A Singular Woman (17 page)

At times, Ann's lack of concern for appearances added to the trouble between her and Lolo. She would finish teaching at nine in the evening and sometimes not return home until midnight, Saman said. (“After four hours of teaching, Ann still had an appetite for more social interaction,” Leonard Kibble, a fellow teacher, told me.) As far as Saman could tell, she seemed barely to sleep. She would stay up, typing and correcting Barry's homework, then be up before dawn. On one occasion, Saman said, “She got home late with a student, but the student didn't see her home properly. So he dropped her near the house, and Soetoro got very mad because of that.” An argument ensued, which Saman overheard. “He said, ‘I've warned you many times. Why are you still doing this?'” Saman recalled. Lolo summoned a witness from the neighborhood. Whether Lolo's worry was infidelity or simply what others might think is unclear from Saman's story. After the argument, he said, Ann appeared in the house with a towel pressed to her face and blood running from her nose. It is difficult to know what to make of the nearly forty-year-old recollection. The confrontation occurred within earshot, Saman said, but out of his sight. No one else I interviewed suggested there was ever violence between Ann and Lolo, a man many people described as patient and sweet-tempered. But Saman's story suggests, if nothing else, the rising tension in the marriage.

With her children, Ann made a point of being more physically affectionate than her mother had been with her, she told one friend. She was cuddly and would say “I love you,” according to Maya, a hundred times a day. “She loved to take children—any child—and sit them in her lap and tickle them or play games with them and examine their hands, tracing out the miracle of bone and tendon and skin and delighting at the truths to be found there,” her son would write many years later. She was playful—making pottery, weaving decorations, doing art projects that stretched across the room. “I think that we benefited a great deal from her focus when we were with her, when she was beside us,” Maya told me. “So that made the absences hurt a little less.” She was not firm about bedtimes, said Kadi Warner, who, with her then husband, John Raintree, lived with Ann for several months when Maya was nine, but she insisted that her children get up in the morning. She preferred humor to harping. Where her children were involved, she was easily moved to tears, even occasionally when speaking about them to friends. She took her role seriously, while acknowledging, sometimes jokingly, the limits of her influence. As she told an Indonesian friend, Julia Suryakusuma, “One of the areas where I failed as a mother was that I couldn't get my children to floss their teeth.” At the same time, Ann was exacting about the things she believed mattered most. Those included such things as honesty, hard work, and fulfilling one's duty to others. Richard Hook, who worked with Ann in Jakarta in the late 1980s and early 1990s, said she told him that she had worked to instill ideas about public service in her son. Because of his intelligence and education, she wanted Barry to have a sense of obligation to give something back. She wanted him to start off, Hook said, with the attitudes and values she had taken years to learn.

“If you want to grow into a human being,” Obama remembers her saying, “you're going to need some values.”

If some of Ann's values sound midwestern, as Obama suggests, some were also Javanese. In a detailed survey of scholarly studies of Javanese society and culture, an anthropologist at the University of Indonesia, named Koentjaraningrat, included, in a list of ideal human virtues, “keeping good relations with others, helping as much as possible, sharing with neighbors, trying to understand others, and placing oneself in the situation of others.”

When necessary, Ann was, according to two accounts, not unwilling to reinforce her message. Don Johnston, who worked with her in the early 1990s, sometimes traveling with her in Indonesia and living in the same house, suggested to me that President Obama's work ethic reflected Ann's standards. “She talked about disciplining Barry, including spanking him for things where he richly deserved a spanking, according to her,” Johnston recalled. Saman, speaking in Indonesian with Felina Pramono interpreting, said that when Barry failed to finish homework sent from Hawaii by his grandmother, Ann “would call him into his room and would spank him with his father's military belt.” But when I later asked President Obama, through a spokeswoman, whether his mother ever resorted to physical discipline to reinforce a point, he said she never did.

One evening in the house in Matraman, Saman said, he and Barry were preparing to go to sleep. They often slept in the same place—sometimes in the bunk bed in Barry's room, sometimes on the dining room floor or in the garden. On this occasion, Barry, who was eight or nine at the time, had asked Saman to turn out the light. When Saman did not do it, he said, Barry hit him in the chest. When he did not react, Barry hit him harder, and Saman struck him back. Barry began to cry loudly, attracting Ann's attention. According to Saman, Ann did not respond. She seemed to realize that Barry had been in the wrong. Otherwise, Saman would not have struck him.

“We were not permitted to be rude, we were not permitted to be mean, we were not permitted to be arrogant,” Maya told me. “We had to have a certain humility and broad-mindedness. We had to study. If we said something unkind about someone, she would try to talk about their point of view. Or, ‘How would you feel?' Barack has famously mentioned that she said to him, always, ‘Well, how would you feel if X, Y, and Z? How would that make you feel?' Sort of compelling us ever towards empathy and those kinds of things, and not allowing us to be selfish. That was constant, steady, daily.”

It was clear to many that Ann believed Barry, in particular, was unusually gifted. She would boast about his brains, his achievements, how brave and bold he was. Felina Pramono sensed that Ann had plans for his future. Benji Bennington, from the East-West Center, told me, “Sometimes when she talked about Barack, she'd say, ‘Well, my son is so bright, he can do anything he ever wants in the world, even be president of the United States.' I remember her saying that.” Samardal Manan remembered Ann saying something similar—that Barry could be, or perhaps wanted to be, the first black president.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Lolo asked Barry one evening, according to Saman, the houseboy.

