A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [39]
“What do you mean, ‘Ann’s son’?” Jon asked.
“Yeah,” he remembered Charles saying. “Didn’t you know Ann had a baby?”
“No.”
“You probably haven’t heard it from our parents, have you? He’s black.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yeah. Somebody she met at the university.”
Only Arlene Payne remembered receiving a call from Madelyn. It may have come after the wedding. When I asked her how Madelyn seemed to be feeling about what had happened, Arlene said drily, “A little distraught.”
Distraught because Ann was seventeen years old? I asked. Or because she knew that motherhood might derail Ann’s education? Or because Ann’s new husband was black? Or because he was African, with plans to return home?
“I think that’s probably quite enough.”
Madelyn and Stanley’s views about race were not extreme. In Dreams from My Father, Obama says they had given little thought to black people until they were living in Texas when Stanley Ann was eleven or twelve. There, fellow furniture salesmen advised Stanley early on that “the coloreds” should be permitted to inspect the merchandise in the store only after hours and that they would have to arrange for their own delivery. At the bank where Madelyn worked, a white secretary reprimanded her hotly for speaking respectfully to a black janitor she had befriended. Stanley Ann, too, had encountered race hatred for the first time, according to Obama. Madelyn found her and an African-American girl cowering in terror on the ground in the yard of the Dunhams’ house, where they had been reading, while a group of white children taunted them. When Stanley reported the incident to the school principal and some of the children’s parents, according to Obama’s account, he was told, “White girls don’t play with coloreds in this town.”
Stanley would maintain later that the family left Texas in part because of their discomfort with that kind of racism, Obama writes, though Madelyn said they left because Stanley was not doing well at work and had a better opportunity in Seattle. Obama writes that he cannot dismiss his grandfather’s account as “a convenient bit of puffery, another act of white revisionism.” After Texas, he says of Stanley, “the condition of the black race, their pain, their wounds, would in his mind become merged with his own: the absent father and the hint of scandal, a mother who had gone away, the cruelty of other children, the realization that he was no fair-haired boy—that he looked like a ‘wop.’” In Stanley’s mind, racism was mixed in with the attitudes responsible for much of the unhappiness of his early life, “part of convention and respectability and status, the smirks and the whispers and gossip that had kept him on the outside looking in.”
Perhaps for those reasons, the reaction of Stanley and Madelyn to the African man Ann brought home was less hostile than stereotypes about the period and the place they came from might suggest. In his book, the younger Obama only imagines their reaction, preferring constructions like “would have” and “might have.” Whatever he knows for a fact, he does not say. “The poor kid’s probably lonely, Gramps would have thought, so far from home,” Obama writes. “Better take a look at him, Toot would have said to herself.” He imagines Stanley being struck by the dinner guest’s resemblance to Nat King Cole, and Madelyn holding her tongue when she glimpses Ann reaching over to squeeze Obama’s hand. The younger Obama suggests, too, the conversation his grandparents might have had later, how they would have marveled at the man’s intelligence and dignified bearing—“and how about that accent!”
Madelyn and Stanley were, it seems, somewhat awed by Obama. Arlene Payne, who would spend time with the three of them over Christmas in Honolulu some years later, said, “I had the sense then, as I