Time magazine's Amanda Ripley has a page turner about Sen. Obama's mother, Stanley Dunham.
Amanda is as good a writer as you can get and I'm glad she was the one asigned to do this piece. Her piece was effective because, I believe, like me she was moved by Obama's mom when she first read about her in Obama's first book, Dreams from my father.
It was the summer of 2006 and I was reading The Economist abroad . At that time I didn't even know the relationship between the senate and house and certainly didn't know who Sen. Obama was.
That summer, though, someone wrote a brief piece about Sen. Obama and his response to the Hurricane Katrina. I remember a subtle bashing of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and a hat up to Sen. Obama for his response.
I quickly googled his name and read a bit about him.Somehow by the time I got back to the US in the fall for school, there were rumors everywhere that obama was going to run for president. It was everywhere. So I picked up on news about him, went to his informal website which had a million photos of his 2004 senate campaign.
On the eve of returning to school for the fall semester i bought Dreams from my father for the 12hr Greyhound bus trip. I think I cried about 20times reading Dreams from my father for the first time on that stuffy bus.
The funny thing, though, is that though I'm black, I had my strongest response to Obama's mother when I read the book. I thought, wow, this woman, a white woman in the early 60s(remember the turmoil of the 60's) who married two people from other races, had 2 mixed race kids. And who, according to the book was perhaps the kindest person, smartest woman of that era. I thought, if Sen. Obama picked up even a tiny bit of her personality then this man is blessed.
That fall break my boyfriend(who is himself half jewish and half black) and I took a trip to Chicago to see Sen. Obama at one of his first book-signing events for Audacity of Hope. I was there!!! He seemed interested in my boyfriend b'cos he struggled to pronounce my boyfriend's name. he asked him about his home, seattle and looked him really deep and kept talking.
I had brought my copy of Dreams from my father that day to be signed. I wrote a short note that said something like: " I think that your mother was special" but when it got to my turn i was so star struck that
(i) I still don't think i saw his face. I was dazed. it was unbelievable. and look i'm someone who never watches TV and can hardly name a random pop artist. bill clinton came to town when i was in high school and didn't bother to go see him. but that day i was star struck because shaking his hand(very very soft actually for a man) that day i recalled the beautiful person his mother and perhaps he was.
(ii) i was too shy to give him the note about his mother. but i always wanted to celebrate Obama's mother, a remarkable human being.
so it is in this spirit that i applaud amanda ripley for a good job done.
update: sorry for typos.