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of the 1930s. He seemed to have left the impression, at least with Madelyn, that he had a trunk full of plays and the possibility of a literary future—even if, for the time being, he was doing construction at the Socony refinery in Augusta. “He wrote plays and poetry, and he would come over to our house and read them to us,” Arlene Payne remembered. “It was, I’m sure, all very exotic to her.” Though El Dorado and Augusta were archrivals in football and baseball, it was not uncommon for El Dorado boys to date girls from Augusta and vice versa. It is unclear exactly how or when Stanley and Madelyn met. When I asked Ralph Dunham what he thought drew Madelyn to his brother, he said, “Well, he was a personable guy and wasn’t above telling a—” Stopping in mid-sentence, he changed course: “You know, he was okay.” When I asked him what he had been about to say, he continued, carefully, “Well, Stanley didn’t always tell things exactly like they were. But not many people do. And when you’re courting, you first try to present a good side of yourself and your hopes and ambitions and all the rest.” Asked the same question, Jon Payne said, laughing, “Oh, you know, 1930s Kansas, Dust Bowl, Depression, stuck in Hicksville, USA. I think she was looking at Stanley as a way of getting out of Dodge.”

Madelyn and Stanley Dunham

Madelyn’s parents were not impressed. Stanley came across to them as a glad-hander, a gadabout—the antithesis of the Paynes, Jon said. As Obama described their attitude in his memoir, using the nickname with which he and Maya addressed their grandmother, “The first time Toot brought Gramps over to her house to meet the family, her father took one look at my grandfather’s black, slicked-back hair and his perpetual wise-guy grin and offered his unvarnished assessment. ‘He looks like a wop.’” Their disapproval did not escape Madelyn’s notice. On the evening of the Augusta High School junior-senior banquet in May 1940, Madelyn, at seventeen years old, and Stanley, at twenty-two, slipped out of the banquet and got married in secret. They kept the marriage quiet until Madelyn graduated the following month—to try to prevent her parents from having it annulled, some of her classmates believed. The news reached Stanley’s brother, Ralph, only months later. Charles Payne was away at Boy Scout camp by the time it broke.

“My parents were pretty much crushed that their daughter would go off with someone they didn’t really have much respect for,” he told me. “But they accepted it.” Putting as good a face on it as possible, Leona Payne sent out engraved announcements.

Twenty years later, Madelyn Dunham would surely remember her youthful romantic rebellion, her secret marriage, and her parents’ reaction, when her daughter, at age seventeen, learned that she was pregnant with the child of a charismatic older man whom she would marry a few months later. Perhaps Madelyn would be struck by the similarities between herself and Stanley Ann—headstrong teenagers swept away by seemingly worldly charmers promising new horizons, the possibility of adventure, and the certainty of escape. Perhaps she thought, too, of Stanley’s dead mother, Ruth Armour, who, at an even younger age, had done something similar. To anyone new to the story, Stanley Ann’s infatuation, pregnancy, and precipitous marriage to a black student from Kenya might appear to be an inexplicable break with her family’s presumably straitlaced, white-bread Kansas history. But Madelyn and Stanley would have known there was a precedent in Madelyn’s own decision to override the reservations of her parents and short-circuit any discussion of her future by marrying Stanley and bolting for the coast.

Paradoxically, it may have been on the rim of the Pacific that it first dawned on Madelyn that life with Stanley might prove less dazzling than she had imagined. As soon as school was out, the newlyweds had headed for California, the obvious place for an aspiring writer with a trunk full of unpublished works. But after settling in the San Francisco Bay Area, Madelyn found herself