The other Barack
Stanley Ann was self-sufficient and wilful. Her sympathetic biographer, Janny Scott, pictures her dreaming of escape from provincial boredom as she pored over stacks of National Geographic magazines. She hated the jock culture of her high school and took refuge in the proto-bohemian set of wise-ass boys who drank espresso, watched Satyajit Ray films, and listened to recordings by Carlos Montoya and Dexter Gordon. She befriended closeted gays and other misfits, sharing their highbrow pretensions and their sense of marginality. Soon after she graduated, her father smelled another business opportunity and moved the family to Honolulu, where she dropped the name Stanley and enrolled in the University of Hawaii in September 1960.
Russian class was the perfect place for a girl who liked foreign movies and jazz to challenge Cold War pieties. It was also a good place to catch the eye of a handsome black stranger. She and Barack [the Elder] arranged to meet after class, on a bench outside the university library. He was an hour late, and she fell asleep. When he arrived, Scott writes, ‘the man from Kenya awakened the girl from Kansas, literally and figuratively.’ This mythic scene, which their son recounted in Dreams from My Father, supposedly embodied Ann Dunham’s approach to life, as a friend described it: ‘to just be herself in the world … just leave yourself open to the world when you’re sleeping.’ Her awakener was a big shot at the East-West Center, famed for his fearless intellect and heavy drinking. He frequently passed out at parties, where departing guests would have to pick their way around him. But Ann knew nothing of this, at first. She was smitten by his looks, his intelligence and his ‘seductive, almost hypnotic voice’. It was, one of his classmates said, ‘the most mellow, deep voice’ he had ever heard, ‘with a slightly African articulation and maybe a flavour of Oxford’. He was going to be a Big Man in the new Kenya – not ‘the sort of man who would have carried a condom in his wallet’, as one of Ann’s graduate school friends later observed. What was a free-spirited American girl to do?
