A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [37]
Obama was twenty-four years old and Ann was seventeen when they met in the fall of 1960. Though he apparently omitted to mention it initially, Obama was a married man, with a wife and child in Kenya and a second child on the way. Ann had never had a boyfriend, as far as her closest friends knew. She was “a young virgin” when she and Obama met, according to Kadi Warner, a graduate-school friend to whom Ann told the story some years later. “She was totally enthralled by him,” Warner said. “Every time she described him, she talked about his brilliance.” He was older, more worldly, a well-known figure on campus. He was striking and exotic. Ann, transplanted to a campus where three out of every four students were from Hawaii, was in some ways more of an outsider and more off balance than he. He courted her, and she was attracted to him. Whether she had access to birth control is not known, but it is not likely to have been easy. And as Warner put it, “I doubt he was the sort of man who would have carried a condom in his wallet.”
In Dreams from My Father, written when the younger Obama was in his early thirties, he pieces together a version of his parents’ story from fragments he was told as a child. At the same time, he describes many of the stories he was told about his father as “compact, apocryphal,” and allows for the likelihood that important details were intentionally or unintentionally missing. “Even in the abridged version that my mother and grandparents offered, there were many things I didn’t understand,” he writes. He gives his account of his parents’ fleeting coming together and breaking apart in language and cadences reminiscent of those of folktales or myths. His father “worked with unsurpassed concentration,” and “his friends were legion,” as the younger Obama tells it. In a Russian language course, “he met an awkward, shy American girl, only eighteen, and they fell in love.” Her parents were won over “by his charm and intellect.” He married the girl, “and she bore them a son, to whom he bequeathed his name.” He won a scholarship to do graduate work at Harvard, without money to take his family with him, Obama writes. The couple separated, and “he returned to Africa to fulfill his promise to the continent. The mother and child stayed behind, but the bond of love survived the distances. . . .” Though Obama was writing at a time when his mother and grandmother were alive and well, and available for consultation, he offers little in the way of an alternative version. It appears that parts of the account he was told were wrong.
Whatever happened happened fast. Classes began on September 26, two months before Ann’s eighteenth birthday. By early November, she was pregnant. She dropped out of school when the semester ended and married that winter so discreetly, reportedly on the island of Maui, that her son never unearthed a single trace of the event. “There’s no record of a real wedding, a cake, a ring, a giving away of the bride,” he writes. “No families were in attendance; it’s not even clear that people back in Kansas were fully informed. Just a small civil ceremony, a justice of the peace. The whole thing seems so fragile in retrospect, so haphazard. And perhaps that’s how my grandparents intended it to be, a trial that would pass, just a matter of time, so long as they maintained a stiff upper lip and didn’t do anything drastic.”
If so, they got their wish.
On August 4, 1961, at 7:24 p.m., at Kapi‘olani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu, Ann gave birth to Barack Hussein Obama Jr. Eleven months later, the elder Obama was gone. In June 1962, he received his undergraduate degree from the University of Hawai‘i and left for the East Coast. According to an article in the Honolulu