A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [2]
Had she lived, Dunham would have been sixty-six years old on January 20, 2009, when Barack Obama was sworn in as the forty-fourth president of the United States.
Dunham was a private person with depths not easily fathomed. In a conversation in the Oval Office in July 2010, President Obama described her to me as both naively idealistic and sophisticated and smart. She was deadly serious about her work, he said, yet had a sweetness and generosity of spirit that resulted occasionally in her being taken to the cleaners. She had an unusual openness, it seems, that was both intellectual and emotional. “At the foundation of her strength was her ability to be moved,” her daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng, once told me. Yet she was tough and funny. Moved to tears by the suffering of strangers, she could be steely in motivating her children. She wept in movie theaters but could detonate a wisecrack so finely targeted that no one in earshot ever forgot. She devoted years of her life to helping poor people, many of them women, get access to credit, but she mismanaged her own money, borrowed repeatedly from her banker mother, and fell deeply in debt. In big and small ways, she lived bravely. Yet she feared doctors, possibly to her detriment. She was afraid of riding the New York City subway system, and she never learned to drive. At the height of her career, colleagues remember Dunham as an almost regal presence—decked out in batik and silver, descending upon Javanese villages with an entourage of younger Indonesian bankers; formidably knowledgeable about Indonesian textiles, archaeology, the mystical symbolism of the wavy-bladed Javanese kris; bearing a black bag stuffed with field notebooks and a Thermos of black coffee; a connoisseur of delicacies such as tempeh and sayur lodeh, an eggplant stew; regaling her colleagues with humorous stories, joking about one day being reincarnated as an Indonesian blacksmith, and protesting slyly all the while that she was “just a girl from Kansas.”
There is little evidence in the papers she left behind and in the accounts of friends and colleagues that Dunham set out to change the world. She was admirably, movingly, sometimes exasperatingly, human. Her life was not simple, which may help explain why it has been misunderstood or misrepresented or was relegated to the shadows. It involved tensions and choices that will be recognizable to readers, especially women. It was an improvisation, marked by stumbles and leaps. “I am not such a harsh critic after all, having screwed up royally a few times myself,” she wrote cajolingly to a friend at age thirty, already divorced from her first husband, separated from her second, and on her way to becoming a single parent of two. She was resilient. As one friend of hers put it, Dunham kept “dislocating the center.” She lived by strong values, which she passed on to her children. She was idealistic and pragmatic. She was not a visionary or a saint; she believed that people’s lives could be made better, and that it was important to try. Directly or indirectly, she accomplished more toward that end than most of us will. Then suddenly, in midstream, she was gone. “She had no regrets about any of her choices,” Maya told me. “She just wanted more time. More time to make mistakes, more time to do good things . . .”
Anyone writing about Dunham’s life must address the question of what to call her. She was Stanley Ann Dunham at birth and Stanley as a child, but she dropped the Stanley upon graduating from high school. She was Ann Dunham, then Ann Obama, then Ann Soetoro until her second divorce. Then she kept her second husband’s name but