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

by Janny Scott

  I asked James Fox, a respected anthropologist who had worked in Indonesia over a twenty-year period, what he made of Ann’s dissertation. Fox, who had degrees from Harvard and Oxford and had taught at Duke, Cornell, and Harvard, was a professor at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University when we spoke. He said he held the view that anthropology, as a discipline, was too fashion-driven: Anthropological theory had a half-life of five years, and graduate students tended to gravitate to the latest theory. Ann, he said, did something unfashionable. She produced an ethnography of the sort Fox believed would be a reference point for many years. “Ann’s book will be a monument into the next century,” he said. “You can get into it, and you can get a glimpse of life in a certain period. You can’t do that with a lot of anthropological theory. It’s momentary. It might be stimulating, but it doesn’t last long.”

  When a redacted version of the dissertation was published by Duke University Press in 2009, Michael Dove, the Yale anthropologist and Ann’s longtime friend, wrote in a review that her study of Kajar “is one of the richest ethnographic studies to come out of Java in the past generation. This sort of long-term, in-depth, ground-level study, once the norm in anthropology, is increasingly rare.” Ann had concluded that development in the villages she studied was held back not by a lack of entrepreneurial spirit but by a lack of capital—the product of politics, not culture. “Indonesia exemplifies the truth that often the disadvantaged do need not assistance but fair play, not resources but the political control over resources,” Dove wrote.

  Ann signed the dissertation S. Ann Dunham. On the dedication page, she wrote:

  dedicated to Madelyn and Alice,

  who each gave me support in her own way,

  and to Barack and Maya,

  who seldom complained when their mother was in the field

  On February 8, 1992, less than two weeks before Ann was to defend her dissertation, Stanley Dunham died. He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer more than a year earlier. His condition had deteriorated, his brother said, to a point where he was unable to walk. He was buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, or Punchbowl National Cemetery, a rolling green landscape of finely tended lawns flecked with gravestones overlooking the Pacific. His death hit Ann hard. The tensions between them, which had marked earlier years, had subsided. She had talked about him, at least to some, as the family’s emotional glue. “When she talked about her mother, it was with admiration,” Don Johnston, her colleague, said. “But clearly her stronger emotional bond was with her father.”

  Two years earlier, Obama, at age twenty-eight, was elected president of the Harvard Law Review—“its first black president in more than 100 years of publication,” as the Associated Press reported on February 5, 1990, the day after the election. That initial article, in which Obama was said not to have ruled out a future in politics, made no mention of his parents. An article in The New York Times the following day mentioned them briefly—a former Kenyan government official and “an American anthropologist now doing field work in Indonesia.” A longer article a week later in The Boston Globe went into greater detail. “What seems to motivate Barack Obama is a strong identification with what he calls ‘the typical black experience,’ paired with a mission to help the black community and promote social justice,” the Globe reported. It described “his unusual path, from childhood in Indonesia, where he grew up, he says, ‘as a street kid,’ to adolescence in Hawaii, where he was raised by his grandparents.” The article dwelt at some length on the influence of Obama’s father, who, it said, was born in Kenya, “studied at Harvard and Oxford and became a senior economist for the Kenyan government.” In high school, the article said, Obama began a regular correspondence with his father, “whose heritage was to be a major influence on his life, ideals and priorities.” One of Obama’s most valued possessions, the article said, was the passbook that his grandfather, a cook for the British before Kenyan independence, was required to carry. “He said that even though his heritage is one-half white, and although he has had a mixture of influences in his life, ‘my identification with the—quote—typical black experience in America was very strong and very natural and wasn’t something forced and difficult,’” the article said. Of Ann, it said little more than “His mother, who is white, is a Kansas-born anthropologist who now works as a developmental consultant in Indonesia.”

  In an even longer article in the Los Angeles Times a month later, Ann was described simply as “an American anthropologist” and “a white American from Wichita, Kan.”

