be bridged. She volunteered little about her past and, on a visit to Honolulu,
even stopped her father from showing Suarjana photographs of her when she was young. She never directly told Suarjana her age. When the question arose by chance in a conversation, she refused to answer—then handed him her passport. Intellectually, the relationship changed him. Perhaps Ann was changed less by him than he was by her, he said. But he was sure he’d left a mark.

  They talked about Indonesian art and culture, gender roles in Bali, the reasons for declining production in Kajar. Were government programs flawed in concept or in implementation? Was there a relationship between the salaries of government ministers and corruption? Ann was the scholar in their conversations; Suarjana was the cynic. She spoke from the head; he spoke from the gut. “Oh, Made, please,” she would complain, in exasperation. She was also the optimist, her mind always bending toward practical solutions. She would assert nothing, it seemed to him, without evidence to support it. She had the spirit of a teacher, a jiwa guru. Whatever Ann knew that Suarjana did not know, she would offer to teach him. She gave him a four-volume set of books on English grammar and usage. “How far did you study?” she would invariably ask. Then she would administer a pop quiz on the spot. She corrected his essays in red ink in his spiral notebook. She insisted each of them speak the other’s language. If he spoke to her in Bahasa Indonesia, she might refuse to answer at all. She recommended him for a workshop for journalists at the East-West Center and paid his tuition at an English language institute at the University of Hawai‘i. From her example, Suarjana said, he learned how to be open-minded and to recognize shades of gray. He learned to look at batik differently, too: In his mind, its importance was no longer strictly cultural and economic. Woven unmistakably into textiles were the lives of the people who made them.

  “You’re an eccentric,” Ann told him. He was not sure what the word meant. But it was a compliment, he was sure of that.

  If Ann had a weakness, he thought, it was that she too easily trusted strangers. Her generosity and her compassion got the better of financial good sense. On one occasion, a man came to her, professing to represent a nongovernmental organization and asking for money, Suarjana told me. She gave him two million rupiahs, or roughly twelve hundred dollars, of her own money—and never heard from him again. She was not especially concerned about money. Once, Suarjana suggested that the price of a batik she was considering buying at an exhibition was too high. “It’s only paper,” she said blithely, before allowing him to talk her out of the purchase on the grounds that most of her money would go to the dealer, not the craftsman. She was not ambitious or acquisitive, at least in the usual sense. She would have liked to have learned to drive so she could have driven Suarjana around Hawaii without having to rely on her father. She would have liked to have found a way to afford a house in Bali where friends and her children could stay. As the latest deadline for her dissertation closed in, Suarjana threatened to end their friendship if she did not finish. When she finally did finish it in 1992, and he congratulated her for it, she told him, “I did it because I wanted us to remain friends.”

  To those who knew her well, Ann seemed happy with Suarjana. Rens Heringa met her and Suarjana for dinner in Yogyakarta. “It had just started,” Heringa remembered. “She was all rosy and happy, and it was quite funny and nice.” Ann ordered spaghetti, which Suarjana loathed, and joked that it was his favorite food. She called over a street singer to sing “Bésame Mucho.”

  Bésame, bésame mucho,

  As if tonight were the last time.

  In a letter to Suryakusuma, who was skeptical of Suarjana’s motives, Ann downplayed her feelings. “I never said I was a woman in love . . .” she protested. “I like him a lot. He has a place in my heart.” Suryakusuma believed Ann could be too open, too trusting. In a letter that Suryakusuma read aloud to me, but did not give me, she told Ann: You have a big capacity to love, but you often love uncritically. (“I know I benefit,” Suryakusuma wrote.) She told Ann that one of the nicest things about being her friend was that Ann was not judgmental: “You take people as they are, with all their faults.” But, Suryakusuma said, often one’s strong point is also a source of vulnerability. Your capacity to love, she told Ann, leaves you open to being used by others.

  In the early 1990s

  The attention of a much younger man was flattering, Heringa told me, but it cannot have been simple. Indonesians made jokes about older women who went around with younger men. Hotels expected couples to be married. “Ann didn’t give a damn,” Heringa told me. “She was much less concerned about what people thought than I was. She just could not have cared less.” In the spring of 1990, Ann and Suarjana spent several months together at the University of Hawai‘i, where Suarjana took part in the English-language institute in which Ann had helped him enroll. They lived in a dorm at the East-West Center, where, according to Suarjana, they had separate rooms. He cooked Indonesian soto—a souplike dish with bean sprouts, scallions, cellophane noodles, lemon slices, hot chili, egg slices, and so on—for Ann’s parents. They took a short vacation to the Big Island. Ann reported to Suryakusuma that she had enjoyed their domestic arrangement. They had had only one fight—over his tendency to turn off her fan without asking first. They enjoyed collaborating on the chores and the shopping—the novelty of which, Ann confessed, was wearing off for her. “After all, God surely intended me to be a Nyonya Besar,” she wrote to Suryakusuma with mocking self-knowledge, using a term for “mistress of the house.”

