In Which Barack Obama Has A Mother And This Is Her Time

You can read the first part of our series on Barack Obama’s parents here. Share Part II with your close ones.

‘Hers Was A Mind In Full Tilt’

Part II: I Want This Kenyan Inside of Me

Barry’s mom had a good time with the fellas

by Alex Carnevale

We last left young Ann Dunham, mother of Barack Obama in Hawaii, where she was meeting with her hippie friends, smoking blunts, and listening to Joan Armatrading CDs. Then she met someone.

The man Stanley Ann Dunham fell in love with was a Kenyan grad student, meeting with the fate of so many of our finest women.

Stanley Ann began classes at the University of Hawaii in 1960, and shortly after that, Box received a letter saying that her friend had fallen in love with a grad student. He was black, from Kenya and named Obama.

About that same time, another letter crossed the Pacific, this one heading to Africa. It was from Barack Obama Sr. to his mother, Sarah Hussein Onyango Obama. Though the letter didn’t go into great detail, it said he had met a young woman named Ann (not Stanley). There wasn’t much on how they met or what the attraction was, but he announced their plans to wed.

The Dunhams weren’t happy. Stanley Ann’s prospective father-in-law was furious. He wrote the Dunhams “this long, nasty letter saying that he didn’t approve of the marriage,” Obama recounted his mother telling him in “Dreams.” “He didn’t want the Obama blood sullied by a white woman.”

Oh, irony. Fantastic.

Parental objections didn’t matter. For Stanley Ann, her new relationship with Barack Obama and weekend discussions seemed to be, in part, a logical extension of long coffeehouse sessions in Seattle and the teachings of Wichterman and Foubert. The forum now involved graduate students from the University of Hawaii. They spent weekends listening to jazz, drinking beer and debating politics and world affairs.

My grandparents met in a socialist club, so I guess I shouldn’t talk, but ew. Speaking of ew:

The self-assured and opinionated Obama Sr. spoke with a voice so deep that “he made James Earl Jones seem like a tenor,” said Neil Abercrombie, a Democratic congressman from Hawaii who was part of those regular gatherings.

Mr. Abercrombie later went on to marry Janet Fitch and start a clothing company.

While Obama was impatient and energized, Stanley Ann, whom Abercrombie described as “the original feminist,” was endlessly patient but quietly passionate in her arguments. She was the only woman in the group.

From the little we know of this relationship, here are some of the characteristics that define Obama’s parents:

impulsive

well-organized

bipolar

passionate

liked black people

obligatory ‘yes we can’ joke (actual screenshot from barack’s website)

If you’re a grad student from another country, you obviously do whatever you have to do to knock up a U.S. citizen while you’re there. That’s freakin’ common courtesy.

“I think she was attracted to his powerful personality,” Abercrombie said, “and he was attracted to her beauty and her calmness.”

Six months after they wed, another letter arrived in Kenya, announcing the birth of Barack Hussein Obama, born Aug. 4, 1961. Despite her husband’s continued anger, Sarah Obama said in a recent interview, she “was so happy to have a grandchild in the U.S.”

“I know he loved Ann,” Abercrombie said, but “I think he didn’t want the impediment of being responsible for a family. He expected great things of himself and he was going off to achieve them.”

“Rocky Took A Lover (acoustic)” – Bell X1 (mp3)

The marriage failed. Stanley Ann filed for divorce in 1964 and remarried two years later, when her son was 5. The senior Obama finished his work at Harvard and returned to Kenya, where he hoped to realize his big dreams of taking a place in the Kenyan government.

Punting on your son Barack Obama has got to be one of the biggest missteps since Brian Dunkleman left American Idol.

Stanley Ann Dunham loved the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. and the music of Mahalia Jackson, and thought Harry Belafonte was, as her son remembers, “the best-looking man on the planet.”

At 18, she met and married Barack Hussein Obama Sr., a former Kenyan goatherd and an economist-in-training who had recently become the first African student in the history of the University of Hawaii—this in 1960, a time when inter-racial marriage was still illegal in almost half the mainland states.

Thinking Harry Belafonte is handsome has to be on SWPL somewhere.

It was his mother’s presence—and not infrequent absence—that most colored his early years. She cried easily and remained an impossible romantic. (She would pull her children from bed to look at a particularly beautiful moonrise.)