  The marginal role to which Ann was consigned in those accounts did not go unnoticed. She had raised Obama, with the help of her parents, after his father had left for Harvard when Obama was ten months old. She had been his primary parent for the first ten years of his life. She had returned to Hawaii to live with him when he was in middle school. She had moved back to Hawaii from Indonesia for several months during his senior year. Yet in those accounts, Obama had been “a street kid” in Indonesia, then sent back to Hawaii to be “raised by his grandparents.” Yang Suwan, Ann’s Indonesian anthropologist friend, recalled Ann returning to Jakarta around the time of the Harvard Law Review election. As always, she was extraordinarily proud of her son. But on another level, she seemed crushed.

  “‘His mother is an anthropologist,’” Ann told Yang, quoting an article she had seen. “I was mentioned in one sentence.”

  The new girlfriend Obama had brought with him to Hawaii the previous Christmas was different from Ann. A young lawyer from Chicago whom Obama had met while working as a summer associate at the law firm of Sidley Austin, Michelle Robinson had grown up on the South Side of Chicago and had returned there after graduating from law school. Her father, Fraser Robinson III, a descendant of slaves, had been employed as a maintenance worker and later a foreman in a city water-filtration plant; her mother, Marian, had stayed at home with Michelle and her brother when they were young. The family was hardworking, churchgoing, and close-knit. As an undergraduate at Princeton and as a law student at Harvard, Michelle Robinson had been active in black student organizations. She moved systematically through her life, making sensible, carefully considered decisions, each building to the next. “I would say Michelle is much more like our grandmother,” Maya told me. “And I would say that my mother and my grandmother really were also opposites.” After the Christmas visit, Ann reported back to Suryakusuma. “She is intelligent, very tall (6’1”), not beautiful but quite attractive,” Ann wrote of Robinson. “She did her BA at Princeton and her law degree at Harvard. But she has spent most of her life in Chicago.” Ann, who prided herself on raising her children to have a global perspective, described Robinson as “a little provincial and not as international as Barry.” But Ann liked her. “She is nice, though,” she said. If Robinson and Obama were to marry after he graduated from law school, Ann told Suryakusuma, she would not be unhappy.

  Graduation rolled around.

  “I would have liked to go for the graduation, but both Barry and his girlfriend recommended that the family skip it,” Ann wrote to Dewey from Jakarta. “Apparently hotels are a problem and the law school graduates with everyone else so that you can hardly find your kid.”

  When Ann told Made Suarjana that Obama was graduating from Harvard Law School, he said, “So he’s going to be a billionaire.” Ann corrected him: No, she said, he wants to return to Chicago and do pro bono work. Because Suarjana knew that Obama was interested in politics, and because he felt he knew something about American public life, he said, knowingly, “Okay, so he wants to be president.”

  To his surprise, Ann began to weep.

  It was the only time, he told me, that he saw her cry. He was uncertain what it was about the idea of her son one day running for president that brought her to tears. He thought maybe it was fear: What would it mean to be a man with an African father running for president in a country riddled with the racism Ann must have encountered wh
en she had married the elder Obama? Maybe it was protectiveness: Every facet of a candidate’s life, professional and personal, would be unearthed and subjected to scrutiny. Maybe it was the anticipation of loss—a mother’s loss compounded by whatever regret she might have had about the years they had spent apart and the distance that almost inevitably was widening between them.

  “No, not this time,” she answered, according to Suarjana. “He’s going to be a senator first.”

  Had they already talked about it? Suarjana wondered later. If Obama was to be “a senator first,” perhaps Obama and Ann had discussed what would follow. Obama must have thought about running for president, Suarjana said, or Ann must have thought about his running. What role had she played in cultivating that ambition? Suarjana had been struck by the respect with which Ann treated Obama. It reminded him of the way a mother treated the eldest son in a Javanese family, preparing the boy from an early age to one day inherit the role of father and backbone of the family. Ann’s relationship with Obama seemed different from the relationships between mothers and sons that Suarjana had seen in American movies. Conversations between her and Obama, occasionally recounted to Suarjana, had a certain gravity. When Ann recounted stories about her daughter, she sounded less formal and more relaxed. That made sense, Suarjana thought, because Ann and Maya had lived closely together for many years. Nevertheless, he could not help but notice the depth of Ann’s admiration for her son.

