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of Buchenwald and the first Nazi concentration camp liberated by U.S. troops in Germany in April 1945. The family has been around long enough, and was interested enough in history, to have accumulated a lot of stories. “You’re probably aware that we’re related to the Bushes, to Dick Cheney,” Ralph Dunham told me matter-of-factly. “Also, Mark Twain is a distant relative. If you want to go far enough back, we’re tied in with some royalty back up the line. And another thing: I’m a first cousin times removed of Jefferson Davis. You see, my great-grandfather Clark’s mother was a Davis, and she was a first cousin to Jefferson Davis. . . .” For all the efforts to make Barack Obama appear exotic, even alien, he can claim a heritage that could hardly be more American. There is even something American, in the best sense of the word, in the swift march of those generations over the last century and a half from small farms to medium-size towns to big cities and sprawling metropolitan areas and finally across oceans and vast cultural distances to places like Jakarta, Yogyakarta, and Kalimantan.

As a small boy in Augusta, Kansas, Charles Payne, Stanley Ann’s uncle, knew both his grandfathers. His grandfather on his mother’s side, Thomas Creekmore McCurry, had a farm in Peru, Kansas, which was a town of about one hundred people near the southern edge of Chautauqua County on the Oklahoma line. His paternal grandfather had a farm in Olathe, the seat of Johnson County in northeastern Kansas. They worked the land the way it had traditionally been done—without plumbing, electricity, or tractors. Thomas C. McCurry prided himself on the straightness of the rows he cut with his horse-drawn plow, his daughter Leona McCurry Payne used to tell her children. He planted his potatoes, she used to say, “in the dark of the moon.” Each set of grandparents raised half a dozen children, more or less. Those children grew up, flocked to towns, found jobs, and did not grow their own food. Their children, in turn, went off to college, left Kansas behind, and ended up in pleasant metropolitan areas all across the United States. The four Paynes—Madelyn, Charles, Arlene, and Jon—had no more than one or two children each. Two of those children became anthropologists who did fieldwork in Indonesia. Richard Payne, the son of Charles Payne, and a younger first cousin of Stanley Ann’s, spent several years in the Indonesian part of Borneo, now called Kalimantan. On the final night of the Democratic National Convention in Denver in August 2008, Richard Payne and his father got a ride back to their hotel in a sport-utility vehicle with Maya Soetoro-Ng, President Obama’s half sister, and other family members. “Somehow Maya and Richard got to talking in Bahasa Indonesia,” Charles Payne recalled, referring to the Indonesian national language. “They carried on quite a conversation. When they were finished with that—showing off, of course—Maya said to Richard, ‘You have kind of a yokel accent.’ He said, ‘Yeah, I know.’”

Kalimantan is a far cry from Kansas, the state where Stanley Ann’s story begins. But Kansas is a far cry from the stereotype that its name may conjure up. It is more complex, contradictory, and surprising—a place of extremes. Craig Miner, a historian and author of Kansas: The History of the Sunflower State, 1854–2000, has described it as a place of thousand-mile-diameter storms and aviator-dazzling summer clouds “triple the height of Pikes Peak.” It long held the title for having the largest hailstone on record. It has had the highest number of F5-intensity tornadoes of any state since 1880. At times, Miner has written, the night sky is brilliantly clear: The Andromeda Galaxy, more than two million light-years away, appears as obvious as the moon. But the dust on the ground has been so thick that on occasion people have driven with their headlights on in broad daylight. The summer that Stanley Ann’s mother, Madelyn, was eleven, the temperature in Augusta, her hometown, hit 121 degrees Fahrenheit on July 18—the hottest on record. The varnish on the pews in