Obama drawn home by a guiding force
With the grandmother who played a central role in his young life now seriously ill, he'll return to Hawaii for 2 days.
RALEIGH, N.C. - If Michelle Obama is her husband's "rock," his grandmother is a big part of the ground beneath it.
Madelyn Payne Dunham gave young Barack Obama a place to call home while his mother traveled the world. When he needed money for school, she went without new clothes to help pay his tuition.
And when the Illinois senator decided to seek the Democratic presidential nomination, Dunham provided the "Kansas heartland" pedigree he needed to appeal to conservative white voters - and a personal anecdote about racial prejudice that helped the man with the foreign name and Ivy League resume connect with the African American experience.
Dunham, 85, is said to be gravely ill after falling and breaking her hip, and some reports suggest she might not live to see the Nov. 4 election. Whatever happens, she has already lived long enough to see her "Barry" achieve what she had wanted for him, her brother said yesterday.
"I think she thinks she was important in raising a fine young man," Charles Payne, 83, said in a telephone interview from his Chicago home.
Obama and others credit Dunham - whose 86th birthday is Sunday - with instilling in him an appreciation for education and hard work, and setting an example of thrift, practicality and tolerance.
The oldest of four children born to an oil-company clerk and a teacher, Madelyn Payne grew up on the edge of Augusta, Kan. She was a good student and an avid reader.
A couple of weeks before her high school graduation in 1940, without her parents' knowledge or blessing, she married Stanley Dunham. While her husband was away in the Army during World War II, she was home raising their daughter, Stanley Ann, and supervising a B-29 bomber assembly line at the Boeing plant in Wichita.
After the war, she followed her husband around the country as he took a series of sales jobs and earned a college degree on the GI Bill - an accomplishment she always dreamed of but was never quite able to find the time for. Despite that, she worked her way up from a bank secretary to become one of the first female bank vice presidents in Hawaii.
The Dunhams were living in Honolulu when their daughter met Barack Obama Sr., a Kenyan student. Barack Jr. was born in Honolulu in 1961 and remained with his grandparents after his father left to pursue his education. Aside from the four years he lived in Indonesia with his mother and stepfather, Obama spent his childhood in Honolulu - most of it in the two-bedroom high-rise apartment where Dunham still lives.
Obama often speaks fondly of "Toot" - his version of the Hawaiian word
Tutu
, or grandparent. But an incident when he was a teenager also reminded him how deep the mistrust between whites and blacks goes in this country.
In his memoir
Dreams From My Father
, he recalled overhearing Toot ask her husband for a ride to work, because a particularly aggressive panhandler had accosted her for money at the bus stop the day before. When Stanley Dunham refused, his grandson couldn't understand why.
"Before you came in, she told me the fella was black," his grandfather explained. "That's the real reason why she's bothered."
Obama said the words were "like a fist in my stomach."
He wrote: "Never had they given me reason to doubt their love.. . . And yet I knew that men who might easily have been my brothers could still inspire their rawest fears."
Obama revived the story in March, when comments by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, his former pastor, forced Obama to publicly address race relations in America.
"I can no more disown him," he told an audience in Philadelphia, "than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."
Payne said his sister's reaction to being made a campaign issue was "no more than just sort of raised eyebrows." Though too ill to travel for the campaign, she followed it closely on TV - even undergoing a corneal transplant earlier this year so she could watch the coverage.
Obama's campaign said he had canceled events tomorrow and Friday to spend time with his grandmother. Payne said his sister was hospitalized briefly but is back home, where Obama's half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, cares for her.
Some reports have Dunham near death. Payne declined to speculate how long she might have and whether she had the strength to see her grandson through the election.
"I think, of course, it's been terribly important to her," he said. "And she would like nothing better than to see that."