A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [129]
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 when 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.