A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [41]
“She said then she knew,” Warner said.
By the spring of 1963, Ann had returned to Honolulu from Seattle and had reenrolled as an undergraduate at the University of Hawai‘i. She was twenty years old, a single mother of a biracial child, living with her parents. Stanley and Madelyn had bounced through four addresses in their first four years in Honolulu, settling, after Ann’s return, in a low-slung bungalow-style house on University Avenue a short walk from campus. Stanley, listed in the Honolulu city directory until 1968 as manager of a business called Pratt Furniture, had acquired an interest in a chain of furniture stores, according to his brother, Ralph. Madelyn, who Arlene Payne said had gone to night school in Washington in order to get ahead in banking, had begun her uphill climb from loan interviewer to vice president at the Bank of Hawaii. Within a decade, she would be one of the bank’s first female vice presidents and the formidable “grande dame of escrow,” as a younger colleague would remember her when her grandson made her famous decades later. Maxine Box, Ann’s friend from Mercer Island whose parents would visit the Dunhams in Honolulu several years later, said, “I pat her mom and dad on the back. The turmoil in that family must have been incredible.”
Whatever turmoil there had been, Madelyn and Stanley made their peace with Ann’s choices, and they embraced new parental and grandparental roles. “All I know is from at least the day Barack was born, there was total acceptance,” Charles Payne said. “He was their baby, and they loved him from day one.” Stanley, having seen little of his own father after the age of eight, cannot have forgotten how it felt to be fatherless. He must have also remembered the haven he and his brother had found in their grandparents’ multigenerational home. Madelyn, having been pregnant herself at nineteen, may have found it easier than some mothers would have to see her daughter as a new mother at roughly the same age. Madelyn, who was only thirty-eight when her grandson was born, “wasn’t particularly grandmotherly, mind you,” Maya Soetoro-Ng told me. So she adopted the name Tutu, an affectionate term used in Hawaii for grandmother—more palatable than, say, Granny. Over time, Tutu evolved into Toot. Just as her mother had taken in Madelyn and her infant daughter while Stanley was in the Army, Madelyn and Stanley now took in Ann and her son. And just as Leona Payne had made it possible for Madelyn to work at Boeing, Madelyn and Stanley made it possible for Ann to return to school. Madelyn had no intention of letting Ann’s changed circumstances derail her education.
Stanley and Barack
“You have to understand that Ann’s mother very much regretted her choices,” Arlene Payne told me. “She would never have let Ann go that way. She had ambitions. She wanted to get on in the world. She realized what a mistake she had made in not going to college. She expressed that to me a number of times, so I think she would never have allowed Ann to not go to college.”
They were opposites in many ways, Madelyn and Ann. In temperament, Ann took after her father, Maya said. They were “people of appetites”—not content with small portions or small vistas, not willing “to walk in the same circle.” They were gregarious and loquacious. They loved food, words, stories, books, objects, conversation. Madelyn, by contrast, was practical and down to earth. “My mother’s favorite color is beige,” Ann would joke to colleagues years later. Madelyn was sensible and unsentimental—not a “softie,” the term Maya applied to Ann. Maya described her grandmother’s dictum as: Buckle down, don’t complain, don’t air your dirty laundry in public, don’t be so restless. “Work hard, care for your family, raise your kids right, and provide for them,” Maya added. “Make sure they have better lives than you. And that’s about it.” Madelyn pushed boundaries in her professional life, but she did it by following the rules. “It wasn