A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [60]
She had kept her earlier commitment. The year Barry returned to Honolulu and entered fifth grade at Punahou, Ann traveled nearly seven thousand miles to spend Christmas with him and her parents, leaving Lolo and Maya in Indonesia. Before she arrived, Barry was told by his grandmother that his mother had lined up an unexpected gift: Seven years after his parents had divorced, his father was coming to visit. Obama Sr. was living in Kenya, where he had moved with his third wife, an American he had met while he was at Harvard and with whom he had produced two more children. When Ann arrived, she plied Barry with information about Kenyan history—none of which he retained, according to his account. She assured him that his father knew all about him from her letters. “‘You two will become great friends,’ she decided,” Obama writes in his memoir, leaving the verb dangling dubiously off the end of the sentence. Ann had worked to keep alive the connection between Obama and his son. Her friend Kadi Warner told me, “She really was committed for him to have some presence in Barry’s life. She knew it was up to her to maintain it.”
Obama’s account of his father’s Christmas visit is poignant. He notices the effect of his father’s presence on his mother and grandparents—his grandfather “more vigorous and thoughtful,” his mother “more bashful.” As the weeks lurch along, tension builds—“my mother’s mouth pinched, her eyes avoiding her parents, as we ate dinner.” After his father scolds him for wasting his time watching a cartoon special of How the Grinch Stole Christmas! an argument breaks out between his parents and grandparents. Ann seems to mediate at first, then sides with Obama against her parents. “I listened to my mother tell her parents that nothing ever changed with them,” the younger Obama writes. Dispatched by his grandmother the next day to collect any dirty laundry from the apartment where his father is staying, he finds his father shirtless and his mother ironing. She appears to have been crying. He delivers his message and declines an invitation to stay. Back upstairs at his grandparents’ apartment, Ann appears in his room. “You shouldn’t be mad at your father, Bar,” she tells him. “He loves you very much. He’s just a little stubborn sometimes.”
When he refuses to look up, she adds, “I know all this stuff is confusing for you. For me, too.”
With Barack Obama Sr., Christmas 1971
Ann returned to Indonesia in early 1972, after the Christmas visit, and negotiated a leave of absence from her job in Jakarta in order to enter graduate school at the University of Hawai‘i. She even managed to line up some financial support through a foundation grant to the management school where she had been working. Taking Maya with her—and for a time, Lolo—she returned to Hawaii and found her way that fall into the master’s-degree program in anthropology, the field that had been her undergraduate major. In an application to the East-West Center in December 1972, she described her academic specialization as economic anthropology and culture change. “But I’m more interested in the human and psychological factors that accompany change than purely technological factors,” she wrote. She said she was planning “a possible joint project” with Lolo, who was involved in a population-studies program under the department of geography. But Lolo did not stay long. He remained enrolled only for the spring semester of 1973, according to university