A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [152]
“What was Grandma Annie like?” Suhaila asks her mother in the story.
“She was like the moon,” her mother replies. “Full, soft, and curious.”
Barack, meanwhile, was elected to the Illinois State Senate in November 1996, one year after his mother’s death. The original edition of Dreams from My Father, which was published in 1995 and sold approximately nine thousand copies in hardcover, came out in paperback the following year and went out of print. Obama ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2000, then won the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate in March 2004. Four months later, he gave the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in Boston—the speech that laid out, for millions of Americans for the first time, his father and mother’s story and made him into a national political sensation almost overnight.
The news traveled swiftly among people who had once known Ann.
“Did you watch the Democratic convention?” a former student of Alice Dewey’s wrote in an e-mail to Nancy Cooper, an anthropologist and former Dewey student herself.
“Yes, I did,” Cooper answered.
“Did you see that guy who gave the keynote speech?”
“Yes.”
“You know who that is?”
“No, I don’t.”
“It’s Barry. Ann’s Barry.”
Ann’s friend from Mercer Island, John Hunt, had happened on the connection years earlier in the frequent-flyer lounge at Los Angeles International Airport on the day the Los Angeles Times published its two-thousand-word profile of the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. In Yogyakarta, Djaka Waluja and Sumarni, Ann’s former field assistants, had no idea what had become of Barry until a photograph of him with Ann, Lolo, and Maya turned up on Indonesian television in a report on Obama during the presidential campaign in 2008. When Linda Wylie, another Mercer Island classmate of Ann’s, had the connection pointed out by a friend after the 2004 convention speech, she went looking for a copy of Obama’s book. The resemblance between Obama and his mother seemed unmistakable.
“The minute I saw the picture, I felt like crying,” Wylie said.
Beyond the physical resemblance, people who had known Ann well were certain they recognized the imprint of her values, her confidence, her intelligence, on her son. There were even traces of her dry humor. Many remembered her pride in him and wished she could have seen his success. Some wondered what she would have made of his choice to go into politics. Nancy Cooper remembered, sometime later, an exchange between herself and Ann during the 1988 presidential election campaign. The Reverend Jesse Jackson, running for the Democratic nomination, had given a speech at the University of Hawai‘i—a speech that Cooper had attended. When she and Ann talked about it, Cooper was struck by Ann’s excitement about Jackson and his multiracial Rainbow Coalition. Ann seemed, Cooper told me, “to have some sort of insider knowledge.” When Cooper asked her about it, Ann told Cooper, for the first time, that her son’s father was African. “Then, for me, it was as if a light went on,” Cooper told me. “Up till that point, everything I knew about her was associated with Java. . . . In that moment, she was just really enthusiastic about Jackson’s campaign. It was almost as if she knew Jesse Jackson.”
Two months after Obama’s 2004 speech in Boston, the Crown Publishing Group reissued Dreams from My Father, and it became an instant bestseller. The editor of the new edition had asked Obama to write a short preface, bringing his story up to date. In it, Obama briskly summarized what had happened in his life and in the world in the years since the book had first appeared in the summer of 1995, while Ann was dying. He ended the preface on the memory of his mother, “the single constant in my life.”
In my daughters I see her every day, her joy, her capacity for wonder. I won’t try to describe how deeply I mourn her passing still. I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her.