A Singular Woman (10 page)

Later, they unloaded that hitchhiker and picked up another—a homeless boy who regaled Byers with stories about male prostitution and other survival strategies for young people in the city. They rolled into the Bay Area and found their way to the home of Raleigh Roark's half sister, who had left Seattle and was living not far from the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. Byers, Stanley Ann, and the young hitchhiker arrived and settled in.

Meanwhile, back in Seattle, Hunt had barely gone to bed that night—or perhaps woken up in the morning—before the telephone rang. Byers's parents were calling. “My story was, ‘Gee, I don't know. I dropped them off at Bill's. I thought Bill was going to take her home,'” he told me. Back in Kansas, too, the telephone rang in the home of Leona and R. C. Payne, Charles Payne remembered. Thinking Stanley Ann and Byers might have headed for Kansas, Madelyn was calling her mother. The two teenagers were reported missing. Hunt, who was not in the habit of lying to his parents about things that mattered, received a visit from a member of the county sheriff's office. Gradually, fragments of the story spilled out. They had all talked about going off on a lark, driving someplace. They had said, “Wouldn't it be fun to drive to San Francisco?” Perhaps Byers's parents remembered Byers having talked about Roark's half sister in the San Francisco Bay Area. Someone called the police in the Berkeley area and in the surrounding county. Officers turned up at the house. The young hitchhiker tried, unsuccessfully, to bolt through an open window. The three runaways were taken into custody and put briefly in juvenile detention, segregated by gender. Stanley Dunham arrived by plane from Seattle and somehow managed to retrieve the car, which had been impounded. Then he drove Byers and Stanley Ann home. As Bill described it, Stanley Dunham seemed to suspect, wrongly, that Bill and Stanley Ann had eloped. Byers told me, “I remember him going off on this strange monologue, saying, ‘Sex isn't all it's cracked up to be, you know?'”

There is a temptation to see in the midnight road trip a foreshadowing of events yet to come in Stanley Ann's life. It certainly suggests a willingness to take a risk, an aptitude that flows, like a leitmotif, through the history of the Dunhams and the Paynes. Madelyn, as a teenager, had defied her parents and married in secret. Stanley, at a young age, had struck out for the coast. They may have appeared conventional from the outside, but there was a restlessness about them—the restlessness that had propelled Americans westward and that would eventually take the Dunhams as far west as they could go. Perhaps it is a leap to connect that impulse to a late-night lark in the young life of one high school senior. But the truth is, Stanley Ann would keep traveling for the rest of her life.

When she resurfaced in school, she did not want to talk about what had happened, Hunt remembered. People would not understand, he said, and she could not explain. Such an escapade was unheard of. Kathy Sullivan told me she remembered thinking, “My God, that's worse than getting pregnant.” Perhaps Stanley Ann had intended, as Charles Payne put it, “to shake up her father.” No one seemed to remember if she was punished. But as senior year wound down, it became apparent that the Dunhams were moving on. Stanley's work selling furniture in Seattle had dried up. Hawaii, in its newness, was courting transplants. The mayor of Honolulu and a delegation of Hawaii businessmen had been at the Seattle Chamber of Commerce in October, talking up business opportunities. Madelyn would have been happy to stay put, her brother Charles remembered. Her career in banking was flourishing. Stanley Ann had no interest in moving, either. Some said she wanted to attend the University of Washington, where many of her closest friends were headed. Or she may have wanted to go east to the University of Chicago. Arlene Payne, who was at the university, getting a Ph.D. in education, remembered Stanley Ann staying with her that year, apparently scouting for schools. In
Dreams from My Father,
Obama writes that his mother was offered early admission to the University of Chicago, but “my grandfather forbade her to go, deciding that she was still too young to be living on her own.” Whatever the case, sometime shortly after graduation in 1960, Stanley Ann vanished. “She was upset that she had to move,” Maxine Box remembered. “She didn't really have any choice.”

