A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [35]
When the semester started in late September 1960, it seems reasonable to imagine that Ann was still in a certain amount of emotional turmoil. At an age at which her friends were heading out into the world, she had been steered by her parents, over her objections, to an island several thousand miles out in the Pacific. She was enrolled in a commuter school where students had few options but to live at home. Torn from the first group of close friends she had ever made, she was alone again and an outsider. “Gramps’s relationship with my mother was already strained by the time they reached Hawaii,” Obama writes, attributing the strain to “his instability and often-violent temper” and her shame at his “ham-fisted manners.” Charles Payne remembered that Madelyn stayed behind for a time on Mercer Island, to close things out, as he put it. “What was the relationship of Ann and Stanley in that period, without Madelyn to mediate, I don’t know,” he said.
Shortly after the start of the semester, Ann encountered the first African student to enroll at the University of Hawai‘i, Barack Hussein Obama. “We often say that Mom met her husbands at the East-West Center,” Maya once said, while conceding that it was not strictly true. Obama was not on an East-West Center grant, and the center had not yet been built. But the family myth contained a kind of truth: Wherever Ann and Obama met, it was in a moment suffused with the spirit in which the center was born. One friend said he remembered Ann saying she had met Obama in the university library. According to the younger Obama, they met in a Russian language class; when they made a plan to meet later in front of the university library, the elder Obama arrived an hour late and found Ann asleep on a bench. Then the man from Kenya awakened the girl from Kansas, literally and figuratively. Renske Heringa, a Dutch anthropologist and friend of Ann’s in the early 1980s, said Ann told her that the meeting on the bench was her first encounter with Obama. “She remembered it as a very romantic and beautiful thing,” Heringa said. “She was completely not out to ‘do the right thing’ or behave the way people expected.” To Heringa, the story illustrated a quintessential quality of Ann’s—a willingness to “just be herself in the world. This whole story about her meeting Barack Senior shows enormous trust—to just leave yourself open to the world when you’re sleeping.”
Obama, charismatic and sharp, had arrived at the University of Hawai‘i one month after the declaration of statehood. He had been flown to the United States with eighty other young Kenyans by Tom Mboya, a Kenyan nationalist who had raised money from Americans to educate a new generation of leaders in anticipation of Kenyan independence. He had attended British schools in Kenya, he told a reporter from the student newspaper shortly after he arrived in Hawaii. Then he had taken British correspondence courses while working for two years as a clerk in Nairobi. He had received “invitations to campus” from the University of Hawai‘i, San Francisco State College in California, and Morgan State College in Baltimore, the article in the student newspaper said. But he had read about Hawaii in The Saturday Evening Post and was attracted by the climate, the allure of the islands, and the state’s reputation for racial tolerance. He enrolled as an undergraduate in the College of Business Administration and moved into Charles H. Atherton House, a YMCA branch near the campus used to house students. To his surprise, he discovered that Honolulu was not “the skyscraper metropolis of the Pacific” and Hawaiians were not “all dressed in native clothing” and engaged in native dancing. The cost of living was three times as high as he had expected. In an interview in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, he said his money would