“Oh, prime minister,” Barry answered.

What mattered as much as anything to Ann, as a parent, was her children's education—just as it had mattered to generations of her Kansas forebears. But that was not simple. Because they were living in Indonesia, she wanted her children to know the country, have Indonesian friends, and not grow up in an expatriate bubble. At the same time, she wanted them to have the opportunities she had, including the opportunity to attend a great university. For that, they needed to be academically prepared. Indonesian schools in the late 1960s and early 1970s were inadequate. There were not enough of them, the government controlled the curriculum, teachers were poorly trained. They were paid so little that many also worked second jobs, dividing their time, energy, and attention. Westerners sent their children to the Jakarta International School, which offered what many say was an excellent education. But the school was expensive and difficult to get into. At its founding, money had been raised by selling bonds to institutions such as the Ford Foundation. Slots went to the children of diplomats, executives of foreign firms, and employees of international organizations including Ford. Without a job in one of those institutions, few people could get a child in or afford the tuition. Furthermore, there were few if any Indonesian students in the school. There were not many educational options in Jakarta that would have provided what Ann was looking for. When Maya was about five, Ann enrolled her in a multinational bilingual playgroup run by the wife of an American minister in a large house in Kebayoran Baru. Kay Ikranagara enrolled her son, Inno, too. The teachers were Western as well as Indonesian. Maya and Inno were native speakers in both languages, speaking Indonesian with their fathers, English with their mothers, and both with their teachers. But that sort of school in Jakarta was hard to find.

For Barry, Ann tried two Indonesian schools, one Catholic and one Muslim. Though she eventually sent him back to Hawaii, the experience of an Indonesian education cannot have failed to have left a mark. Michael Dove, who got to know Ann when they were both anthropologists working in Java in the 1980s, told me he discovered, as an American with allergies teaching in Java, that to sneeze was to exhibit an untoward lack of self-control. The Javanese, especially the Central Javanese, place an enormous emphasis on self-control, Dove said: “You demonstrate an inner strength by not betraying emotion, not speaking loudly, not moving jerkily.” Self-control is inculcated in part in Indonesian schools, Kay Ikranagara and her husband told me. And it is done through a culture of teasing. “People tease about skin color all the time,” Kay Ikranagara said. Having dark skin is a negative—as would have been plumpness and curly hair. If a child allows the teasing to bother him, he is teased more. If he ignores it, it stops. Kay Ikranagara's husband, Ikranagara, who grew up in Bali, said he was teased mercilessly about being skinny. He learned to compensate by being clever. “Our ambassador said this was where Barack learned to be cool,” Kay Ikranagara told me. “If you get mad and react, you lose. If you learn to laugh and take it without any reaction, you win.”

As Obama tells it, Ann's attitude toward his future gradually shifted.

Ann's efforts to prepare Barry for his return to school in Hawaii are the subject of an oft repeated story told in
Dreams from My Father
and recounted occasionally in President Obama's speeches. The story concerns what Obama describes as a common practice in the Jakarta household (a practice which Saman, the houseboy, said he did not remember). Five days a week, Obama writes, Ann would enter his bedroom in Jakarta at four a.m., force-feed him breakfast, and teach him English lessons for three hours before he left for school. When he resisted, Ann would tell him: “This is no picnic for me either, buster.”

In early 1971, Ann told Barry, then age nine, that he would be returning to Hawaii. He would live with his grandparents in Honolulu and attend Punahou Academy, a respected prep school within walking distance of the Dunhams' apartment. His application had been considered, Obama says, only through the intervention of an alumnus who was Stanley's boss. “It was time for me to attend an American school, she had said,” he writes. “I'd run through all the lessons of my correspondence course. She said that she and Maya would be joining me in Hawaii very soon—a year, tops—and that she'd try to make it there for Christmas.” Madelyn's brother Charles Payne told me he suspected that Madelyn played a part in the decision. “Madelyn always had a great concern about Barack getting a good education,” he said. “I think that was her defense against his racial mixture—that education was the solution to whatever problems that would bring.”

Ann, too, may have doubted the wisdom of her decision to take Barry to Indonesia at the moment she did. Yang Suwan, her Indonesian friend, remembered Ann once saying as much: “She said if she had known before, she wouldn't have come and brought Barack.” And in
The Audacity of Hope
, Obama writes, “In later years my mother would insist that had she known what had transpired in the preceding months, we never would have made the trip.”

Now she was dispatching him, alone, on a trip halfway around the globe. As he later described his send-off in
Dreams from My Father
, an Indonesian copilot who was a friend of Ann's escorted him to the plane “as she and Lolo and my new sister, Maya, stood by at the gate.”

Ann's decision to marry Lolo had required that she uproot Barry, at age six, and transplant him to Jakarta. Now she was uprooting him again, at barely ten, and sending him back. She would follow him to Hawaii only to leave him again, less than three years later. When we spoke, Obama recalled those serial displacements. He was less aware at that time, he said, of the toll they took than he would become many years later.

“I think that was harder on a ten-year-old boy than he'd care to admit at the time,” Obama said, folded into a chair in the Oval Office and speaking about his mother with a mix of affection and critical distance. “When we were separated again during high school, at that point I was old enough to say, ‘This is my choice, my decision.' But being a parent now and looking back at that, I could see—you know what?—that would be hard on a kid.”