  Ann’s work at Bank Rakyat Indonesia had delayed, once again, the completion of her dissertation. In early November 1989, she asked Dewey to run interference for her with the university. “Have just returned from a long, hard trip to North Sumatra with my field team,” she explained. There had been delays getting into the field, she said, “and it has been necessary for me to do more handholding than anticipated. My field workers are sharp, but most are economics or business majors who have never worked with village people before.” In mid-December, she returned to Hawaii for Christmas. Maya, having finished her job as a tour guide, was back in Honolulu, staying with a University of Hawai‘i professor, with a temporary job lined up waiting tables in a Japanese restaurant. “Barry is also coming at Christmas with a new girlfriend in tow,” Ann wrote to Dewey. “He is still enjoying law school and writing pro-choice opinions on the abortion issue for the Law Review.” Ann’s dissertation committee, headed by Dewey, and the chairman of the anthropology department agreed to submit an extension request to the graduate division. “So now I must make some hard decisions about finishing my degree vs taking a new job,” she wrote to Suryakusuma in January. Bank Rakyat Indonesia had agreed in principle to giving her a two-year contract, but she did not know whether the bank would wait several months while she finished. “My family and friends all say to finish my degree, but there are also practical considerations if I take several months off from work,” she wrote. Among them were the usual financial pressures. To Dewey, Ann wrote, “Am sending a money order for the $1,000 I borrowed from you some time back. You can take out interest in batiks or other goodies when I get back.”

  In early 1991, Dewey persuaded Ann to narrow the focus of the dissertation to metalworking, with particular attention to blacksmithing, the forging of iron and steel to make tools. That meant dropping four other peasant industries—basketry and matting, clay products, textiles, and leather—about which Ann had gathered data over the course of a decade and a half. Soon, she was firing off chapters to Honolulu. “Since narrowing the topic to blacksmithing and metal industries, everything is going much better,” she wrote to Dewey. Ann’s office rented a house for her in her old neighborhood, Kebayoran Baru. “I thought if I went to Jogja I would end up eating lesian with Made on Jalan Malioboro every night and never get anything done,” she told Dewey. (Lesian appears to be a misspelling of lesehan, a Javanese word meaning to sit on the ground or on a mat, usually with one’s legs folded back. Makan lesehan is to eat in that position, often at a low table.) In her spare time, she could not resist rounding up even m
ore data, driving with Suarjana to Klaten, where, she exulted to Dewey, “there are iron and brass casting industries which date from the Dutch period (they used to make spare parts for the sugar factories and railway locomotives). Absolutely fascinating!” The following fall, she was back in Hawaii for two months, finishing her dissertation. On November 10, with her draft due at the end of the month, she handwrote a short note in Indonesian to her former research assistant, Djaka Waluja. She had heard from the village headman in Kajar, through Suarjana, that Waluja had been in the village. If he had any new information, Ann asked, could he send it along?

  Ann’s opus weighed in, at the end, at one thousand forty-three pages. She had completed the dissertation, “Peasant Blacksmithing in Indonesia: Surviving and Thriving Against All Odds,” almost twenty years after entering graduate school. She had paid for the typing of at least one draft in barter, Dewey would remember: rattan furniture from the house in Kebayoran Baru.

  Drawing on data from the fields of archaeology, history, metallurgy, and cultural anthropology, Ann described the occupation as it was seen by the smiths themselves. She recounted the early history of metalworking industries in Indonesia, with its “unbroken line” tying the culture of the Early Metal Age to the present-day smiths. She discussed metalworking technologies, types of bellows, the layout of the smithy. She examined the class position and social status of smiths. She devoted one hundred pages to Kajar, and another seventy to smithing villages in the Minangkabau highlands in West Sumatra, Tana Toraja in Sulawesi, Central Java, Bali, and South Sulawesi. She looked at the future of metalworking industries against the backdrop of economic trends, critiqued government programs, and looked at the implications of her findings for future development. Although economists and bureaucrats had been predicting the demise of village industries since the late nineteenth century, she wrote, she had found that employment in those industries had increased. Social scientists who saw that increase as a sign of a crisis in the agricultural sector were assuming, incorrectly, that agriculture was more profitable than other occupations. In fact, metalworking was more profitable than agriculture in a number of villages she had studied. For that reason, villagers considered metalworking their primary occupation, agriculture only secondary.