  His life decisions, it seems, carried more than the usual freight.

  “She felt a little bit wistful or sad that Barack had essentially moved to Chicago and chosen to take on a really strongly identified black identity,” recalled Don Johnston, Ann’s colleague at Bank Rakyat Indonesia. That identity, she felt, “had not really been part of who he was when he was growing up.” Ann felt he was making what Johnston called “a professional choice” to strongly identify himself as black. “It would be too strong to say that she felt rejection,” he said. But she felt, in that way, “that he was distancing himself from her.”

  At the same time, Ann’s example could be discerned in some of Obama’s choices. Barry had left Hawaii far behind him when he had planted himself first in New York City and then in Chicago—just as Ann had done when she had made Indonesia the center of gravity in her life. His community organizing work paralleled some of her development consulting work abroad. Then, after all of Ann’s efforts to secure for him the best education and impress on him the importance of living up to his potential, he had flourished at Harvard.

  “So that experiment I was talking about earlier?” President Obama said when we talked, referring to his account of his confrontation with his mother during his senior year in high school. “Turns out she was actually onto something.”

  Ten

  Manhattan Chill

  Ann, at fifty, straddled hemispheres. She was an American citizen who had lived in Indonesia for more than half of her adult life. She had a doctorate from the University of Hawai‘i based on work done over two decades in Java. She had a career in Asia but a family in the United States. Her mother, Madelyn, turning seventy, was a widow living alone in Honolulu. Barack, at thirty-one, was a lawyer in Illinois, writing his first book and engaged to a woman rooted in Chicago. Maya, twenty-two, was an undergraduate majoring in English at the University of Hawai‘i. Ann longed to live closer to her children and had begun dreaming of grandchildren. But she could live more comfortably in Indonesia, on a development consultant’s salary and benefits, than she could ever afford to live in Hawaii, and her work had a degree of impact in Indonesia that she could not begin to match in the United States. As long as she had a job, she could keep renewing her visa and continue to live in Indonesia. She even toyed with the idea of making it a more permanent base. She thought about one day having a house in Bali, if she could come up with the money; it would be a place where she and her children and their friends could alight. But as a foreigner, she could not own property, she could only lease it. As an expatriate, one heard unsettling stories of sudden lease cancellations, mysterious property claims, precipitous departures. If she could park everything that was important to her in another country, the risks might be fewer. But Ann did not have the luxury of maintaining homes in two places. She never wanted to fall out of love with Indonesia because of some catastrophe she could ill afford, she told Garrett Solyom. An American consular official in Bali had once told the Solyoms ominously, “If you’re at an age where you don’t have the money or connections to be able to get out of here at a moment’s notice when you need to, you shouldn’t be here.”

  In mid-1992, Ann made the decision to move back to the United States. Barack was to marry Michelle Robinson at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago in early October—an event to which Ann looked forward with great pleasure. On a visit to Chicago in advance of the wedding, she got in touch with Mary Houghton, the president of ShoreBank, a bank holding company that Houghton and others had founded in the early 1970s in an effort to show that banks could play a constructive role in low-income black neighborhoods. Houghton, who had also advised microfinance organizations, had met Ann at a party in Jakarta in the late 1980s and remembered her warmly as “forthright, sharp-tongued, opinionated, happy.” When Ann contacted her, they agreed to meet for what Houghton remembered years later as an agenda-free brunch in downtown Chicago. Ann’s contract in Jakarta was to wind up the following January. She was moving back to the United States and would need a job. Houghton offered to put her in touch with a nonprofit based in New York City whose interests seemed aligned with Ann’s. Conceived during the first United Nations World Conference on Women in 1975, the organization, called Women’s World Banking, had set out to promote full economic participation for low-income women by helping them develop viable businesses. Toward that end, it offered support, training, and advice to several dozen microfinance organizations in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere, which in turn offered credit and other financial services to women producers and entrepreneurs. The original board had included Ela Bhatt, the founder of the Self Employed Women’s Association, whom Ann had first encountered during her eye-opening trip to India in her first weeks at Ford. Women’s World Banking was governed by women and run by women and existed first and foremost for the benefit of women.

