A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [100]
“Excuse me,” a younger Indonesian friend recalled Ann saying. “You guys make me feel uncomfortable. I’m sitting here and you’re doing nothing to me and yet I feel badly. How do you think she felt?”
What drove her?
In the eyes of her children, there was something soft and a bit naive about their mother. In Dreams from My Father, she comes off as a romantic, a dreamer, an innocent abroad. Amid the secrets, the unacknowledged violence, the corruption of Jakarta, Ann is “a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism.” Twenty years after the end of her first marriage, her chin trembles when she speaks to her college-age son about his father. Her wistful expression at a screening of Black Orpheus seems, to her son, a window into “the unreflective heart of her youth.” In later life, she travels the world, working in villages in Asia and Africa, “helping women buy a sewing machine or a milk cow or an education that might give them a foothold in the world’s economy,” as Obama describes her work. She stares at the moon and forages through markets of Delhi or Marrakech “for some trifle, a scarf or stone carving that would make her laugh or please the eye.” At times, she seems almost childlike.
Maya, too, described her mother to me as what she called “a softie”—a person of acute sensitivity and empathy who would be overwhelmed with feeling at the sight or even the prospect of other people’s suffering. In the company of her family, she might weep at a newscast, Maya said, and she could barely watch movies in which children were hurt. “She could be naive when speaking about this country and what people were ready for . . .” Maya said. “There was that sense—like, ‘Why can’t we all get along?’ And, you know, there was a touch of the flower child in her.” Perhaps Ann was simply an optimist; perhaps she refused to be cynical. But, Maya said, “it seemed perhaps a little naive at times—this failure to comprehend that not everyone would necessarily have good motives or benevolent intentions.”
When I asked President Obama if he saw his mother as naively idealistic, as his book seemed to suggest, he paused a while before answering, then said, “Yes, I do and did see her that way, in part—but not in a pejorative sense. I mean, my mother was very sophisticated and smart. In her field of study and her work, she was deadly serious about what she was doing, willing to take on a lot of sacred cows, and really committed. So as a professional, she knew her stuff. There was a sweetness about her and a willingness to give people the benefit of the doubt, and sort of a generosity of spirit that at times was naive. . . . Now, I like that about her. That’s not a criticism; there’s a wonderful quality about that. But there’s no doubt that there were times when she was taken advantage of in certain situations. And she didn’t mind being taken advantage of. Part of the idealism was, ‘You know what? If somebody makes me pay five times what the going rate is at the market for this little knickknack that I think is neat, that’s fine.’ There’s an idealism and naiveté embedded in that. But I don’t see that as a criticism. I see that as part of what made her special—and also part of what made her resilient. Because I think she could bounce back from disappointments in a lot of ways.”
Friends and colleagues described her differently. Many remembered Ann as tough, sharp, and worldly. Most said they had never seen her cry. She was more open than many people, both intellectually and emotionally. She was unusually curious: She wanted to understand the reasons for things. At one point, for example, she became interested in the relationship between Indonesians and the relatives some of them exploited as servants, Pete Vayda remembered. “It was the kind of thing she was very interested in—some kind of injustice based on something structural or cultural,” he said. “It was not a matter of saying these were evil people, but something systematic about exploiting poor relatives