Her friends—the first set of close friends she had ever had—moved on, too. Kathy Powell, who had become pregnant in her senior year, had married Jim Sullivan and finished the school year at Edison Technical High School in Seattle. Steve McCord was in San Francisco, studying art. Bill Byers dropped out of the University of Washington and enrolled for a time in a college in Mexico where he had been told that William Burroughs had had a wild time. Later, he returned to Seattle, got a degree in electrical engineering, and went to work for Boeing. Chip Wall joined the Peace Corps after graduating from the University of Washington. He spent two years in India, helping set up chicken-farming cooperatives in a village on the Ganges in Bihar and working in Hyderabad. Upon returning home, he was drafted and sent to Vietnam. Marilyn McMeekin went to Korea with the Peace Corps, Iona Stenhouse to Sierra Leone. The valedictorian of the class of 1959, the class ahead of theirs, became an anthropologist working in French Polynesia. In the context of Mercer Island, where the idea of conformity was at least in some circles out of fashion, Stanley Ann might almost be seen in retrospect as part of a trend.

Apart from a few fleeting encounters, few of her friends ever saw or heard from her again. “People said she went to Africa and married a black king,” Kathy Sullivan remembered. “We all thought that for years and years.”

T
here are ways in which Hawaii's capital city brings to mind the sun-bleached seediness of Southern California beach towns. But a short drive outside of Honolulu, the fiftieth state feels like another planet. Leaving the city behind, the Pali Highway cuts northeast through the remnants of the Ko‘olau volcano, heading toward the windward coast of the island of O‘ahu. The road climbs several thousand feet toward Pali Pass, disappears briefly into a tunnel, then plunges toward the beach town of Kailua. Jagged volcanic ridges parade against the sky like dinosaurs' backbones, slopes diving away from the ridgeline in dark, rippling curtains. Smudgy, gray-bottomed clouds congregate upwind of the mountains, sunlight mottling the hillsides in luminous green. In the front yard of a house on a quiet street in Kailua, I met Marilyn McMeekin Bauer, Stanley Ann's high school classmate. Bauer moved to Hawaii in 1968, straight from two years in the Peace Corps in Korea and eight years after Stanley Ann's arrival. Looking back, she said, she could not imagine what it was like for Stanley Ann to be airlifted at age seventeen straight from the monochrome insularity of Mercer Island onto the campus of the University of Hawai‘i. It must have been, she said, a shock.

Hawaii in the summer of 1960 bore little resemblance to El Dorado, Ponca City, or any other place the Dunham family had roosted. As a state, it was an infant, admitted to the union on August 21, 1959. The population of the entire archipelago, 2,400 miles out in the Pacific, was fewer than 650,000. Whites made up less than a third of the population and were outnumbered by Japanese-Americans. Nearly one in five people was Hawaiian or part Hawaiian. There were Filipinos, Koreans, Chinese, and nearly 13,000 “other,” though less than one-tenth of one percent of the population was classified as Negro. The place prided itself on tolerance. Despite the occasional real estate listing insisting on “no haoles,” or white people, or calls for “Americans of Japanese ancestry only,” residents saw Hawaii as a laboratory for assimilation and a model of harmonious coexistence. Steeped in its vision of pluralism, the state seemed poised at a moment of infinite possibility.

Hawaii was on the verge of economic liftoff, too. Jet travel had sliced hours off the time required to cross the Pacific. Visitor expenditures had risen fivefold between 1950 and 1960, outstripping the value of sugar and pineapple production for the first time. The total value of mortgages had quadrupled, and bank branches had more than doubled in number. By 1967, Honolulu would rank fifth in the country in the value of building permits issued, trailing only New York, Los Angeles, Houston, and Chicago.
Paradise of the Pacific
—a glossy magazine featuring articles on outrigger canoe racing, the muumuu, and Duke Kahanamoku, the Olympic swimming champion who popularized surfing—was thick with ads for real estate companies, banks, moving and storage services, decorators, flooring. For a footsore furniture salesman with an industrious banker wife and a college-age daughter, Hawaii had promise. With tuition at the University of Hawai‘i at eighty-five dollars per semester, enrollment in the fall of 1960 jumped by thirteen percent. For the first time, the number of incoming freshman topped two thousand, Stanley Ann Dunham among them. Arriving on campus in September 1960, she swiftly jettisoned her first name. From then on, Stanley was Ann.