“The First Cut Is The Deepest” – Rod Stewart (mp3)

The couple divorced in 1963, when their son was just 2, and Barack met his father (who ultimately claimed paternity of a total of eight children by four women before dying in a car crash at age 52, in 1983) precisely once more in his life—for a month, at Christmas, in Honolulu, when he was 10.

Obama & half sis

Ann and Barack Sr. fanfic could be entertaining. “As he put his pollen inside her dandelion, he muttered, I bet this baby won’t hold political office BWHAHAHAHA. Ann, meanwhile, was already reading a Joyce Carol Oates novel and counting her alimony money.” Something like that.

That was the end of Ann’s first marriage. There have been worse first marriages. Imagine having a bad marriage and not even having a president-elect to show for it. That’s gotta be the best bad hook-up ever.

“Sci-Fi Kid” – Blitzen Trapper (mp3)

Ann next married an Indonesian national named Lolo Soetoro. She eventually began pursuing a Ph.D. in anthropology that required frequent fieldwork in Indonesia, and Barack spent four years of his childhood there, in the world’s most populous Muslim nation.

Because his mother wanted Barack to have the best possible bite at the American Dream, she left him in Hawaii for much of his adolescence in the care of his maternal grandparents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, who fed him a poly-cultural diet of sashimi and Jell-O with grapes, and got him admission and a scholarship to the prestigious Punahou School, in Honolulu. He arrived there in fifth grade as a round-faced boy with baby fat, and left the lanky figure of today.

is barry actually a character from the TV show The White Shadow?

The sad fact of Obama’s childhood – and a motivator to keep him close to his children – is that his parents weren’t around enough for him. His new stepfather didn’t help things, from the sound of it.

Alice Dewey told me that Dunham “divorced happily” from Soetoro—who died in 1987 of complications from a liver ailment—in part because “he gradually became more and more like a Westerner and she became more and more like a Javanese.” Obama told me he could only laugh at the false press accounts that portray Soetoro as some kind of radical Muslim who had sent him to an Islamic school. “I mean, you know, his big thing was Johnny Walker Black, Andy Williams records,” Obama said. “I still remember ‘Moon River.’ He’d be playing it, sipping, and playing tennis at the country club. That was his whole thing. I think their expectations diverged fairly rapidly.”

Barry’s half-sister

It will be interesting to see if any of this becomes GOP talking points. It’s unlucky for the GOP that Barack Obama Sr. is not around today, he sounds like a terrific guy.

Her boldest step of all may have been marrying Barack’s father, a fellow undergraduate at the University of Hawaii, whom she had met in a Russian-language class. Obama has acknowledged that the precise circumstances of their marriage are a bit cloudy, even to him; it would turn out that his father was already tribally married to another woman, in Africa, and after he left Barack and his mother to pursue graduate studies at Harvard on a scholarship, he would marry and divorce another American woman, and then father a child by a second African woman.

Barack Obama’s father did write him letters from time to time, as this Washington Post article recounts. One of them said, “Like water finding its level, you will arrive at a career that suits you.” He did nail that one.

Ann Dunham kept up a fond correspondence with Barack’s father, even after her marriage to Soetoro, another foreign student, who eventually went to work for an American company, Union Oil, in Jakarta. She made sure her son knew of his father’s intellect and his government jobs in the post-colonial regime in Kenya, and of the improbable courtship the two had shared. But Obama’s father would remain a distant, intimidating, absent figure, the disappointing details of whose life and career Barack would learn about only much later. “The truth is that none of the men in my life were that successful or that stable,” Obama told me. “They made an awful lot of mistakes.”

Rectifying our parents’ mistakes is a difficult task. Since it is nearly impossible to imagine anyone short of Barack Obama Sr’s ghost himself derailing the Obama steam train at this point, we will all have to live with President Obama.

barry gets a degree

As one of my advisors put it to me, “You can’t hate Obama just because people you hate like him.” I don’t hate Obama. He’s a compelling figure. But the feeling you have for a great orator, the stirring emotions you get when you see him, have little to nothing to do with what kind of leader he might be. Concern over the election of an executive with no large amount of experience or substance in his campaign is natural. But he will be President, so I have to live with it. You must accept what you can’t change. We can only hope Barry has learned that lesson, too.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. You can read the first part of this miniseries on the life and times of Barry Obama here.

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