A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [61]
Barack Obama Sr. and the young Barack, Christmas 1971
By that summer, Ann had landed a grant from the East-West Center to cover her university tuition and field research. Married students with children were exempt from the East-West Center requirement that students live together as a community in the center’s dorms, but the housing allowance was too low to permit students to live above the poverty level in Hawaii, said Benji Bennington, who had become an administrator at the center. So Ann found an apartment in a low-slung, cinder-block building reminiscent of a budget motel, with hot water heaters on the balconies and utility meters bolted to the outside wall. The apartment, on Poki Street, was a mile and a half from the university and a short walk from both the Dunhams’ apartment and Barry’s school. She furnished it with the help of a furniture pool run by the off-campus housing specialist for the East-West Center, who also helped many of the students qualify for food stamps. When Ann overheard Barry’s school friends commenting on the limited refrigerator inventory and his mother’s unimpressive housekeeping, he says, she would take him aside and let him know that as a single mother back in school, baking cookies was not at the top of her priority list. She was not, she made it clear, putting up with “any snotty attitudes” from him or anyone else.
The status of Ann’s marriage was ambiguous, it seems. According to Obama’s account, Ann had separated from Lolo. But that was less clear to her friends. “She certainly considered herself married,” said Kadi Warner, who was also a graduate student in anthropology on an East-West Center grant when she met Ann in the early 1970s. “But she had a different sense, perhaps than he did, of what that meant.” Lolo, calling from Jakarta to speak with Maya, would be in tears. “Ann thought it was cute and amusing but nothing like, ‘I have to pick her up and go back,’” Warner said. “Her thing was, ‘You just have to do this to finish school, that’s how it is. This is what we have to do.’” Her attitude seemed to be that she and Lolo were married, they would see each other occasionally, and that was what adults did when they had other obligations. She intended to work, to make a living, and to at least contribute to, if not fully underwrite, the education of her children. She had returned to Hawaii because she knew she would need an advanced degree, her friend Kay Ikranagara told me. That required that she live apart from Lolo, at least for a time. “Clearly, Ann put her children’s education above all,” Ikranagara said.
Ann was unlike the other graduate students in her department. She was older than most and, in effect, a single mother. It was unusual for women to go back to school, especially with young children, or to start a family while preparing to do fieldwork. “When I showed up wearing maternity clothes, my professor came up to me and said, ‘You’re kidding, right?’” said Warner, who became pregnant several years later. (She promised her professor, she told me, that she would not give birth in class.) Ann was not simply a mother, she was raising two biracial children with different fathers. “It struck me that she was doing something unusual and dangerous and difficult, raising multicultural children on her own,” said Jean Kennedy, another graduate student. Kennedy, who had grown up in what she described as a racially stratified university town in New Zealand, had become intrigued with Southeast Asia after a group of Indonesian, Malaysian, and Thai students arrived on the campus where she was an undergraduate. She had gotten interested in how people would “sort themselves,” as she put it, in the future. “Somebody like Ann, who was cutting across all of this with such strong-minded determination to cut the bullshit and get on with what needed to be done—I admired her,” Kennedy said. “I could barely make it as a graduate student, and could not even think about getting myself into these sorts of conflicts and