At first glance, the University of Hawai‘i in 1960 might have seemed an unlikely fit for a brainy nonconformist with a wry sense of humor and a taste for cool jazz. It was a quiet provincial land-grant college nestled in the tropical lushness of the Mānoa Valley, east of downtown Honolulu and at the base of the Ko‘olau Range. The valley was known for its rainbows, produced when the trade winds coming across the windward shore of O‘ahu hit the mountains, sprinkling the valley on the far side in showers. The student newspaper,
Ka Leo O Hawai‘i,
occupied itself with documenting every beauty contest, sorority pledge week, and race for homecoming queen. Its monthly calendar featured a spread of a comely coed, dressed in something tropical but demure. (“A water sports enthusiast, she likes swimming, surfing and water skiing. Another one of her interests is that of hula dancing.”) In the home economics department, the course offerings included “Aesthetics of Clothing and Personal Appearance.” The annual, student-sponsored Ka Palapala Beauty Pageant of Nations, with its bathing-suit rally and formal-dress competition, selected seven finalists, one for each of seven ethnic groups. “The University of Hawai‘i used to be a good party school,” Pake Zane, a Chinese-American born on Maui and an undergraduate in the late 1950s, told me. “We had our share of demonstrations, but it was basically much more conservative. People would say, ‘Don't go make trouble.' It's a kind of Oriental attitude—that you don't want to bring shame on your family.” There were exceptions to that rule, of course. When James Meredith was barred from entering the University of Mississippi in September 1962 on the basis of his race, five hundred students and faculty members on the Mānoa campus held a rally to protest his treatment, and the political-affairs club fired off a resolution to the University of Mississippi. “We, students in the newest state of the Union—a state dedicated to the principle of racial equality—are distressed by the ungoverned passion and hate that is sweeping Mississippi over the admission of a Negro to its state university,” the resolution began.

The campus was changing. At the outset, Ann may well have felt herself to be a fish out of water, but the university was positioning itself in the world in ways that would set the course of her life for the future. In April 1959, a month after Congress voted in favor of statehood, Lyndon B. Johnson, the United States Senate majority leader, who had worked closely with Hawaii's territorial delegate on statehood, called for establishing in Hawaii an international center of cultural and technical interchange between East and West. For too many years, he said, “we have neglected the simple things that would break down the barriers between ourselves and people who should be our friends.” The president of the University of Hawai‘i went to Washington to help make the case for locating the center on campus. The progress of the proposal became regular front-page news at the school. Professors, politicians, students, and journalists weighed in. “I can see the bright young men from the small towns all over Asia and the bright young men of the United States interested in Asian affairs studying together on the same campus,” said William J. Lederer, coauthor of
The Ugly American,
the novel about the parochialism of American officialdom in Southeast Asia, which had become a huge bestseller in 1958. Edward R. Murrow of CBS News, passing through Hawaii, called the proposed center “one of the most exciting educational projects I've heard of in many a long year.”

The summer Ann arrived in Hawaii, Congress appropriated $10 million to set up the East-West Center, an institution that more than any would go on, over the next twenty-five years, to influence the direction of her life. An advance team set off for Bangkok, Rangoon, Saigon, Calcutta, Dhaka, Kathmandu, Karachi, Colombo, and points beyond, touring twenty countries that might be encouraged to send students. I. M. Pei, the Chinese-born American architect, agreed to design a complex of five buildings on twenty-one acres at the eastern end of the University of Hawai‘i campus. The center's emphasis would be the exchange of ideas, information, and beliefs through cooperative study, training, and research. Theory and practice would be combined, preparing leaders, current and future, to confront real-life problems. Grant recipients, chosen jointly by the center and the participating countries, would receive a full scholarship, covering tuition, housing, textbooks, travel, and field study. In the fall of 1960, the first two students arrived—a professor-poet from Pakistan and a graduate student in soil science from Ceylon. The center's first American student, a graduate student in philosophy, set off in the fall of 1961 on a three-month trip to Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Burma, East Pakistan, Ceylon, India, and Hong Kong to research a thesis comparing Buddhism and Western thought. By September 1962, there were 250 grant recipients enrolled at the university. The center's international advisers included Ralph J. Bunche, undersecretary of the United Nations; the vice chancellor of Punjab University; and an undersecretary of state for agriculture in Thailand. At the groundbreaking in the spring of 1961, Johnson, newly elected as vice president of the United States, arrived in a white convertible. “The purpose of this East-West Center is not for West to teach East or East to study the West,” he said at the dedication. “The purpose here is to bring together two proud and honorable cultures, and to fuse a new strength—a new strength for freedom that will last through eternity.”