  In mid-September, Ann received a letter from Women’s World Banking, alerting her to a job opening. Embarking on a monthlong trip to Hawaii and the mainland, Ann sent off her résumé and a letter asking to be considered. In New York, she met with the president of Women’s World Banking, Nancy Barry, in a French restaurant near the organization’s offices in Midtown Manhattan. Barry, a Harvard Business School graduate in her early forties, had worked at the World Bank for fifteen years before becoming president of Women’s World Banking. Smart, charismatic, and driven, she was a product, she liked to say, of both the decentralized culture of Women’s World Banking and the command-and-control ethos of “the World Bank of Men.” At Women’s World Banking, she wanted to influence the policies of banks around the world to better serve the poor. Ann had more experience with poor women than anyone in the Women’s World Banking office, Barry could see. She had also influenced the design of the services offered by Bank Rakyat Indonesia, which ran the largest self-sustaining microfinance program in the world. At their first meeting, Barry found Ann’s size jarring, she told me. The staff of “Wild Women’s Banking,” as it had occasionally been called, was so young and attractive that it had been suggested Barry had a “looks problem.” But she was impressed by Ann’s intelligence, experience, and independence of mind. She could see that Ann had a sense of humor, the ability to laugh at herself, and the charm to win people over. So Barry offered her a job that had not previously existed: coordinator for policy and research. In many countries, government and bank policies favored big over small businesses, the formal over the informal sector. They favored male clients, who owned property, over women, who did not. Governments also placed restrictions on the activ
ities of independent-sector organizations in ways that held back microlending, limiting loan sizes, rates of interest, and the outside funding those organizations could receive. Ann’s job would be to help Women’s World Banking and its affiliates persuade policy-makers to change all that. “This was not like we had a position for a policy coordinator,” Barry told me. “But in my mind we had a whole agenda waiting to happen if we had the right person.”

  Moving to New York City for the first time was not easy at age fifty. Ann arrived in Manhattan in late January 1993 during a cold snap so bitter that her lungs ached when she breathed. Three weeks into her stay, a truck bomb detonated in the underground garage beneath the World Trade Center, injuring a thousand people and killing six. Ann, with a starting salary of $65,000 a year, had expected to be able to find a two-bedroom apartment for about $1,500 a month within walking distance of the offices on West Fortieth Street. But because two-bedroom apartments were renting for more than $2,000, she was forced to settle for an antiseptic one-bedroom in a forty-story tower near the United Nations for $1,550. She parked most of her books and belongings in storage in Hawaii, for which she paid another $250 a month. (A “wardrobe inventory” she put together around that time listed a remarkable forty-eight skirts, half of them marked “sm” and apparently not in use.) Women’s World Banking paid for two weeks in a hotel near the office while Ann looked for an apartment, but she got stuck there for ten extra days, at her expense, waiting for the credit clearance needed to sign a lease. She spent $8,000 on housewares and furniture from Pier 1 Imports, and another $1,500 on winter clothes. She had never worn panty hose in her life, she told friends. The small amount of savings she had accumulated dwindled, and her credit card debt rose. Afraid of the subway system, she spent money on cabs. “Aduh! Aduh! Aduh!” she would say, falling back on an Indonesian expression of pain in the face of the rushing crowds. Ann missed Indonesia. The best Indonesian restaurant in New York seemed no better than the lowliest warung. From her room on the twenty-sixth floor of the hotel, she gazed at the sky, remembering the full moon in Bali and wondering why she had traveled so far from Made Suarjana. She told herself she would stay in New York for two or three years, then move to Bali. Suarjana could start a civil-society organization or a publishing house, and she would look for work as a consultant.