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By Root 1003 0

Star-Bulletin, he left in late June “for a tour of Mainland universities before entering Harvard in the fall.” The article, four paragraphs long, said he had been awarded a graduate faculty fellowship in economics and planned to return later to Africa to work in economic-development and international-trade planning and policy. In Dreams from My Father, Obama recalls coming upon that article, along with his birth certificate and vaccination forms, while he was in high school. “No mention is made of my mother or me, and I’m left to wonder whether the omission was intentional on my father’s part, in anticipation of his long departure,” he writes. “Perhaps the reporter failed to ask personal questions, intimidated by my father’s imperious manner; or perhaps it was an editorial decision, not part of the simple story that they were looking for. I wonder, too, whether the omission caused a fight between my parents.”

Whatever fight there was may have happened earlier. Ann, it seems, left Hawaii well before Obama. Her friend Maxine Box, from Mercer Island, recalled seeing her in Seattle late in the summer of 1961—happy and proud of her baby, who was with her, but saying nothing about marriage, at least that Box could remember. In the spring quarter of 1962, as Obama was embarking on his final semester in Hawaii, Ann was enrolled at the University of Washington in Seattle, according to Bob Roseth, director of news and information for the university. Her high school friend John Hunt saw her once that spring with her baby, and Bill Byers remembered having dinner with her once in an apartment where she was living. She looked different: She had lost weight and grown her hair long, said Linda Hall Wylie, another high school classmate, who remembered running into her fleetingly on University Way. Her sudden motherhood startled her friends, and not simply because the father of her baby was black. She had had no serious boyfriend in high school that they knew of, and she had never shown any interest in babysitting, a growth industry for teenagers on Mercer Island. Precipitous marriage and maternity seemed to be the fate mostly of girls who had “gotten in trouble.” Few would have expected Stanley to hew to the standard female trajectory—from college and sorority life to a short stint in teaching or nursing, followed by departure from the workforce in order to marry and raise children. No one would have imagined this. Sometime after that spring quarter, Ann apparently gave up trying to make a go of it alone in Seattle. She returned to Honolulu, after which she may have seen only one friend from Mercer Island ever again. Her life had taken a hairpin turn, and there was no turning back. A yawning gulf had opened between her and her old friends. “The rest of us were leading the sorority/going on dates/going to the football games/totally different life,” Wylie said. “When you go away and your life changes so dramatically, no one else can understand it.”

The news of Ann’s pregnancy, sudden marriage, and separation was closely held within the extended Dunham and Payne families—not unlike the news of Madelyn and Stanley’s elopement twenty years earlier. Ralph Dunham, Ann’s uncle, told me that he heard nothing about her pregnancy and marriage until after Barack was born. “They might have been worried about family reaction,” he said. “It would have upset my grandmother and my aunt, I think.” (He remembered once mentioning to his grandmother, who had raised him and Ann’s father, that he had invited an African-American friend, who was a university professor, to his house for dinner. To which, he said, she replied, “You mean to say, you actually sat down and ate a meal with a black person?”) Madelyn’s brother Charles learned of Ann’s marriage before he learned of her pregnancy, which he said he was told of only after she gave birth. When I asked him about his parents’ reaction to the news, he said, “They tended to be closed about things. If they were unhappy, I wouldn’t expect them to voice anything. Just keep quiet. I heard nothing.” Jon Payne, Madelyn