Stacy Schiff , The Daily Beast
Stacy Schiff is the author of Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), which won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for biography; Saint-Exupéry: A Biography, which was a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize; and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America. Her latest book, Cleopatra: A Life, comes out from Little, Brown in November.
If you want to understand what shaped Barack Obama, don’t look to his father’s disappearance. Stacy Schiff says it was his unconventional mother who made him.
In 1960, before the Civil Rights Act, before the women’s movement, a smart, white 17-year-old arrived at college to find herself pregnant within a matter of weeks. The startling part was not that she dropped out of school at the end of the semester. Or that the father of the child she was carrying was from a different continent and of another color. Nor was it startling that she married him, at a time when doing so qualified as a felony in nearly half of America. Or that she divorced her husband shortly thereafter. The startling part was her conviction—as the child grew into a man—that her son was so gifted "that he can do anything he ever wants in the world, even be president of the United States." And that she was right.
"If nothing else," President Obama’s mother reminded him, "I gave you an interesting life." She made one for herself as well, unconventional and itinerant, wholly unfamiliar by the standards of the day, rich in false starts, inconveniences, and accomplishments. The only child of a Kansas couple, she had a nomadic childhood, moving seven times in 12 years, to wind up at a Seattle-area high school. As Janny Scott makes clear in her incisive biography, A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother, the grandparents of whom he writes so affectionately had known their share of drama as well. His maternal grandfather, Obama notes, was "always running away from the familiar."
Stacy Schiff is the author of Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), which won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for biography; Saint-Exupéry: A Biography, which was a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize; and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America. Her latest book, Cleopatra: A Life, comes out from Little, Brown in November.
If you want to understand what shaped Barack Obama, don’t look to his father’s disappearance. Stacy Schiff says it was his unconventional mother who made him.
In 1960, before the Civil Rights Act, before the women’s movement, a smart, white 17-year-old arrived at college to find herself pregnant within a matter of weeks. The startling part was not that she dropped out of school at the end of the semester. Or that the father of the child she was carrying was from a different continent and of another color. Nor was it startling that she married him, at a time when doing so qualified as a felony in nearly half of America. Or that she divorced her husband shortly thereafter. The startling part was her conviction—as the child grew into a man—that her son was so gifted "that he can do anything he ever wants in the world, even be president of the United States." And that she was right.
"If nothing else," President Obama’s mother reminded him, "I gave you an interesting life." She made one for herself as well, unconventional and itinerant, wholly unfamiliar by the standards of the day, rich in false starts, inconveniences, and accomplishments. The only child of a Kansas couple, she had a nomadic childhood, moving seven times in 12 years, to wind up at a Seattle-area high school. As Janny Scott makes clear in her incisive biography, A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother, the grandparents of whom he writes so affectionately had known their share of drama as well. His maternal grandfather, Obama notes, was "always running away from the familiar." On one of his earliest excursions he ran away with his bride; Obama’s grandparents married in secret, while his grandmother was still a high-school student. Ralph Dunham was a charmer, a scribbler, and a dreamer. His wife was hardheaded and practical. For much of the marriage, Madelyn Dunham outearned her husband. In 1942 they named their daughter and only child Stanley, which may have been asking for trouble. The girl whom President Obama would describe later as "a bookish, sensitive child growing up in small towns" was much protected, especially by her father. He deemed her too young still to accept an offer for early admission to the University of Chicago. She wound up instead at the University of Hawaii, pregnant. Surely there is a parenting lesson in there somewhere.
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