The water terrace. There's a low stone form here that fills until it can't hold any more and then spills over its own edge, and near it an upright ring that puts out a fine mist. The piece is called Seeing Through the Universe.
The terrace is named for Ann Dunham — Obama's mother, and a considerably more interesting person than most people realize.
She was an anthropologist. Her doctorate was on peasant blacksmithing in rural Java, and the dissertation ran past a thousand pages, which even by anthropology standards is a lot of blacksmithing. She spent most of her working life in Indonesia, and the practical end of it was money. She worked on some of the earliest microcredit programs in the country — small-loan systems built for people no bank would look at. Village women borrowing enough to buy a sewing machine.
She died of cancer in nineteen ninety-five. She was fifty-two years old, and at that point her son was an unknown lawyer in Hyde Park who hadn't run for anything. She never
saw one election. Obama has said the thing he regrets most in his life is not being at her bedside when it happened.
The fountain is by Maya Lin. And that name should stop you for a second, because of what she did when she was twenty-one.
Nineteen eighty-one. The competition to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington was open to anyone, and it was blind — no names, just numbered entri
