A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [40]
It is not known what options other than marriage Ann might have considered once she learned she was pregnant. Abortion was illegal but not impossible, especially for people with connections in the medical community. Had they wanted it, the Dunhams might conceivably have had access to that world. Thomas Farner, whose parents were bridge partners of the Dunhams on Mercer Island, said his parents sent his sister, Jackie, a high school classmate of Stanley Ann’s who died in 2007, to Honolulu to stay with the Dunhams not long after she and Stanley Ann graduated from high school. The reason for the trip, Farner said, was to enable his sister to have an abortion. Their father, a physician, must have arranged it, Farner said. The Farners’ older sister, Judy Ware, who was not living at home at that time, told me she believed her brother’s account was accurate. Ann’s graduate-school friend, Kadi Warner, recalling conversations she had with Ann many years later, said Ann married Obama because she was pregnant. “She was a nice, middle-class girl,” Warner said. “And she loved him.” The decision appears not to have been forced on her by her parents. In Dreams from My Father, Obama writes that Ann told him, in his early twenties, that his grandparents “‘weren’t happy with the idea. But they said okay—they probably couldn’t have stopped us anyway, and they eventually came around to the idea that it was the right thing to do.’” When I asked Arlene about the decision, she said, “I think you have to understand that Ann was an independent soul, and she would make her own decisions about this kind of thing. What Madelyn wanted, I don’t really know. I think that it was Ann’s decision, and I think Madelyn thought she would have to let her do what she wanted.”
Madelyn, after all, had done what she wanted at Ann’s age.
It was Obama’s father in Kenya who vociferously opposed the marriage, according to the younger Obama’s telling. He wrote to Stanley Dunham, saying “he didn’t want the Obama blood sullied by a white woman,” as Obama quotes Ann as having told him. “And then there was a problem with your father’s first wife. . . . He had told me they were separated, but it was a village wedding, so there was no legal document that could show a divorce.” Nevertheless, they intended to return to Kenya when the elder Obama finished his studies, the younger Obama writes. “But your grandfather Hussein was still writing to your father, threatening to have his student visa revoked,” he quotes his mother as saying. “By this time Toot had become hysterical—she had read about the Mau-Mau rebellion in Kenya a few years earlier, which the Western press really played up—and she was sure that I would have my head chopped off and you would be taken away.”
Things changed abruptly. Obama, a member of the Luo ethnic group, was from a culture that traditionally allowed for polygamous marriages. He had not only a pregnant wife but a child back home. “The way the story was put to me, she found out he had this family in Africa, so she divorced him because of bigamy,” Arlene Payne said. “What all else was involved, I have no idea.” According to Warner, Ann “realized very early on that she was in over her head with this guy.” Warner said, “His attitude changed when she got married. She became his wife, and he became very critical.” One evening, Warner remembered Ann telling her, Ann had cooked dinner for Obama. She put the food on a plate and put the plate in front of him at the table.