A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [3]
During the presidential campaign, people who had known Dunham well were perplexed by what they felt were the caricatures of her that emerged. In a supermarket checkout line, one friend of Dunham’s, Kadi Warner, wept at what seemed to her the injustice of a tabloid newspaper headline: “Obama Abandoned by His Own Mother!” Her friends were certain they could see her in Obama’s intellect, his temperament, and his humor—not to mention his long chin, the toothiness of his smile, the angle of his ears. Yet he, who had already written a book centered on the ghost of his absent father, seemed to say more about his grandparents than he did about his mother. Some thought they could guess at some of the reasons. “He’s running for election in America, not Indonesia,” a former colleague of Dunham’s, Bruce Harker, told me two weeks before the election. “Americans spend what percent of our gross national product on foreign assistance? Do you really think he can get elected by saying, ‘My mother was more Indonesian than American’? He plays the hand he has to play: ‘I was raised by a single mother on food stamps; I was raised by my grandmother—like a lot of black folks.’
“To talk about his mother as a do-gooder foreign-assistance peacenik anthropologist in Indonesia?” he added, stopping to make sure that I understood he was being sarcastic. “Where’s Indonesia? Is that near India? No way.”
This is not a book about President Obama, it is a book about his mother. But she shaped him, to a degree he seems increasingly to acknowledge. In the preface to the 2004 edition of Dreams from My Father, issued nine years after the first edition and nine years after Dunham’s death, Obama folded in a revealing admission: Had he known his mother would not survive her illness, he might have written a different book—“less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life.” Two years later, in The Audacity of Hope, he returned to the subject. Only in retrospect, he wrote, did he understand how deeply her spirit “invisibly guided the path I would ultimately take.” If his ambitions were fueled by his feelings about his father, including resentment and a desire to earn his father’s love, those same ambitions were channeled by his mother’s faith in the goodness of people and in the value of every life. He took up the study of political philosophy in search of confirmation of her values, and became a community organizer to try to put those values to work. He dedicated that book, his second, “to the women who raised me”—his maternal grandmother, Tutu, “who’s been a rock of stability throughout my life,” and his mother, “whose loving spirit sustains me still.”
That would have pleased her. Dunham, for whom a letter in Jakarta from her son in the United States could raise her spirits for a full day, surely wondered about her place in his life. On rare occasions, she indicated as much—painfully, wistfully—to close friends. But she would not have been inclined to overstate her case. As she told him, with a dry humor that seems downright Kansan, “If nothing else, I gave you an interesting life.”
One
Dreams from the Prairie
In the late winter of 2009, Charles Payne reluctantly agreed to allow me to visit him in Chicago. He was eighty-four years old, the eldest of the three siblings of Madelyn Payne Dunham, the indomitable grandmother who famously helped raise Barack Obama and went on to live long enough to follow his two-year presidential campaign from her Honolulu apartment